Ethyl Young & Lewis Morrison, My Mother & Father
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I don’t know how my parents met, never thought to ask my mother but they were married on Sept.4 1922 and I was born the next May 27th. My parents had purchased a cute little white three room house and they had purchased nice furnishings and carpets etc, their happiness was very short lived however. My Dad worked for the railroad, mostly right around Francisco, Princeton and vicinity. He was a very sweet young man and according to my mother, Byron not only looks very much like him but has his love of music and his pleasant disposition. The night I was born, my father had a heart attack and the Doctor had to leave my mother and take care of him. So my grandmother delivered me the family thinks my dad probably had rheumatic fever from flu when he was young and injured his heart. On Aug 17 my father turned 20 years old, but Dec. 6th he was at a coal mine with a train switch engine while they were loading the cars with coal, some broke loose and he was caught between the cars and his lower trunk and legs were crushed. He died a few hours later after mom reached the hospital. He is buried in the Francisco Cemetery in Indiana with many of Grandmother and Grandfathers relatives nearby. I remember every Memorial Day, grandmother would cut her many Iris, tulips and roses and we would have many graves to put flowers on. both there and at Mt. Carmel.
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My mother like most young widows moved back to the family home, refurnishing much of the farmhouse with her stuff. It is to bad she didn’t go to work, she could have kept the little house and probably would have been self sufficient which she never seemed to care about. But Grandfather wanted her to move home with her baby. She had two younger brothers still in high school and one younger sister still living on the farm. So that is where I spent most of my childhood on Grandparents peach farm. There was big red barn that had once had horses and a couple milk cows but by the time I was there was storage and a garage for grandfather’s beloved “Baby Overland” car. I rode many miles in the “Baby Overland” to county fairs, Mt. Carmel, Oakland City Princeton etc. I remember a big baby buggy that was my mom and dad’s proud possession when they would take me out for walks. It was large, navy blue and made of woven reed. They must have still had a cow because I remember hay in the loft and climbing up in the barn loft and looking down out of the big wide hay doors. My older male cousins would swing down out of the loft on a rope too. Besides the peach orchard we had several cherry trees, not the sweet cherries but the pie cherries that require sugar and cooking. There were gooseberry bushes all around the peach orchard for pies and jams. Also, blackberry bushes, a grape arbor with concord grapes, good for eating but lots of seeds, but they made delicious jellies and jams. There was a “Smoke” house with a laundry room attachment. In the fall grandpa and mom’s brothers would butcher a pig and they would cure hams by artificial smoke and real smoking. As people now do with their small “smokers” for fish. They had a big home- made one and the smoke would go for several weeks. Grandmother also canned a lot of meat including chickens for winter, She had a winter kitchen but also a small summer kitchen. It had beside a coal kitchen range a small white stove with burners but I don’t know what kind of fuel it used. It seems as though it might have been kerosene. There was a huge garden, bigger than a couple lots. And a small corn field. When canning season started my aunts and uncles too would all come over and work on jams canned fruits etc and the males would do the pig and chicken slaughtering, cut off the chicken’s head and dip it in hot water to pull off the feathers easily. I have seen grandmother after everyone was pretty well grown go out and cut off a chickens head with an ax and scald and clean it for dinner.
Grandmother had a black woman who came once a week to do the laundry and the big kettles of boiling water would be full of white clothes, colored clothes and work clothes. She had a washer that after boiling the clothes, you put them in this wooden tub/tumbler and stand there and cranked a handle while the tub turned around and around washing, then rinsing.. Grandmother was very particular about her washing and one day she quietly walked into the washer room and saw the black lady spit a stream of tobacco juice in the clothes she was tumbling. Grandmother grabbed a broom and chased to woman off the property screaming at her all the way. I don’t know how many times she washed the clothes again that day. She had a great old black man who came once a week to work in her garden with her and another day to do the yard work. She always made a big lunch for him and sent some home for his dinner. She would ask him what he wanted to eat and every time he would say,” Oh miz Young, if you jes got some of that good corn beef and cabbage and some of your cornbread, I be real happy”. So, once a week she would know he wanted corned beef and cabbage and cornbread and usual the other day he wanted biscuits and sausage gravy, he loved her biscuits and gravy. He would sit out under the grape arbor in the shade and enjoy his lunch (dinner as they called it ) Supper was at night.
Grandpa had a wonderful well and sometimes in the summer when the water table would get low in some wells neighbors would come over and get some from him. The well was really deep and everyone said it was “sweet water, and so very cold. It never seemed to get low. To bad in later years the town grew up around there and everyone had water from a town well. But both grandparents were gone by that time.
My mother told me about one time when to grandmother’s horror Granddad bought a saloon on the outskirts of town and hired a female bartender or waitress Grandmother was so jealous when her daughter Tilla was about 12 or 13 yrs they went down one night to peek into the back window and see what was going on. The window was to high so grandmother put a board across the rain barrel to stand on so she could see. Tilla was holding the board and it slipped while grandmother was climbing up. She tumbled into the rain barrel and was having a difficulty getting out when the local doctor came out the back door. To grandmother’s total embarrassment, she was soaking wet as well as Tilla She never told anyone about the Doctor being in the saloon and he never told anyone about finding Grandmother in the rain barrel. It always remained their secret. Mom said she remembered both Tilla and Grandmother coming in shoes dresses soaking wet and Tilla crying and Grandmother telling her to be quiet and not say a word. I guess Grandmother never found out what Grandfather, the barmaid and everyone was doing at night in the saloon. She prevailed after a few years and before I was born it had been sold.
Grandmother had all the church quilters at her house once a month on Thursdays. The boys would set up the quilting frames in the living room. All the rooms in the house were big with high ceilings and each one had a fire place except the bedrooms. In the winter she had bricks she would lay on the back of the kitchen stove and heat up to wrap a cloth and put in all the beds to warm them up at night. The mattresses and pillows were all feathers. When Grandmother had her quilting ladies over we all had to stay away. One time my mischievous uncle Willard taught me to sing a song “Sally had a wooden leg laid away” and sent me in to sing it. Since I was spoiled and precocious and loved Uncle Bill I marched in and announced I wanted to sing them a song, The ladies all thought my father’s death was so sad they waited while I sang the song to my grandmothers shock. I certainly didn’t know that they called a bottle of moonshine a”wooden leg”
My dad had a handsome phonograph and had many records he had collected. It was a tall mahogany, and very nice “Victor” with the dog and microphone picture on it.. Of course moms younger brothers and sisters loved it and kept adding more records. Grandmother had a piano and an old pump organ she had brought with her from Mt. Carmel. She played and sang church hymns. Every Sunday she and I, sometimes Grandpa would walk to church and by the time I was three or four I knew every song they sang in church and I could sing with the loudest. Even then, like all of the Young family I could carry a tune quite well. My mom, her younger sister Edna and her two brothers had a church quartet, that sang almost every Sunday My Uncle Waldo had a wonderful baritone voice and Uncle Bill and my mom did the harmonizing, while Aunt Edna, who was only ten years older than me sang soprano.
Grandmother was always very proud. On Saturdays if it was summer the watermelon man would come by with his melons in a little wagon pulled by a horse. My grandfather didn’t grow melons I don’t know why as he seemed to grow everything else. So grandmother would make him plug three corner sample and show to her until she found a big one that looked ripe and suited. It would be taken in the smokehouse put on ice until Sunday evening when all the brothers and sisters would come over with their children and visit in the evening. Grandmother and Grandfather would sit on the porch swing in the evening and hold court while the adults sat around just visiting. Sometimes on Sunday Willard and Waldo still young living at home and not married would go out early Sunday morning and crank the old ice cream maker for the evening visits. Those days Grandmother would make a cake or one of the daughters or daughters in law would bring a cake over. I would play in the hot southern nights with my cousins and I did have “cousins by the dozens”, We would chase fireflies and put them in a jar where they would stop flashing, play hide and seek, tag, etc.
Aunt Christie Hale, her husband with their three boys Bruce (badly wounded during W.W.II and spent most the next ten years of his life in a veterans hospital. ) Gordon, a career Air Force mechanic based mostly at Mountain Home Idaho and Eugene who stayed around Princeton I believe, , Uncle Wayne wife Lucy and their son Devin Lee. Later they had two other boys Glen Alan and Lyle Frederick but all three were at least ten years difference in ages, Aunt Janie and Uncle Tommy Livermore with their brood Marcella, William Joseph ( Billy Joe) Uncle Walter wife Maud, would occasionally drive down from Oakland City with daughter Norma Jean, son Walter Jr, and whoever was born by that time. After church on Sundays, my two young uncles would go play on a baseball team and generally mom and aunt Edna went to the games and watched them. Grandmother did not cook on Sundays but went to church, spent the afternoon reading her Bible so I was alone until my Aunt Esther moved back to Francisco. She had been married about 1919 to a young soldier from W.W. I named Ernest Wagner. They had two daughters Dorothy Pearl and Hattie Elizabeth named for Grandmother.
Mom and I use to take the train and go over to Louisville Kentucky where they lived and which at that time was nothing more than beautiful rolling hills and farms. Now Kentucky Derby and big horse show with gorgeous farms and pure bred horses. Uncle Ernest died when Dorothy was five years old and Hattie was 3 yrs old, He was one of the “Doughboys” in Germany during W.W. I and had been sprayed with mustard gas. Aunt Esther moved back after his death and became the local telephone operator. This was the old plug in switchboard and she was the only operator An apartment was built on the back of the office and she had to answer day and night, Grandmother had a telephone put in the house, the old kind, one ring for the operator and if you were on the same line you could ring friends by knowing their call number example two long rings, one short turn of the little handle on the side.
I was just a year older than Hattie and a year younger than Dorothy, Uncle Ernest had one sister Pearl as his only family She lived in Mobile, Ala and as she had no children and was widowed young Dorothy Pearl, as she grew up spent a lot of time with her and I think made her home there in later years. I believe my fourth or fifth birthday I had come down with tonsillitis and maybe flu, but mom was making cake and ice cream. To keep me from being so cranky and crying Dorothy Pearl was trying to make a little tea party for me. in the Smokehouse. She wanted to keep the door shut while she was getting ready, but I was being a spoiled sick child and was screaming and insisting that I should go in NOW. Mom tried to keep me happy and finally in despair Dorothy let me come in. She had my little play table all set up with some toy cups etc. if she is still living, “sorry Dorothy “for my acting like a brat. I think I was pretty sick for about ten days and once Mom tried to get me to eat by making my favorite Banana pudding with a layer of vanilla wafers, then the banana pudding with whipped cream on top. I ate it but vomited for a couple days. To this day I won’t eat banana pudding or pie. And wouldn’t touch a banana until my boys were born and I bought bananas for them to eat. I still want them very firm and almost green before I will touch them
I attended school in the same building as my two uncles, Waldo and Willard and my Aunt Edna, who was about 16 yrs old when I started. School It was the pride of Francisco, a two story brick school. And the town centered around school plays, basketball and baseball teams activities. My Uncle Bill either quit or graduated about the time I started but my Uncle Waldo was still in school for a couple years. He was very handsome, dark wavy hair, taller than most of the Young” males in the family, about 6 ft. was very popular in all the high school plays as the male lead,with his singing, played basketball and baseball When W.W,!! came he went to the Army Military Police, He never married although had a serious girlfriend he met during the war, He came home and devoted his life to taking care of Grandmother and Grandfather, dying of pneumonia when he was about 68 yrs old.
I remember in the winter my grandfather getting after me for holding my winter coat too close to the fireplace to get it warm before going out for the walk to school, Probably about three quarters of a mile. That just about takes care of my childhood, We called our teachers by their first names, Miss Rose, Mrs. Ellen etc, and did have a lot of southern customs in that part of the country, “Kinfolks” use to get me teased a lot after I moved west. The first day of every month grandmother would put on one of her nicer dresses black stockings and laced shoes. She did wear oxfords with a 1-to two in. heel for “dress” Grandpa would put on his suit and necktie and they would get the “Baby Overland” out and drive up to Mr. and Mrs Shoe’s grocery store. It was the only grocer in town and also had seeds and animal feed in a building in back of the grocery store. Grandmother and Grandpa would drive up to the store and pay their monthly bill. Nearly everyone paid the first of the month in those days and charged everything. The Shoes would invite them into the office, where they would sit and visit and Grandpa would pay the months bill. To my knowledge this never varied while I lived there. Francisco was very small, but had a bank, Shoes Grocery and Feed Store, Shoes also had sewing items and bolts of clothing material they were really an old general mercantile store, you could buy nearly everything there., the schoolhouse, grade students downstairs high school students upstairs, a Doctors office, a Barber shop where everyone including women and kids had their hair cut, and a pharmacy and the old ice cream and coca cola refreshments. I remember the wonderful old ice cream tables and chairs, and the great signs on the wall with the Coca Cola girls holding trays with coke glasses full of ice and the coke beverage. Coca Cola must have been a new product about then The homes of town residents were generally stone or brick with huge covered porches.
My mother used up the insurance money from my father's death giving some to my grandparents and buying things for me and the family home and then the bank crash took most of what was left by the time I was six yrs old. One day she and some siblings and friends were swimming in the White River or Wabash and the ring she never removed from her finger that my dad gave her when they were married came off and was lost in the river. Her brothers dove and dove for it in the water but of course never found a trace of it. I remember she cried and cried about it. It was a wedding ring with a couple little diamonds and rubies; I would like to have given it to one of my granddaughters. Since money was getting low for her she left me with my grandparents and went to Chicago with a girlfriend in 1928 to find work. She found a job in one of the big factories there on an assembly line at the Mazola Oil Co. She said she put the lids on the cans. How she stood all day I don’t know for she always wore high heels and had bunions on her feet.
