Julia Relays Stories from "Mother and Daddy's Younger Days"

Before I was born Daddy had some prime horses, both for riding and work, and also  male oxen.  He bought Mother a new buggy to drive down town with a favorite horse Gyp.  Mother was always proud of her horsemanship.  When she was on Main Street and a train came into the station, Gyp would get excited and real up on his hind legs, everyone would be watching her but she could control the horse, and loved every minute of it.

Now I will tell you some things I can remember about Mother and Daddy that they told me about their younger years.  My Dad was raised very proper.  He called his father "sir", went to church, and always ate dinner in the dining room with linen napkins, etc.  When he was twenty years old he left home to live the life of a hobo for twenty years. He was engaged to a girl from Seymour by the last name of Beres.  They decided to elope to NY one night and get married.  The young lady's mother learned about it and wouldn't let her out of the house. Dad waited & waited, and she never showed up at their meeting place.  He thought that she had changed her mind and did not know her mother wouldn't let her go.  The next morning Dad went to work downtown.  I'm not sure of the factory he worked in.  Instead of going to work he went to the Brunswick Hotel bar and left his lunchbox with the bartender and asked him to hold it for him.  Twenty years later when he came back the bartender handed him his lunch box.

When he left the hotel, he went to the railroad station and got in a box car and spent the next twenty years riding the rails all around the U.S.  He would work for awhile and earn enough money to move on to something else.  He told me about building bridges, farm labor, tending bars, etc.  Many nights he slept outside.  Lived with Indians in the Bad Lands & Black Hills of South Dakota. And sewed his wild oats.  He told me about one girl he decided to marry and when he was approaching her home her father was in the front yard with a shotgun.  He left town the next day.  At one time he owned a saloon and was doing very well.  He wrote to his brother Will in Seymour and told him he had a barrel half full of money & when it was full he was coming home.  I asked him what happened and he just laughed.  I guess he lost it.  He never contacted his Mother the whole twenty years he was gone and she never really forgave him.  He was in the west when things were really wild and told about going to public hangings, being robbed, and having some really rough times.

When he came home he bought the farm from his mother and went into the dairy business.  My mother lived next door at the time and was helping Dad's mother with the housework.  He started to court mother and they were married June 1, 1911.  Mother was 18 years old and Dad was 42. I spent many hours talking with him about his wandering years. He had a rocking chair next to the furnace down cellar where he smoked his pipe and I would sit on the stairs and we would toke.  I wished I had written down some of the events he told me about.  About 1958 Lula Tomlinson came into the beauty shoppe where I did her hair and she was wearing the ring that Dad had given to Miss Beres as Lula was her niece.  It was a moonstone ring and Miss Beres had willed it to Lula.

Mother was born in Salisbury CT.  Both her parents were French.  They had six children, five girls and one boy, and my Grandmother had a son before she was married in France who she brought with her to the US.  They were poor and both had flighty tempers which erupted quite often.  Grandpa worked all week in a factory for three dollars per week. As soon as the children were old enough, they worked for neighbors on farms and housework.  Also, that area was a popular vacation area for wealthy NY people and there were summer Inns where they came for vacations.  Mother and her sisters had to pick fresh blackberries and huckleberries in season and sold them to the Inns.  Mother always told about the rattlesnakes they would encounter while picking berries in the brush on Sharon Mountain.  They called their parents Mama and Papa.  Mama said one day Papa brought Mama home a new pair of shoes which he paid $1.25 for and they got into an argument and Mama took the new shoes out to the chopping block and chopped them all to pieces with an axe.  But they had good times also.  They were full of fun and had lots of laugh together.  When my mother started school she couldn't speak English and the teacher said to her "Amelia say A" and she said "Say A" and all the children laughed.  My grandmother taught herself to read and write and was clever handling her money and ended up owning her own home.  Grandpa was secretly hiding money over the years and when the children were all grown went back to France where he died.