My memories - Bob

Mom

Mom was most recognized for her cooking.  This is probably a result of her early immersion in cooking and having a mother who was an excellent cook for a teacher. Much of her cooking was done from memory and without measuring spoons and cups, and prepared from basic ingredients. From the earliest times, I remember the men who came to help with the threshing and hay baling on the Lamont farm raving about the meals she prepared for them, eating until every bowl was empty. Her dishes were always the first to go at the Community Association covered dish suppers. When it came to holidays, especially Christmas, Easter and Thanksgiving, she outdid herself making many traditional Slovak dishes learned from her mother, such as nut roll and poppy seed roll. For Easter, she sometimes made a braided sweetbread.  She always prepared the traditional Christmas Eve supper, consisting of boiled fish and rice cooked in milk (both drizzled with melted butter), a special sauerkraut which included dried yellow peas, and for dessert, boiled prunes. The meal began with silent prayer and the serving of Oplatki, a thin Communion-like wafer stamped with a Christmas religious scene and served with a dab of honey placed on pieces when served to family members. During our early years in Lamont, the family gathered at her mother's house across the road and her mother led the preparation of meals.  However, when we moved to the Highland Road farm, because the demands of the holiday meals was becoming too much for her mother, the some of the gatherings shifted to the farm. 

Mom loved musicals.  I remember agonizing through many Fred Astaire and Jimmy Durante movies. (When Dad picked, it was Abbot and Costello or Ma and Pa Kettle)

She was very good at sewing and mending our clothes. For several years she made many of our shirts and the girls dresses from the print feed sacks available in those days.

By choice, she never drove. She expressed a great deal of fear at the prospect of even trying, probably worsened by a couple of mishaps attempting to drive the tractor. Consequently, Pete did all the shopping for groceries and most of Amelia's clothes. During the Lamont years, much of the non-grocery items were ordered from the Sears catalog.

Dad

There was a cultured side to Dad that seems to conflict with much of his background.  One of my early memories of him from the Lamont farm was that on Sundays when he was home, every afternoon he would listen to the opera broadcast, "Live at the Met," on the radio. Perhaps he was influenced by the Bradford Italians.  His appreciation of classical singing continued throughout his life, evidenced by his comments regarding the singers when they performed on TV.

When he worked at Bovaird & Seyfang, he and some of his co-workers engaged in interesting competitions, such as searching for the hottest peppers and seeing who could eat them, and seeing who could put large, complex picture puzzles together the quickest.

While living at Lamont, Dad's love of hunting took a terrible blow when his prized, pedigreed beagle, Flash, was stolen one evening when the family went to a movie in the pickup truck. (We kids always rode in the cattle box on the back, even in the frigid winter, covering ourselves with blankets and straw.)  Dad frequently spoke of hunters who considered Flash to be the best rabbit dog they had ever seen, and lusted for the dog.  Dad had the State Police launch an investigation and search, but Flash was never found and no suspect was identified.  Dad never tried to find a replacement for Flash, but sometime later, he got us kids a large German Shepherd mix.  We named him Thunder because of his fear of thunder storms.

After a movie or other evening trip to Kane, the ritual was for Dad to stop at the Texas Hot and pick up hotdogs to eat when we got home.

He considered lying to be the worst possible offense we could commit...and he believed in corporal punishment.

His integrity was unquestioned.  He could buy a tractor or other piece of farm machinery with a handshake and no down payment.

When I think of summing up Dad's life and personality, the one word that comes to mind is "work." From the time he moved back to the Lamont farm in 1942 until he retired in 1986, he worked 365 days of the year. That is what the circumstances dictated.  In Lamont there always was a need to care for the livestock and tend to the farm duties when he was working in Bradford and later, when he started the meat market.  When we moved to the Highland farm, it was more of the same.  Until retirement, Mom and Dad never had a real vacation or even a complete holiday without having to do critical chores such as milking.  At most, Dad took an occasional part day off to take us fishing or to go hunting. In all those years, he probably did not have more than a dozen days when he was too sick to do at least part of his chores.  That includes the 2 days he took off in the 1960s to have his appendix removed following a diagnosis of acute appendicitis.  The day after surgery the surgeon examined him during hospital rounds, and Dad asked how he was doing.  The surgeon told him that everything looked okay, so when he left the room, Dad got dressed, checked himself out of the Kane Community Hospital, and quickly injected himself back into his routine at the farm.

It was not only the quantity of work Dad did that was remarkable, but the quality. The dog casting is symbolic. There is a saying that "if it is worth doing, it should be done right."  That seemed to be Dad's driving principle. He never cut corners or did a sloppy job.  When we set fence posts, he laid out the fence rows using basic surveying techniques he learned doing road work.  He would start by setting the corner posts, and spot the location of other posts by sighting over them while Dick or I moved the post around until it fell within the sight line. I remember one day when we were working near the road, a car stopped and the driver proceeded to tell dad that we had the straightest, neatest fence rows that he had ever seen.  (The posts were mostly made from old dead chestnut trees which were still standing in the woodlands surrounding the farm. We cut the trees and split the trunks into posts by hand.) In the same realm, weeds were an embarrassment. A patch of mustard weed in a field was an abomination  From the time we were able to walk in the fields on the Lamont farm until the advent of herbicides we spent a great deal of our summers weeding row after row of corn and potatoes and carefully walking through the grain fields pulling mustard.  When herbicides came on the scene, he used them with fervor. (In retrospect, it is probably no accident that he died of cancer.  In the early days of herbicides, there were almost no controls, and the consequence of exposure was not yet realized.)  Dad chuckled once when a couple elderly women  stopped him and asked what crop the farm next to ours was growing that had the pretty yellow flowers, which was actually mustard weed in full bloom.

Yet another aspect of his work ethic was his self-reliance. It is obvious that during his diverse early work experiences, he not only did the job, but learned skills that he later put to use. He converted the Lamont garage into a slaughter house and market, including installation of a cork-insulated walk-in meat cooler. On the Highland farm, he remodeled the barn and built a milkhouse with a little help from a couple of Amelia's brothers. He built a hay drier and weed sprayer from scratch. He did masonry, carpentry, plumbing, electrical wiring, and auto mechanics. With regard to the latter, he completely rebuilt the Farmall A engine, getting what guidance he needed from the manual.