Our First Home
I’ve taken the license to change Memory to Memories; they all center around the first home that I lived in, and I’ll talk about that home first. We lived on a farm in Pike County in western Illinois. Our home had a kitchen and an unheated porch off the kitchen called a summer kitchen, a front room, and two bedrooms. This small, unpainted house was sheltered by a giant maple tree in the front yard to the west, between the front porch and a gravel road. The gravel road defined the front or west side of the yard. Other boundaries were a lane from the gravel road along the north side of the yard and a hedge along the south side. The hedge was a line of giant Osage Orange hedge trees that taught me to watch out for thorns at an early age, since I was barefoot most summer days. The house was small, and we were poor, but to me those realities were unimportant; our neighbors were in the same situation. We grew up in this “sharecropper” house with no electricity or running water during the Great Depression and then the Great War.
Light, Heat and the Outside World
The house contained two sources of heat: a cook stove in the kitchen that we used the year around, equipped with a boiler containing hot water for washing, and a Warm Morning (that was the brand name) stove to warm the front room in the winter. Coal oil lanterns provided light. They would constantly flicker, sending shadows around the kitchen or front room in random patterns that were part of every night. I remember Dad bringing home a Coleman (brand name) lamp that he was very proud of. It produced a brighter light that was also very steady - no more flickering shadows. We endured measles and whooping cough and many bouts of flu and colds in that home. The little house was battered by storms and barely held out the cold in the winter when Dad would fill the old Warm Morning stove with a combination of coal and hedge logs until the lower body of the stove glowed orange. No one ever got burned; we were taught to respect that stove at an early age. We had a battery-powered radio until batteries were no longer available during the last two years of the war. Dad subscribed to the Quincy Herald Whig and the St. Louis Livestock Reporter, so we had a newspaper connection to the world.
The Race to Get Dressed
Here is my specific first memory: “OK, Donnie, we’re going to beat them this time,” my mom would say as we got dressed in the morning. This was a race to get dressed between my older brother John Edward and me. Dad helped John Edward and Mom assisted me. Dad always moved faster. While Mom would linger over fastening an overall buckle or putting on my shoes, my dad raced through the process. They always won the race, but I never really minded since the time that my mom spent devoting total attention to me was scarce. For Mom there was always a baby to feed or some other household chores to perform, so this was always a special moment. Other first memories were associated with my mother singing. When I heard Mom singing, that was a good sign that her world that day was OK. “I’m looking over a four-leaf clover,” “In the shade of the old apple tree,” “School Days,” and “There’ll be blue birds over the white cliffs of Dover” were among her favorites.
The Sound of Security
Another “first memory”: Dad was a farmer who in these early days was a renter before he became a farm owner. My best feelings of security came on those long spring evenings when we could finally open the windows to the outdoors and let the spring sounds of frogs croaking and other indistinguishable night sounds drift in. Dad would be working late on the farm that he rented two miles away. I’d lie awake and listen for his return. The sound I waited to hear was his tractor, an old Allis Chalmers Model 45, whose exhaust made a very distinct crackle. The moment he drove over the crest of the hill on the gravel road about a quarter mile to the north, the sound of the tractor would reach me - and I’d be asleep before he arrived home. That was true security. I still like the definition of security as being a sound that lets you go to sleep.
