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.

A Trip On Memory's Ship

perhaps it was a day like this on the courthouse square
that brought forth an old man's memories

January often brought tales of days of yore from my octogenarian grandfather "Golly" in his weekly newspaper column.

January 1961 – 

January with cold weather and plenty of snow and then a thaw. Time for an oldster to dream. Dream of the past, of the present and of the future.

Three quarters of a century ago brings the joyous memory of new leather boots with red tops and copper-trimmed toes – a proud possession of a small boy.

No TV, no radio and no phonograph – not even a telephone – but maybe a copy of Robinson Crusoe was available or some of J. Fenimore Cooper's Leather Stocking Tales.

Once in a while a so-called "blood and thunder awful" pamphlet "Buffalo Bill" "The James Boys" or "Old Nick Carter" – would add variety if not refinement to the store of knowledge of a growing lad.

During the long evenings there would be available a dish of apples, a pan of popcorn, and upon a really rare occasion, home made molasses candy.

Warm comfort came from the big chunk stove, and there was a feeling of security in the living room, while snow was piled in high drifts by a howling blizzard.

In time came a moderation in the temperature. The sun came out brightly. Farmers with teams and bobsleds "broke out" the roads. Then would come cutters or dickies with driving horses, and sleigh bells would jingle merrily.

A thaw followed by a freeze would form a coating of ice over the snow, and out came the home made schooners with barrel staves for runners.

... and this from 1960

"Let's take a trip on Memory's ship"*

Let's hold a party – a picnic party – we'll blend memory of the past with imagination of the future...

During these January days of drizzly rain, mixed with sleet, snow, visibility near zero, and not a peep of sunshine, we need a picker-upper if it is only a dream –

I can see as I close my eyes, nodding daffodils, golden in the warm spring sunshine. There are spring beauties breaking through the carpet of leaves. Nature is awakening.

There is a sweet music in the gentle soughing of the new and tender foliage of the trees. Harmonizing with it is the buzz of insects and bees seeking nectar. An early Song Sparrow may add his joyous song, delighted to return with his mate to build a nest and rear a family. A Bull Frog may add his Basso from a distance to the medley of nature's symphony. The happy brook babbles over bright pebbles as it murmurs a background. Spring, gentle Spring!

That tin can, blackened over many fires, appears and is put in use over a small blaze of tinder dry sticks that snap and crackle, and mingle their odor pleasingly to scents of the woodland.

The basket is opened. The tantalizing odor of home-baked beans mingles with the aroma of rich coffee. Jaded appetites awaken, whetted by the warmth of the sun and the clean air from the mountains, and ample justice is meted out to the contents of the picnic basket.

Now let's do some resting and loafing and let the sumptuous repast settle. Happiness, joy, contentment.

Good it is that dreams cost nothing, otherwise I would be entirely broke. I dream of the past and a dream of the future. I dream of friends no longer seen except in memory, and of those I see now and hope to see in the time ahead.

Dreams – Life would surely be dreary for an older person if he or she could not recall happy experiences and joys of the days that can never come again.

So let the skies be dark, let rain and sleet and snow fall, let Winter do his worst - I can dream!

*I had to look up that snippet of verse and found it came from a somewhat familiar song.

School Days (When We Were A Couple O Kids)
Words and music by Gus Edwards and Will D. Cobb

Verse 1: Nothing to do, Nellie Darling,
Nothing to do you say,
Let's take a trip on memory's ship,
Back to the by gone days
Sail to the old village school house,
Anchor outside the school door,
Look in and see, there's you and there's me,
A couple of kids once more

Chorus: School days, school days, dear old golden rule days,
Readin' and 'ritin' and 'rithmetic, Taught to the tune of a hick'ry stick,
You were my queen in calico, I was your bashful barefoot beau,
And you wrote on my slate, I love you Joe, When we were a couple of kids.

A Story Of Hair

This is a story about haircuts and photographs and delightful discoveries and memory.

Last winter my mother was in need of a haircut, despairing at the length of her wavy gray locks. "I look like an old hag," she said. "Old women shouldn't wear long hair." We talked a bit about how she wanted to have her hair cut and the particular problems that those of us with thick, coarse hair face in the hairdresser's chair.

"I must have been about 14 when I had my first real haircut," she said, "and it was a disaster. That woman just lopped it off. I never forgave her." She related how the next day she was going on an expedition with her father and his writerly and photographerly friends and she had to cope with that horrendous haircut. "We were going to Letchworth to see the Mary Jemison statue and the monument to New York Dragoons and I looked just awful. I think there are pictures somewhere."

And pictures there are! 

But the best part is my delight as I found that expedition chronicled in the newspaper, penned by another participant in the trip.

From that story:

"But here we are at the Inn ... and there
are Bill Fish and daughter Barbara,
the little princess of a few years ago
and little princess still."

And then there was this:

"Then to the Civil War Parade Ground, now equipped
as a park center with a large new shelter house
and outdoor tables with tops of cut bluestone and fireplaces.
There Bill Fish's father was once stationed;
and Martin took the pictures of Bill and Barbara
standing beside the great boulder with its
bronze memorial tablets."

I was excited to share my finds with my mother. "See," she said. "That haircut was awful."

Continuing An Icy Theme

Yesterday I shared my grandfather's story of ice harvesting in the early 20th century. As the thermometer hovers well below freezing this week, I share snippets from old newspapers to document ice house history in Potter County.

From 1910

from 1922

from 1932

from 1924

... and more from my grandfather, shared in his Golly column in 1969.

The youngster of today cannot remember his first dish of ice cream any more than he can remember his first slice of bread, but there was a time when ice cream was new. No one thought of eating ice cream only in midsummer and then only for a special treat on the Fourth of July or at a Sunday school picnic or church social.

Ice was necessary to make the delicious treat, and very few people had access to an ice house. Ice cost money – as much as ten cents for a good big cake. Ice cream freezers were expensive luxuries. Not many families could afford one at a cost of $1.50 to $2.50 – 12 to 20 shillings as the older people of that day might have said.

This writer remembers to this day his first experience with the frozen delicacy.

There was in Whitesville, the town of the long straggling main street, a kindly soul by the name of Bert Wildman. Bert had made a freezer of ice cream to sell at five cents a dish, or a whopping big saucer piled high for a dime.

Bert Wildman was kind, generous and thoughtful. He spied this scribe barefoot and in knee pants. There was no hope of a nickle or a dime sale, so he invited the little fellow to a treat. It was the most wonderful delicious ice cream ever made.

Kindly Bert Wildman departed this life years and years ago but we loved him as long as he lived and we still revere his memory.

The Iceman

From "Golly Column" 1967, written by my grandfather, W.D. Fish.

An old time expression - "that does not cut any ice!"

But times have changed in 50 or 60 years and we do not have to cut ice. We make it at home in our refrigerators.

A half century ago the late Robert R. Lewis harvested ice on an artificial lake at Camp Moxie, near Seven Bridges, to supply the summer needs of the people of Coudersport.

Hundreds of tons of clear clean ice were cut from the little lake, shot down a slide to the tracks of the Coudersport and Port Allegany Railroad, loaded on cars and hauled to this place. Here it was stacked in a huge ice house and stored for use in the heat of summer.

No doubt a goodly number of men were thankful for the employment this industry provided at $1.25 or $1.50 a day. There was no minimum wage of $1.25 per hour in that day.

During the summer season faithful Nick Gustwick, long since gone to his reward, delivered the ice to local residents fortunate enough to possess a refrigerator or an ice box.

Then came electric and natural gas machines, crude in their early days but greatly improved in a few short years, until today modern refrigeration is found in every home.

Harvesting ice was big business in the day when ice had to be stored in winter.

She TItled It 'My First Love'

I have inherited my mother's collection of family history - filed somewhat haphazardly into folders bearing the family surnames. Tucked away between the crowded folders were spiral bound notebooks full of her familiar scrawlings - a trove of memories, musings and observations. I share this essay entitled My First Love.

Florence "Mollie" Beach
Sunday, May 7, 1939

By Barbara Fish Heimel

I fell in love with my cousin Mollie when I was very young. Her visits were exclamation points in the routine of everyday life. Delicious anticipation followed the announcement that she would be visiting for a few days. Here was an adult who actually paid attention to children, was interested in our lives and our concerns.

Mollie was the one of the older children in a large family, the eldest daughter of my father's sister, Ettie. Her actual name was Florence Spicer, named for her mother's sister. Her father nicknamed her Mollie when she was hardly past infancy because she was always jolly!

I think her life was far from easy. They lived in a house that was little more than a shack, no electricity or plumbing and darned little money. It was hard for me to see how she could be my cousin when she was as old as my mother. I eventually figured it out.

When I was hardly more than a baby, she took me to her home in Hornell for a week or so while Mother and Dad and the two older kids went on a vacation trip. That was the first of several visits.

I knew my Grandmother Fish through Mollie's tales of their relationship. Sadly, I could never make that deaf old lady hear anything I tried to say to her.

Mollie loved to sing and dance and when she was in town, there were people around most every evening, playing cards or singing around the piano. Mollie used to play by ear as she certainly never could have afforded lessons. She would sometimes play old hymns with rolling chords and encourage us to sing along.

She smelled wonderful and often wore an amazing red fox fur piece -  a source of endless fascination with its beady glass eyes and magnificent bushy tail. Under the poor beast's chin was a clip that opened to fasten onto one of its dangling little black legs. I'm sure this was the height of fashion in the 1930s and I expect was all she had left of more prosperous days.

She identified herself as a grass widow, which meant there was no Mr. Beach around. She did, however, have a succession of gentlemen friends who were frequent visitors as well. Most of the men were Whitesville folks she had known for a long time, as had my dad. She had one son and never had a desire for any more.

Mollie with one of her 'gentlemen friends'

The suffering of childbirth was a perfect example to her of how men victimized women. I understood that to mean that male doctors refused to give any sort of pain relief to laboring women. I never did get the whole story on that. But, while she liked the company of men, she certainly didn't want one of her own. I also assumed that her husband had done her wrong, but I never felt it would be polite to inquire.

Countless times I went to Mollie for comfort when the world treated me badly. I could depend upon her to listen and sympathize and buoy me up, restoring my battered self confidence and wiping my tears. Then distracting me with tales of the exciting thing she had just read the night before and what did I think about it. And I was again a person of consequence when an adult would ask my opinion and listen thoughtfully to what I said.

When the banks failed in 1929, Mollie lost her savings and her home. Thereafter, she lived with different families as a practical nurse, looking after invalids or children. It grieved her greatly that she had no home.

She continued to spend vacations with us and how she and Dad would argue politics! She loved FDR and my Dad thought he was ruining the country. I really enjoyed their squabbling because each defended his or her position eloquently, but there was never any doubt of their affection for each other so the raised voices weren't scary. I still like a good argument, in fact.

In the early 1940s, Mollie. came to live in Coudersport to take care of an elderly couple. Upon their deaths, she was willed a tenant house on their property. She was so grateful and really enjoyed at last having a home of her own. When her own mother suffered a crippling stroke, Mollie brought her to this little house to care forher for the rest of her days.

She took great pride in being a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution and urged me to join also. Always interested in history, she joined the Potter County Historical Society soon after she had relocated to Coudersport and always attended their monthly meetings, often driving here and there to transport old folks who would otherwise not be able to get out for evening affairs.

Mollie eventually moved to Florida to live near her son and other family, helping to look after the 'old folks' in the trailer park. We went to see her several times, the last time in a nursing home, where she was still looking after the old folks. Not paying much attention to me, her face lit up when she saw Joe. "I don't know who you are," she said, "but you're a good looking man!"

She celebrated her 100th birthday in January 1991 and died in July of that year.

(Here's another picture of Mollie from my previous blog post. Brother Steve commented here about some of his memories of his mother's first love!)

My Little Town, Part 2

Mrs. Dix's kindergarten was just a part of the neighborhood. You went down the street, past the Hoffman's driveway that led to their lawnmower repair shop, past the Hoffman's yellow house, past Mrs. Dudley's peaberry bush (you had to reach up and grab a peaberry every time you passed), past Mrs. Dudley's house, then the house that had apartments in it. My Aunt Florence lived there ("She's not your aunt, Janie, she's my cousin," said my mother. "Freddy calls her Aunt Florence, " I said. "She's not his aunt either."). Following the sidewalk around the peculiar way the street curved and then to the brick building with the big TAXIDERMY sign.

Walking on rainy mornings with the boy next door, David Bradley, wearing our raincoats with buckles and the hoods with the built-in visor, we splashed through the big puddle that formed on the sidewalk every time it rained. The same big puddle we jumped on in winter to splinter the ice.

Mrs. Dix welcomed a new class every fall to the high-ceilinged classroom with its big window facing the street. When you turned left, there was the kindergarten and straight back, another door led to In the Mr. Dix's taxidermy, a dusty mysterious place.

Update: Feb. 24, 2025
Imagine how delighted I was to unearth this photo of Happy Hours on an old computer file!
It shows the big front window and the venetian blinds I had forgotten.
From 1957, we see Roberta Hendryx (now Tucker), Fred Fish and Susan Frederick.

Everett and Twila were their names, though calling adults by their first names was out of the question. In addition to the kindergarten and the taxidermy, they also had antiques - Mrs. Dix collecting china dolls with  dusty hair and vacant eyes and Mr. Dix, those tall three-wheeled cycles, that he sometimes rode in parades.

This was a private kindergarten, established to get the community's five-year-olds ready for first grade at a time when there was no kindergarten in the Coudersport School Jointure. My grandparents paid my tuition - or dues as she called it - $10 a month. 

perhaps I was practicing my penmanship
on the invitation to graduation.

 Mrs. Dix was grandmotherly, though she and Mr. Dix had no children or grandchildren. She twinkled in that way of grandmothers in the little golden books, a cloud of rosewater, lipstick that collected in the wrinkles around her lips and the kind of shirtwaist dresses with matching belts that all the old ladies wore. She would sit at her desk twiddling her fingers, her reading glasses on a chain around her neck, while we were working at our desks, seated in the squeaky chairs, both feet on the floor.

She favored very elaborate and exciting 'programs' to celebrate the seasons, culminating in the graduation program in the spring. It was expected that parents would dress their girls in white dresses with crinolines, patent leather Mary Janes and ankle socks with ruffles and the boys in little boy suits or at least shirts with ties, their shoes freshly polished. 

 

Susan Frederick shared this 1957 photo with me as we
gathered for our high school class reunion last summer.
She's in the front and her mother the lady watching
in the grown-up chairs. Susan still has her diploma -
celebrating her as a master of rhymes I believe.

 

My Little Town

Just two houses down the street lived Mrs. Dudley. She wore flowered dresses, often protected with an over-the-shoulder apron, and her thin, gray hair was pulled in a tiny, tidy bun at the back of her neck. She was very much a lady. She wore black rubber knee protectors and had a rug she carefully folded and put under herself when she tended the flowers. Other times she wore canvas wedgie-type shoes, navy blue in color, with heavy cotton stockings on her legs. She was in her 80s, which seemed impossibly old, and her most remarkable feature was her dowager's hump. 

Behind her cottage was a big backyard that led to the river. There were tall trees for shade and flower gardens with lush growth of poppies, delphiniums and a riot of spring flowers from bulbs - tulips and daffodils and snowdrops and crocus.

In front, tucked between the sidewalk and the porch was a rambling flowering crab apple tree with white flowers giving way to "pea berries" or small hard green balls. You always grabbed a handful as you sailed by on your bike or walked under its branches. The boys loved to use them in pea shooters or sling shots.

We passed her house on our preferred route to church, to town, to school. I rarely ventured beyond the front porch that wrapped around, joining the parlor door and the everyday door. You just stepped up and there you were on the sloping floorboards. She sat on a wicker couch on the porch, with a faded flower chintz cushion at her back. She would sometimes be asleep when I sped by on my blue Western Flyer bike and I often made several trips to assure myself she hadn't died there on the porch in the afternoon heat. 

The porch was partially obscured by large hydrangea bushes on the everyday door side. Although I didn't know what those bushes were, they made a perfect screen from the street and they lent a dampness and coolness to the porch, even in the summer. 

One summer Debbie, Vicki and I spent many afternoons on that porch, sitting at Mrs. Dudley's  feet on the scratchy brown porch rug,  as she read to us from her old cracked leather copy of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. I can still remember her pointing out those old pen and ink illustrations - so different than the riotous Disney version that had played at the Coudersport Theatre. We thought we were well past the age of being read to and made a solemn pact not to tell the others what we did each afternoon, behind the hydrangea bushes.

Mrs. Dudley had two handsome grandsons - contemporaries of my older brothers - who came to spend the summers with her. There were notorious for the trouble they caused. But, trouble back then and trouble today are two different things. I thought it was strange that those boys had no father. Their mother, a soft spoken lady who drove a foreign car with New Jersey license plates, dropped them off each summer and picked them up before school was to begin. But their father was absent - not dead but divorced it was whispered.

"I must tell you one of my memories of you that I love," Mrs. Dudley wrote on a card she sent me when I graduated from high school. "When you were about four years old, I said to you one day 'You are a lovely little girl Janie.' You replied, 'I know it, my Daddy tells me so.' I don't think your Daddy and I would have any quarrel now."

I was relieved that she hadn't mentioned this other memory from about the same time of my life (chronicled in my grandfather's Golly column here.)

The time came when Mrs. Dudley could no longer manage on her own in that little cottage just two doors down and her daughter came and loaded her up in the foreign car and she was gone. It wasn't long before a family with young children moved in and then the crab apple tree was cut down and the gardens grew to weeds.

(Click here to read another memory of Mrs. Dudley)