According to records in my geneagloy collection and stories handed down, my dad had gone to work as a hired hand for Josie Haas, a widow woman. My mother had eloped and gone to Chicago with a man named Jack Walden, who was rumored to be a criminal who worked for the "mob". She was 19 years old at the time. She escaped in the dark of night and came home to grandma. Or so the story goes.
At that time Reuben Bartholomew was the handyman for Josie Haas. Christine Haas was her daughter. Christine and Reuben soon fell in love and married. What followed is history.
Of course, I was not born yet when that happened, so I can only surmise! My first memories are of life on the Stroh place outside of Nickerson before I started school. By coordinating my memories to what I recall I can figure out, I must have been about 6 years old when we left there and moved across town to the Ailmore place.
The big book that shows my genealogy is screwed up and shows my sister Mary married Tom Shea when she was 2 days old. So I am going to forgo dates and jump right into my memories. According to the birth dates that I am sure are correct, I was six years old when Dorothy was born. I remember momma bringing her home and she was crying all the time. Harvest was about a week away and when it came time to drive the truck that hauled the wheat to the silo in town, Dorothy went with momma. She was nursing and there was not much she could do, but take her.
So the dynamics of the home at that point in time were these:
Josephine, my half sister from mom's first marriage was 12 years old.
Jake was 10.
I was 6.
Donna was 4.
Mary was 2.
And Dorothy was new.
I did not like her because Momma always babied her. Of course, she was a baby, but that was not taken into consideration. My dad worked as a farm hand for a man who owned bottom land named John Britain. We did not know him very well., but sometimes Dad would take Jake and I to work with him. There was a slough that ran through the farm and sometimes it would have water flowing through it. The water fed through to the Arkansas River which was next to the land. If Jake had been lucky in his foraging he would have enough scraps of wood to build me a boat of sorts to float in the slough. If not we just poked around to find crawdads.
I recall one time when Donna who must have been about 3 years old at the time poked her finger at a turtle, which latched right on and would not let go. It was rumored that it would let go when the sun went down. Donna screamed he head off until John Britain took his pocket knife and severed its head from its neck. It let go then and I do not think Donna ever did that again.
As I recall, momma had geese and one time John Britain and dad snuck a goose egg into the chicken house and when John's wife found it, she was very excited! "Oh look at the size of this egg my chicken laid!" Not sure if anyone ever told her!
I started school on the Stroh place and one time it snowed very deep and Jake Stroh brought his horse to the school so he could bring us kids home to momma. People used to help people like that. It was called "helping your neighbor". It must have been one of the memories that makes me help people today. It was just "doing the right thing." Helping your neighbor.
We need more of that today. We need more kids playing with crawdads in a slough. We need more walks in the woods and more helping each other and less television time. I guess even televisions are going by the wayside and being replaced with computers, cell phones and the internet.
I may have outlived my usefulness!
Peace!
