My mother found out when she was a young adult that she was adopted. This effected her very deeply thoroughout most of her life. She explained it as that she didn't know who she was anymore, not knowing where she came from. After a long time and with assistance from my father they began to try to find my mother's natural parents (no easy task). This journey began in the mid 1970s. My parents reached the point where they needed to enter into the court system to request access to my mother's adoption records, but was initially denied. After raising this to the Superior court of New Jersey the following information was released on 6/22/1977:
Name of biological mother: anne Campbell/Gorman
Religion of biological mother: Roman Catholic
Address of biological mother at time of placement: 435 Lake View Ave., Haddonfield, NJ
Age of biological mother: Not shown on record
Baptism: No recordName of putative father: Walter Hardiman
Religion of putative father: Not shown on record
Address of putative father: Address unknown, as stated on record
Age of putative father: Not shown on record
Baptism: No recordName of adopted child: Alice Marie Gorman
Date of birth: 1/6/1928
Religion: Roman Catholic
Date of baptism: 1/22/1928
Place of baptism: St. Michael's, Hopewell, NJ
Address of child at time of placement: St. Michael's Orphanage, Hopewell, NJ
Date of placement in adoptive home: 9/11/1928
Date of legal adoption: 12/20/1929 Place: Middlesex County Orphan's Court
Listed as Mason on Charles Leach's marriage record.
1841 Census: Wapentake of Morley, Parish of Bradford, Chapelry of Horton in the limits of Borough of Bradford. E.D. 5 Croft Street
Charles Leach 30 Artist b. Yorkshire (everyone listed born Yorkshire)
Mary " 30
William " 11
Eleanor " 9
Emeline " 7
Alfred " 5
Richard " 1
Next household listed:
Richard Walters 60 Army P
Mary " 55
James Padgett 20
Sarah " 20
Horatio Leach 7
This will be an account of my life, but it will also be an account of the way of life in the 1920’s & 1930’s in a rural country town. As I write this, I am eighty years old as I was born in 1921 and it is now 2001. From my grandparents until now, no Hurry family member has reached this age, so I feel privileged to have done so.
I shall include pictures as much as my ability allows. I was born in Louden, NJ, which is now part of Atco, on the 17th of April, 1921. My late brother Walter Smith Hurry was also born there on the 19th of February, 1926. I note that my brother died at the age of 47 in Massachusetts. He had been married for only a few years to Anne Smith. My mother was Phoebe Jane Hurry (nee Hardiman) and my father was Thomas Sherman Hurry. I wish to note now that my memories of events from birth until my mother died on May 3, 1931 are few. It has been suggested that the traumatic events in my very early years may have caused this. My father had a complete nervous breakdown shortly after the birth of my brother and was institutionalized for the remainder of his life.
Memories of living with my mother
I will now tell of the things that I recall before my mother died. I remember: that my mother belonged to a club call the “Pansies”, they met for tea, cake, and conversation once a month and I remember them at our house; when the house was electrified; when we got running water and indoor plumbing; and how we got a radio and sat around it listening. Sam and Annie Hough lived across the street. Their son Norman had a crystal set radio and used to let me listen on one ear phone while he listened on the other. Clayton, an older son, and my first cousin Beatrice Leach were married. Incidentally, Beatrice was my Godmother. As I write there are only two of the first cousins still alive, Kempton (Ken) in California who is about six years older than I am and me in Florida. There had been twenty four of us. I also remember that someone had thrown away an old tattered baseball glove. My mom gave me a quarter, and I had the shoemaker sew it up. I got a bicycle, but didn’t know how to ride it, training wheels hadn’t been invented yet. I would lean it against the back step, get on, and ride it until I fell, then I would repeat the process all over. I remember the day that my mother had the stroke that led to her death. I remember no specifics, just that I remember. To this day I weep. After my mother died, I went to live with Aunt Kedron and Uncle Jim Hurry. They lived just across the field on another street. My mother and Aunt Kedron were sisters and my father and Uncle Jim were brothers. If anyone wonders why I don’t talk about my brother, it is because I don’t remember much about him.
I will now start the story of my childhood after I started living with my aunt and uncle. They never mistreated me or required me to work, except for the chores that were necessary around a rural household in that era. They were very good to me.
The Town
Atco in the 1930’s was a typical small rural town. There was one traffic light at the intersection of Atco Avenue and the White Horse Pike, which was Route 30. The White Horse Pike went from Camden to Atlantic City. In the town there were two or three grocery stores, a butcher shop, a bakery, and a lumber yard which also sold coal, the fuel choice at that time. There were also a shoemaker and a couple of barbers. The one big shining light in Atco was the fact that there was a doctor in town. He made house calls every day and was on twenty four hour’s call. There was also a store that sold tobacco, penny candy, ice cream, and other odds and ends such as needles and thread, paper and pencils, aspirin and other associated medical type products. The only industry in town was a broom factory. They made the regular broom that was a part of every household’s kitchen. Their raw supplies come in by rail and the brooms were also shipped out by rail.
A couple of icemen served the town and came every two or three days. Gasoline was six gallons for a dollar, hair cuts were twenty five cents, and cigarettes were ten cents a pack. A bottle soda was a nickel, as was a single dip of ice cream, and penny candy was abundant in many varieties. There were two grammar schools in town. One was in down town Atco so to speak, and the other one was in Louden next door to the Hurry homestead (no excuse for me to be late).
There wasn’t a Police Department per se, only a constable. He was an elderly man named Graham who was called Squire Graham, and he settled any local disputes. His decisions were respected and he also gave quasi-legal advice. Atco had rural mail delivery and incidentally my Aunt Clara was post mistress--one cent stamps for letters and three cent stamps for newspapers. During the summer there were a couple of men with large trucks who would pick up any farm produce that you wanted to sell. They took it to the Philadelphia wholesale produce market and delivered it to the dealer of your choice and later you would receive a check.
The Hurry House
The Hurry house was old and was probably built in the early 19th century. It sat on about twelve acres of land. It was a large house with five bedrooms on the second floor and two finished rooms in the third story attic. The first floor had a parlor, a dining room, a kitchen, a bathroom with no plumbing, plus another bed room, and a back shed. There was a cellar which had a very low ceiling. The kitchen was very large because it was originally a boarding house to house the glass factory workers. Now I will describe the backyard. There was a barn, a large wagon shed, plus a chicken coop that comprised the outbuildings, and of course there was a rose covered “necessary” up the path. To the rear of the property was a large gravel pit. Most of the roads in the Township were covered with gravel from this pit--more about this later. In addition to the large vegetable garden, there also was a grape patch which was perhaps an acre and a half. Behind the house and before the outbuildings there was an area with flowers and shrubs. I shall list some of them: lilies of the valley, japonica, wisteria, poppies, pussy willow, several varieties of roses, lilacs, moon flowers, morning glories, etc. We had a yellow oxhart cherry as well as two pie cherry trees, a bartlett pear tree, and eight or ten apple trees. A number of huge tall maple and oak trees were also in the yard.
This next item is rather difficult to describe. In the house there were several carbide gas lamps for light, as there was no electric in the house yet. The gas came from a tank behind the house that was buried in the ground with only the lid visible. It was about three feet in diameter and perhaps six feet deep. It was about half filled with water. Above the water was a frame like device with an inverted can of carbide over the water. A flotation device metered the chips of carbide and allowed some to fall into the water when the gas pressure was low. The carbide chips and water produced a gas which was piped into the house. I almost forgot the pig sty! Uncle Jim would buy a small pig in the spring and with all of the vegetable peeling, corn husks, watermelon and cantaloupe rinds, the creature would be a hundred pounds or more in the late fall. Then you know the story--pork chops, ham, bacon, and scrapple. I shall end this part of the story now, but will probably add to it later when I recall more.
Uncle Jim Hurry
I wish to write about this remarkable man. He was fifty six years old when I came to live at his house. As I look back, I realize what a clever and talented person he was. He was a very skilled carpenter in an age of no electrical tools. As a carpenter myself, I can’t imagine working without an electric saw or drill. He was adept in driving a well point into the ground in order to obtain water, knowing at what depth to check for water, and by using a pitcher pump to know when the flow was the greatest. He always had a large vegetable garden for our use at the table during the summer and also enough to put up for the winter with the surplus being shipped to market. At this point in time horses were used to pull all the various farm implements needed. Uncle Jim could do all of this. When I first went to live there, he owned a horse, but later on he had an arrangement with a neighbor to use his. As a carpenter he had several extension ladders. When he needed a smaller one, he made it in the following manner. He took a nice straight cedar pole that was about ten feet in length and perhaps six inches in diameter at the widest end, and then he proceeded to rip saw it length wise by hand. Remember, this had to be exactly down the center of the log--not an easy task! Next he spoke shaved pieces of oak to the correct size to be ladder rungs. They were then inserted into the pieces of cedar he had sawed. He made wine and a lot of vinegar which was an important staple in those days. He could resole shoes using leather and tacks. He had the equipment to do this, which consisted of a cast iron base on which several different sized shoes forms sat. The shoes to be resoled were put on them to be worked on. Recently, I saw a copy of a 1880 Philadelphia census page which listed Uncle Jim’s father (my grandfather) as a shoemaker. This is certainly where Uncle Jim got the know how and from where the tools came. Another time he needed a pair of hinges to put on a dog pen door. He simply used two pieces of rubber cut from an old discarded tire--flexible and long lasting. I could cite many other things, but these are an illustration of his skills. He hunted rabbits, which were a great addition to our fall menu. He taught me to hunt using rabbit dogs (beagles). He also went fox hunting for sport with other men. They never shot the fox, but were content to listen to the baying of the hounds. The fun for the men was to get an occasional glimpse of the wily creature. He knew the surrounding woods like the back of his hand. He knew where the best huckleberries (now called blueberries) were. He also knew where wild cranberries were to be found, and we picked them and made cranberry jelly. He owned a wood lot where he would cut down oak trees. They were hauled home with horse and wagon to be cut up for firewood. He could also hand sharpen saws. There were men who would cut pine trees down to be used to make charcoal. They would bring their axes and one and two man logging saws to be sharpened. In the winter he would operate a bulldozer for the township to clear the roads of snow. I could go on but I think that I have shown how talented and versatile this tall slender man was. I am certainly glad that I was his nephew.Aunt Kedron Hurry
Aunt Kedron Hurry was fifty three years old when I came to her house to live. I have no idea of her formal education, but she started to work in a rug mill when she was twelve years old. Besides being a homemaker, no easy task in those days, she was many other things. She was book smart, a secretary for two fraternal lodges, a small town newspaper reporter, and each year worked on the election board. Homemaking was hard, remember, we had no running water, but there was a hand pump was in the shed next to the kitchen. In the summer a kerosene stove with three burners was used for cooking and also all of the hot water that was needed was heated on it. In the fall and winter the large kitchen range was used with wood and coal used to fire it. Flat irons with detachable handles were heated on it for ironing clothes. Before electricity, perishables were put in an icebox for keeping, which was not good at it’s best. Aunt Kedron sewed, darned socks, made curtains, etc. She could can vegetables and fruits as well as make jellies and jams. Our basement shelves bore proof of that. She could wallpaper, as most housewives were able to do. Because we had apple and cherry tress and picked wild huckleberries, she baked many pies. She would also oversee the making of batches of root beer. She and Uncle Jim had a circle of friends with whom they played cards. She was born in England and just about every day around four o’clock, she would have a cup of tea--very British! She also liked a small glass of wine before going to bed. She was very clever within her scope of activity. Aunt Kedron and Uncle Jim were not emotional people and did not show affection. As with Uncle Jim, I’m surely glad that she was my aunt.
Jimmy Hurry
Jimmy Hurry was still living at home when I moved in and was fifteen years old. He and I got along fine, remember I was moving on to his turf. We played together as much as a five year difference in age allowed. When he was sixteen, he went to live with his Uncle Percy, who was the brother of Aunt Kedron’s first husband. He lived in the Croyden, Pennsylvania area. He had a fuel oil and kerosene delivery business and Jimmy could get his driver’s license at sixteen and work for him. Eventually he married. After the war Ellen and I visited him and his wife Crissy many, many times with Kathy and Tommy. They lived in Cornwells Heights Pa.
While I think about it, I want to talk about my cousin Louise Hoffman, who lived in Atco. She is a couple of month older than I am. Her mother was my Aunt Lottie Hoffman nee Hurry. Her father was my Uncle Win (Winfield) Hoffman. He is buried in the family plot in Atco. In the summer of 2000 I was able to find her. We hadn’t seen each other for sixty six years. She lives in Vero Beach Florida, about forty miles North of here. I was able to contact her. Marguerite and I visited her and had a pleasant time. We talked about Atco and our lives. Later I sent her old family pictures, but she never responded and that’s where it seems to have ended.
My Life
Well now I will get to the meat of the biography, so to speak. After my mothers funeral (I do not remember one single thing about it), I went with my Uncle Ed and Aunt Minnie to their farm in Whycombe, Pa. Uncle Ed was my mother’s brother. It was quite large and was situated on a low hill which was not steep at all. A road bisected the property and at the bottom of the hill there flowed the Neshaminy Creek. It was very shallow, and their very small band of cattle liked to cool off by standing in it. Uncle Ed worked in a rug mill in Philly and his son Gilbert ran the farm. There was another son Edward, but he was not living there. Both the sons were graduates of the National Farm School, which now many years later is the Delaware Valley College. The raising of chickens was the main thrust of their operation. They did have a few milk cows, a few sheep, and a real nasty ram. If he saw anyone in the enclosed portion of the barn yard he would chase you. The house was made of field stone with walls perhaps 18 to 20 inches thick. The barn was right on the road’s edge, and they used to drive into the barn to garage their car. You then had to go down a flight of stairs to come out on the lawn near the house. There was a natural spring on the hill near the house. It had a small roof and a door on it. The water was cold and home churned butter and milk was kept there. I remember it as a pleasant time for me. I guess that I spent most of the summer there before I went back to Uncle Jim’s. As a foot note: 50 years later, after Marguerite and I were married, we looked for the property and had difficulty locating it since the barn was gone. We met the present owner and had a nice talk with her. She explained that the barn had been hit by lightening and had burned down. It had been full of antiques. A sad footnote: In 1957 the Hardiman family had a reunion which was held in Atco at the Hurry homestead. Ed Hardiman, Jr. and his wife Kitty stopped at a motel to spend the night before they arrived. He suffered a heart attack that night and died. Some years later (I don’t know how many) his brother took his own life.
School
I don’t remember a whole lot about going to school which was next door. I will tell some of the things that I do remember. The school consisted of two rooms with four grades in each room. When I reached the seventh grade, they changed that and I traveled to the Atco school. At this point in time there was no electricity in the school. For drinking water a separate small pump house was in the school yard and in it was a hand pump. In the winter if the well froze, I would go home, which was next door, and bring a bucket of water for drinking--we all used the same tin cup. For light there were gas lamps hung from the ceiling. Heat was provided by a huge round coal stove in the center of the room. If your seat was close you practically roasted, likewise if you were far away you were cold. The teacher had to take care of the fire. No electricity and no running water translates into two “necessaries” or as they were known then as privies out in the yard. One for boys and one for girls with a long, and I do mean long, fence between them. A music teacher came once or twice a month and exposed us to the wide world of music. Sometimes a man would come and show movies for a dime, I think. It was a small screen with black and white pictures, and I have no idea of the content. Some of the larger boys would put stones and sticks into the tailpipe of one of the teacher’s car to devil her.One day a boy fell on the school steps and broke his arm. A telephone call from Aunt Kedron brought the local doctor, Henry Schwartz to the scene. It just so happened that Uncle Jim was replacing some wooden cedar shingles on the wagon shed roof. The doctor had him shave two of them down to the correct size, then he used them on each side of the broken arm after he had set it--no x-rays, no parental involvement, and all for two dollars, if he ever got it. The school yard was great. It had many huge oak trees in it, and some of them were at least three feet in diameter. Next to the school yard was a baseball field. We kids used it, but it was primarily used by an adult team, which played on Sundays. Generally there was a big attendance at the games. I chased foul balls for the team and was rewarded with a nickel and an ice cream cone from the vendor present after the game. I really thought that I was privileged. When the big team players broke a bat, they tossed it, so we kids would glue and screw it together, put tape around it and use it. When a ball was used so much that the cover would come off, we taped it with black friction tape called tire tape. Believe me, nothing was wasted. I guess that we started recycling and didn’t even know it.
Well where do we go from here? I guess an incident from the time when I went to the Atco school for 7th and 8th grades. A local character would go to the bank, which was very near the school, and get a dollars worth of pennies. Then during the lunch hour, when many kids were about, he would toss them into the air onto the street. This would cause a near riot with the kids scrambling for the pennies. Remember, this is the time of penny candy stores. Because I lived too far from school to go home for lunch, I carried mine in a paper bag. There were no “Hop-a-Long Cassidy” metal lunch kits. Sometimes I would walk a couple of blocks to a small meat and grocery store and get a roll with cheese, bologna (the spelling then), and mustard for a nickel. If I was lucky enough to have another nickel, which wasn’t often, I would get a bottle of soda--cream probably. If you talked too much in class, the teacher would moisten a piece of tape (sort of like scotch tape, but not self adhesive) and put it over your mouth. There were the outside boys and girls privies as usual. It is very ironic that years later, I was an elected member of the Waterford Twp. School board and was instrumental in having indoor plumbing installed. A case of what goes around, finally comes around. I graduated from the eighth grade in 1934 and went on to high school the following September. A friend of mine has a picture of the grammar school graduation and I will attempt to get a copy.
Now perhaps, I shall talk about high school. I attended the Haddonfield Memorial High School in Haddonfield, NJ and graduated in 1938. The Waterford Township pupils commuted by train. I lived more than a mile from the rail road station, and the Haddonfield station was a mile from the high school. So you see, we got plenty of exercise just getting to school and home again. I might also add that it was uphill both ways (this is for son Tommy’s benefit). Just a quick conservative bit of math tells me that translated to at least 3600 miles--farther than from Atco to Los Angeles. It made no difference, rain, snow, or just plain cold, off you went--umbrellas, raincoats, and rubbers? Forget it! The students from Haddonfield for the most part came from a much more affluent circumstance. They dressed well and were driven to school in case of inclement weather. My clothes were barely adequate at times. This is not a complaint or a plea for sympathy, I’m just telling it the way that it was. Aunt Kedron and Uncle Jim did the best they could under trying circumstances, and I certainly have no complaint.
I never had any particular problem with my studies in school. I finished 42nd in a class of about 120 in high school. Math by far was my best subject and most liked by me. I also enjoyed chemistry, physics, and biology. There was also a senior history class I liked. It was called POD Problems of Democracy. I had two years of Spanish and I liked it very much. Because of the transportation problem, I was not able to go out for any sport teams. However, I was an avid football fan. On Saturday mornings, I used to get a train around 7 am and go to Haddonfield. We always had extra train tickets which were provided by Waterford Township. I would literally roam the streets until the 1 pm game time.As I have said before, I didn’t usually have any pocket money and many times a friend of mine, Bill Muncey, would treat me to an ice cream cone when we would be walking to the train station after school. The train which we rode from Haddonfield to Atco after school let out for the day, was just four cars, and only high school kids were on it. Atco was the last stop and then the train would go backwards back to Haddonfield where there was a facility for it to turn around.
In the spring of 1938, the seniors went on a three day school trip to Washington DC. Every student who desired to go went at no cost. I don’t know where the money came from to pay for it. In Washington we visited the usual places, the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials, the Treasury building, and the top of the Washington Monument. Now to a more serious note. I really had not experienced racial bigotry until my senior trip to Washington. We just had two black students in our class. One was a girl named Pleasant O’Neil and the other was Freddy Cooper. Freddy was a football player. He was a ball carrier and he dominated play in every game. They had to be housed in an “appropriate” hotel. They couldn’t stay in our hotel. When we got on a bus for sightseeing, the bus driver did not want to let Freddy on the bus. Big mistake! We all said “Freddy rides or no one rides.” So the driver, not wanting to lose 40 or more fares, said all right. I have to say that my cousin Alice Cordner made sure that I had descent clothes, toiletries, a camera, and some pocket money for the trip. I was able to get a senior yearbook but not a class ring. All in all, high school was a pleasant memory.
Earning Money and Doing ChoresMoney was usually in short supply when I was growing up. I got a ten cent allowance. Not much, but not as bad as it sounds. I always bought the candy bars at the A&P grocery because you got three of them for a dime. At the regular candy store, they were five cents apiece (lesson learned--always shop around). During the summer vacation from school, I did many things in order to have some pocket money. A big thing was to work for local farmers picking things in season, such as strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, peas, and lots of tomatoes. A day’s picking netted you a dollar, if you had a good day. One man would give me a quarter to go back to the stream in the woods and catch him a bucket of catfish--no problem. Another man would give me a quarter to go into the woods once again, and pick some teaberries for him. He dried them and made teaberry tea. Teaberries were about the size of a green pea, pink and white in color, and they grew close to the ground only two or three inches high. They were scarce, but I knew where some grew. At that time there were only four or five flavors of gum--spearmint, peppermint, pepsin, and teaberry. Juicy fruit hadn’t arrived yet. We had a multitude of lilacs in our yard and there were a lot of abandoned farms that that had lots of the purple flowers in their yards. So I would pick bunches of them, tie the bunches with string, put them in baskets, and send them to the Philadelphia produce market. Most of the chores that I did were for the most part fun. I fed the chickens, collected the eggs, cut the asparagus, chopped some kindling wood, and picked whatever vegetable and fruit was ripe.
Now let me tell you about making cider. We had perhaps a dozen apple trees. I would pick the apples at the proper time, put them into baskets or just into the wheel barrow and take them over to the wagon shed. There was a cider press in there and I made the cider. The press was about five feet high. At the top there was an opening into which you put the apples. You turned a handle and the apples were ground up and they fell into a tub. It looked sort of like a basket with no bottom. When it was full, you could screw down a flat piece of wood, which would squeeze the juice from the ground up apples. The apple juice would flow from the spigot at the bottom into a container, so we now had cider. The ground up apple pulp that was left was fed to the chickens or to a pig, if we happened to have one at the time. The cider was very delicious to drink, and when aged and treated, it turned to vinegar. The whole cider process had a drawback though. It attracted every yellow jacket in the area, so I had to be very careful. The vinegar was used to preserve many, many jars of pickles and cucumbers. We had two red cherry pie trees. Just as they were about to ripen, you had to cover them with a fine netting or the robins could finish them off in a single day. One year we planted peanuts. They grew fine, but to try to roast them properly on or in a kitchen range was sometimes an insurmountable task. A man who lived about an half mile down the road, had some bee hives. In the early spring his bees would come up to our yard to get the pollen from pussy willow tree we had. My cousin Jimmy had a pigeon coop in the top of the barn. In the evening he would let the flock of pigeons out. They would fly around until dark and then come back to the coop. Aunt Kedron liked creamed squab on toast--not me.
Preparing for Winter
I think that I shall relate the various things that were done to prepare for the coming of winter. A number of tons of coal was purchased. When the coal truck arrived, a cellar window was opened and the coal was put into the coal bin beneath the window using a chute. I don’t know how much coal was needed for the winter. In addition to this, there was a fairly large wood pile. This was used in the fall and the spring when you might need a little heat in the morning or evening. For a few years when I first lived at Uncle Jim’s, there wasn’t a furnace in the basement. The kitchen range and a pot belly stove in the dining room provided the warmth. The dining room stove was put there in the fall and taken down in the spring. All of the other rooms were shut off with no heat in the upstairs bedrooms. If it was bitter cold, before I went to bed, I would heat a brick in the oven, wrap it in newspapers, and put it under the covers at the foot of the bed. A three burner kerosene stove was also in the kitchen. This was used for cooking when the kitchen range wasn’t fired up. There was a large tin container that sat over the three burners. This was used to heat water for laundry, no washers yet, at least not at the Hurry home. A scrub board was used.
Now I shall tell about filling the larder. We put up (canned) lots of tomatoes and I always helped Aunt Kedron. Boiling water was poured over the tomatoes, which were in a dish pan. This would loosen the skin and they peeled easily. They were cut up, put in a large pot, and cooked. When they finished cooking, they were ladled into quart mason jars. A rubber ring was put on the top of the jar and a zinc lid was screwed on very tightly. I estimate at least one hundred jars were done. Ketchup was also prepared. The tomatoes were cooked, then put through a fine sieve, various spices were added, and it was put into bottles. Sometimes a sweet preserve was made. A lot of apple sauce was also put into jars along with huckleberries that we picked in the woods. Many jars of various kinds of pickles and cucumbers were put up. Beets and a lot of string beans also ended up on the basement shelves.
Now here is a really neat trick. A depression was dug in the ground, perhaps two feet deep, three feet wide, and about eight feet in length. First a thick bed of oak leaves was put in, then this was covered with a black roofing paper. A few more leaves were added and then many, many cabbages that we had grown were put in. The cabbages were covered with more leaves and building paper, then a huge mound of dirt covered all of this. In the winter when you wanted a cabbage or two, you dug into the mound and got them out and recovered it. The cabbage was no longer green, but was white. You took a couple of leaves off and it was ready to be used.
Uncle Jim also grew a lot of sweet potatoes. They had to be kept warm during the winter, so there were three or four barrels of them kept in the kitchen. Remember, this was a huge kitchen. Several hundred pounds of white potatoes were purchased and stored in a portion of the cellar which was cool and dark. If a pig had been raised, there were slabs of bacon and several hams hanging there also. These were home smoked in a neighbor’s smoke house using oak and hickory chips. Apple and grape jelly along with strawberry and peach preserves and also apple butter were made for the winter in abundance. This you won’t believe! When there were more eggs than could be used, they were carefully put into a five gallon crock. A crystal like powder call “water glass” was mixed with water and this solution was put into the crock to cover the eggs. This preserved the eggs for quite a long time. They were good for cooking and making scrambled eggs, but were not so good for frying. Sometimes a watermelon would be given at least four coats of shellac, put on the cellar floor, and around Christmas, we would cut it and if you were lucky it would be edible.
Traveling Salesmen:
A bread man, milkman, and an iceman made regular stops. Once a month a Jewel tea man came. He sold odds and ends as well as tea and coffee. Every once in a while, a rag man came. He bought old rags and newspapers. He would weigh them and pay so much per pound. Men came around who sharpened scissors and knives. We didn’t need them because Uncle Jim could do this. Also about once a year, an old gold man would come. If you had broken eye glass frames, watch chains, or watch cases which had some gold content, he would by them. When one of your cook pots sprung a leak, you mended it with a couple of washers and a small bolt.Recreation
Now I guess I shall explore what I did for recreation, the fun things. We were never bored and the town fathers didn’t have to provide us with lighted basketball courts or places to skate (stop moralizing and get on with the story). A wire hoop was nailed on the end wall of the wagon shed. I used to shoot baskets there, generally with a tin can. Any kind of ball was hard to come by at the time. During the summer on occasion, Uncle Jim, Jimmy, and I would go fishing in one of the streams back in the woods. This would be after dark and we would catch eels and catfish, which would appear on the dinner table the next night. After the Sunday ball games, I would go around and pick up empty cigarette packages. At this time the cigarette pack was lined with a thin wax like paper on which there was a very thin coating of tin foil. This was like the aluminum foil today. I would peel this off and add it to my ever growing ball of silver paper. Most boys had one. Most of us also had a large ball of string and twine--no scotch tape yet, no zippers or Velcro, also no power mowers, microwaves, televisions, tape players, recorders, push button phones or a million other things that are so necessary now.My friends and I ice skated on the frozen flooded cranberry bogs. We played baseball during the summer. It was generally against a team from Atco. I remember once there were only eight gloves among the eighteen players and most of the time there was no catcher’s mask. We also didn’t have a bunch of parents screaming at us about everything. I had a special friend, his name was Arthur Ward. He lived about a half mile up the road. Just about every Saturday I would go to his house, and we would play most of the day. His mother was very good to me. This friendship continued through high school and later our children played together. A very pleasant memory. In the town of Berlin there was a movie theater. This was about three miles up the road and we would walk there on some Saturdays. For a dime you saw a double feature, a newsreel, and a cartoon. When I was in grammar school, I was a skillful marble player. A man in Atco had two official clay marble rings in his back yard and they were used for marble tournaments. When I was quite young, I entered a tournament that the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin sponsored, won and received a medal. Sometimes in the summer time, a couple of us neighborhood guys would walk down to Atco in the evening to a local store. The owner would cut a packaged quart of ice cream in half for each of us. Each half cost twenty five cents. We always brought our own spoons from home and would find a convenient place to sit and eat it. One of the boys was Zan (Alexander) Duble. He had moved from Atco to a large house near me in Louden. We became very good friends. He was a year ahead of me in high school. This friendship also lasted through high school and afterwards. His father owned the local lumber yard. His parents were very nice and were good to me.
Every summer the Atco and Louden fire companies would hold carnivals. They were three or four night affairs and featured stands, which were games of chance such as penny pitching, knock the wooden milk bottles down, ring toss, etc. There was also food stands, music, and minor entertainment. This was a fun thing and eagerly looked forward to by the people of the town, especially the kids. Fireworks were legally sold then, and I used to get an assortment of them to set off. They were dangerous and every once in awhile someone would get hurt, but I was lucky in that respect. Decoration day always brought a parade with some bands, floats, fire engines, etc. and a ceremony at the cemetery. The WWI Veterans would be there, and firing squads would fire volleys into the air causing we kids to scramble for the spent shell casings. Now sixty or more years later, same parade, different faces, and the WW2 Veterans like me are old men!
I always was a roller skater, not street but rink. The nearest roller rink was in Watsontown on the White Horse pike about seven miles up the road toward Camden. Before I had a car, I would hitch hike to the rink and usually could get a ride back to Atco at the end of the evening. It was here that I met Ellen Marie Lyons and we eventually married--more about this later. Years later my daughter Kathy would also skate there.
I am not a dedicated religious person, however I went to Sunday school when I was young. When I was older I was a member of the Christian Endeavor Society and I did become a member of The First Presbyterian Church of Atco. The names of my brother Walter and me are inscribed on the Veterans Honor Roll in the entrance hall of the church.
After High School
I am now out of high school and ready to face the world. In the summer of 1938 the terrible depression of 1929 had faded away, but there was not a lot of jobs around for a seventeen year old boy. I did some farm work for different people. Across the street from the house where I was born, people name Fuchs lived. Karl Fuchs the father was a very smart man and had a glass grinding shop with six to eight employees. His shop made and polished glass for industry. He supplied the Kodak-Eastman Company with many of his products. Any way in the Fall when he was very busy, he hired me and I learned to polish lenses. I had been a welcome visitor to his shop since I was a young boy. This employment was only part time, as I only worked when the shop was very busy. I applied for and got my social security card--10-26-1938. I still have my original card in my wallet to this day!
In the summer of 1939 on a lazy Sunday afternoon I was relaxing under a very large maple in the side yard. I was listening to the radio. I had purchased this radio from Sears & Roebuck using their mail order catalogue. There were not battery operated radios yet, so I had used an electrical extension cord from the house to the lawn, so that I could listen to it. This particular afternoon a car stopped out front, a man got out, and walked over to me. I recognized him as Caleb Githens who owned a general store in Atco. He asked me if I would like to work in his store. Well, I tell you that I could have kissed that man right then and there! So I started to work at the C.B. Githens General Store. I worked over sixty hours a week and the pay started at sixteen dollars a week and didn’t go much higher. Mr. And Mrs. Githens were good people and we were friends for a long time. There were groceries and a butcher shop in the store itself. It was actually a one room facility, not large at all. They also sold chicken and cattle feed, in fact a lot of it. Mr. Githens also sold fuel oil and gasoline. I worked as the lone grocery person. I stocked the shelves, waited on people, and ran the cash register. The cash register was a huge brass affair that was electrified, but could be operated by a small crank if necessary. Now it is a collector’s item. Behind the counter there were wood slats to walk on covered with saw dust.
The butcher was a classic. He wore a hard straw hat called a skimmer, which was a butcher’s trademark. A butcher in those days was not only a meat cutter, but also a diplomat. He had to know his customers--who bought what, etc. so that he knew what meat to order each week. On occasion he would make a five gallon crock of sauerkraut.
There was no frozen food at that time. Sharp cheese came in “wheels” about 12 or 14 inches in diameter and maybe 4 or 5 inches thick. The cheese rested on a wooden turntable which was on an apparatus with a hinged knife, so that wedges of cheese could be cut. Coffee, for the most part, came in 3 or 5 pound boxes, was weighted, sold by weight, and put into paper bags. Bananas came on a huge stalk and was sold by the half dozen or dozen. At that time bread was ten cents a loaf, ground meat perhaps twenty cents a pound, and pork chops twenty five cents a pound. Gasoline was six gallons for a dollar and cigarettes were ten to fifteen cents a packet.
Sometime in the spring of 1940, I left the grocery store and went to work in Philadelphia at the Bendix aviation Corporation. Aircraft instruments were manufactured there. I was hired as a tool boy and quickly became a lathe operator. I worked long hours there also, but the pay was over a hundred dollars a week. I arranged to live at Aunt Lillie’s on 9th street in North Philly all week and went home to Aunt Kedron’s on the weekends.
On December 7, 1941, a Sunday, I was driving into Atco to go to a football game when I heard the news of Pearl Harbor. I mentioned it to people, but the significance of it did not register. Little did they realize, and me among them, what the future boded. I was still working at Bendix when the attack on Pearl Harbor occurred. Another young fellow there, with whom I was friendly, enlisted in the early Spring. Perhaps this triggered something, because I also enlisted in the Army Air Corp on March 28, 1943 and was not discharged until December 11, 1945. Some 45 months later I was overseas in the ETO (European Theater of Operations) for 27 months. I was in Scotland, England, France, and Germany. I was processed at Fort Meade Maryland and took basic training at Kiesler Field, Mississippi. It was very hot and humid and some 80 thousand soldiers were there--not a pleasant experience. I left there and went to Lowry field in Denver, Colorado where I attended a bombsight school. There we were taught to maintain and repair Norden bombsights. From there I went to air bases in Syracuse and Rome NY. Before I went overseas, I was at Fort Dix for a couple of months. While there Ellen Lyons and I were married. Shortly after that I shipped over seas for some 25 months. Ellen was a secretary at Gloucester City, High School.
I then went to England. I was in route from an airfield West of London (Reading) to an airfield North of London (Stanstead) and decided to spend the night in London. As it happened this was the night that the infamous V2 rockets (buzz bombs) first struck London. After that terrible night I headed North the next day.
Along the way I became a Sgt. Not long after D-Day our service squadron went to France. Many months later when the war was winding down, I was able to get to Paris and see the sights. I also went to the huge outdoor field where the high concrete platform that Hitler used to rant and rave on stood. In fact I also stood on the very spot--big deal.
After my discharge from the service in December 1945, Ellen and I set up house keeping and subsequently Kathy was born in 1947 and Tommy in 1951. Ellen had many health problems and passed away in June 1980, nearing her 60th birthday which would have been in August. She had been a good person, wife, and mother.
In 1981, Marguerite Graham nee Phelps and I were married. To this date in 2001 we have had a very satisfying and happy twenty years of marriage.
Final Musings
I shall now tell of the many changes that I have witnesses in my life. We have gone from kerosene stoves and kitchen ranges to modern gas and electric stoves, microwaves, etc; from slices of bread held on a fork over the fire to automatic toasters and toaster ovens; from ice boxes to refrigerators with ice makers and freezers; from cars that had to be cranked to start the engine to the modern cars; from bi-planes to jets and rockets to the moon (I remember when someone had to manually spin the propellers on a plane to start the engine); from six party telephones to the infamous cell phone of today; from windup gramophones to what we have now. There were no televisions or tape players, only black and white movies; no zippers, Velcro, scotch tape, computers, viagra, frozen food, calculators, and word processors. This list could go on and on, but I shall stop now.The sun still comes up at dawn and sets at nightfall and I think that modern man would change that if he could. As I look back, I know that things could have been different, but I have no regrets. I thank you.
No children. Died after being married for about 5 years. Died of heart attack.
1851 census gives name as John, 1861 and 1881 censuses give name as William. Probably used father's name after his death between 1851-1861. Enumerated on Sutton road in 1891, worcester St. court #6 in 1881.
1 _FA1
2 DATE 1891
2 PLAC Age 20 at 24 Stourbridge Rd, a Painter
1841 Census: Wapentake of Morley, Parish of Bradford, Chapelry of Horton in the limits of Borough of Bradford. E.D. 5 Croft Street
Charles Leach 30 Artist b. Yorkshire (everyone listed born Yorkshire)
Mary " 30
William " 11
Eleanor " 9
Emeline " 7
Alfred " 5
Richard " 1
Next household listed:
Richard Walters 60 Army P
Mary " 55
James Padgett 20
Sarah " 20
Horatio Leach 7Charles Leach and children (no wife with him) are in the 1851 census in a district of Leeds called Armley
Unmarried in 1881 census.
Single in 1881 census, living with sister.