The Barn
The enterprise of finding "secret forts" and "hideouts" dominates the mind of a lad who just turned seven and has no siblings, and Al Botcher's farm near Hokah, Minnesota was so chock full of possibilities that I could have used a directory to keep track of them all. The biggest of them all was the barn--imagine a secret hideout larger than most people's homes!
When school abruptly ended for the year, my mother engaged a young girl to babysit me during the day and do light housework to keep herself occupied. She had the menial task of making lunch and providing kool-aid and snacks throughout the day and the impossible task of keeping an eye on me.
I think her name was Marna.
When Al and my mom rolled out the driveway and down the road, I finished my corn flakes and was out the door to explore my environment. Marna would call out my name around midday and I would go eat lunch; then it was back out the door until the early evening when they returned. I might show up once asking for kool-aid.
Kool-aid was so wonderful. It came in a little packet like garden seeds do. You dumped it into a pitcher of water, added about a cup of sugar and mixed it. It came in multiple flavors but the deep red cherry ones were the best. It was so cheap that you could have all you wanted. No one cared. The sugar was more expensive than the kool-aid, but it wasn't any good without it.
The barn could be entered from any number of places. The easiest was a common door which opened into an ante room where milking equipment had once been stored. But this entryway was entirely visible from the house. Anyone studious of proper clandestine behavior would never enter this way. It was more proper to walk absent-mindedly toward the fields beyond the end of the barn and then meander in and out of a small patch of dried nettle stems before darting out of sight.
It just was not an option to have anyone know where the heck you were!
The barn was built into a hillside on one end so that a hay wagon could be pulled in right through an enormous sliding door to unload the bales. The door hung on a metal track and could be slid open wide enough to pass. It was better, however to leave no trace of the entry point, so I had the option of pulling the door outward of the barn and cramming my tiny body through, letting it flap shut behind me with an echoing thud.
Once inside, the senses were overloaded with mysterious stimuli. On the opposite side was another similar sliding door for the hay wagon to exit through and the floor was covered with about six inches of old, musty, dry, shredded hay. The smell was wonderful.
Long vertical lines of sunlight came in through the cracks between the boards of the walls and scintillated across the walls and floor. There was a reverberative hush inside the barn and if there was any breeze outside, it whistled through holes at the roof level far above and at each end, and through a boxy window right in the middle.
There was a metal track, much like the ones the sliding doors hung on, extending from one end of the highest point of the ceiling to the other. In the old days, before hay was baled, this track extended outside one end of the barn and a huge metal fork hung from it. The fork would have been lowered by a rope and hay was lifted from wagons and then brought into the loft, rolled down the track and lowered to the pile.
There was no fork anymore and it was all just so much rusty metal hanging way up there.
A wooden ladder was built right onto each end wall and went right up to the ceiling at the ends of the track. If the loft was filled with bales of hay, I could climb the ladder to the track and hang from it, walking hand over hand feeling the thrill of danger as I encroached into the space over the abyss where hay was not stacked.
Another thrill of danger the barn afforded was walking the beams. The barn had huge 10 x 10 beams running from side to side and similar posts holding their weight and the weight of the roof. Beginning thrill-seekers could walk a beam where the hay bales had been stacked almost up to it. Only advanced practitioners dared walk a beam over empty space with only a foot of loosely packed hay to break a potential fall.
The solitude of the hayloft was nearly overwhelming. If one quieted one's breathing, one could then hear the "hoo-hoo-hoo" of pigeons perched along the track near the ceiling and in rude nests built in nearly inaccessible places near the ends of beams or in the V-shaped joints of their supports.
If you suddenly yelled out, the semi-darkness exploded into a cacophony of flapping and fluttering wings as seven or eight pigeons leaped from their nests or perches and fled, banging their wing tips on the boards as they exited, in absolute panic, the little ventilation holes at the ends of the ceiling track.
These delights were merely the introduction to the secrets of the barn. I would learn over the course of time that the barn had seasons. In the summer, after the first crop of alfalfa had been baled and stacked, it was imbued with the sweet smell of the aging green hay. Even the baling twine exuded the spicy smell of sisal. Burlap bags had their own peculiar smell as well.
New bales of hay were still quite heavy. As they dried, they became lighter and they could be moved slightly from their neat arrays, to create a secret tunnel. Some tunnels between bales occurred naturally as well since the bales didn't always completely fill the space available.
Marna must have been curious when I returned for Kool-Aid, covered with dust, with scratches all over me from cramming my stringy little body through cracks and tunnels in the hay.
There were also a couple of hay chutes in the loft. One was covered with a wooden cowl to prevent falls but the other was a genuine trap door with no cover. They led to the milking parlor on the lower floor of the barn and were once used to dump hay down for the cows below. These chutes were dangers of the highest order and could be toyed with in a number of ways. Aside from dropping objects into them, they could be jumped across in a display of arrogant, fearless conquest.
There was a safer way to access the lower part of the barn, however. A ladder reached up from a small opening at the end opposite the drive-thru. It led down into the ante-room where milking equipment had been kept. On wooden shelves, a few artifacts of a bygone era remained. Stacks of gunney-sacks and an odd assortment of rubber and stainless-steel milking machine fittings, worn out or broken, old pails, pitchforks, and scoop shovels adorned the little room along with a few more modern items like the paper cores that binder twine came on.
The milking parlor had rows of old, rusty stancions that once had clamped loosely around a cow's neck with a now-rusty water cup within reach as well as loose hay for munching.
The floor was poured concrete and the area at the rear of the stanchion rows was formed into a twelve inch trough which ran the length of the parlor on each side. As the cows were milked, or waiting their turn, they drank, munched, mooed, defecated, urinated and created quite a mess in the troughs, and the troughs would have to be cleaned out with scoop shovels afterward, throwing the manure outside on a pile, to ferment while it awaited spreading upon the fields.
I gradually came to understand these dairy-farming procedures, not because Al Botcher tried milking cattle--he knew better than to give up his day job for that arduous lifestyle--but because there were active dairy-farmers in the valley that I could watch, including the bachelor on the next farm up the valley and the parents of the three other children in Pfeffer Valley that were to become my close friends. It is not a routine that I would wish upon anyone, but it had an odd peacefulness, structure, and clearness of purpose that spoke of a simpler life in earlier times.
A large doorway led from the milking parlor right out into the cow yard. The cow yard was a fenced in area with a large cement vat which was filled with drinking water for the cattle and for keeping filled milk cans cool until they could be picked up by the milk truck.
Al kept water in the cement vat because he did embark upon raising feed-cattle, heifers and steers that he raised for beef. This necessitated planting and harvesting hay and other crops and he partnered with a man two farms down the road named Al Thompson. Al Thompson had the necessary tractors and machinery and the two Als became close friends as did my mother with Al Thompson's wife Evelyn.
The men had years of farming adventures and all four became drinking partners at the pub, not to anyone's betterment.
I had years of adventures in that barn and in other people's barns, where I fought wars, displayed examples of exemplary valor and cowardice, swallowed entire universes and generally filled in the long summer days of being single digits of age and an only child.
A large, old-fashioned barn like that is becoming a real rarity. Pole buildings have replaced them nearly everywhere. Putting a new roof on a large, tall barn is an expensive and dangerous proposition and once the roof is compromised, the weather gets in and eventually everything falls apart. Very sad.
Thursday, March 26, 2020
Wednesday, March 18, 2020
The New Farmhouse
The New Farmhouse
Al Botcher's farm was similar in a lot of ways to the one owned by Grandma Lill and Grandpa Lee.
The driveway fanned into a rather large area where cars could be parked a number of places and there was a wooden garage, large enough to pull a single car into and hardly enough room to open the driver's door to get out. Passengers had to get out before Al put the car in there. There was an outhouse next to it which you could use if you were outdoors and didn't want to go into the house.
There was a big barn with cow yard and a machine shed/grainery like there was at the Sparta farm but there was even more. Another implement shed with attached corn crib sat beyond the garage and further yet was a hog house with a chicken coop across the pigpen from it. It was like a little town sitting there, all waiting to be explored.The house sat by the road with a front yard shaded by two big white pine trees which must have been a hundred years old. A small smokehouse made of cement blocks stood on the back side.
A big garden area with bordering lilac bushes lay east of the house.
We would enter through the back door by the driveway right into the kitchen where my mother had placed a round, white wroght-iron table with a big glass top. It was her prize possession and must have been a wedding gift that was stored somewhere because Grandma Lill had no place for it. Sitting at the table, one could look out nice windows to a view of the driveway and the machine shed and barn across the way.
The sink and appliances were across the room with counter tops between. The bathroom, like the one at the farm, was not very big and was stubbed in on the front yard side. It contained a vanity, big wall mirror, toilet, and tub. A door at the other end of it was the only way down into the basement, which was very rough but had a concrete floor. It was not actively used for the storage of much more than some firewood since anything large would not be easy to get through the bathroom and around the corner of the stairs going down.
The basement consisted basically of two large rooms with a huge support wall between them that held up the middle of the house. The far room held a great big octopus furnace and a coal bin.
That was a filthy mess! I don't think my mother ever went down there it was so bad. About once a year a dump truck would arrive and back up through the yard to a little window that could be removed. A wooden chute was stuck from the truck through that window and an entire load of coal would be shoveled down it. It would create so much coal dust that it would be all day before it settled. No fire was lit in the furnace during this time for fear of igniting the dust and blowing up the house.
A doorway from the kitchen led past a stairway and into a nice, large living room. Doorways at each end of this living room led into and out of an equally big dining room, which would only be used if Al and my mother were entertaining more than six guests, such as Thanksgiving dinners or Christmas dinners. It contained my mother's collection of books. When my mother obtained a book, it was read and then went on a book case or a shelf, never to be abandoned, no matter how trivial.
The same was the case with what she would call knick-knacks. Knick-knacks were all the little decorative things one accumulates during life--framed pictures, baskets, lamps, candle sticks, candy dishes, pitchers, trivets, decorative boxes or other containers, souvenirs, and any number of little things that just can't be parted with.
Grandma Lill must have been storing a lot of these things for my mother, because she really filled up that house with them. I'll bet Lill was glad to get rid of them, because she was probably storing a lot of things for the other children as well.
Across the east end of the living and dining rooms was an enclosed front porch. Some comfortable furniture was placed out there and it was real nice. A door led down some steps and across a little stretch of lawn to the huge garden.
The stairway between the kitchen and living room was enclosed and had a door at the bottom. Beneath and behind it was a closet for storing items, but it also doubled as a really good hiding place.
The stairs went up to a little landing. The bedroom belonging to Al and my mother was right at the top. A short hallway led to another small bedroom which was used as a guest room. The guest bedroom had a door that opened onto an outside balcony that had a white wooden rail around it. It looked down into the front yard.
Walking right around the bed and through another door led into my bedroom which was actually pretty awesome.
I had a small window that looked out to the front yard and the big pine trees and another window that looked out over the roof of the front porch and gave me a beautiful view down the valley. I could see the gravel road winding down into the lowlands of the next farm and back up again along the steep side of a hill. In the distance, a mile away perhaps, I could see another farm perched on the side of another hill, the farm at which my school bus picked up two boys and a girl. These kids were to become my good friends.
My room had a double-sized bed and I had my own closet. What was even more amazing was that my closet, although about six or seven feet deep, had only a partial back wall and led into the back of the closet of my mother and Al's bedroom! It was a secret passageway.
The secret passageway was a novelty for a while, but they ultimately filled it up with shoes and boxes so that I couldn't appear suddenly in their bedroom.
My mom never met a little piece of furniture she didn't love, so I ended up with a small desk in my room which was really nice. I could keep all of my finds in and on it.
I don't think that my mom and Al ever became aware of the best feature of this bedroom. The window facing east, when raised up, not only gave me a nice breeze in the summertime, but provided an opportunity, especially on a cold winter night, to pee through the screen onto the porch roof and not have to trod through the guest bedroom, down the stairs, through the kitchen to the bathroom and back again.
What a great house!
Al Botcher's farm was similar in a lot of ways to the one owned by Grandma Lill and Grandpa Lee.
The driveway fanned into a rather large area where cars could be parked a number of places and there was a wooden garage, large enough to pull a single car into and hardly enough room to open the driver's door to get out. Passengers had to get out before Al put the car in there. There was an outhouse next to it which you could use if you were outdoors and didn't want to go into the house.
There was a big barn with cow yard and a machine shed/grainery like there was at the Sparta farm but there was even more. Another implement shed with attached corn crib sat beyond the garage and further yet was a hog house with a chicken coop across the pigpen from it. It was like a little town sitting there, all waiting to be explored.The house sat by the road with a front yard shaded by two big white pine trees which must have been a hundred years old. A small smokehouse made of cement blocks stood on the back side.
A big garden area with bordering lilac bushes lay east of the house.
We would enter through the back door by the driveway right into the kitchen where my mother had placed a round, white wroght-iron table with a big glass top. It was her prize possession and must have been a wedding gift that was stored somewhere because Grandma Lill had no place for it. Sitting at the table, one could look out nice windows to a view of the driveway and the machine shed and barn across the way.
The sink and appliances were across the room with counter tops between. The bathroom, like the one at the farm, was not very big and was stubbed in on the front yard side. It contained a vanity, big wall mirror, toilet, and tub. A door at the other end of it was the only way down into the basement, which was very rough but had a concrete floor. It was not actively used for the storage of much more than some firewood since anything large would not be easy to get through the bathroom and around the corner of the stairs going down.
The basement consisted basically of two large rooms with a huge support wall between them that held up the middle of the house. The far room held a great big octopus furnace and a coal bin.
That was a filthy mess! I don't think my mother ever went down there it was so bad. About once a year a dump truck would arrive and back up through the yard to a little window that could be removed. A wooden chute was stuck from the truck through that window and an entire load of coal would be shoveled down it. It would create so much coal dust that it would be all day before it settled. No fire was lit in the furnace during this time for fear of igniting the dust and blowing up the house.
A doorway from the kitchen led past a stairway and into a nice, large living room. Doorways at each end of this living room led into and out of an equally big dining room, which would only be used if Al and my mother were entertaining more than six guests, such as Thanksgiving dinners or Christmas dinners. It contained my mother's collection of books. When my mother obtained a book, it was read and then went on a book case or a shelf, never to be abandoned, no matter how trivial.
The same was the case with what she would call knick-knacks. Knick-knacks were all the little decorative things one accumulates during life--framed pictures, baskets, lamps, candle sticks, candy dishes, pitchers, trivets, decorative boxes or other containers, souvenirs, and any number of little things that just can't be parted with.
Grandma Lill must have been storing a lot of these things for my mother, because she really filled up that house with them. I'll bet Lill was glad to get rid of them, because she was probably storing a lot of things for the other children as well.
Across the east end of the living and dining rooms was an enclosed front porch. Some comfortable furniture was placed out there and it was real nice. A door led down some steps and across a little stretch of lawn to the huge garden.
The stairway between the kitchen and living room was enclosed and had a door at the bottom. Beneath and behind it was a closet for storing items, but it also doubled as a really good hiding place.
The stairs went up to a little landing. The bedroom belonging to Al and my mother was right at the top. A short hallway led to another small bedroom which was used as a guest room. The guest bedroom had a door that opened onto an outside balcony that had a white wooden rail around it. It looked down into the front yard.
Walking right around the bed and through another door led into my bedroom which was actually pretty awesome.
I had a small window that looked out to the front yard and the big pine trees and another window that looked out over the roof of the front porch and gave me a beautiful view down the valley. I could see the gravel road winding down into the lowlands of the next farm and back up again along the steep side of a hill. In the distance, a mile away perhaps, I could see another farm perched on the side of another hill, the farm at which my school bus picked up two boys and a girl. These kids were to become my good friends.
My room had a double-sized bed and I had my own closet. What was even more amazing was that my closet, although about six or seven feet deep, had only a partial back wall and led into the back of the closet of my mother and Al's bedroom! It was a secret passageway.
The secret passageway was a novelty for a while, but they ultimately filled it up with shoes and boxes so that I couldn't appear suddenly in their bedroom.
My mom never met a little piece of furniture she didn't love, so I ended up with a small desk in my room which was really nice. I could keep all of my finds in and on it.
I don't think that my mom and Al ever became aware of the best feature of this bedroom. The window facing east, when raised up, not only gave me a nice breeze in the summertime, but provided an opportunity, especially on a cold winter night, to pee through the screen onto the porch roof and not have to trod through the guest bedroom, down the stairs, through the kitchen to the bathroom and back again.
What a great house!
Thursday, March 12, 2020
Hokah Elementary
Hokah Elementary
I had to ride a real school bus to Hokah Elementary. It seemed to me a somewhat scary proposition, but what are you going to do? We hadn't even really moved in completely when the big monster pulled into the yard and the door swung open.
I got on and took a seat. A bus full of snotty-nosed kids of all ages sized me up, and I wasn't very big. Al's farm was the next to the last one up Pfeffer Valley and the last one was owned by a middle-aged bachelor with no kids, so the bus turned around in the ample driveway in front of the house. Only two more kids got on in the whole valley and still only two more on the way to Hokah, six or seven miles distant. Two of the four got off at the Catholic church and school along with about half of the passengers.
Hokah Elementary was a square brick three-story building that looked monolithic to me as the bus dropped us off. Everyone else knew one another and made off quickly for the playground in order to burn off a little energy before the bell rang to summon us inside. A little old lady met me and brought me right in to show me around.
The building was really old. The basement had a lunch cafeteria with benches and chairs and there were two actual bathrooms, one for the boys and the other for the girls, which had toilets and sinks to wash your hands in. This was a new luxury after my time at Hickory Hill. The fixtures were old and the faucets squeaked and dripped.
On the first floor were four classrooms for the lower grades and on the second floor were a couple of classrooms, some storage, and an office which belonged to the Principal. This entire arrangement was far more complex than what I was used to, which was having one teacher who was also the Principal and one helper.
The classrooms were old fashioned, with a banged-up teacher's desk and rugged little desks with holes in the tops which used to be for inkwells in the earlier days before pencils were invented. The seats were attached to the little desks so that once you were in there, you didn't get to move your chair around and make noise.
There were probably a dozen to fifteen first-graders and once the bell rang and they filed in, all sweaty from jumping around outside, they looked me over with a lot of curiosity. I was extremely self-conscious, owing mostly to the fact that I was an only child and it was never really required of me to socialize with any peers. I was also noticeably shorter and smaller than everyone in the room, including the girls, and one of the girls was quite small. Her name was Rosemary and she had me by about a half-inch. She was physically tiny and diminutive in affect as well, but probably delighted that someone actually smaller than her had arrived.
The teacher placed me near two boys, one named Bob Millen and the other named Don Botcher. Don was my cousin by marriage. Al Botcher had two brothers. One lived in Caledonia about twenty miles distant. The other lived in this little town of Hokah.
Once assured that I was on the bottom of the pecking order in school, they turned out to be quite friendly. Don was a tallish lad and very nice. He had a great sense of humor and liked to laugh about anything, no matter how inane. Bob was a budding young delinquent and I learned that he was regularly threatened by his parents to be sent to Red Wing. Red Wing is a reform school, a prison for young offenders. It sounded ominous and I can attest, after seeing it years later, that it is ominous. It is surrounded by an impassible mesh fence that rises up about twenty feet and arcs inward. Red Wing is where Robert Zimmerman, a.k.a. Bob Dylan, sings about.
Bob Millen was destined to be my best friend at Hokah. He took a liking to me for some strange reason. I was very short and immature, but I had become a very good reader and speller, and understood the simple arithmetic exercises we were learning. I think he got it in his mind that because I was so little, I was a prodigy of sorts.
Because Bob Millen liked me, nobody picked on me, but as it turned out, none of the boys seemed to be bullies, and the older children had recess at different times than we did.
Roger Johnson was one of the boys we picked up along our route and in another year, his younger brother Donnie would come to school. Howard Wilson walked to school because his house adjoined the farther reach of the playground, which was huge, stretching from behind the school building over a hundred yards to the edge of an escarpment which led steeply down into a weedy swampy area. He had a younger brother, too. Ed Littlejohn was a short, compact boy who was very wiry, somewhat like myself, but stronger and more confident.
The school had a front yard which abutted the main street in an area where residences lined it. A few short blocks to the east, it came through the two-block long town of Hokah and only a few more blocks west took you out into the farmland. There was a primitive merry-go-round, a couple of teeter totters, and a large pipe frame with four swings hanging from long chains. Everything squeaked and was a pinch-danger if you put your hands or fingers in the wrong place.
The backyard property of the school was immense.
There was one large pine tree with limbs low enough to climb into. There were also a couple of areas where snow paths could be trampled down so that we could slide down into the swampy area. The teachers didn't care if we climbed the tree or explored down into the swamp. I can tell you that neither would be allowed these days.
We could actually be out of sight of the teachers, making secret forts and hiding places on the edge of the swamp, as long as when the bell rang we came hustling back to school. We observed this rule religiously because our Principal, Mr Wagner, was supposedly a retired Navy officer and very tough. Unlike many school children today, the last thing we wanted was to be sent to the Principal or worse, to have a call made to our parents.
I particularly wanted nothing to do with offending my new stepfather. I hadn't the slightest clue as to how he would react and he was big and scary. I even refrained from tantrums and misbehavior of all overt types because of this uncertainty. You see, he was just what I needed!
Attached to the back of the school was a spiral slide which went up to the second story. We would climb on the very bottom of this slide, which was almost irresistible, but never beyond the first of two or three turns, because the slide led directly up to Mr Wagner's office. It was a fire escape. If we knew for sure that he was gone somewhere we would take some liberties with it, but not many, because you could still have to answer to him when he got back if a teacher caught you.
About once a month we had a fire drill. There were no lights or buzzers to go off in those days. The teachers simply announced that there was a fire drill. We got up out of our seats in an orderly fashion, actually went upstairs, through Mr Wagner's office and out a little door and slid down the slide.
It was the greatest thing ever! In the event of a real fire--and the building looked like it could go up in flames at any moment--we would either go down the stairs if the fire was above us or up the stairs and down the slide.
Bob Millen and Don Botcher told me that Ed Littlejohn was an Indian. I do not think that he was of native American descent, but his name reinforced that idea. He was also very stealthy. If he hid in the swamp, none of us could find him. I have been in touch with him in older years and he appears as Norweigan or Danish as any of the rest of us.
There were girl classmates as well. I remember a Nancy, a Sharon, Betty, and of course Rosemary. I'm sure there were more.
At least once every other day, we filed up the stairs quietly past Mr Wagner's closed door and up another set of steps up in to the attic of the building where we sat on some wooden benches that had been installed up there. All of the lights would be turned off and we were admonished to be as quiet as mice. That wasn't going to happen, but we tried and there was always the concern about disturbing Mr Wagner.
An ancient projector clattered and clicked as a film rolled off of one reel, past a little light, and onto another reel, with a resultant picture jumping around on a large screen, which rolled down out of a large metal tube much like a window shade. Some of the movies would be about personal hygiene--how to brush your teeth, wash your hands properly, wash your hair, and similar things. Others would be like little newsreels showing us how to conduct ourselves when the flag is brought past, how to fold up the flag, and innumerable things like that.
We regarded the trips to the attic a real treat because it broke up the crushing boredom of trying to sit at a little desk without squirming.
After a week of habituation to the routines of Hokah Elementary school, I felt quite comfortable, and enjoyed playing with the first group of friends that I ever had. There was no such thing as homework. We had a couple of books which remained in our desk when we weren't reading from them, as did our pencils, crayons, and rulers.
The teacher would give us work sheets which we did in class and put on her desk when we were finished. If she didn't like what we did with them, she called us up and we had it out right there.
Since we had no book bags or backpacks and took nothing home, once school let out, I was free to explore the other dimensions of my new reality--the new home, the farm on which it stood, and the comings and goings of my new family situation.
I had to ride a real school bus to Hokah Elementary. It seemed to me a somewhat scary proposition, but what are you going to do? We hadn't even really moved in completely when the big monster pulled into the yard and the door swung open.
I got on and took a seat. A bus full of snotty-nosed kids of all ages sized me up, and I wasn't very big. Al's farm was the next to the last one up Pfeffer Valley and the last one was owned by a middle-aged bachelor with no kids, so the bus turned around in the ample driveway in front of the house. Only two more kids got on in the whole valley and still only two more on the way to Hokah, six or seven miles distant. Two of the four got off at the Catholic church and school along with about half of the passengers.
Hokah Elementary was a square brick three-story building that looked monolithic to me as the bus dropped us off. Everyone else knew one another and made off quickly for the playground in order to burn off a little energy before the bell rang to summon us inside. A little old lady met me and brought me right in to show me around.
The building was really old. The basement had a lunch cafeteria with benches and chairs and there were two actual bathrooms, one for the boys and the other for the girls, which had toilets and sinks to wash your hands in. This was a new luxury after my time at Hickory Hill. The fixtures were old and the faucets squeaked and dripped.
On the first floor were four classrooms for the lower grades and on the second floor were a couple of classrooms, some storage, and an office which belonged to the Principal. This entire arrangement was far more complex than what I was used to, which was having one teacher who was also the Principal and one helper.
The classrooms were old fashioned, with a banged-up teacher's desk and rugged little desks with holes in the tops which used to be for inkwells in the earlier days before pencils were invented. The seats were attached to the little desks so that once you were in there, you didn't get to move your chair around and make noise.
There were probably a dozen to fifteen first-graders and once the bell rang and they filed in, all sweaty from jumping around outside, they looked me over with a lot of curiosity. I was extremely self-conscious, owing mostly to the fact that I was an only child and it was never really required of me to socialize with any peers. I was also noticeably shorter and smaller than everyone in the room, including the girls, and one of the girls was quite small. Her name was Rosemary and she had me by about a half-inch. She was physically tiny and diminutive in affect as well, but probably delighted that someone actually smaller than her had arrived.
The teacher placed me near two boys, one named Bob Millen and the other named Don Botcher. Don was my cousin by marriage. Al Botcher had two brothers. One lived in Caledonia about twenty miles distant. The other lived in this little town of Hokah.
Once assured that I was on the bottom of the pecking order in school, they turned out to be quite friendly. Don was a tallish lad and very nice. He had a great sense of humor and liked to laugh about anything, no matter how inane. Bob was a budding young delinquent and I learned that he was regularly threatened by his parents to be sent to Red Wing. Red Wing is a reform school, a prison for young offenders. It sounded ominous and I can attest, after seeing it years later, that it is ominous. It is surrounded by an impassible mesh fence that rises up about twenty feet and arcs inward. Red Wing is where Robert Zimmerman, a.k.a. Bob Dylan, sings about.
Bob Millen was destined to be my best friend at Hokah. He took a liking to me for some strange reason. I was very short and immature, but I had become a very good reader and speller, and understood the simple arithmetic exercises we were learning. I think he got it in his mind that because I was so little, I was a prodigy of sorts.
Because Bob Millen liked me, nobody picked on me, but as it turned out, none of the boys seemed to be bullies, and the older children had recess at different times than we did.
Roger Johnson was one of the boys we picked up along our route and in another year, his younger brother Donnie would come to school. Howard Wilson walked to school because his house adjoined the farther reach of the playground, which was huge, stretching from behind the school building over a hundred yards to the edge of an escarpment which led steeply down into a weedy swampy area. He had a younger brother, too. Ed Littlejohn was a short, compact boy who was very wiry, somewhat like myself, but stronger and more confident.
The school had a front yard which abutted the main street in an area where residences lined it. A few short blocks to the east, it came through the two-block long town of Hokah and only a few more blocks west took you out into the farmland. There was a primitive merry-go-round, a couple of teeter totters, and a large pipe frame with four swings hanging from long chains. Everything squeaked and was a pinch-danger if you put your hands or fingers in the wrong place.
The backyard property of the school was immense.
There was one large pine tree with limbs low enough to climb into. There were also a couple of areas where snow paths could be trampled down so that we could slide down into the swampy area. The teachers didn't care if we climbed the tree or explored down into the swamp. I can tell you that neither would be allowed these days.
We could actually be out of sight of the teachers, making secret forts and hiding places on the edge of the swamp, as long as when the bell rang we came hustling back to school. We observed this rule religiously because our Principal, Mr Wagner, was supposedly a retired Navy officer and very tough. Unlike many school children today, the last thing we wanted was to be sent to the Principal or worse, to have a call made to our parents.
I particularly wanted nothing to do with offending my new stepfather. I hadn't the slightest clue as to how he would react and he was big and scary. I even refrained from tantrums and misbehavior of all overt types because of this uncertainty. You see, he was just what I needed!
Attached to the back of the school was a spiral slide which went up to the second story. We would climb on the very bottom of this slide, which was almost irresistible, but never beyond the first of two or three turns, because the slide led directly up to Mr Wagner's office. It was a fire escape. If we knew for sure that he was gone somewhere we would take some liberties with it, but not many, because you could still have to answer to him when he got back if a teacher caught you.
About once a month we had a fire drill. There were no lights or buzzers to go off in those days. The teachers simply announced that there was a fire drill. We got up out of our seats in an orderly fashion, actually went upstairs, through Mr Wagner's office and out a little door and slid down the slide.
It was the greatest thing ever! In the event of a real fire--and the building looked like it could go up in flames at any moment--we would either go down the stairs if the fire was above us or up the stairs and down the slide.
Bob Millen and Don Botcher told me that Ed Littlejohn was an Indian. I do not think that he was of native American descent, but his name reinforced that idea. He was also very stealthy. If he hid in the swamp, none of us could find him. I have been in touch with him in older years and he appears as Norweigan or Danish as any of the rest of us.
There were girl classmates as well. I remember a Nancy, a Sharon, Betty, and of course Rosemary. I'm sure there were more.
At least once every other day, we filed up the stairs quietly past Mr Wagner's closed door and up another set of steps up in to the attic of the building where we sat on some wooden benches that had been installed up there. All of the lights would be turned off and we were admonished to be as quiet as mice. That wasn't going to happen, but we tried and there was always the concern about disturbing Mr Wagner.
An ancient projector clattered and clicked as a film rolled off of one reel, past a little light, and onto another reel, with a resultant picture jumping around on a large screen, which rolled down out of a large metal tube much like a window shade. Some of the movies would be about personal hygiene--how to brush your teeth, wash your hands properly, wash your hair, and similar things. Others would be like little newsreels showing us how to conduct ourselves when the flag is brought past, how to fold up the flag, and innumerable things like that.
We regarded the trips to the attic a real treat because it broke up the crushing boredom of trying to sit at a little desk without squirming.
After a week of habituation to the routines of Hokah Elementary school, I felt quite comfortable, and enjoyed playing with the first group of friends that I ever had. There was no such thing as homework. We had a couple of books which remained in our desk when we weren't reading from them, as did our pencils, crayons, and rulers.
The teacher would give us work sheets which we did in class and put on her desk when we were finished. If she didn't like what we did with them, she called us up and we had it out right there.
Since we had no book bags or backpacks and took nothing home, once school let out, I was free to explore the other dimensions of my new reality--the new home, the farm on which it stood, and the comings and goings of my new family situation.
Friday, March 6, 2020
Call Me Al
Call Me Al
The disclosure to me by my mother that she was going to get married was as incongruous to me as it was stunning and surprising. She sat me down in our little upstairs apartment at the farm and told me that she might get married and that I would then have a step-dad.
I didn't know what to think. I thought things were going pretty well with our then current situation, living upstairs from Grandma Lill and Grandpa Lee, who cared for me all day while she was at work and spoiled me in the evenings until she returned, usually quite late.
From my mother's point of view, which I had no ability to empathize with at my tender age of six, living with her parents as a single mom was a drag sometimes. She was twenty-eight years of age, beautiful, and had wanted a loving relationship and life-partner. While I was otherwise occupied, the rascal had been going out partying and dating!
Then came the shocker. We would not continue to live with Grandma and Grandpa! I was pretty dubious about that part of the deal, because I was living pretty large.
She assured me that we would have our own house to live in and that I would even have my own room. Her fiancé was named Al. His real name was Adolph Botcher but he shortened his first name because we had just won the second world war by defeating, among others, Adolph Hitler and no one, even of German heritage, wanted to have any connection to that horrible tyrant.
Not too long thereafter Al even went so far as to have his first name legally changed to Alec, which he went by thereafter.
Al Botcher had never met me. He was going to marry a woman without even setting his eyes on the child that was going to become his stepson! I'm sure she must have had Al over to the house to meet her parents and me between that announcement and the wedding, but I don't have any memory of it.
All I remember is that I checked out of Hickory Hill school and we moved our paltry belongings in early spring of that year to Hokah, Minnesota where Al Botcher had bought a farm, not too different from the one belonging to Lill and Lee.
The address of the farm was La Crescent, Minnesota, right across the Mississippi River from La Crosse, Wisconsin. It was located in one of the valleys, named Pfeffer Valley, between the bluffs along the river. Hokah was a very small town several miles south and located where the Root River flows into the Mississippi. The farm, however, was in Houston County and Hokah had an elementary school in the Houston School District. Houston High School is where I was slated to go when I got old enough.
Our new abode was really only about forty miles from the farm of my grandparents, but it seemed five hundred miles distant. The roads were rather poor in those days and there was only a primitive state highway, HW 16, going between La Crosse and Sparta unless you wanted to drive the back roads, which would virtually take forever.
Al worked as an accountant for Harnwell and Harnwell, an office right near Fifth Street and Main in La Crosse right across from the Bodega, a landmark restaraunt and in fact, the one that Uncle Si went to for his coffee clutch. Al continued that job even though he was going to dabble into farming in Pfeffer Valley. My mother continued to work as a secretary at Camp McCoy. They would drive to La Crosse in the morning where she would catch a ride to Camp McCoy with someone else who worked there.
I don't remember a wedding. I think they just went before a justice of the peace.
Al Botcher was a big, strong, fairly imposing man. He was handsome and my mother seemed delighted with him. He had the middle finger of one of his hands bent back and growing right back into itself just before the knuckle. When I got more relaxed around him, I asked him how that happened and he told me that it was an accident with a stone boat when he was young.
That didn't help me much. I later learned that a stone boat was a sort of raft, made of sturdy bolts of wood, that got dragged behind a tractor or a team of horses to load stones that had come to the surface during plowing of the fields.
So Al had some experience at farming.
Al Botcher and my mother made a very pretty couple and were excited to move into the farmhouse. I was apprehensive about going to a new school in a small town instead of out in the country. There were a lot of things to do to adjust to Hokah, Minnesota.
My little universe was about to get a bit larger than hanging around with Grandma Lill and Grandpa Lee.
The disclosure to me by my mother that she was going to get married was as incongruous to me as it was stunning and surprising. She sat me down in our little upstairs apartment at the farm and told me that she might get married and that I would then have a step-dad.
I didn't know what to think. I thought things were going pretty well with our then current situation, living upstairs from Grandma Lill and Grandpa Lee, who cared for me all day while she was at work and spoiled me in the evenings until she returned, usually quite late.
From my mother's point of view, which I had no ability to empathize with at my tender age of six, living with her parents as a single mom was a drag sometimes. She was twenty-eight years of age, beautiful, and had wanted a loving relationship and life-partner. While I was otherwise occupied, the rascal had been going out partying and dating!
Then came the shocker. We would not continue to live with Grandma and Grandpa! I was pretty dubious about that part of the deal, because I was living pretty large.
She assured me that we would have our own house to live in and that I would even have my own room. Her fiancé was named Al. His real name was Adolph Botcher but he shortened his first name because we had just won the second world war by defeating, among others, Adolph Hitler and no one, even of German heritage, wanted to have any connection to that horrible tyrant.
Not too long thereafter Al even went so far as to have his first name legally changed to Alec, which he went by thereafter.
Al Botcher had never met me. He was going to marry a woman without even setting his eyes on the child that was going to become his stepson! I'm sure she must have had Al over to the house to meet her parents and me between that announcement and the wedding, but I don't have any memory of it.
All I remember is that I checked out of Hickory Hill school and we moved our paltry belongings in early spring of that year to Hokah, Minnesota where Al Botcher had bought a farm, not too different from the one belonging to Lill and Lee.
The address of the farm was La Crescent, Minnesota, right across the Mississippi River from La Crosse, Wisconsin. It was located in one of the valleys, named Pfeffer Valley, between the bluffs along the river. Hokah was a very small town several miles south and located where the Root River flows into the Mississippi. The farm, however, was in Houston County and Hokah had an elementary school in the Houston School District. Houston High School is where I was slated to go when I got old enough.
Our new abode was really only about forty miles from the farm of my grandparents, but it seemed five hundred miles distant. The roads were rather poor in those days and there was only a primitive state highway, HW 16, going between La Crosse and Sparta unless you wanted to drive the back roads, which would virtually take forever.
Al worked as an accountant for Harnwell and Harnwell, an office right near Fifth Street and Main in La Crosse right across from the Bodega, a landmark restaraunt and in fact, the one that Uncle Si went to for his coffee clutch. Al continued that job even though he was going to dabble into farming in Pfeffer Valley. My mother continued to work as a secretary at Camp McCoy. They would drive to La Crosse in the morning where she would catch a ride to Camp McCoy with someone else who worked there.
I don't remember a wedding. I think they just went before a justice of the peace.
Al Botcher was a big, strong, fairly imposing man. He was handsome and my mother seemed delighted with him. He had the middle finger of one of his hands bent back and growing right back into itself just before the knuckle. When I got more relaxed around him, I asked him how that happened and he told me that it was an accident with a stone boat when he was young.
That didn't help me much. I later learned that a stone boat was a sort of raft, made of sturdy bolts of wood, that got dragged behind a tractor or a team of horses to load stones that had come to the surface during plowing of the fields.
So Al had some experience at farming.
Al Botcher and my mother made a very pretty couple and were excited to move into the farmhouse. I was apprehensive about going to a new school in a small town instead of out in the country. There were a lot of things to do to adjust to Hokah, Minnesota.
My little universe was about to get a bit larger than hanging around with Grandma Lill and Grandpa Lee.
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