3 - When I Was a Boy

On recollections as a little boy I remember my dad telling me about ice skating on the Baltic Sea. There were four boys and one girl plus Grandma and Grandpa. He told how they would all bundle up and put on wooden skates and skate in a long line for miles. This must have been a sight as they were not the only family doing it. He also told how John Willis and himself (August) along with Minnie skating with Herman the little one and playing crack the whip trying to send him as far out on the ice as they could as I guess he was a real brat, always tattling on them. He said they would try to snap so hard he would end up in Norway which was quite a distance. Dad’s Uncle August migrated to America first and sent money for the rest of the family to migrate. The papers I have indicate it cost about $280.00 for the seven of them to come steerage. It was October 1891 and I guess that the weather was lousy. Dad said Grandpa was sick the whole time from when he got on the boat till he got off in New York. Maybe that’s why he never went back for a visit even. They told how they would sneak up on deck to play and no one stopped them as the weather was so rough the first class passengers didn’t go out either. He told how the breakers would come on the bow and it would get them all wet but they didn’t mind as the air was fresh not like down below. They lit in New York and traveled to Cessina Park Illinois where Uncle August was farming. It is a large German community of emigrants close to Woodward. He never told me but my two older brothers told how the people around there would dress up in sheets and scare the daylights out of the newcomer. They both told me independent of each other that Uncle August would go out at night and smoke. This one night the visitor came to give them bad time and he hit one of them over the hand with a single tow (used as hitch horses to the wagon) and had to take off to keep from going to jail. He and his family wife and daughter moved to Falda Lake Minnesota. His daughter stayed, but he went back to Germany after his wife died. He was there when World War I started, and passed away about 1930. All but one of Grandpa’s nephews were killed in World War I. The only one to come home lived in Damgarten and raised one son. That son was missing in action in France on D-Day the 6^th of June 1944.

After the first world war was over grain prices were low and Dad got an ulcer in his stomach. In the Fall of 1929 Dad got sick and with a poor harvest. Along with sickness and low prices, he lost his farm in 1929. We had a bankruptcy sale in February. Everything we could keep was packed in a couple of wagons, two teams of horses and our old car a 1914 Dodge touring car. They held an auction selling off stock, machinery and in March of 1930 we set out for East Wenatchee owning two teams of horses, one milk cow and a flock of chickens plus four pigs our furniture and clothes. We took up residence on the old Van Cleve place. Three hundred sixty acres of dry land farm and lived there till Dad passed away in 1936. We got along fairly well. He worked in the orchards and other odd jobs till he had a stroke in 1932. Then he was unable to work at all. The apple ranchers were spraying their orchards with lead and when he rented one team of horses to a rancher he fed them hay from the orchard. Killed them dead. There was a wash below our house and when a farmer couldn’t sell his crop he would dump apples in the wash. Well our cow got into these apples, no more cow. (Arsenic poisoning per Dad 5/2010) In the fall we would butcher the pigs when it got cold enough that the meat would keep. We were able to raise pork and chickens for our eggs.