My Clothes!

I never was very good at sticking my tongue out but my wife of 59 years has it down pat, as they say. She can make a mean face look good on a holy man jumping down a mountain in Peru.

Maybe it is her stylish glasses that adds something but mine are older and got scratches on them from her long nails trying to gouge my eyes out.

I say things like this so she will love me more. She is funny about making love and she has to be in the right mood and my mind is not like it was when I was 20 and could hang up my shirt on willy and walk over and get a coat hanger to hang it on.

So I am seldom able to get my clothes to hang on anything but I am thankful that I can find them down around my ankles.

Shawnee State Forest

Shawnee State Forest

Hunting Deer

© by Abraham Lincoln

October is almost here again. It is the month I was born in. I am a Scorpio — if you believe in signs; My name, Abraham, means, "Father of a multitude." My wife tired of that and she ended our multitude at five. Five is a magic number and, as of this past Pat and I got married in 1955 have been married since then.

Five in the morning is a perfect time to be in Shawnee State Forest near Portsmouth, Ohio. That forest is huge and has hills and hollows and I always feared I'd stumble into a working still, but I never did.

I am going to describe getting ready to go to Shawnee State Forest to hunt deer. Step back in time to the late 1950s and try to imagine me at 24 years of age. I worked in Research and Development in Building 30 at NCR (National Cash Register Company) where playing golf and hunting and fishing were the big topics about weekend activities. My interest was in fishing and hunting and specifically hunting deer with a bow and arrow.

I had hunted rabbit with the bow and arrow and was successful at shooting them sitting and running. I even entered shooting contests in Greenville and shot paper target deer hitting the paper targets where the heart would be on a living deer.

I also read every published scrap of information about hunting deer and bear with a bow and arrow. The Bear Archery Company programs, with their legendary sportsman Fred Bear hunting and killing bear with, what else — a bow and arrow. I was hooked and couldn't wait to tie my first buck on my front fender and head back home to Gordon, Ohio where little kids would rush out to see the dead deer on my fender Abe Lincoln had shot with his bow and arrow.

Getting ready to go deer hunting began some 30 days before I actually left home. I felt like I should follow the rules if I wanted to get close enough to deer to shoot one with a bow and arrow and I had to avoid smoking (I was addicted to nicotine in those days) and giving up cigarettes was worse than going without sex.

I bought some rotten apple lotion in a tiny bottle and we had one or two apples in that condition on the window sill. I looked through my clothes and found some old pants and shirts that had paint on them and probably added paint color to camouflage me and them in the forest. I don't remember my coat but it was cold down there in the forest before daylight and rainy days were common in October.

The alarm clock was like 2:00 A.M., and I had the old clothes on, smeared with rotten apple lotion. My wife gave me a sack of rotten apples, and some food to eat and I roared out of Gordon in a 1958 Pontiac that was almost 20 feet long.

When I pulled into Shawnee Forest the headlights showed the way to a place I had chosen to begin my deer hunt. The rotten apples were dripping off my clothes when I strung my bow and hooked five razor sharp arrows on the bow quiver and stepped off the road into that wilderness.

I went back and forth from home to the forest for 5 years just to learn where the deer came up out of the valley and crossed the ridge using their game trail and I wanted to be in position, on their game trail, when they came along that morning. It would be daylight by the time I got to the top of the ridge where the deer always crossed over (that took a lot of Saturdays to find long before I ever went hunting).

As I remember those hunts, I would sometimes see the deer coming up out of the hollow on my left and I would work my way up the hill hoping to meet them at the top. At other times I would get to the top before they got there and I would have to wait on them to come up and cross over in front of me: passing me as close as 10 feet away, or closer.

I had my day spoiled once when, instead of a herd of deer, I hear a crashing sound and looked, expecting to see the deer running, but instead saw a hunter in a bright day-glow orange coat, walking up out of the hollow, stepping on sticks and scuffing through dry leaves. I thought to myself, "Shit. This idiot scared away the deer I would be tying on my fender."

He came on up to the cross over point and walked right by me, about 5 feet away, and never knew I was there. I could have said, "Hi," and caused him to have a heart attack or a stroke, but chose to say nothing and he went on over the ridge making more noise than a herd of elephants and he never knew I was standing there beside the tree he had passed.

I am proud to admit that I did shoot at deer and my arrows missed them all: yippee! I could never avoid hitting small trees, twigs, and limbs that I never saw when I took aim at a deer. My arrows went sailing off and sticking in the tops of trees on the other side of the ridge. From the ridge they looked close enough to reach out and pull them back out, but once I was over the ridge and looked up at this tree, I realized I would have to climb 20 or 30 feet up the tree to get close enough to pull out the arrow.

Sometimes the mere sound of the wooden arrow being draw across the bow would be enough to alarm the deer they jumped 9 feet away in one leap before I could fully draw the bow, aim and shoot. I never realized my dream of a deer on my fender but I did learn how to get so close to deer that I could see the individual hairs on their face; watch the skin twitch across their chest, and see the flies drinking from the corners of their eyes. How close? I could almost reach out and touch them and they never knew I was standing there in front of them. Honest.

Notes:
It took me about 5 years to discover the trails deer used and to learn how to walk in the woods without making any sound. It was the greatest experience in my life.

About Shawnee State Forest:
Shawnee State Forest, also called "The Little Smokies of Ohio," has developed into the largest of the 20 state forests, with over 60,000 acres. While the Forest is a fantastic recreation feature in Southern Ohio, it is also a wildlife habitat. And other activities like timber harvesting, tree planting, forestry research, watershed and soil protection, and production of tree seeds are all in a day's work for Forest Employees and many local residents. Nearly 8,000 acres was designated as wilderness and all activities and public motorized travel have been eliminated in the area.

Currants

When  I was a little boy, still in bib overalls, I used to wander over to see Esta Flory, then an old woman whose old man never made his own smokes—Esta rolled them every morning—about breakfast time.

I went to the side kitchen door past the row of currant bushes and when they were ripe there were dozens on bushes riper than this that I snatched off, crammed in my mouth, and peeked in through the screen door like an orphan to see if I was invited for breakfast. Sometimes I got to eat twice—first at home—second at Esta's house; plus the currants.

Life was simple in those days. A kid could dip both hands in the washbasin to get cleaned up. Rubbing wet fingers over both eyes and across front teeth was good to do. No soap was required and there wasn’t anything to dry. My hair flopped like it fell last week when mother washed it with the bar of Ivory soap and poured bath water out of the galvanized tub to rinse it. It was there until she washed it next week.

I was always hungry and looked for food that either smelled better or was seasoned more or it looked good on nice plates. All our dishes looked like they fell off the table, and cracked ever which way, but were still stuck together. A million little cracks were filled with germs or so I thought. Mom said her dishwater was hot enough to kill anything living in them cracks.

Esta had nice knives and forks. They were black wooden handled knives and forks with big rivets through the wood but you couldn’t feel the rivets. They were worn smoother than the silk used on funeral ribbons. The metal was black too and the ends of the forks were as sharp as needles.

Mom told me wood handles were dirty because old dirty, greasy, dishwater soaked up between the wood handles and metal and then it leaked out on your food when you used it. If I was invited to eat I tried to pick out a metal knife and fork. Still I liked to look at the black wood and shiny brass rivets.

Seems to me like people used everything for mugs and bowls and nothing was left out of circulation for long. I never knew what I would get if I got cereal but it would be anything from a coffee mug to a bowl that held mashed potatoes last night at supper. Mom said it doesn’t matter if you’re hungry.

I can honestly say we made toast the old fashioned way every morning. Mom would stick a slice of bread on a dinner fork and take the lid off the cook stove and hold the fork way out on the end while the bread began to burn brown and then black on each side. If she held it too long the side was total carbon and she scraped it off, or most of it off, before she put some butter on it and put it on my plate to eat. She said a little carbon was good for you and I believed her.

It happened, when the fork got hot mom had to drop it, bread and all, into the hot coals in the stove. She grabbed something from somewhere, maybe from her apron, and dug around, sending sparks to the ceiling. The bread was always like carbonized coal when the she got the fork out of the stove.

Swarms of Honeybees

Swarm of Honeybees

Two large swarms of honeybees came from a hole in the large maple tree behind our house. The first swarm numbered in the thousands and was very active but gathered together on this limb of the spruce tree. The second swarm appeared after the first had flown away. It didn't stay long and also flew away. 

Sears and Roebuck Home

I remember when this was just built because we passed it when we went to my grandparent's house for Sunday dinners. My dad always told me that the house was purchased from a Sears and Roebuck catalog and it was delivered by mail to this location. I don't know when, but Sears and Roebuck stopped delivering houses by mail order. The entire house (now shown with later additions) was sold for less than a thousand dollars.

Birthday Month

October 25th It was hot in 1934 mom had her bed brought downstairs. I was born there The doctor never showed up but the midwife, Emma Schoenfelt, came. They named me Abraham Wesley Lincoln because I am related to President Lincoln.

October 27th It was hot in 1936 when Patty was born in the country. The same doctor never came so her aunts and grandmothers were the midwives. They named her Patricia Ann Custer because she is related to General George Armstrong Custer

Mud Creek

1024mudcreek_1635, a photo by iamabraham on Flickr.

I thought about the good times I once had a place we called, "Mud Creek."The creek isn't much to brag about but did have one hole or deep spot so you could swing three or four feet before touching bottom. Mud Creek was a more of a draining ditch than an actual creek. It carried water off of several adjacent farms in the area as it flowed south to the beginnings of larger streams like Miller's Fork. When I turned the corner and drove down the little hill to where Mud Creek used to be, I was greeted with this thicket of bushy shrubs and weeds. What happened to "Mud Creek?"I wondered. I had a find a lane to turn around in so I could go over the culvert again. I am positive nobody swims there these days and I doubt that anybody knows it used to be a happy place where boys jumped in the pools as naked as J-birds.

Hunting Arrowheads

When I go hunting for arrowheads I know what I am looking for and I expect to find something. I will stop and examine a piece of flint; a mere chip from an arrowhead that is several thousand years old and has been on the ground on this spot for ages. Finding a chip is the first clue that most beginners miss.


I always look for a unique color when I go onto an old cornfield or a one that was plowed and rained on. The colors on the ground in our part of the country are always in the brownish range — some dark and some light with lots of in-between shades of earth colors. If something black pops out at me it is almost always an arrowhead.

The next thing I want to see are small objects with at least one straight side. A straight line doesn't exist in Nature and if you see one it has been made straight by a human being. So arrowheads have at least two straight lines that are the edges of the blade.

The blades are made of flint, often traded but seldom found locally in the rough. Local Indians traveled great distances to obtain new flint stones they obtained by trading. Or, they might set down along what is now called Flint Ridge in Ohio, (a natural outcropping of flint used by Native Americans for as long as anyone can remember) and strike off some promising flakes that are easier to carry home than a chunk of stone.

If you go to Flint Ridge, be prepared to walk on mountains of flint shards that people flaked-off over the centuries. I was astonished the first time I visited the place — astonished that people often at war, could travel such distances and work side by side in peace, fashioning stone implements of war sharper than a surgeon's scalpel, and leave without harming each other.

But the next day, on the way through the woods, to their homes, they would easily put one of those new flints through your head or rib cage and cut off your scalp to add color and excitement to their adventure told around a campfire back home.

The arrowheads we find and pick up and stick in our mouths to get some of the dirt off, were used and not discarded. We could easily be sticking a flint point that killed a young settler, up from Kentucky, in our mouth and never know if they died instantly or suffered through the night before they died.

I remember, in a cornfield, just northwest of Brookville, finding two, nearly identical arrowheads, where the cornstalks grew up out of the ground. Finding two, like that, tells me that the arrows were shot into a human being or an animal that escaped and died, alone, somewhere in the forest.

Since arrowheads are so valuable they were always retrieved from the prey and identified by the markings on the shafts and returned to their owners. It is possible that both arrows were shot into a human being who ended up hiding in the forest where he died and over the centuries the only thing left was the two stone arrowheads that I found.

Hunting Deer

Shawnee State Forest

© by Abraham Lincoln

I used to be a pretty good shot with a bow and arrow. I bought a new bow in Greenville and this gently recurved bow sent many an arrow into the bullseye on targets. I didn’t go for the much-hyped “Bear”archery branded bows but I did buy a new “Root”bow and it was my choice when I hunted deer. I am proud to say that my arrows never killed anything but just getting ready was part of my life experience — going to the forest and finding deer and their trails and leaving without being detected.

Long before I had any hope of killing a deer with my bow and arrow I spent lots of Saturday mornings driving to Shawnee State Forest looking for deer and was finally successful in finding the saddle where a small herd crossed over each morning. My idea was to be there on that ridge when the deer came up and crossed over to the other side. I did it because of visions in my head of killing a deer that would be fresh meat for the family.

Once I had learned where I had to be to be able to shoot at a deer, I would leave home very early in the morning and arrive at the forest, park my car, and be on the ridge, waiting on deer by 5:00 AM. If it happened to be raining that was so much better as it is a lot easier to move through a wet woods without making any sounds than it is when it has been dry for a spell.

I had visions of a deer tied on my car before I left that day. It was those visions that kept me going to Shawnee State Forest to hunt deer. I always imagined myself coming back home, in Gordon, Ohio with a deer strapped on the car. I wondered what the people back home would say? Seeing me with a smile on my face, coming back into town; my car loaded with fresh meat — and a new skin to work into leather.

Life was different getting ready for the hunt — no sex, no smoking and no perfumes. Instead, I wore apple-stained clothes; and had no sex and quit smoking for a week before the hunt. None of this is made-up by me to tell here; it was old-timer's advice from long ago.

Smearing rotten apples on your clothes and abstaining from sex and smoking is what you learned to do if you didn’t want the deer to smell you in the woods. Deer are also attracted to the smell of rotten apples on the ground and that smell will attract them to the tree where they can eat apples. So smearing yourself with apples was a smart thing to do.

I notched the arrow that would do the deed and drew the string and left it go. But, just the sound of that arrow as it slid over the wood spooked my deer. It jumped up and came down and was gone without a trace and without a sound. I stood there in defeated silence and heard the birds start singing again. I smelled like rotten apples all the way back home.

Shucking Corn

Shucking Corn
© By Abraham Lincoln

Nowadays the fields are still planted with corn and soybeans. The corn is field corn and not sweet corn. Sweet corn is the kind you roast and slather with butter, sprinkle with salt and bite-in filling the space between teeth with bits off the cob.

Field corn is the kind fed to farm animals. During the war years my mom would sometimes reach through the rusty wire fence and pull off several ears of field corn and drop them in a pot of boiling water.

Field corn doesn’t taste anything like sweet corn but we got used to the taste and it broke the cycle of having a pan of green beans for dinner— and leftovers for supper.


Back in the day, the fields were sometimes planted by a check method whereby a corn planter was filled with seed corn and every foot or two over, ran a wire from one side of the field to the other and there were knots tied in the wire.

The planter would be tripped as it ran across the field with the knotted wire and dropped one, two or three kernels of corn into a fresh row that the machine made and then covered up before it dropped another kernel or two in the same furrow a foot or farther from the first kernels dropped. It was called, “checked”corn.

I think the same machine, pulled by a team of horses, was used to plant tomato and tobacco plants.

If, in rabbit hunting season, you could get into a field of standing corn that was brown and the ears were ripe and ready to fall off, you could stop anywhere in the field and see a straight row in any direction—even on the diagonal.

So fields of checked corn were ideal for hunting rabbits and pheasants. But the corn had to be removed from the corn stalk at harvest time and in most cases it was a labor intensity job.

The corn stalks would be cut and stacked up to form a kind of tipi in the field and each stalk had ears of corn still attached. The next step was to let the corn dry and then it would be pulled off the stalks and tossed into a wagon that was pulled by an older horse who had lots of experience in corn shucking and knew when to advance and when to stop.

We didn’t own a car but did go to town on Friday nights or Saturdays with the neighbor lady. On the way we would pass field after field filled with tipi-like stacks of cut off corn yet to have the ears removed.

When the corn harvest ended, the corn cribs up near the barn would be filled with corn on the cob and that would be fed to the farm animals. There was usually some corn left over in the corn crib in the spring but it would be empty and ready to refill come next fall.

Brookville Weather

Brookville Weather
© By Abraham Lincoln

A few weeks ago I stood at the window and watched it pour down 3 inches of rain in a short time. Once, we stood and watched the manhole covers bounce and water shoot-up about 2 feet. Our street looked like a mighty river and it was being fed by neighbor's yards that were flooded and spilling over sidewalks. My backyard looked like a running river. Water got up and flooded the library parking lot. It was an angry Wolf Creek that summer.

In 2002 we had a wet spring followed by a hot dry summer that melted into a cold and wet winter and lots of neighbors were shoveling and blowing snow. So in 2003 we started with a cool and wet spring and had a nice summer with more than enough rain to keep the grass a bright green into the middle of August. That may change now but my bet is that it is going to be a really nice winter and I might not get to use my new Toro snow blower.


Sometimes it is hot and humid and the air is loaded with pollutants plus ragweed. At other times it is cool and breezy and you look around thinking it is fall when it is just beginning summertime. Now and then some of us get to see a tornado.

Do you remember that a tornado took some of the roof off of Boose Chevrolet? Another time people got to see a tornado skipping along the ground and cross Arlington Road just north of where Interstate 70 is today.

People often talk about the blizzards that snowed us in. I remember the big one that found most people stranded along Wolf Creek Pike. Larry Gray's wife got stuck and spent a couple of days with others in a farmer's house on Wolf Creek Pike. I left work early that day and got as far as Heckathorn Road and got stuck. I had a new 1967 Ford. Eventually I was able to back up so I could turn down Heckathorn and followed it to Wellbaum Road. I took that all the way into Clayton and from there got on to I-70 and headed west at a crawl.

It was snowing big time and hard to see more than a few feet in front. But I got in behind a semi and followed it to the exit at Arlington Road and got off and drove on into home. The kids and my wife were watching at the window and were glad to see that I made it home.

That might be the year the trailer park east of town was snowed in. Someone died but the funeral home couldn't get there to pick up the body. They eventually got the dead man on a snowmobile and strapped him on the seat behind the driver. Do you remember that winter?

One winter the snow was so deep along the streets that you could only see little orange flags go past but you couldn't see what the flag was mounted on—a car, maybe a snowmobile.

I wonder what the year 2014 will be like?

August Vacations

© 2005-2013 – Abraham Lincoln. All rights reserved.

 The National Cash Register Company, where I worked after getting out of the US Army in 1957, shut down for vacations in August. The NCR complex remained open but most of the offices thinned-out and some factory departments closed for 2 weeks. Nearly every one had been employed there long enough to get two weeks of fully paid vacation each year and when I left, years later, I was getting 3 weeks.

There was a great exodus from Dayton and vicinity to places like Michigan and Canada. Long before drugstores stocked over-the-counter Benadryl a lot of families headed north for some relief from the Miami Valley Drip. Once you crossed the Sault Ste Marie International Bridge into Ontario, sinusitis disappeared. My father in law liked going to fish at Blind River for walleye and always brought home an ice chest or two packed with them.

Patty and I went past their spot on Blind River and ended up fishing in Kagawong Lake. An immigrant family, from England, owned the camp. Eager to please, they made our stay there a real pleasure. It was a primitive site with an outhouse or privy, and the water you bathed in or drank came straight out of the lake.

I never caught any walleye fish but then I only fished for something I could catch and eat right away and that was perch. I do remember taking my father in law out to my favorite fishing spot in the lake, beside an island and pointed out to him the monumental boulders you could see just a few feet below the surface. The water was crystal clear.

Minds do not work alike I am told but when I think about vacations my mind is flooded with memories of vacations and none so vivid as one to Lake of the Woods, Ontario. I went in a brand new 1958 Pontiac accompanied by a friend from work. We met at State Route 40 and 49 in the wee hours of the morning and Howard transferred his goods into the cavernous trunk of my new Pontiac and off we went.

We found a place in Canada where we could stay and get the use of a boat. The mosquitoes were horrible and forced us to move and camp on an island in the lake — a breeze kept the mosquitoes away. It was a nice place to fish and we caught enough to eat each day.

My wife and I had only been married since 1955 and I was overseas until 1957 so I was just getting to know my wife again when this fishing trip came up. All of a sudden I missed her more than I enjoyed fishing so I promptly announced I was going home the next morning.

My companion who had caught more fish than I did was disappointed but we came home after being gone one night and two days. It was the shortest vacation to Canada that I ever took.

Tobacco

The white eggs hatch inside the worm and eat it from the inside out

You are close to being my age if you can remember what a tobacco lath with a spear on the end looked like. I doubt that many alive today can pick out a true tobacco barn and if they did would they know why the sides had tall, narrow, doors that opened up and were hooked in the open position on each side.

Stepping inside one of these old tobacco barns the first thing you notice is the giant posts that hold the barn skeleton upright is crisscrossed with rails -- not just any rails but very strong and dried out tobacco rails. Depending on the size of your tobacco harvest those rails might have to be moved back and forth on two levels. The top most level and the one below nearest the bottom of the barn.

Those tobacco rails spanned the width of the barn and the tobacco lath that laid across them was filled with speared-on-the-lath tobacco leaves. And a whole lath about 6 feet long was enough to hold a dozen, or or less, freshly cut tobacco leaves. The whole lath with the leaves was hung up on or across those tobacco rails and left there to dry out.

The green leaf color turned to a cigar brown as it dried out. The tall narrow doors that stood open along the barn sides, circulated fresh air that came into the barn with old air among the leaves drying in the barn.

The only thing I didn’t mention was that tobacco had to have the blossom cut off the main stem to keep it from going to seed. And there were those fat tobacco worms that would ruin a considerable amount of tobacco by eating the leaves.

Some adult was always offering a little kid a quarter if they would just bite the head off the tobacco worm. Some did it and collected the quarter and some didn’t. I didn’t do it and got nothing but I have seen older boys do it without getting a mouth full of green slime.

At least once or twice the entire field was gone over with men carrying hoes and their job was to keep the hoe as sharp as a razor to cut off the many weeds that seemed to grow taller than the tobacco.

Machetes were used to cut the stalk of tobacco off close to the ground. The stalk was the part that was speared and was slid down to the bottom of the tobacco lath.

A wagon load of tobacco, on laths, was a job for a good team of horses to pull up to the tobacco barn where the speared tobacco on the laths was loaded on the tobacco rails in the barn.

The tobacco dried and in the winter, each lath was taken down, brought into the strip shed on the end of the barn — the tobacco was taken off the lath and the leaf was pulled off the stems. The stems were used like sticks of wood to keep the fire going in the little stove in the strip shed.

Leaves were packed in a large wooden box and sold to tobacco buyers who came around to appraise the tobacco farmers had grown on a specific allotted number of acres.

Fences

Bob Wright was the city manager when we moved to town. He was the person everyone called when they wanted to find out something. Shortly after we moved in, we began to meet our new neighbors. We had kids and were the youngest family in the block. The rest were older people—40s, 50s, and 60s.

Not long after we moved here I was sitting on my toilet in the utility room with the door wide open. And I hear the sliding screen door open but thought it was one of the kids— instead, in walks my new neighbor, Ruby Davis. She saw me on the toilet and said, “Hi neighbor.”

Lordy, I was embarrassed. I sat there and said, “Morning, Ruby; what’s up?” About that time, my wife, Pat, came from somewhere and laughed so hard she almost had an accident. Seeing what a predicament I was in, she moved Ruby away from the utility room door so I could get out of my bathroom.

I went to Sears and bought a roll of old-fashioned garden wire fence material—brought it home and began digging holes for the posts. Ruby watched the route to our house being cut off and came over to inquire about what kind of fence I was going to put up. She went on and on about this crappy fence I was putting in the yard instead of chain link.


I had to tell her that the neighbor’s young boy, still in diapers, had fallen into a hole that I had filled with water. The hole was for a bush I was planting and I had filled it with water so the ground would be saturated when I planted it. Patty had called me for lunch and I left the hole unattended when I went in the house for lunch.

We both heard this “Sploosh” sound and jumped up and looked and saw our neighbor boy, in a diaper, clinging to the side of the hole with muddy water running out of his diaper. Pat got him out of the hole and took him over to his mother.

I told Ruby about kids falling into holes filled with water and said I had to put up a fence. She didn’t like my fence and said she was going to call somebody about it. Before she had a chance to call, I called Bob Wright, then the city manager, and explained my problem with my neighbor.

He told me that I could put up any kind of fence, with any kind of wire, or boards (painted or unpainted), as long as it was in my backyard and on my side of the property line. And that’s what I did. The fence ended up being pretty nice and was replaced, when I had more money, with chain link and then with a wood fence that is still up. Times have changed. The last board fence I had put up was expensive. Ruby would have been pleased.

You're In The Army Now

Our Company Clerk class after basic training. I am on far right in front row

After 14 weary days at sea, the transport ship docked at Yokohama, and my company went to Camp Drake, Japan and as individual replacements were scattered throughout the Far East - some stayed in Japan but others went to Korea, Guam and the Philippines. Two days after landing at Camp Drake's 15th Replacement Company my orders shipped me to the Adjutant General Section (AG) at 1st Cavalry Division Headquarters, at Camp Crawford near Sapporo, Hokkaido, Japan.  

Three camps were established outside Sapporo, the Islands capital city. 1st Cavalry Division Headquarters and the 7th Cavalry Regiment were stationed at Camp Crawford. The 5th Cavalry was stationed at Camp Chitose, Area I. The division had a huge training area of 155,000 acres. The mission of the division was to defend the Island of Hokkaido.

On 10 February 1953, the 5th Cavalry Regiment, 61st Field Artillery Battalion and Battery "A", 29th AAA AW Battalion, departed from Otaru, Japan for Pusan and Koje-do, Korea to relieve the 7th Cavalry who had previously rotated back to Korea. On 27 April, all elements of the 5th Cavalry, less the 3rd Battalion and Heavy Mortar Company, returned to Hokkaido. I joined this regiment in 1955 at Camp Schimmelpfennig shortened to Schimm.

Sapporo was the coldest place on earth. To me it was impossible to get warm and stay that way very long. We stood rifle inspections in blizzards that were so cold the rifle bolts froze in the open position and could not be slammed shut. Troops were towed about the complex on long ropes pulled by "cats." 

We wore skis and snowshoes and Mickey Mouse boots and often climbed up ladders to get out of our snowed under Quonset huts. It was not uncommon to see met walking across the roofs of their huts on their way to the mess hall.

My Army career began with the Carrier Company #2 as the Company Clerk, and I shared an office with the First Sergeant and Company Commander in the 1st Cavalry Division, and I was in the 1st Cavalry Division when my tour of duty ended in 1957. Four years, two months, 17 days of service to my country. 

Hollyhocks

Pink Hollyhocks

 The pink hollyhock was the last to bloom this summer. I liked it because I could see all of the tiny veins. And it has a wrinkled appearance instead of each petal being smooth like silk.

Yellow Hollyhocks

There were a lot of hollyhocks this summer and that was the only kind of flower that came up from its seed. These were all pink.

You can participate in the September 1, 2013 theme something pink  link your post on September 1 to the CDP theme day page.

Learning to carve stone

One of the things I used to do a lot of that I don't do anymore is stone carving. This is one example of that stuck into the bricks at the entrance to my office. It is easier to carve straight lines in granite and marble than it is to carve curved lines in black slate or soft stone like sandstone (At least I thought it was). Anyway, in 1981 while the bricklayer was laying up the bricks I showed this carving to him and he suggested he fix an opening for it and that's how it got there in the brick wall. I also carved names on some of my dog's tombstones. Anyway, that's an example. If you die while taking a walk, and are interested in being taken home—wear dog tags.

Spittoons

Spittoons
© By Abe Lincoln
 
The tiny building set along the Dayton, Greenville and Union City railroad line. It was built as a ticket and baggage office shortly after the railroad came to town. The small office was no longer used by the railroad and was sold to George Myers. It was his Gordon Coal Office. My mom didn't like the place because my dad went there, and she said it was "A place where old men loafed and told dirty stories."

When I was a little boy, I used to go there and listen to the men tell stories about some “loose” ladies in town—they didn't seem dirty to me. I didn’t know what the stories meant, but I laughed like I knew.

Old wooden chairs lined up against the office wall and beside each was a tobacco spittoon. Some spittoons were once brass, that shined, but now most were a brownish black where the tobacco juices and spittle had dried. My dad chewed and spit Mail Pouch tobacco juice.

I was careful not to bump those spittoons because they were almost always full and I didn't want to clean the stuff up if it slopped over the edge onto the oiled floor.
Almost everyone chewed tobacco in those days and very few used regular store-bought cigarettes.

He smoked Bull Duram tobacco that came in a little bag with a drawstring. His wife, Esta, used a cigarette rolling machine to make cigarettes for him. It was her job before she fixed his breakfast. She put a clean piece of tobacco rolling paper on the little machine and poured a little tobacco from the sack onto the paper, and pushed the handle over and it rolled one cigarette that looked like one bought at a store.
 
Esta Flory, my neighbor lady, rolled cigarettes for her husband, Ira, a retired tinner—he made tin roofs and installed them. One day he fell off of a roof and never worked a day after that. He was the first man I ever saw who smoked cigarettes.
 
The end of Ira's nose was yellowish-brown from smoke and his fingers were stained yellowish-brown too. Mom said the long hairs growing on top of his nose came from him smoking so much. They were long hairs and when I was little, I couldn't keep from looking at them. 

Most spittoons in public places, like movie theaters, were made out of brass and they were kept shinned-up like gold. Spittoons were everywhere—not just where men loafed—they were in the grocery stores, the post office, banks and in the butcher shop. 

My dad never owned a regular spittoon. He used old coffee cans until they got to looking so bad that my mother who throw them out. Then he would have to go to the door to spit—that didn't last long.

He would use one of mother's glass Mason canning jars to spit in—that made mom mad. That looked worse because you could see, and evaluate the tone of the juices in the jar. So mom would get him a new can—anything you couldn't see through for him to use and she would grunt and cuss, under her breath while trying to clean out the canning jar.

When I first went to work at NCR, in Dayton, Ohio, they provided brass spittoons for any employee who chewed tobacco. NCR had crews who pushed carts filled with clean spittoons. They picked up spittoons that were filled with slop and left a clean one that shined like gold.
 
After my parents were divorced, before I started to school in the first grade, my mother became interested in someone; she said he was like Jesus.
 
She told me that you could always tell a carpenter from anybody else because they always had some fingers sawed off. He was missing two or three fingers on his right hand. He didn't loaf much. So he was like Jesus.
 
He was married to a fat lady who smoked Kool cigarettes and chewed tobacco—the slobbers ran out the corner of her mouth. She wasn't like anybody else I knew.

I told mom about her bad habits and she told me to mind my own business.
 

© 2005 Abraham Lincoln - All rights reserved.

Welcome Park

Welcome Park— The sign you see when you come into Brookville, Ohio off of Interstate 70 and/or Arlington Road.

The Vintage Brookville Lawn

The Vintage Brookville Lawn—
Lawns, power mowers, fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides are big business. Large corporations have a vested interest in maintaining the ideas that created new industries and made stockholders wealthy. Snow blowers, garden tractors and tillers produce income in seasons when grass is not being cut.

A few years ago we bagged grass clippings because we were told, by the "Lawn Experts" that it was the proper thing to do. Some old timers knew better but went along with the experts. Then the experts changed their advice when confronted with dumps filled with grass clippings.

When the city and county land fills got full of vegetation, they said, "No more grass." City officials were warned that the cost of dumping city trash would increase dramatically if any bags of grass were in the dumpsters. That threat eliminated the practice of bagging grass clippings for the trash men to haul off to the dumps.


Almost overnight, power mowers were introduced that chomped and ground and re-cut the grass until it was just about invisible. They were called "Mulching Mowers."After that cost of living in Brookville theme simmered down, the city got the idea of selling very large paper bags the citizens could buy to put their yard/lawn wastes in and set it out or take it to the city garage and put it in one of their large trailers yourself. As far as I know that is still the policy.

We bought a new mulching mower that had no chute for the grass to exit. The mower blade was bent and twisted in such a way that it was supposed to keep the grass cuttings in the air to be repeatedly cut by the ugly looking blade until there wasn't anything left to cut.

But after several years, the virtues of buying paper bags and setting them out only to see them go into the same dumpsters at the city garage dulled the virtues of cleaning up our dumps and buying paper bags to do it. The yard debris and small trashy limbs and stuff have been bagged in black plastic and set out on trash day to be picked up.

These were sold and still are sold to anybody buying a new mower. And suddenly, the experts who once told us that grass clippings were bad for lawns now said it was OK to leave them on the ground. They also said that they did not produce thatch buildup which was something we all knew but trusted them to know better.

The pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers have destroyed most ground bacteria. And that has made finding a night crawler next to impossible except at bait stores.

Interesting reading and photographs from the period—
Restoring American Gardens An encyclopedia of heirloom ornamental plants 1640 - 1940

Eating Pig's Feet

Pig's Feet
We never had a whole hog to eat but we did eat all of what we got. We ate their skin that was cut into small squares and put into a press and cooked and became a cake of cracklins. The grease that came from the skin was the lard everyone used to cook with. Nowadays the lard cannot be sold and is thrown away but the cracklins are worth about $4.00 a pound. Mom loved pig's feet and got them when she could. She also liked pickled pig's feet. Of course we ate the pig's intestines because they were packed with sausage. The jowl meat was and is delicious as is the side meat when sliced like bacon.

Chicken's Feet
We ate their feet, necks and the back. Mother said we ate "the part that was last over the fence." We also ate their gizzards, hearts and livers. Mother even sucked what meat there was off their heads and those feet with toenails. I never could eat the heads and feet but learned to eat everything else.

Grease Sandwiches
Oh boy. Mother fried fresh bacon in an iron skillet on the old cook stove. She always saved the grease to use in preparing other dishes. After the grease was poured out of the skillet the residue left over became the main ingredient in a "grease sandwich." She took a couple of slices of bread and used it to wipe out the skillet. The stuff in the skillet came off on the bread and that, plus fresh green onions, was the best sandwich I can ever remember eating.

Cold grease sandwiches were much like eating pure lard that looked to be riddled with dirt or scraps of something. The scraps of something were bits and pieces of burned bacon. Gosh it was good eating.

Warnke Covered Bridge

The Warnke covered bridge is located closer to us than any of the others. We drive out of our way to cross it. It is in good condition and is still used by traffic on a daily basis. I have been taking pictures of it for many years and some of the kids grew up having their picture taken in front of this bridge.

Christman Covered Bridge

The Christman covered bridge is similar to the Warnke covered bridge that is considerably closer to us than the Christman. We still have about a dozen covered bridges in our area of the state of Ohio.

Dreams

When I went to bed last night, Memphis, Tennessee was the farthest thing from my mind. After pulling the covers up around my neck and beginning the first coughing fit, the down-filled comforter was not comforting but rather hot–as in heat hot.

I got up, used the big green monster we thought was such a neat color in 1962, and fumbled around in the dark looking for a cough drop. The selection was awesome–Halls more like candy; or, something stuck to a wrapper I had to bite through, to get open. It took both to stop the cough and one or the other made me realize this was the NCAA playoff–Memphis against Kansas.

So I sat in the recliner and dozed through the first half of this important basketball game and went back to bed when Memphis was behind.


I had a dream last night. Maybe it was the cough drops. I dreamed the most beautiful dream. I was a fabulous person and a professional photographer and people swooned at the sight of me with my camera.

Everywhere I went dogs and kids followed me around and when I stopped they posed. I could turn, point my beautiful camera and shoot and the photos were instantly snapped- up by Time Magazine, People Magazine and the UK’s very own Daily Mail and Daily Mirror.

Rich ladies, whose garages were filled with Bentleys and Lamborghinis, had agents steal me off the street, with my camera, and set me up in mansions to make pictures of their daughters.

I walked into kitchens and saw young ladies, with toast in one hand and a glass of milk in the other and I pointed my beautiful camera and pressed the shutter and out came glamour magazine shots of models wearing jaunty hats with wide yellow ribbons; and pouting lips with Mona Lisa smile. In one hand a $10,000.00 bill and in the other a contract edged in gold.

Memphis lost.

Eating Pig's Feet

Grease Sandwiches
Oh boy. Mother fried fresh bacon in an iron skillet on the old cook stove. She always saved the grease to use in preparing other dishes. After the grease was poured out of the skillet the residue left over became the main ingredient in a "grease sandwich." She took a couple of slices of bread and used it to wipe out the skillet. The stuff in the skillet came off on the bread and that, plus fresh green onions, was the best sandwich I can ever remember eating.

Cold grease sandwiches were much like eating pure lard that looked to be riddled with dirt or scraps of something. The scraps of something were bits and pieces of burned bacon. Gosh it was good eating.

Chicken's Feet
We ate their feet, necks and the back. Mother said we ate "the part that was last over the fence." We also ate their gizzards, hearts and livers. Mother even sucked what meat there was off their heads and those feet with toenails. I never could eat the heads and feet but learned to eat everything else.


Pig's Feet
We never had a whole hog to eat but we did eat all of what we got. We ate their skin that was cut into small squares and put into a press and cooked and became a cake of cracklins. The grease that came from the skin was the lard everyone used to cook with. Nowadays the lard cannot be sold and is thrown away but the cracklins are worth about $4.00 a pound. Mom loved pig's feet and got them when she could. She also liked pickled pig's feet. Of course we ate the pig's intestines because they were packed with sausage. The jowl meat was and is delicious as is the side meat when sliced like bacon.