My Little Town, Part 3

North East Street, the street where I lived. It's the street where my aunts and uncles and cousins lived too, in those 1950s days when families were a kind of clan.

I grew up next door to the Coudersport Dairy. The soundtrack of my childhood was spliced together with rumbling farm trucks backing into the driveway in the early morning to deliver milk from nearby farms, empty milk cans clanging together, rattling glass bottles of milk in cases as the step trucks rolled slowly up the driveway on their morning trips around town. And Mr. Bradley's cheerful whistling - that's what everyone remembers about Mr. Bradley - Pete as he was known, though his name was Harold.

The Bradleys owned the Dairy and lived in the mansion-like next door house with its deep and shady front porch. Mr. and Mrs. Bradley had two teenage daughters, Judy and Carol, who seemed so beautiful and mysterious to me with their boyfriends and girlfriends coming and going. Their little brother was David, the same age as me, and then came Mike, the baby, some years later.

Isn't that a grand house! Still standing, it's unrecognizable since a fire and
extensive remodeling to accommodate several apartments.

The Dairy building was simple and still stands today tucked up against the flood control channel at the corner of Sixth and North East Street, silent since the Dairy closed in the mid 1960s. The driveway that seemed so long to this child is widened, taking away the yard where the wonderful, big sandbox used to be and the teenage daughters sunbathed on chaise lounges.

  

From Potter Enterprise, 1950

My friend Jeffrey lived on a dairy farm on Ford Hill, growing up having to milk the herd of Holstein cows twice a day. He imagined the milk making its way to a big, gleaming factory and was so disappointed to find the Dairy was no more than a garage when he made friends with David Bradley in elementary school.

The best part of living next to the Dairy was the room where Mr. Bradley kept a little box freezer, the kind with hinged lids that allowed access to the depths where there would be Dixie Cups and popsicles and other frozen treats. It was the honor system, just leave your nickel or dime on the ridge of the blackboard and go on your way.  It seemed so grown-up!

Sometimes I'd peek around the corner to the room where the milk was processed, warm, even in the winter. The cooler, its compressor insistently humming, was beyond. Sometimes there was a milky, watery stream circling down the drain in the main room where the trucks were loaded. And always the sweet, milky scent in the background. Whenever milk is warming on the stove for hot cocoa, the scent takes me back to the Dairy.

1964 advertisement

David Bradley and I played together nearly every day. That sandbox, safely behind a split rail fence to separate the yard and busy driveway was where we'd make elaborate towns and later lined up the toy soldiers to fight wars - though it felt a great injustice that there weren't any nurse figures like I wanted to be. Sometimes we'd play in the big backyard that stretched all the way to Seventh Street. Mr. Bradley hung a wooden horse, complete with a mane and tail made of baler twine, from two ropes tied on a limb of a maple tree. The Bradleys had a big garden back there and a barbecue fireplace. Sometimes the men from the Dairy would sit around the picnic table to eat their lunches.

On rainy summer afternoons, we moved our play to the front porch. It was furnished much like a living room with a full size glider and furniture that appeared every spring and went away in winter. I'd bring over my dolls and we'd play house. I was the Mommy and David was the Daddy and sometimes the dolls would cry and cry and sometimes they would be naughty and sent to the corner to repent. 

I did my best to try to stay overnight there when invited, enticed by the thought of staying in Carol's room with the canopy bed and little balcony porch. But after the popcorn and whatever program was showing on one of the three channels on tv, I always dissolved into tears of homesickness and my father would cross the driveway to carry me home in my pajamas and tuck me into my own bed, still shuddering from weeping.

There came the summer when the new garage went in, right on the line that separated my parents' property from the Bradley's. I watched the progress from the little platform hammered into the branches of a tall spruce tree in our side yard. That's where I stretched out to read - perhaps a Judy Bolton mystery or one of the teenage novels by Rosamond du Jardin or Betty Cavanna though I was far from becoming a teenager myself.

The garage not only housed the Bradley vehicles, the upstairs became storage space for a new, modern twist at the Dairy, soon to replace the thick milk bottles with their aluminum foil tops.

1964

And now we had a new play place - though the grownups would not approve had they known. We'd built tunnels and labrinyth-like paths between the cartons of cartons, that reached the ceiling.

But there was no stopping the change that made paper milk cartons ubiquitous in supermarkets as folks turned away home milk delivery. It wasn't too many years before the Bradley family moved away, Mr. Bradley taking a job in the northeastern part of the state. The Dairy, operating for a time under different management, was then closed.

 

Cleaning Up

 

I've been knitting dish cloths this winter - those colorful squares I mocked when Grandma made them, likely knitted when she was the age I am now.

Grandma knit us an afghan as a wedding gift and I still have it - somewhere. Big knitted blocks of color - red, turquoise, green, yellow, orange - all crocheted together and bordered in black. She created it in cotton yarn which I appreciated at the time and still do.

I see the afghan on the back of the couch in the old pictures – first in that apartment over the store and later in the little house when the children joined us. There are pictures of it stretched over a card table or couch cushion to make a fort with a little delighted face peeking out.

Knitting, creating something tangible, starting with those lovely wooden needles so smooth to the touch, and a ball of tangled color.  The neat, even stitches collecting across the needle, growing, then decreasing. Slowing my breathing, matching the rhythm of throwing the yarn over. Knits, purls, yarn over, casting on and binding off, untangling the yarn as I go.

And the stack of the square dishcloths grows. My dishcloth drawer is already quite full, most of the brighter colors faded from bleach I sometimes add to the load of kitchen linens when they're washed. And perhaps they're an unwelcome gift, much like my Grandma's were.

Would that I could begin to untangle my emotions and reactions to the chaos of our country since January 20 as easily as I have come to untangle those balls of yarn. Straightening out the threads tangled and knotted and sliced by those men who have grabbed the power in our little corner of this world. Their words, their actions leading only to more chaos and heartbreak for no good reason. There is no good reason.

And still I knit. Dishcloths to wash away mud, grime, feculence, filthiness, rottenness, sleaze and slime.

Minding Our P's and Q's

When you hear the phrase "mind your p's and q's" what do you think?

Most would use this definition: To mind one's p's and q's is to be on one's best behavior, to mind one's manners. 

That's what I thought until the last sentence in this news story baffled me. 

When my grandfather wrote this in his "Cross Fork News," in 1905, his use of 'p's' and 'q's' was the one he knew best.

I had to look far down on the Google and AI suggestions to find an explanation that makes it all clear - though I'm sure I could have posed the question to my typographer mother for the clarifying answer.

In the days of hot metal typography, the phrase was an admonition to trainee typesetters. Lower case "p" and "q" would be in adjacent trays - and the letters are mirror images of each other.

Now his choice of words makes perfect sense and I believe we could easily substitute "Donald Trump" for W.H. Sullivan and come up with an answer for how he was first elected and then re-elected - there were too many who failed take to the tall timber and watch their p's and q's.

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Ice

There's a small army of trucks emblazoned with logos of an electric utility thundering past on the state highway outside my window, followed by the green of the trusty township plow and cinder truck. Likely they're making more permanent repairs to the grid after last night's power loss.

It went off here just as we were getting into the latest episode of All Creatures Great and Small on the television. Sunday night we settle in, dishes from dinner stashed away, leftovers refrigerated, for 60 Minutes and then the offerings on Masterpiece - it's just a comforting habit though now everything is available on demand. 

But Sunday evenings have always had their own rhythm even since childhood when some Disney program or another came on the Heimel family television and Dad would sometimes go down to the store and come back with a carton of ice cream and a can of Hershey's syrup. One of the older boys would carefully scribe the ice cream and slice through it with what my mother called an angel food cake cutter, taking great care that each portion was equal - most important in a family of seven.

These were the days when so-called "blue laws" closed all the stores on Sunday. We were exempt from that inconvenience as my father worked at the family's grocery store and he had a key. Other families had to plan ahead for a Sunday treat, but we were special, an interesting introduction to the concept of privilege. 

Raising our own family, we also enjoyed the Disney offerings and later it was Mrs. Fletcher solving all kinds of crime from her beautiful bungalow along the Maine coast. In those days, I had the ironing board set up adjacent to the action and Arthur was off in the other room ostensibly writing lesson plans or correcting papers but more often lost in musicland.

But last night, power blinked off and on and finally we were truly in the dark. I lit a candle - Yankee Candle Christmas Cookie - and used my phone's flashlight feature to fetch real flashlights from the laundry room cupboard. Arthur unplugged the kitchen range just for good measure even though the fancy breaker it was plugged into snapped it off at the first blink, and we waited.

No internet - no power and it was soon off to bed. Arthur read in the light of his headlamp and I used my Kindle, charged in full with a selection of reading material already downloaded.

Power returned in an hour or so but Arthur was already asleep and I couldn't bring myself to go down the stairs and reboot the system to go back to Skeldale House and then laugh with the Saturday Night Live Anniversary Special we had been looking forward to. It was just too cold and the bed was so cozy and warm. 

It's most certainly has been miserably cold, snowy, icy and windy outside- matching what's going on inside this old farmhouse- two colds to soldier through, accompanied by the icy disaster of this new presidency raining down on our heads with winds of most unwelcome change knocking these two septuagenarians off course.

-gany, -ghany, or -gheny?

Perhaps Golly* could have called on the President** to solve his editorial dilemma in 1940:

Here's something we gotta do something about! Should have done it long ago. The words Allegany and Alleghany and Allegheny.

Hully gee, but we've lost a lot of time looking in histories, atlases and on maps to learn the particular Allegany, Alleghany or Allegheny we want to use at the moment.

Even right now, after all the years we have been wrestling with the problem in orthography, we still don't know which is which nor why.

Just took a look at a map, an old-timer, and there we find "Allegheny" Township. Then to satisfy ourselves we scanned a list of townships sent out by the Commissioners of Potter County and there we find it "Alleghany."

It is far from our desire to call attention to any error made by that august body - if error it is – but by golly, we want to get to the bottom of this thing – not the river.

We'll have to admit that Allegheny is correct for the river of that name and the mountains, but why should a port on the Allegheny be spelled Port Allegany?

Allegheny County is in Pennsylvania and Allegany County, N.Y. is just north of us.

And there is the Allegheny National Forest in Pennsylvania and just adjacent to the north is Allegany State Park.

Seems to us, when we were considerably young than at present, Alleghany City was located in Allegheny County. Of course it is now a part of Pittsburgh.

If we could get our Allegany, Allegheny and Alleghany straightened out and put away in our mental file, it would surely be a great help in editing a country weekly. 

**The 47th President of the United States has issued a plethora of executive orders, among them a plan to rename a body of water and a mountain peak. This from a press release issued by the U.S. Department of the Interior

WASHINGTON, D.C. — In accordance with the President's  recent executive order, the Department of the Interior is proud to announce the implementation of name restorations that honor the legacy of American greatness, with efforts already underway.

As directed by the President, the Gulf of Mexico will now officially be known as the Gulf of America and North America's highest peak will once again bear the name Mount McKinley. These changes reaffirm the Nation's commitment to preserving the extraordinary heritage of the United States and ensuring that future generations of Americans celebrate the legacy of its heroes and historic assets.

*Golly is the pen name of my grandfather, W.D. Fish, who wrote a weekly column for the local newspaper for more than 40 years.

The Good Life

"... Separation and consequent isolation have increasingly played havoc with rural life in the United States... Meanwhile rural mail routes, mail order houses, traveling markets and salesmen have joined hand with rural telephone lines, rural electrification, school consolidation, radio and television, mass auto production and good roads to link the rural communities to urban markets and urban shopping and recreation centers. The resulting absence of group spirit and neighborhood discipline, the chaos and confusion of perpetual movement to and from work, to and from school, to and from the shows and the dances, has destroyed the remnants of rural solidarity and left a shattered, purposeless, functionless, ineffective, unworkable community."

Those are the words of Scott Nearing in "Living The Good Life: How To Live Sanely and Simply in a Troubled World".  He and his wife Helen were pioneers of a homesteading movement born in the 1920s and 1930s, rediscovered by disillusioned Baby Boomers in the late 1960s. 

I read those words in 1973, young, idealistic, just a few months removed from casting my first ballot - the first of many for a losing candidate - for President of the United States, (read more about it here) and feeling the sting of being so very out of step with my community. This community.

Living The Good Life, cover price $1.95
along with a later colorful photo book,
now a collector's item

The Nearings write of cultivating a simple life - the good life - beginning in 1932 when they moved to a farm in Vermont. They built their own house, grew their own food and developed a maple syrup business to make enough money to meet their basic needs.

Arthur and I met Helen and Scott Nearing in the summer of 1978 when they were speakers at the Homesteading Festival at Mansfield State College. Our friends, homesteading on Niles Hill at the time, were presenting workshops at the Festival - small engine repair and home birth - and suggested we come over. Arthur, working as a photographer/reporter for The Potter Enterprise captured the Nearings on film that day. These pictures survive in our archives, along with the full-page story he wrote to chronicle the event.

Scott Nearing, 1978
Nearing lived as a boy in Morris Run (Tioga County)

The story Arthur wrote for the newspaper begins: 

"Mansfield State College's football field became a place for the exchange of ideas last Wednesday through Sunday as the school's Division of Continuing Education hosted a "Homesteading Workshop". Workshops were conducted throughout the days to acquaint potential homesteaders with information ranging from the economic problems associated with homesteading, to such things as tending bees and gardens, and lessons in producing homemade music."

"Highlight of the session was a visit from Helen and Scott Nearing from Forest Farm in Harborside, Maine. Scott, now 95, and Helen, 75, began their homesteading careers in 1932 by moving from New York City to a run down farm in Vermont. For the next 23 years they worked at their farm being able to produce nearly all their own food from their own land, with a growing season shorter than Potter County's. 

"The Nearings moved to Maine in the spring of 1952 because they felt the development of one of New England's major ski areas near their home jacked up prices and made it impossible to live as they wished."

Arthur then transcribed a question and answer session that followed the Nearing's presentation.

The moderator questions: "Part of your book "The Making of a Radical" has to do with the area just 12-14 miles south of here. In that book you write of riding the horse wagon up to the fair, to Mansfield, and here you are almost a century later." 

Helen Nearing chimes in: "I think that's why Scott came. We were saying no to everybody. Our garden needs us. We want to be home and we're both interested in our books We didn't want to come but I think Mansfield got him!"

"Scott and Helen Nearing, 20th Century pioneers and authors
of many books including "Living the Good Life" and "The Maple Sugar Book"
were featured guests at last week's Homesteading Festival at Mansfield
State College. Alert, bright eyed and full of spunk at age 95 and 75
respectively, the couple toured various workshops at the Festival
which provided practical information for modern homesteaders.
The Nearings have been intellectual figureheads in the 'back to the land'
movement, advocating self determination and rugged individualism."
The Potter Enterprise, August 1978

I was there that summer day in Mansfield, baby Kate in a Snugli on my chest. I was so impressed with  Helen clicking away with her knitting needles and her quick-fire answers to questions posed. Reading the account of the day written for the newspaper nearly 47 years later, I realize again how fortunate I am that my path and the path of Arthur crossed and we together forged our own pathway through those homesteading dreams and beyond.

And today, we find ourselves in the same community - again feeling the sting of being so very out of step with this place where we've spent much of our lives.

 

Elephant On The Pike

It was a front page story - above the fold - in 1928.

Good Sized Elephant Seen Along
Coudersport Pike by Two Reputable People

Potter County is famous in more ways than one. New York farmers come here to learn of potato-raising – how to produce 400 or 500 bushels an acre; thousands come here each year to see ice that forms on the hottest summer days; great numbers of the Masonic fraternity come to the reunions of Coudersport Consistory where the Scottish Rite degrees are conferred up to and including the 32nd; the county is famous for its 700 miles of uncontaminated trout streams; a big crop of deer is raised here each year and it is claimed there are more brown nosed black bears in Potter County than in any other county in the United States.

Now comes the strange part of our story. An elephant was seen on the Coudersport Pike last Saturday afternoon by two reputable citizens – a least one of them was reputable. Dr. Carl H. Dudley, pastor of the Presbyterian Church, and W.D. Fish of the Enterprise were returning from a motor trip through the southern part of the state, Maryland and West Virginia, when shortly after having run over a rattlesnake in the road, the pachyderm was seen just at the edge of the woodland and contently browsing.

For fear the story would be given no credence the newspaper man took a camera shot at the beast which is here reproduced.

When this story was related at a meeting of the Coudersport Rotary Club Monday, there was a united cry of "what had you fellas been drinking?" but the Enterprise hastens to assure readers that the men were sane, sober, fully clothed and in their right minds.

Of course there is a short sequel to the tale – the rattlesnake had been killed and laid across the highway track in a lifelike position and the pachyderm was the property of a small circus that had a broken truck and was awaiting assistance from a garage.