Fun and Games: Julia's Remembrances of Fun on the Farm

Julia and her partner in crime Sonny

One of the things Debra and Danielle and I found in our research in November was a spiral notebook with many pages of Julia's handwriting in which she had captured Sonny's Remembrances and her own.  Those were transcribed by my father, and then by me, and are shared elsewhere on this blog.  Also in that notebook were some further remembrances that I have never seen before.  This collection of stories I am calling "Fun and Games", and there is one other I will transcribe in which she captures stories from her Mother and Daddy's early days.

Here are a few events that stand out in my mind which occurred during my life on the farm.  We were always busy other than working on the farm.  When Lindberg made his historic flight across the Atlantic from Paris to New York in 1927, we ran around the yard with our arms spread out pretending we were "Lindy".  One day we built an airplane out of old boards and climbed up on the peak of the barn and thought we could fly.  We couldn't decide who who would ride on the plane first so decided to take a test run.  We threw it off and it landed in a pile of lumber on the ground.  That was the end of our flying.  We also tried jumping off the barn roof with an umbrella as a parachute; that didn't work either.

Mother took us to Ridgefield to visit our friends the Browns that lived on our street at one time.  Mr Brown was a carpenter and built his children a roller coaster in their backyard which we played on all day.  We couldn't wait to get home and build our own rollercoaster.  The next day we started our project.  The only lumber we had were old silo boards.  Daddy watched us work day after day and never said a word even though he knew it wouldn't work.  We assembled the boards and down the first hill they wouldn't (?) curve properly. We built it about 50 feet long and we worried we might hit the stone wall which was about 75 feet away.  But we were going to take the chance.  We built a platform about 6 feet high for the starting point which was very wobbly and Sonny took Mother's wood box from behind the black Glenwood Stove in the kitchen and put wheels on it to ride in.  Elizabeth took pieces of hay and concealed the ends in her hand. We each drew a piece.  Whoever got the lucky piece would be the first to ride.  Katherine drew the lucky piece.  We put her in the box, all you could see was her head sticking out of the box.  We gave her a pussh and she landed in the first (?) that's as far as she went, and got a good bump on the head.  That was the end of our roller coaster which we spent days building.

Sonny was always coming up with real bright ideas and he used me to carry them out.  Eddie Krejnik's father bought him a new bicycle and Sonny put me up to go up to Eddie's house and ask him for his old scooter.  We didn't tell mother about it because she would not have let me go.  I spent about 2 hours following Eddie around as he was doing his work teasing him for the scooter.  He finally gave it to me. Sonny waited down the road for me.  I came alone riding the scooter and he yelled at me for taking so long to get it.  When we came to the first hill on Botsford Road, Sonny took the scooter away from me and rode down the hill and I ran along behind him.  The rubber tire was missing from the back tire so we fixed it up with a thick rope.  We fixed it up and had lots of fun with it.

Another time we had company and they parked the car at the crest of the hill in the driveway.  They were visiting on the front porch.  Sonny put me up to going down cellar to get some potatoes.  We then stuffed them in the exhaust pipe of the company's car and then we hid behind the apple tree. When the company were ready to leave, he got in his car and stepped on the self starter, the car wouldn't start.  So he got out the hand crank and began cranking.  The engine finally caught and the potatoes went flying down the hill.  Mother saw them and I saw a grin on her face so I knew we were safe.

Mother was full of pranks herself. Elizabeth and Katherine went out one night and when it was time for them to be coming home with some boys walking with them, Mother and Harriette went down by the old slough and hid behind the stone wall.  When they came along she jumped out with a white sheet over her and about scared them to death.

In the summertime when it rained hard we would put on our bathing suits and go outside and run all around the house & yard and sit in puddles of water.  When the first snow came we always ran around in the snow bare-footed and tried to see who could stay outside the longest. Then we would come in the house, put a chair in front of the stove & put our feet in the oven to warm up.

Every summer after the haying was done we had our yearly trip to Savin Rock, an Amusement Park in West Haven.  We saved our money all year long for this event.  we had a good time on the rides.  Mother and Daddy always had a soft shell crab.  We ate in the park.  We always saved enough money to buy Peter Frank Pop Corn, Chocolate, Strawberry & Vanilla flavors to take home.  We drove down to Savin Rock in Daddy's Model T Ford which had three rows of seats.  One year we took 2 of the Brewer (?) girls with us who lived up the street.  That made 8 children.  Daddy was not a very good driver and at a busy intersection we almost ran into a horse and wagon.  A policeman was standing on the sidewalk and Mother began yelling at him that he should have been in the road directing traffic instead of standing on the sidewalk.  The policeman asked Daddy if we were all his children and Daddy said yes.  The policeman decided Daddy had enough problems and let him go but told him to tell his wife to keep her big mouth shut next time.