Chapter 16: Stories My Parent's Told Me
I would like to share with you some stories my parent's told me about their childhood as they were chlidren growing up in the early 1900's.
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The Billy Goat
My father told me when he was a little boy growing up on the farm he once had a pet billy goat. He said he fixed up a little cart with wheels on it, and hooked the billy goat up to it, and he would sit in cart and the billy goat used to pull him around all over the place.
My father said he spent so much time with the billy goat that he begin to smell like the billy goat, and that his parents and the rest of his family told him to stay out of the house because he stunk just like the billy goat.
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Cream and Sugar Bread
My father told me the story that when he a little he really loved cream and sugar bread. He said he liked it so much that he just couldn't get enough of it. Cream and sugar bread was a slice of bread with fresh cream poured on the bread, and then sprinkled with sugar. My mother used to make cream and sugar bread for me when I was a little boy, and I liked it too.
Well, anyway as my father told me the story, he just couldn't get enough cream and sugar bread, so one day when his parents went to town to do some shopping, he decided he would eat cream and sugar bread to his heart's content. They left him in the care of his older half sisters, but he figured he could sneak away from them.
So shortly after his parents left for town riding on their horse drawn buggy, my father said he sneaked in the house and got a couple loaves of bread, a sack full of sugar, and a tablespoon without his sisters' notice. Then he went over to the spring where the cream cans were kept to keep cold, and took one of the cans of cream. He then crawled under the thick grape arbor which grew over by the spring where nobody could see him, and started eating cream and sugar bread. My father said he ate cream and sugar bread all afternoon until he was so full he couldn't eat another bite. He said he ate the whole two loaves of bread.
By the time his parents came home later in the afternoon, my father said he was already starting to feel sick at his stomach. At supper time he told his parents he was kind of sick, and didn't feel like eating any supper. After he went to bed he said his stomach really starting hurting, and that he had never felt so sick in all his life. He said he thought he was going to die. His parents heard his moaning and groaning, and came to his room and asked him what was the matter.
My father said he then confessed to his parents about what he had done. He said his parents started laughing. He said he thought they would be angry at him, and punish him, but his father said he had been punished enough, and learned his lesson well no doubt, and would not do that again.
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The Dead Skunk
My mother told me the story that when she was a little girl on the farm that there was a dispute between my mother's family and a neighbor family who lived on the farm across the road. It was not a serious dispute, but mostly just involved arguments between the children as they walked together to school, and eventually the mother's becoming involved in the dispute.
Anyway things esculated to the point where the neighbor children began playing pranks. One day when my mother went to the mailbox to get the mail, she found a dead skunk stuffed in the mailbox. When she returned home from the mailbox, and told her parents, needless to say the relationship between the two families was somewhat strained for a while.
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The Mad Dog
My mother told me the story that once when she was a little girl a dog afflicted with rabies, a mad dog as they called it, came on their farm and bit some of her parent's farm animals, a horse, cow, and also a cherished shepherd dog which contracted the rabies, and eventually died of the horrible disease.
My mother said their shepherd dog was sick, but that they didn't know that it had rabies. It had a large wound on it's face where the rabid dog must had bitten it. Her mother tried to treat the shepherd with some salve to put on the wound, but the dog growled and withdrew under the house away from her mother.
My mother said their shepherd dog stayed under the house away from the family for several days, and then one night it went away from the house and out into the woods where they found it dead the next day. My mother said their shepherd dog seemed like it was aware that it was a danger to the family, and stayed under the house away from everyone so that nobody would get bitten.
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The Pet Squirrel
My father told me this story about a pet squirrel his father had. It was a wild red squirrel, or fox squirrel as this squirrel species is sometimes called, that would come into the house whenever it pleased through a special little swinging doorway at the bottom of the front door that my grandfather constructed especially for the squirrel to use.
My father said when the squirrel came into the house it would climb upon my grandfather's shoulder and he would feed it nuts and other food scraps that it enjoyed. My father said the squirrel would only go to his father and no one else in the family. He said his father had a special way with animals.
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Pneumonia
During February of my mother's eighth grade of school, she became very ill with pneumonia and almost died. My mother and her two older sisters, Elizabeth and Freda, and her younger brother Raymond, had to walk to a one roomed country schoolhouse, which was a about three miles distance from their farmhouse. One morning my mother said she forgot to take her overshoes with her to school. She said the ground was frozen when she walked to school that morning, but it thawed during the day, and on the walk home from school her feet became very wet walking down the muddy road.
That night my mother said she became sick with a very high fever. The next day her parents went and got the doctor who lived in the nearby town of Fieldon, and the doctor came and said my mother had pneumonia. People weren't able to go hospitals much in those days. The nearest hospital was many miles away, and the only way to get there was by horse and buggy. Most people were treated at home even for very serious illnesses. The doctors made housecalls in those days and did what they could, but often there was not much the doctors could do.
The doctor told my mother's parents that they had to try to get her fever down, and to open all the windows in her room in an attempt to bring the fever down and also so that she could breath better, even though it was winter and very cold outside. A member of the family sat with her day and night and put cold cloths on her forehead to try to get the fever down. My father, who lived on a neighboring farm a few miles away, also came and sat with her and put cold cloths on her forehead.
My mother said she was terribly sick with the high fever and unaware of much of anything for several days until the fever finally broke.
Afterward my mother said she was very weak, and unable to walk or even get up from the bad for many weeks. She was not able to attend school and complete her eighth grade, but the teacher awarded my mother her eighth grade diploma anyway, because the teacher said my mother was such a good student.
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Working As A Cowboy
My father told me stories about how when he was a young man before he got married, that he went out west and worked as a cowboy for a time. He went out west to the state of North dakota with a friend of his father, and later got work on a ranch in Montana near the North Dakota/Montana state line.
My father said he worked on the cattle ranch at a line shack one winter which was several miles from the main ranch house. While he worked alone at the line shack his job was to look after the cattle and help them out of snow drifts and see if they were okay, and getting feed and water. Someone from the ranch house would bring him supplies every few weeks he said. He said he enjoyed working on the ranch.
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The Screech Owl
My father told me the story about an incident that happened one time when he was in his late teens or early twenties before he was married, and still living at home on his parent's farm, and was going to a platform dance in the area. In the 1800's and early 1900's wooden platforms were built at different locations throughout the area, and young people, and older people as well, often attended the dances during the summer months. My mother's father Charles Kraushaar sometimes played a violin (or fiddle as it was often called) at the dances, and sometimes my father met my mother there at the dances, before they were married, and danced with her, although she didn't usually attend them much.
On this particular summer evening, just before dark, my father was riding his horse to attend the dance. The dance that night was being held in the Union Forest area near the North Fork of Otter Creek, and so my father was taking a route with his horse up the hill above my grandparent's farm house, and through a field that was later to be our hayfield after my father bought the place after my grandparent's death. I'm not sure if it was a hayfield at that time.
There had been some stories at the time, told by some of the local farmers, that there might be a panther in the area. People had been hearing at night loud, screaming, squalling sounds of some sort of ferocious beast being in the area, and some people swore to seeing glimpses of the creature in the dark. Other farmers in the area told stories of their hunting dogs coming home all clawed and bleeding from encounters with some kind of fierce animal.
Anyway my father said he had been hearing the stories of a possible panther being in the area, and that was in his mind as he rode along the edge of the hayfield just before dark that evening. The path my father was taking through the hayfield ran along the edge of some woods. As he was riding along, my father said all of a sudden he heard a blood-curdling scream come from the woods, and his horse reared into the air throwing my father out of the saddle and unto the ground. My father was a very good horseback rider, and the local farmers often hired him to break their wild horses, but this happened so suddenly and unexpectantly, that it caught him off guard and he was thrown to the ground.
My father said as he was rising from the ground a screech owl flew from out the woods and over his head. He said he knew then that it was the screech owl that made the sound that scared him and his horse so badly. Often when I was a boy, when we went to put up hay in the hayfield, my father would point to the very spot where it happened, and tell me the story again of the screech owl that nearly scared him and his horse to death.
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Grandfather Kraushaar
My mother's father, My grandfather Charles Kraushaar suffered from excruciating back pain my mother said. He wore a large leather belt around his back to help alleviate the pain my mother said, and often when he came home for lunch from working in the fields, he would go down into the basement and stretch out and lay down on a wooden cot that was down there. He said that seemed to ease the back pain somewhat. Despite the agonizing back pain he suffered from throughout his life, my mother said my grandfather Kraushaar never let his back pain interfere or stop him from doing his farm work which needed to be done.
She said my grandfather often worked late into the night plowing in the fields with a team of horses, and that he tied lanterns to the harness of his horses for them to see as they pulled the plow through the fields in the night. He also said it was cooler working at night. My mother said some of their neighbors saw the lights flickering in the distance in the night from the lanterns tied to the harness of my grandfather's horses, and thought they were seeing ghosts.
My mother's mother, my grandmother Kraushaar was Caroline (Haushalter) Kraushaar. She and my grandfather Charles Kraushaar were married 4-14-1898 in Jersey County, Illinois. My mother said her parents had numerous fruit trees on their farm and always raised a large garden. She said her mother worked very hard canning the fruits and vegetables, and cooking and washing the clothes for her family, and that she also made a lot of the clothes for my mother and the other children.
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Grandfather Westfall
My father said his father, my grandfather Jasper Mifflin Westfall got up at 4 a.m. every morning and made everyone else in the family get up at that early hour also. He said his father would go to bed early at night, just after dark, at the same time the chickens went to roost, and get up early the next morning, just at the time the rooster commenced crowing. He said my grandfather Westfall used to say, "I go to bed with the chickens, and I get up with the chickens."
My father told me the story that once when he was a boy, a guest from the city came to stay at my grandfather Westfall's farmhouse overnight. When my grandfather got everyone up at 4 o'clock the next morning, including the guest, the guest came to eat breakfast prepared by my grandmother Westfall with the rest of the family. After eating the guest exclaimed, "that was a very nice midnight snack. I think I will go back to bed now."
My father said my grandfather Westfall was a very good gardener and orchardist, and that he grew huge watermelons and pumpkins, and a large grape arbor over by the spring, and also planted a large orchard of apple trees and a grove of nut bearing trees. My father said they had plenty of apples for their family and also sold a lot of apples and cider to their neighbors. The apple variety my grandfather Westfall grew in his orchard was the Ben Davis Apple, an apple not grown much today, but which was a popular apple variety at the time. My grandfather Westfall also had a large grove of walnuts, pecans, and butternuts.
After my Westfall grandparents passed away my parents bought their farm and I was born there. Most of the apple trees in the orchard that my grandfather Westfall had planted had died off by the time I was a little boy. I remember there were still a few of the old Ben Davis apple trees still living along the hillside back of the house. My parents still referred to a hill and hollow in the pasture a short way from our farm house as the Orchard Hill and Orchard Hollow, even though there were no apple trees there anymore.
My grandmother Westfall had also planted numerous peach trees from peach seeds she had saved around the house and yard. These are called peach seedlings and are smaller trees with smaller peaches than the peaches orchardists grow from grafted trees, but they are hardy little trees and produce large crops of sweet flavored peaches. There were a number of the little peach seedling trees that my grandmother Westfall had planted still alive around the yard when I was boy, and my mother made delicious pies from them.
My father's mother, my grandmother Westfall was Frances (McCaulley) Westfall. She and my grandfather Jasper Mifflin Westfall were married in 1893 in West Virginia. My father said his mother worked very hard canning the fruits and vegetables, and cooking and washing the clothes for her family.
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