part-4

The nearly twelve years from the birth of a first child in January 1914 through the end of 1925, or while Mother and Father went on living at 311 Lyon Street, were their time of fulfillment. Family life would change beginning in January 1926, when Grandma Shafer died, as will be told later.

On the national and world scene the period covers those fatal years of European war (1914-18), the aftermath of turmoil and recession (1919-21), the relief of “normalcy” and high boom times (1922-25). Mother and Father worked, saved, tried new investments, prospered. The peaceful life of the young family went on: birth and infancy of two sons, their initiation into school, increasing independence for boys and mother, greater freedom of movement for the family.

Their first child, a boy, 7 1/2 pounds at birth, with blue eyes and fine, slightly reddish blond hair, was born on Thursday 29 January 1914, probably at 311 Lyon Street^{^[1]}. He was called Edwin Marion, one name for his father, the other recalling maternal grandparents.

The new mother was soon doing housework again along with all the drudgery that goes with a baby. Henrietta Loucks began to come in on Thursdays to do laundry and some heavy cleaning. Father often lent a hand, washing dishes or giving baby a bath. Even so, it was a long day. Baby Edwin had the almost constant care of his mother, who will have nursed him for most of a year.

A second son, weighing 8 1/4 pounds, was born Thursday 20 April 1916. He was called Arthur Raymond, perhaps with a thought for the childless widower Arthur H. Holmes; the names recall no close relatives^{^[2]}. Arthur Raymond was born with the brown eyes now and then to be found in earlier generations.

With a second child, Mother had the additional help of a nurse, Miss Ruth J. Marsh, who stayed just a few months^{^[3]} Edwin could recall her presence, large and white, if not her features or voice. She was helpful, willing even to do the odd job about the house.

On the arrival of a second child, the elder, displaced from the crib near his parents, was allotted the east front bedroom for his own. Uncle Percy, in turn displaced, moved to the farm.^{^[4]} By that time, Edwin could crawl in and out of bed, trot to the bathroom, clamber up and down stairs. That is, he needed less care and almost continuous attention, the which Miss Marsh helped supply. She lived in, occupying the guestroom.^{^[5]} Edwin’s mother still tucked him in bed “as snug as a bug in a rug,” rhymed and read him to drowsiness, softly vouchsafed the goodnight kiss.

By the spring of 1917, Art, too, was walking and needing to be looked after closely. It must have been then that the siblings made their first trials of playing together, long a chancy business in view of the elder’s size and strength and inclination to tease. Some might refer teasing to the jealousy of the first born toward a successor; it may just be that few entirely resist the temptation to exploit a position of strength. Mother prudently kept the boys apart at night until early 1919, when Art had too long outgrown the crib in his parents’ room.^{^[6]}

In the fall of 1918 Edwin had commenced kindergarten at Fountain Street School, a short walk east.^{^[7]} (For that school year, memory comes into focus, and I shall resume speaking in the first person.) My change of status made for some hours of peace at home. It also started the inevitable run of contagious diseases. In late October I “came down with” the mumps. Art was moved at once to his grandmother’s and so escaped for the time.

Dr Shafer kept account of the other childhood diseases and vaccinations of “Ted,” as I was then called at home, and Arthur. What I picked up at school he soon caught:

December 1918 Ted vaccination, successful

April 1920 Ted whooping cough

Arthur whooping cough

May 1920 Ted measles

Arthur measles

June 1921 Ted chicken pox

Arthur chicken pox

May 1922 Arthur vaccination, successful

30 Sept. 1923 Ted revaccinated

24 May 1924 Arthur mumps

We seem to have missed scarlet fever (and scarlatina), also German measles (rubella), the flu of 1918/19, and diphtheria. Colds and other indispositions were liberally interspersed, of course, gradually becoming less frequent.

Father and Mother lived very quietly. The Shafers’ old friends, the Barlows and Treadways, were gone early in the period, as was Catherine (Mrs. A.W.) Meech.^{^[8]} Mother still knew almost all the neighbors by sight and reputation, and on occasion passed the time of day with one or another. But except for close friends, that was about all.

An exception should be made for Emily Murphy, who lived in Ghilda Place, in a cottage with a neat garden, directly opposite the Shafers’ old carriage house. She and her husband Jervois had lived there since 1911; their two serious daughters, Emily and Rosaline (Rosy), though grown by 1920, were still at home through 1925; I barely remember seeing them. Murphy, large and quiet, was a cabinetmaker by trade, long employed in the Leonards’ Grand Rapids Refrigerator Company at the junction of Grandville and Clyde Park Avenues, where he became assistant foreman in the mid-1920’s.^{^[9]} His wife, who exchanged glances, was the talker, in a vigorous brogue that helped to shape my early notions of Irish speech, along with the Mulvaney stories and Father’s anecdotes. She was sociable, rather lonely, I think, with few friends, in part perhaps because the Murphys were faithful Episcopalians, who went to St. Mark’s. I had an idea that might meant something, perhaps connected with their coming from one of the Northern counties (Antrim?). And she probably would have been easily slighted or snubbed; Mother and Father may have been among the few neighbors she saw.

Generally, she and Mother just stopped to chat when they met on the street, or in Ghilda Place. I recall her calling once or twice to see Mother, coming in the back way, in any case the more convenient. And once Mother took me along, as I remember, to take a cup of tea. The house was dark inside, the furnishings old fashioned, plain, looking unfamiliar, as tidy as you please, like the garden.

Father’s old friends, who had become the friends of the family, had started out in villages or in the countryside on the farming frontier. Yet even in youth they had glimpsed the unprecedented opportunities opening up as American capitalism gathered momentum. They had chosen to cleave to the old ways, so far as they could, while adapting cautiously, and variously, to the new order of the world. To be sure, others, before and after, have faced choices of that kind. I mean only to call attention to the specific terms of the choices faced by Father and his friends, which define their generation. (Mother shared their preference for the older ways; that had set her apart from so many of those with whom she had grown up. But younger, townbred, energetic, she was far more adaptable than Father in coping with the new order, and a good thing, too.)

From time to time, Mother and Father would pay a call on Fred Darling, a friend from Father’s childhood. I remember our stopping at the Darlings’ on Andre Street^{^[10]} of a Sunday afternoon; they were not at home, and Father left a note. Mother and Father would have repeated the call, probably not often, and I don’t remember the Darlings’ dropping in at our house or at the farm.

Will Swank and his wife Carrie (née Squier, Mother’s first cousin, as already noted) paid a call at the farm once, at most twice, a year, usually of a Saturday afternoon, on the way back from town. Now and then the Snells looked in on them. Father liked to go for a Sunday afternoon drive about some of the scenes of his boyhood, as we began to do, I believe, only after we had a car (1922). As we were passing a farm, he might allude to the family that owned it, some member, an aspect of kinship. His observations were made as an aside to Mother; I rarely followed them.

Well along in the afternoon we might end up at the Swanks’ 120-acre farm, just north of the old Shafer farms.^{^[11]} If we came from the west, on the road from Bowen station, Mother might nod ahead, pointing to her birthplace, shortly before turning the corner north toward the Swanks’ comfortable house of hard buff-colored brick. Alongside the drive and in front of the house were beds of calla lilies, which seemed to me not to belong there.

Carrie Swank, who had been brought up on that farm, was a year or so older than Father, but conceded nothing. She had hennaed her thinning hair, might be dressed in black, hair and dress setting off a sanguinary (I think it was dead-white at first, but a late—and unique —photo shows her very flushed) complexion, heavily powdered, with a spot of red on each cheek. She seemed to live in a private world, amidst her busy furniture. with her baby grand piano, a suburban housewife strayed in time and place. The Snells were always welcome, and she would start in talking to Mother with animation in a small high-pitched voice. I did not take in what she was saying, about her health, cousins, purchases, Will and weather.

To my inexperienced eye they seemed to be oddly matched. Will Swank, good tempered, kind though rough in manner, had built the house Carrie wanted, left her to furnish it as she liked, and ended by asking not much of her. He loved her, as he loved land and stock. They had no children. His father had begun life as a Bavarian peasant, and Will had a peasant’s good-natured envious scorn of “city folks,” but seemed to make a qualified exception for Mother and Father, as honorary country people.

He was, Father said, a good farmer, and somewhat of that was visible in clean fields, even thriving crops, the small orchard back of the house, above all, in the large red barn, his pride and joy, some twenty-five rods down a sandy slope to the north of the house. Not far from the road, near the north line, was a spring; from it he had piped in water for the stock, including his dozen or so blooded milch cows, and for the 10-gallon tin-plated cans of warm new milk, chilled in running water from evening and early morning milking till pickup. The cooling tank, along with the area for boiling water and scalding cans, was at the south side, on the bottom floor. Stalls for cattle and other stock were on the west, and north. The barn had been built into a slope, and a ramp, wide enough for a team and wagon, led about to the east entrance on the main floor. There was also a direct way in from the road. Everything looked, and smelled, clean, though I suppose it would not do today.

Will worked hard and expected the same of his hired men. I don’t know that he ever bought a tractor, though of course he had a rig to sit on as his huge team drew the plow or harrow. Only Father, tilling small fields for love, still walked behind his plow and old horse. Something Will said a few years later would stick in my mind. Fond as he was of hunting, he would just take his gun into the corn field in November and sit behind a shock, shucking and shelling corn. When the birds —pheasants, recently introduced, quail, or partridge—flew cautiously out to the field, well baited, I don’t doubt, he had only to turn at the right moment to bag a brace. Then back to work.

For me, doubtless for Art, too, the hour or so on Sunday afternoon went by slowly. That did not hold for visits of another kind, beginning perhaps in the winter of 1923/4. On the afternoon of New Year’s Day, after a heavy dinner and a short rest we trudged with Father in the lengthening shadows across the snowy fields the nearly two miles to the Swanks’ to call on Will in his office. We entered by the side door; it was not a formal call. The office was bare, except for an old roll-top desk, a few hard chairs, and a red-hot coal stove.

Will Swank was of medium height, wiry, with a farmer’s weatherbeaten face and neck; he looked and sounded sure of himself, yet remained somewhat boyish in expression. He and Father talked crops, prices, recent changes in the township, troublesome neighbors, old days, going on for an hour or two, while we all had hard cider drawn cold from one of several barrels kept for the hired men in an outbuilding back of the house, by the small orchard. As a good farmer Will Swank put in an hour or two a day reading in the off season. A herd of milch cows did not leave such a lot of time after doing the usual chores. He knew the market reports, thought over new seeds and pesticides, methods of crop rotation and fertilizing; as Father said, he “kept up,” and with more than the Rural New Yorker. I could not have paid much attention, enjoying just the walk, the warmth, the hard cider, feeling that by temporary dispensation I was in a man’s world.

The first year, perhaps the second, Carrie would appear with greetings of the season. In the next two years we must have been by ourselves. She lived for some years, dying only in the winter of 1931/2. I am not sure what ended this series of visits. Was it that Art and I were outgrowing this yearly ritual? Perhaps it was that when the electric line reached the farm, in 1927 or 1928, Mother bought the family’s first radio set,^{^[12]} an Atwater Kent “console,” on which Father could hear the Rose Bowl game broadcast.

As part of their regular social life, Mother and Father might call on Miss Alice James, who lived in the immediate neighborhood till her last years in the high school.^{^[13]} Miss James had the regular, heavy features of a vestal virgin, or a mother superior of public education. (She is well represented in a photograph of the teaching staff in 1907; see above following p. ***) Years of responsibility had added weight, spiritual and corporeal, which she bore with composure. She was evidently able and surely benign, but it seemed to me that one could safely communicate with her only in the simplest terms, as if we could not speak each other’s native tongues with great assurance. The high school that she had long known—since attending and graduating in 1874/5—was no longer the same, yet her feelings may have been mixed on her early retirement in 1923, after forty years of service as teacher and administrator. She and her sister Grace soon left for Redlands, California, where they would grow oranges.

We also went to see Miss Anna Susan Jones and her sister Mary D. in their narrow gabled house at 235 Lafayette Street, on the west side almost to Crescent Avenue, where they had lived since they were little girls, in the late 1860’s. Children were much in evidence; the Jones sisters were rearing an adopted niece and nephew—the children, I believe, of their sister Elizabeth—Jean, a year or so older than I, and Charles, somewhat younger than Art. I just recall a children’s birthday party at their house, then one at ours, of perhaps 1920/1. Jones and Snell children, as it turned out, had little in common. Neither Art nor I can recall that one or the other ever took part in the pickup ball games of the neighborhood in our back yard, though both were active, Jean certifiable as a “tomboy;” Charles as a “tough little nut.”

But I took to Miss Anna Susan, small and dry with shy fearless light brown eyes. Some years after, I should have the pleasure of reading Sallust and Ovid in her class, and of finding that two people could see the same point at the same moment—and more often than had seemed possible. Miss Jones was open as few teachers ever are. It was sometimes hard on her. She and Father esteemed each other, though for whatever reason we never saw much of her at 311 Lyon Street.

Every so often, as in earlier years, Mother and Father received Miss Amanda Stout, who taught classical history in the high school. Less often, they called, on occasion with Art and me, at her small flat just across Lyon and Lafayette Streets in the first house on the corner. Miss Stout, short and ample, wore shapeless, rustly skirts and dresses, always of some dark, smooth material. Even if one tried hard, she could not well be imagined otherwise dressed, or undressed. I judged her to be shrewd, kind, and almost invariably ironic. Her speech was distinct, nuanced, slow, and full of pauses; her voice, husky. She had fine black eyes in a soft white face, rather broad, with well-defined nose and chin. Aside from school, the neighborhood, and of course the world at large, one personal topic recurred in conversation with the Snells: the annual visit to her sister Tish, who was married to a Mr. Bellows, living not far from Frankfurt, said to have money.^{^[14]} Miss Stout, as I recall, regularly attended services, sometimes other gatherings, at the Fountain Street Baptist church, then reputedly the most “forward-loking” of the principal city churches.

As I first remember her, Miss Stout seemed ageless, and indeed in the mid-1920’s looked pretty much as she had for the group photograph of 1907 shown earlier (p. ***, above). Her teaching apparently had changed just as little. At the first meeting of her ninth grade class in ancient history, she always began with a short talk on the Greek city states, their influence, and the lessons to be learned. On opening day in September 1904, her remarks completed, there was a question from Don Denison, an extravert, well enough behaved but inclined to be “fresh.” “How do we know so much about them?” he asked. Miss Stout: “Donald, the Greeks wrote a lot.” I can hear her giving this apposite, specious answer. Mr. Denison recalled it as soon as Miss Stout’s name came up in a conversation of early September 1979, almost to the day 75 years later, of course not at the same spot— on the top floor of the “old” high school —but about 10 minutes’ walk to the south and east in his apartment at 505 Cherry Street. Stanton Todd (‘26), his golfing partner for that afternoon, was also present.

Arthur H. Holmes also remained a frequent visitor. Mr. Holmes, short, lame since a boyhood accident, strong in the shoulders, still wore a moustache, might have been a retired soldier. He became at times glum, or distracted, scarcely surprising in a widower living with his parents, who at this time were on Eastern Avenue a short distance south of Fulton Street. His father, a retired contractor, was a powerful, vain, opinionated old countryman, not always the easiest of company.^{^[15]} A.H. Holmes had grown up near Hubbardstown at the northwest corner of Ionia County; like his father, he had in youth taught district school. Always deliberate, like Miss Stout, he strove to speak sententiously, gave the effect of listening to himself. His sayings, as I recall, ran to the obvious; here is a possible exception: “Meditation on what might be precedes just evaluation of what is.” He was said to be a reader, again like Miss Stout, and likewise attended services at the Fountain Street Baptist Church, drawn perhaps by the preaching of the Reverend Alfred W. Wishart. He also became in these years, for a time, a follower of Émile Coué, who taught that one could improve oneself by autosuggestion: by declaring daily with conviction, “Every day in every way I am getting better and better.” (Tous les jours, à tous points de vue, je vais de mieux en mieux.) Mr. Holmes wrote a lot of verse, some of which I shall have occasion to quote later. He was fond of “spirituals”; his favorite “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” sung in a deep obscure baritone. His rare sudden sweet smile slyly implied complicity.^{^[16]}

Like Father, these two friends will have been troubled increasingly by the war as it dragged on. It made them feel older, and lonely. They took some comfort in one another’s company, perhaps more in Mother’s. She was little affected, being still young, at heart an activist: cheerfulness was always breaking in.

With the Powerses also the war would have come up, if in a different way. They were pro-Allied; Florence, ardently francophile. The only professed Democrats, to my knowledge, among Father’s old friends, they took a more positive view of U.S. involvement in the war, of the Allied cause, and of the outcome, as of the future generally. Father might remain silent, or demur so gently that no one took offense. He and Mother had their doubts. Besides, they had been taught to respect Germans. Though on the defensive, they would have been slow to believe all they heard about the “Huns.” But differences of opinion were respected, and the subject would have changed. Political disagreement would arise again, yet without troubling the old friendship between the families.

Perhaps it was the insistent intrusion of war into people’s thoughts and talk that led Father to subscribe to the Review of Reviews, a conservative journal of opinion, which appeared monthly in the house during the later war years and for a time thereafter. In the early 1920’s, while ransacking the bookshelves, I was to look through the bound volumes. From then on Father would subscribe to some such journal; the immediate successor, The Literary Digest. He may have thought it fitting for an established householder with a family and a stake in society. It’s very likely he had grown anxious over the course of events, not necessarily expecting to understand it, wishing all the same to keep informed.

Except for a slight ruffling of the surface once or twice, I doubt aught was said about politics at the Powerses for several years after the war. I am reminded, however, of a mild evening, Tuesday 4 November 1924, when Father and I walked down to Fulton Street Park after supper to see press bulletins and hear announcements giving election returns—“through stereopticon and the loud-speaking Voice-from-the-Air”—courtesy of the Grand Rapids Press. There was a goodish crowd estimated at “thousands”—quietly waiting and talking. By ten o’clock Father had had enough, for President Coolidge already was assured of the electoral votes for a full term; “aerial bombs boomed out” to celebrate the victory.^{^[17]} The Powerses were of course disappointed but, on that occasion, I should guess, not deeply. Will may have voted, in silent protest, for LaFollette.

The conflict in views between Father and Will Powers was grounded in their lives; they had followed different paths, doubtless reinforcing contrasts in temperament. Those ten years Will Powers had passed as a workingman after returning from the Black Hills—from mid-1892 to mid-1902—seem to have formed, or hardened, his views. He would remain a convinced supporter of legislation to protect workers, even of labor unions. His was not an accepted view in his world, and he must have had to keep a tight rein on himself.

With all their differences, Father and Will Powers had many of the same traits: determination, probity, equanimity, courtesy. Their long friendship was founded on the esteem in which each held the other, and himself, for maintaining such traits through every discouragement.

The Powerses, in my earliest memory, of a summer day, it could only have been in 1917, were still out on West Leonard Road, where they had lived since 1911. I see their little white house, with a porch, hollyhocks in front, standing to the south of the road at the end of a straight walk, well to the back on a narrow plot of at most a quarter acre. In the fall of 1917 or the following winter they settled next door at 315 Lyon Street and began to appear often in our lives.^{^[18]} Marion and Florence, then both teachers at the high school, stayed with them. The Powerses were next door neighbors for six years and some months, or during much of the remaining time when the Snells lived on Lyon Street. In the spring of 1924, as I recall, they bought a house on Crescent Street, no. 235, the second one on the north side west of Lafayette Street, much the same sort of place as 315 Lyon Street, considerably larger, painted white, with its own double garage and a smaller yard, though with room enough alongside the garage for pitching horseshoes, or, as Father preferred to say, quoits. The back yard had plenty of space for an old wooden lawn swing painted white. From then on, while relations remained warm, the families met less often. Some times we were invited for baked bean Sunday breakfast. Now and then they would pay a call at the farm Sunday afternoon. And we should always be invited to “family” get togethers, which would come oftener when grandchildren (Marion’s children) were visiting.

While the Powers family rented 315 Lyon Street, someone was always coming or going to visit, to bring or take a cake or some fruit. Now and then we shared Sunday dinner, joined sometimes by the Art Sparkses. Art, who had married Jessie Powers in 1914, had gone into the Raniville company in 1917 as stenographer, then office manager, following his father-in-law, who soon had pushed him into trying out on the road. He would become the star salesmen, a senior executive, finally a highly successful entrepreneur (A.J. Sparks Company, first on Franklin Street SE), producing a new type of industrial belting (“Gandy” belting).

Two of the earliest scenes of the families together were recorded in the summer of 1922 and in the fall of 1924 (following p. ***). Will Powers, with moustache, was solid, his shoulders often hunched slightly. Though only about 5 foot 8, he looked as if he had been strong when young. His voice sounded tense, or constricted, light in tone, rather flat, questioning; he did not say much, that straight out, though mildly, paid close attention. He and his family maintained a connection with the Congregational Church, possibly from Mrs. Powers’ upbringing, probably in any case from the years in the Black Hills. Will Powers’ parents were Protestants of some description, though by an early marriage he had a son called John, seldom mentioned and never encountered at the Powerses’, who was like his mother a Catholic.

Ett Powers, erect, tall for a woman then, wrinkled with graying hair, may have been very good looking in youth. She generally took a humorous view of human failings, in a way enjoyed them, sometimes cackling with glee. She was unfailingly kind to friends and urgently hospitable, insistent at her table that one take another helping. In the early years of living next door she came once in a while to sit with the little Snell boys, giving Mother a free hour or so, of which she otherwise had not many, from the departure of Miss Marsh in the summer or early fall of 1916 until Art began school five years later.

The Powers daughters were altogether unlike one another. Marion, the eldest, who appears only in the earlier photograph— she left town on her marriage in the summer of 1923 —looked much as her mother may have at the same age. She was of medium height, had a well-formed, mobile face, handsome except for a slight cast to the eyes. Her teeth may have already been replaced partly with the white dentures I recall. She had a richly expressive voice, used to good effect, at times allied with an overwhelming smile. After her marriage to Albert Bates, an engineer and industrialist (the Rockford Foundry Company) of Rockford, Illinois, she would become, in her circle, distinguished for a social conscience, no less conscious of social distinctions.

Florence (only in the second photograph^{^[19]}), the youngest of the three, was tall, gracile, pretty, maidenly; she had a soft rippling laugh and an eye for the social comedy. (Self-conscious, she froze before the camera.) She was attentive to parents and friends, adored her brother-in-law Art Sparks, whom she called “Bubby.” By the mid-1920’s, she would be lavishing attentions on nephews and nieces, and on her Chow, Ching by name (Jing, Jingy-boy, Jing-a-ling). By loyalty a Democrat, she was by sentiment a pious Bonapartist, especially cherishing the memory of l’Aiglon.

Jessie, the middle daughter, short, in youth not bad looking, was by the 1920’s growing stout. She was fond of society— her inquiring brown eyes missed little — and expressed kindly cynical views in a controlled voice with an edge. Jessie lived admiring in her husband’s shadow, never for long unnoticed, however.

Art Sparks, a country boy from Clarksville, near Ionia, Michigan, five months younger than Jessie, learned fast. At ease, tolerant, beginning to be ambitious, he laughed and joked a lot in a cheerful baritone, which always retained (for me) a rural note. He had remarkably quick reflexes, wonderful coordination, as first demonstrated at parlor games, such as tiddlywinks and “caroms.”^{^[20]}

In the early 1920’s he became a scratch golfer. He was one of the founders of Cascade—the “other”—Country Club, formed in 1923, and began to combine business with pleasure on the links. He would be included, on occasion, in a foursome with Al Watrous, Chick Evans, Gene Sarazen, or Walter Hagen, among the noted professionals of the time. In the 1930’s he would enjoy medal play for high stakes, which by then he could well afford. He was also a practical joker, though seldom in the family circle. I recall his singing from time to time a snatch of some humorous tune. One, dating from before the war,^{^[21]} always ended:

It [Hit] don’t matter if he is a houn’ [haoun’],

They gotta quit kickin’ my dawg aroun’[araoun’].

Another ran,

Good morning, Mr. Zip, Zip, Zip,

With your hair cut just as short as mine.

Ashes to ashes, and dust to dust,

If the Camels don’t get you, the Fatimas must.

Good morning,…

The grim forecast was set off by a catchy tune^{^[22]}. A third song, once known to nearly everyone— under 40 —was “Barney Google, with his goo-goo-googly eyes” and “a wife three times his size” (c. 1922); Barney had the title role in a popular comic strip. Art Sparks may have known some soldier songs, though he had not been in uniform, but they were not salon-fähig, so some years would pass before I heard “Hinky Dinky Parley Voo” and “Barnacle Bill the Sailor.”^{^[23]} But he sang one of Irving Berlin’s songs, current on the “home front,” about reveille, beginning, “Oh, how I hate to get up in the morning...” (1918).

Domestic life ran smoothly in wartime. Prices started rising, to be sure, in 1916, accompanied by scarcity. Yet even after U.S. entry in the war in April 1917, the Snells hardly felt even the comparatively minor deprivations suffered by most Americans. It was first in the fall of 1917/8 that there were eggs from the farm, in addition to the usual produce; the Shafers had bought White Leghorn chicks in the spring. Earlier Mother had bought butter and eggs from the Ploegs and van Sledrights (as the name seems to have been spelled by them), country neighbors, as she continued to do now and again. Yet she used oleomargarine, too, blaming on it a series of boils suffered by Father in 1918. That is the only comment I recall on wartime supplies. Distribution of sugar and wheat was controlled beginning in 1917; “meatless and wheatless” Thursdays were enjoined; on other days people were asked to do without this or that; and coal became scarce locally in the winter of 1917/18. The Shafers and Snells had their own substitutes—honey, corn, poultry, and wood—from the farm, though the shortages must have caused inconvenience. Everywhere, it appears, families close to the land were better off.

We catch glimpses of family life just after the war from a diary Mother kept irregularly from New Year’s Day 1919 till mid-May. It was personal and local in reference, no notice taken of the momentous public events of that winter,^{^[24]} then well covered in the evening paper, the Grand Rapids Press, always taken by the family in town.^{^[25]}

V.V. Nabokov was to remark, perhaps rightly, that “collecting of daily details...was always a poor method of self-preservation.” Such details are evocative all the same, and the entries are few enough, and mostly so short, it seems worth while to set them all down, with notes:

Wednesday, 1 January Miss Stout here for dinner. Day dark and cloudy, not very cold. Ted’s vaccination beginning to work, has cold in his head. Ted vaccinated December 28, 1918.

Thursday, 2 January L.J.F. here. Bought Ted some <illegible>.

L.J.F. stands for Louis C. <not J.> Falstreaux [spelled various ways below], a linotype operator; see entries for 1 February ff.

Friday, 3 January Ted & Arthur both have colds in head. Ted’s arm sore. Very cold. Zero, he didn’t go to school. Ed went to 1st basket ball game at new gym. Big fire down town Monument Park bldg. Very cold.

The two-story building referred to, on Monroe Avenue at Park Road, housed several shops; most of the damage was to one of them—where the fire started—and to the collection of the Grand Rapids Art Association. The Camera Shop, occupying the west end of the building, and Daane and Witters grocery, standing on the corner, suffered little. The park for which the building was named is directly across the street, a gore of land at the junction of Monroe Avenue and Fulton Street. A monument and fountain had been set there in 1885 to honor the Civil War dead.

Saturday, 4 January Ed went to bank. Washed, changed beds so boys could sleep together.

Sunday, 5 January Took two pictures. 1st one of boys at 6-1 1/2-5.6 Ap. second of group same exposure. Ted arm swollen.

Monday, 6 January Teds arm badly swollen but went to school. Mr. Sledright hurt last Sat. in runaway.

Tuesday, 7 January Ted’s arm swollen and sore but went to school.

Wednesday, 8 January Pyrex cake dish for birthday from Ed. Mr. M. phoned that option was to be extended 60 days and wanted it signed today as Mr. Bliss goes out of town tomorrow. Ted’s arm better. Cold west wind. Signed option extension at 4 o’clock.

Mr. M. was Edwin M. Morris, who had a house on the market at 229 Valley Avenue SW. Emerson W. Bliss was an assistant secretary in the Michigan Trust Company. The family phone number was Citizens 62901; the number would remain the same after Citizens was merged with the Michigan Telephone Company.

Thursday, 9 January Swelling all out of Ted’s arm. Ironed.

Friday, 10 January Cleaned all down stairs

Saturday, 11 January Morton came down with Mrs. Ploeg in machine. Paid her difference between 8.46 and rent in money. Ed fixed door bell. Spent day mending.

Morton Ploeg, like his two older brothers, was an early auto mechanic. The “machine” was one of a series of Fords they owned and worked on in an outbuilding on the hillside west of the barn. The Harry Ploegs, on the north side of Laraway Road just to the west of the Pere Marquette track, had four daughters and four sons. The rent was for 311 Lyon Street, to be taken out to Dr. Shafer. Katie Ploeg (née Modderman) was always “Mrs. Ploeg.”

Sunday, 12 January Florence got telegram of Ruth Tranley’s death. She and her father going to Bay City on 6:35 train. News of the terrible M.C. wreck, five G.R. people killed. Frank Leonard, Harold Sears, Mrs. Remington, Miss Delaney, Mr. Parker.

I don’t know who Ruth Tranley (sp. uncertain) was. Of those killed in the wreck of a Michigan Central train in New York state, Mother appears to have known just the two: Franklin Leonard and Harold Sears— both several years younger.

Monday, 13 January Powers got off this morning. Jessie had to go down to sister-in-laws, Viriginia sick. Mrs. P. came over for dinner and afternoon, Ted & I went to physical training exercises at school. Spent most of evening at Powers.

Art Sparks had four married sisters that I know of; Virginia seems to have been a fifth. Dinner was of course at midday, here and always. I imagine the exercises, in which Mother would have had a certain interest, were at the high school.

Tuesday, 14 January Florence & her father got home at noon.

Wednesday, 15 January Made apron today. Weather warm & snow melting.

Thursday, 16 January Arthur & I walked down to bank today & paid payment on Bond. Went to Steketee’s shopping. Rip up old shawl. J. Martin’s book came today.

The “Bond” was a government bond issued in the war. Mother and Father had bought a substantial amount at 80, probably in early 1918, sold about 1922 at or near par. Steketee’s, as you may remember, was (and is) a department store. John Martin’s Book was our first children’s magazine, which I was by then beginning to read.

Friday, 17 January Cleaned & swept today & baked up. No news.

Saturday, 18 January Mrs. S. brought butter at 70¢, eggs 65. Ma came down with Ploegs. She came to dinner, brought medicine to Florence. Washed. Ed went down to M.E. Church to take tickets.

The van Sledrights had bought the “old Leavitt farm” catty corner to the Martin farm (see p. ***, below). Father did his bit at an evening lecture by one Frederick Villiers, a war artist, accompanied by his illustrations. The lecture, at the First M.E. Church, on Fulton Street at Barclay Avenue, was held for the benefit of the John V. Doran fund for needy teachers.^{^[26]}

Sunday, 19 January First Plymouth Rock Egg. Wrote Howard.

Both entries are in Father’s hand. Plymouth Rock hens, much larger, were thought to be as good layers as White Leghorns, their eggs bigger, brown; being heavier, the hens ate more, but became in turn better eating. Leghorns were later bred larger.

Monday, 20 January Examination week.

Tuesday, 21 January- No entries

Friday, 24 January

Saturday, 25 January Bought new shoes and rubbers. Suit for Art & waists for Teddy. Teddy’s bank acct transferred to School Savings, deposited $2. Went over to Jessie’s party for Bessie H. Ted & Art went over after I came home.

Bessie H. I can’t place, perhaps a niece of Art Sparks.

Sunday, 26 January Went out to see Aunt Ellen. Arthur S. took us over. Mr. & Mrs. Sweet came over in evening for lesson on log. Tried to take picture with camera. Found a screw and tried to put it back but couldn’t.

Aunt Ellen, then going on 83, was the widow of Mason Shafer, Mother’s “Uncle Mase,” who had died in February 1917. They had moved to the Clark Memorial Home (M.E.), primarily for retired clergymen and relicts, dark and sad but comfortable, on Sherman Street east of Norwood Avenue, where she remained until her death in February 1923. I was taken along to see her once in the summer or fall of 1922. Arthur S. was, of course, Art Sparks. The Sweets I can’t identify; “log” would be logarithmic tables. The camera was a new Graflex, which cost, I suppose, roughly $75. It was equipped with a high-grade lens of Agfa or perhaps Zeiss design (as, for example, a Tessar II-B), by then U.S. made. The shutter speed ranged from “time” to a millisecond. The image, 3-1/4” x 5-1/2”, could be seen, right side up, until the instant of exposure. The new Graflex was heavy and clumsy and for most purposes no better that their first camera. They had bought it, I suppose, as suited for taking portraits and action shots of children.

Monday, 27 January Went down to Post Office with Arthur to mail Special Del. letter to Jane Gibson. Mr. Applegate & Son came in evening & I went over to Powers. Ed took camera down town to shop, to be sent to Rochester.

Jane Gibson I can’t identify.^{^[27]} The Applegates very likely were Louis B. and his son Milo L., the former perhaps looking for a way to finance the purchase of 2128 St. George Avenue from his mother. Perhaps he found it for the house changed hands in 1919.

Tuesday, 28 January No entry

Wednesday, 29 January Mr. and Mrs. Sweet came for last lesson. Paid $2. Ted’s birthday. 5 yrs. old. Had letter from his grandfather & A.D. Bill. Card from Mrs. Howard. Song book from Marion & Florence. Stamp Kraft book from Jessie. Pocketbook and 50 cts from Mrs. P. Top & weaving set. Top made a hit. Children at kindergarten made a long chain for him. Birthday cake & ice cream. Ed didn’t come home to dinner. Study hour.

“A.D. Bill” was one $1 bill, sent with a note from Grandpa Shafer, which I still have. I just recall the top, and the fun I had with it. We probably were too young yet to have learned to swat a “birthday boy” the number of years he was old. Father, you will note, still came home usually at noon to eat. Session rooms were closed for the fifth period, but the auditorium was open for “study hour,” each session room teacher in turn keeping order.

Thursday, 30 January Henrietta came back today, washed & cleaned. I went down town & paid rest on Bond & interest. Also paid electric bill. Miss S. came in a while in evening.

Henrietta Loucks, as already noted, did laundry and cleaned house. She came well into the 1920’s, being replaced by Mrs. vanDykes. Miss S. was Amanda Stout.

Friday, 31 January Grandma came down & brought 14 eggs. Hens laid 5 today. Quite cold but bare ground. Mr. P. came over in evening & brought check.

Grandma Shafer must have driven the buggy down by herself. Again, the check would have been to Dr. Shafer for the rent of 315 Lyon Street.

Saturday, 1 February Ed looked up F.P. & got money. Works on Bond Ave. Mr. Falstreau came. Lost his job and got to give up his place. Camera hasn’t been sent yet. Oranges 48, Bacon 32, sausage 22 1/2.

The two men referred to (F.P. was Fred W. Pickell) were buying houses on contract in Wyoming Park. Falstreaux was at 126 Greenfield Avenue; Pickell, at 607 Northgrove Avenue SW. Mr. Falstreaux had had his place ever since it was built, in 1915/6. In the last sentence the prices of oranges is given by the dozen.

Sunday, 2 February Invited over to Powers for dinner. Mr. H. came over in afternoon & stayed to lunch. Talked over Wyoming Park.

Mr. H., Arthur H. Holmes was a fellow investor in houses.

Monday, 3 February Spent day sewing. Camera hasn’t gone yet. Finished Ted’s brown waist. Ted took A.D. Bill to school for stamps. 6 eggs 4 Rocks.

The Camera Shop appears to have taken its time to send the Graflex for repair. “Stamps” were of course savings stamps. Mother had a sewing table by the window in the upstairs hall and a Singer sewing machine with foot treadle. At the east end, beyond the stairs, there was room for work, also for a pier mirror mounted on a base of some sort. Upon the north wall west of the sewing table were exhibited the remains of a big black bass with jaws agape, prepared and varnished by some taxidermist as a trophy. “Rocks” wore from Plymouth Rock hens, due to replace white Leghorn hens, which laid white eggs.

Tuesday, 4 February Figured up balance on Fal. place. Bal. Feb 1 $2,708.51. Snowing, a little colder.

That is, Mr. Falstreaux owed $2,708.51 on his house.

Wednesday, 5 February Falstreaux wants to sell his equity for $250.

Thursday, 6 February Washed, cleaned kitchen wall. Jennie here in afternoon. Ted has cold and didn’t go to school.

Jennie Loucks, Henrietta’s sister, I remember by name, not otherwise.

Friday, 7 February Ted didn’t go to school. Falstraux has sold to man by the name of Pepler. Finished washing kitchen wall.

“Pepler” was Daniel E. Peppler, an electrician.

Saturday, 8 February Ed left insurance papers on L.C.F. place with Wilson. Ironed. Grandma brought 16 brown eggs. Paid 5.98 for medicine. Casc 2.01 iron 1/2 .98. Took rest of med. down to D & W & waited for Mr. Ploeg.

Wilson was S.H. Wilson, head of a real estate firm developing Wyoming Park. The medicine, apparently from Dr. Shafer, was in part for the Snells (cascara sagrada and iron), the rest for the Ploegs. D&W is Daane & Witters, as mentioned earlier, a grocery and market at the head of Monroe Street. Harry Ploeg was “Mr. Ploeg.”

Sunday, 9 February Ted’s cough very bad last night up about 10 times with him. Arthur has cold too. Ed bought atomi. 1.65 Med. .80.

Atomizer and medicine.

Monday, 10 February Ted better to-day but didn’t go to school. Arthur coughs some.

Tuesday, 11 February no entries

Thursday, 27 February

Friday, 28 February Paid ash man for Feb. 75

Saturday, 1 March Mr. Pickell here & paid $25.

Sunday, 2 March Mr. H. here for dinner.

Arthur H. Holmes.

Monday, 3 March no entry

Tuesday, 4 March Mrs. Peppler came and paid $20. Their first payment I gave her a receipt. Mother sick to-day. Rained, turned to snow in afternoon.

Wednesday, 5 March Mother better

Thursday, 6 March Washed, cleaned up & down stairs. Arthur sick held him all afternoon. Helped Ed send out letters for parents meeting & poor work.

Friday, 7 March Cleaned kitchen & ironed. Arthur better.

Saturday, 8 March Baked bread. Miss S. gave me ticket to hear Cyril Maude in “The Saving Grace.” Miss S came over in evening. Ed went down town in morning. Sent $3.65 to Mauls for seeds. Paid for camera. Brought home framed fish and B.B. picture.

Cyril Maude was an English actor/manager, then about 56. Since 1911 he had been playing chiefly in the States; later in 1919 he went back to London. The still life of “black bass and blackberries” had been photographed at Herring Lake in 1912, about 9 August.^{^[28]} The enlargement for years hung in the dining room, on the east wall.

Sunday, 9 March Heavy snow. Ed shoveled snow for over an hour. Went over to see Aunt Ellen. She had been sick but was up again. Stopped into Powers for few minutes when came home. Mr. Morris phoned. Have to sign option tomorrow at 4 P.M. Took two pictures of Ted & one of T. & Art.

Monday, 11 March Arthur don’t feel very good don’t eat much of anything. Morris phoned not to go down to M.T. Co. until Wed. Ed went to Parents meeting.

M. T. is Michigan Trust.

Tuesday, 11 March Went to bask game at Gym with Mr. P. Mrs. P. staid with children. Teddy begins to cough again at night.

Wednesday, 12 March Paid water & gas bills. Went to Mich T. Co. and signed option. Morris offers to sell out Valley Ave. place $3500 for $1200 and we assume indebtedness. Ed sick.

The $3500 figure would be an appraised value; indebtedness was $1,830 (see entry for 31 March).

Thursday, 13 March Didn’t sleep much. Ed don’t feel good. Teddy coughed most of night & he couldn’t sleep. Washed to-day. Phoned Morris that if his proposition was satisfactory we might take it. Fixed up Bichromate of Potash & gave him <Ted> dose every half hour. Clara’s H.’s mother died this P.M.

I think Mother must have written bichromate for bicarbonate. Clara H. was Mrs. Hornung, a friend of the Powerses.

Friday, 14 March Ted didn’t go to school but he slept last night without coughing. Morris took Ed to meet Ira Allen who wants to buy house. Ed feverish. Papers to be made out to-morrow. Father, ill most of the week, went to school anyway, as ever.

Saturday, 15 March Ted on lounge most of day, don’t feel very good. Rained nearly all day. Allen didn’t get money for his place, so deal had to be postponed. Mrs. M. phoned that Building & Loan claimed that Mr. Steketee didn’t pay them up. He claims he did. Grandpa sick to-day. Mrs. Sled. brought butter 60 cts eggs 45 cts.

Mr. Steketee was Jacob Steketee, the family lawyer (no close relative of the department store people). The one clue as to what it was he may not have paid up is given in the entry for 2 April. The old lounge, covered in black leather, was raised at the head to provide a pillow. It stood at the northeast corner of the dining room.

Sunday, 16 March Ted didn’t sleep very good. Warm rain. Rained all night. 60 degrees. Grandpa better. [and in Father’s hand] First Robin.

Monday, 17 March Rained all day. Ted didn’t go to school. Allyn didn’t get money yet. Arthur don’t feel good. Have another cough myself.

Here and below, “Allyn” was the “Allen” of earlier entries—Ira L. Allyn, a foreman at W.C. Hopson Company.

Tuesday, 18 March Fine day. Ted didn’t go to school, coughs some yet. Arthur feels pretty bad. Haven’t heard from Allyn. Pickell here to night his cellar flooded wants us to fix it some way. Ed went to Univ. Club lecture on Miss S. ticket. Young Eng. poet.

Robert Malise Bowyer Nichols, about 25, who lectured at the Women’s University Club, was a war poet, now forgotten. He stayed with the Charles Slighs.

Wednesday, 19 March Ted went to school. Arthur better. Saw milkman & he agreed to deliver milk. Miss G. James called. Ed. came just as she went away & Carrie Snell came up the walk. Ed went over to H. School to see Pickell. I had cramps tonight.

The milkman, whose horse clop-clopped about the neighborhood well before I was up, left quart bottles of milk with perhaps an inch and a half of cream on top, for slightly over 14 cents a quart (see entry for 2 April). Grace James, sister to Alice James, was a neighbor as well. Carrie Snell was the wife of Cousin Percy Snell, from Cadillac; I think Mother meant to write the name of her cousin Carrie Swank.

Thursday, 20 March Beautiful warm morning. Grandma came down with Ploegs, brought 1 doz. eggs. Carrie & I went up to school with Ted. Ted came home with ear ache at 10:30 seems quite sick won’t eat any dinner. Henrietta hung clothes out doors for 1st time. Grandma and Carrie left right after dinner. Ted quite sick all the afternoon. Miss S. came over to call.

Friday, 21 March Ted sick & didn’t sleep good slept with me. Wierenga brought cashier check for money today. Teddy better this P.M. Ironed. Powers girl<s> had a dancing party for some of the teachers. Ash man took ashes today.

Wierenga was almost certainly Peter Wierenga, at 222 Marion Avenue SW in Wyoming Park, identified in 1918 as a farmer. He seems to be entered as “Wier” in a list of payments from house buyers and others written on a page at the end of the book in which the journal was kept.

Saturday, 22 March Invited over next door to eat ice-cream & listen to phonograph. Ed went down town. Trying to finish Ted’s sweater & coat.

The family never did buy a phonograph (record player).

Sunday, 23 March Ed went out after old Dan and took us, bag & baggage & grass seed out to ranch. Fine day little cold yet. Finished sweater.

We were going to the farm for spring vacation. Old Dan was the ancient carriage horse, a gelding, kept shod for the road and used with the buggy as needed, though mostly for light farm work. “Ranch” was Father’s Western term.

Monday, 24 March Went down to Rottschafers & got 40# sulphur, 10 cents lb, lime & clover $29 bu. also $22. Didn’t feel good in P.M. Ed went down to Roy, got oats and seeder.

Rottschafers’ (the Silver Creek Fuel and Feed Company) was on Kalamazoo Avenue just south of Cottage Grove Avenue by the Pere Marquette tracks, or more than two miles from the farm; Mother evidently drove there in the buggy. Lime and sulfur mixed in boiling water made a pesticide (“lime-sulfur”), as described earlier.^{^[29]} Mother was perhaps not quite over her period. Roy Hendershott, about 41, born in the township, had a farm down Laraway Road on the south side three quarters of a mile west.

Tuesday, 25 March Fine day. Ed up at day light seeding meadow, finished at dinner. Sprayed in P.M. John came over to pump. Had to take hose apart. Finished just at dark. Ed nearly done up. Children better. Bees flying. Blue birds.

Hand pump and tank were carried on a “stone boat,” a sledge mounted on two half logs; John was the Ploegs’ eldest son, and fourth child, then 17 or 18. No wonder Father was “nearly done up” at night, often enough.

Wednesday, 26 March Rain. Seeded Rye north of railroad. Thrashed bean in P.M. Morris phoned. $500 left at Stek. $100 of it went to Adriance. Agreed to make out papers next Monday.

Navy bean plants, dried over the winter, the beans ready to burst out of the brittle pods, would be beaten against the barn floor. The $500 would be Allyn’s downpayment. Homer Adriance & Son dealt in “real estate, loans, insurance” at 117 Widdicomb Building.

Thursday, 27 March Cold about 22 in morning. Ed about sick. Finished beans.

Friday, 28 March Ed sick. Felt better about 10 o’clock went out and mowed & piled blackberry canes. Finished at supper time. Ed ditching some every day. Water washed out some of strawberry plants.

As noted above, the water table was then high, and low-lying fields often flooded in spring and fall. Clearing drainage ditches, heavy work, was necessary every year.

Saturday, 29 March Ed worked out all day, finished seeding unloaded straw & loaded hay for Roy. Made cutting of grapes & set out in following order 1st Concord, 2nd Niagara, 3rd Brighton, 4th Delaware, 5th currants. Began to rain at dark. Snowing at nine o’clock.

Grape vines were south and west of the house in three north-south rows; the vines were trained on wires strung between log posts. Grapes were all for the table, though wine of a sort has been made from the Concord and Delaware grapes. Concord are good-sized, blue; Niagara a pale green sometimes called white; Brighton, largish, dark blue; Delaware, small, almost purple, called red. Only the Concord grape was bred entirely of American stock (vitis labrusca); the others were crossed with European stock (vitis vinifera). Just to the west stood a half dozen German prune trees, whose fruit, in German called Zwetsch(g)e, was smallish and football-shaped, with blue skin and tart, yellow flesh. Red currant bushes were planted to the east of the vines and the pieplant (rhubarb) patch, south of the bushy quince tree and a pear tree alongside older gooseberry bushes. Immediately to the south of this fruit garden was a row of pear trees, then the old asparagus bed. We had only winter pears, called Kieffer, a large and rather grainy fruit. According to Mother, who did not much care for them, an itinerant salesman had talked the Doctor into buying the engrafted stock, probably not so long after moving to the farm, that is, by 1905.

Sunday, 30 March Cold, ground covered with snow. Put 12 racks of honey on bees, seem to have plenty. Came home in little snow storm, cold northeast wind. House about 40. Didn’t take long to heat it up.

It was surely comb (“supers”) she was putting on, cane sugar syrup being used for food to carry the bees over. The coal fire in the furnace in the basement of 311 Lyon Street had been banked when we left and of course had gone out. But a fire was soon burning, and the hot air quickly rose to the living quarters, through asbestos-wrapped pipes and gratings (called “registers”) set in the floor. Father was good at managing a coal fire. He shook down ashes and clinkers and shoveled in coal first thing in the morning and late in the afternoon. In very cold weather he might check the fire at noon or add coal. At bed time he went down for a last look, perhaps only banking the fire or adjusting the draft. Quite regularly ashes and clinkers had to be shoveled out into an ashcan for weekly removal. Mother could of course tend to the furnace as needed.

Monday, 31 March Ed made contract with Allyn & Morris may deed. Bal at Building & loan 1830.05. Pickell paid.

The “bal” was that owing on the Morris house.

Tuesday, 1 April Ins. policy on 229 S. Valley Ave expires Sept 5 1921 $2000 No. 620459 London & Lancashire Fire Wm. C. Sheppard. [The above in ink] Deposited checks & cash left ins papers with Morris. Signed Allen’s contract & Ed mailed copy to Steketee. Got Ins. & Pass Book from Morris.

The new Morris house finally was numbered 233. Mr. Sheppard was an official of the Mutual Home and Savings Bank, 201-205 Monroe Avenue.

Wednesday, 2 April Started taking Maryland farms milk. 7 qts for $1. Bought $2 tickets. Ed couldn’t get deed recorded because 1918 state & county taxes not paid. Ed went to class in auto repairs. 8 eggs to-day, 5 brown, 3 white.

Evidently Father already had in mind buying a “machine.”

Thursday, 3 April Rainy washing. Went down to bank. Got qt paint.

Friday, 4 April Mrs. Peppler came to day. Teddy taken sick at school. Ed went down to Winegar to see Conklin but he doesn’t work there now is with Burch, on the road won’t be back for two weeks.

Winegar’s sold furniture; Burch’s sold upholstery material and furniture supplies, also did repair work. Conklin was Ernest S. Conklin, a salesman, who seems to have worked at Burch’s from 1918 to 1920 continuously. He had lived since 1914 at 871 Franklin Street SE. I can only guess what business Father may have had with him; perhaps it was connected with an earlier purchase of furniture from Winegar’s.

Saturday, 5 April Ed went to ranch brought home oysters, parsnips & eggs. Painted cold room one coat of paint.

Father had a hankering for buttered parsnips, which I heartily disliked. The “cold room” was a sizeable unheated space at the northeast corner of the house off the kitchen; food was kept there, including butter and milk in the cold months. Mother probably did the painting, with white lead and oil, for the walls were some shade of white.

Sunday, 6 April Ted doesn’t feel very well. Warm 70 . Ed wrote to Howard, I to the Mrs. Arthur Sparks birthday. Went over there to lunch and had some cake.

Monday, 7 April Voting day. Winegar contract for 3598.83. Went down to M.T. Co. with Steketee, Uhl, Bliss and Mrs. M. M.T. agreed to put house in shape provided Morris carries out agreement. They refuse to commit themselves until they consult an attorney.

Election of city commissioners fell on the first Monday in April. Mother still could not vote. The 19th Amendment giving women the vote was declared ratified on 28 August 1920. “Winegar contract” is rather a puzzle. “Wierenga” (partial transformation of “Winegar”) probably is what Mother meant to write (see entry for 21 March). Negotiations with Morris and the Michigan Trust of course had to do with another deal (considered above and below). Uhl was Marshall Uhl of the Michigan Trust, a near contemporary of Mother (Central ’02). From 8 April through 25 April there are no entries, not even for Art’s birthday.

Sunday, 27 April Went down to Wyoming Park. Found house in very unsatisfactory condition.

The Morris house. For details, see next entry.

Monday, 28 April Going to see Bliss at 4 P.M. Order 1 ton Poc. egg & 1 ton Poc. lump of Rotschaffers. Hard coal 11.85 & 12.15. Insists on putting on tile roof fix wall in living room, base board, floor in bedroom. 5 new doors.

“Poc” (for Pocahantas) is a “hard” coal, like Pennsylvania anthracite, from Pocahantas County in the southern part of West Virginia. Lump was the largest size (over 4 inches); egg, the third largest (over 2-1/2 inches). It burns with an intense heat, with little flame, giving off almost no smoke. Like anthracite, it cost more than bituminous (‘soft’) coal, though its B.T.U. equivalent is slightly less. Bituminous coal then supplied the greater part of U.S. consumption for space heating, being cheaper, though dirtier.

Tuesday, 29 April Went down to see Bliss. He won’t change order for tile roof. Went to see Steketee.

Wednesday, 30 April No entries

Monday, 12 May

Tuesday, 13 May Went out to 933 Cottage Grove Ave and got checks.

That is still another house, in the southeast sector of town off Kalamazoo Avenue, being sold to William K. Nickerson, a “laborer.” Mother will have gone most of the way there and back by street car.

Wednesday, 14 May Mr. & Mrs. M here nothing doing.

The directory indicates that the deal finally went through: Allyn is shown living there in 1919, though he didn’t stay long; in 1920 the house is shown as vacant. This entry is the last in the journal, except one on 31 May, when Mother wrote in red ink, “94 in the shade.”

A small set of baby pictures seems fitting here, chosen out of a large number taken; they show Mother and Father as parents, pleased, protective; also Miss Marsh. (Photographs follow p. ***.)

In the fall of 1921, Art entered kindergarten; finally we were both in school at least part of the day, children’s illnesses on the decline. Mother began to have time all to herself and could return now and then to earlier amusements. Once more she could spend an hour with her stamp collection. Fascinated by the speech of the Hansons, farmers of Danish origin near Herring Lake, she began a story about their hard life, dropped it and outlined a story about a character (the “Poet of Fruitland”) based on J. H. Howard, together with his wife and her family (the Hunts), the family into which her sister married (the Gavigans), the Hansons, and other local people.^{^[30]} These beginnings, collected by Suzy with “Camping Journals,” seem to have been carried no further.

Another revived occupation was playing the piano. Some pieces of sheet music suggest that she first resumed playing on her own. Among them were “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” (1912), “There’s a Long, Long Trail” (1913); “Keep the Home Fires Burning (Till the Boys Come Home)” (1914); Ernest R. Ball (and Al Dubin), “All the World Will Be Jealous of Me” (1917). Before long she realized that she was rusty, and she soon decided to take lessons. From 16 January 1922 through the rest of the winter and the following spring, Mother took lessons, sometimes weekly, oftener every other week, generally on Monday and otherwise on Thursday, with a few exceptions. She went to Miss Mary Lourena Davis in the Gilbert Block, a protégée of Marguerite Colwell, who as a former neighbor may have been consulted.^{^[31]}

Mother was not a beginner and was soon given easy pieces along with the old drills of Carl Czerny, followed by those of Charles Louis Hanon, exercises in rhythm by Hanna Smith, various routines for stretching the fingers and relaxing the wrist, and simple work on harmony. Her “lesson record,” if incomplete and not always easy to interpret, provides a good idea of the music she studied. The pieces are listed here, in the order of first known date assigned.^{^[32]}

Monday 16 January-

Monday 24 April 1922 Lucy Nord, “Two Hearts,” Auld Lang Syne (Songs of Nations), Copyright 1896 (?), Louis Retter Music Co., St.Louis.

Monday 13 February-

Monday 24 April 1922 “Rainbow,” Auld Lang Syne, cited above.

Monday 20 February-

Monday 24 April 1922 L. van Beethoven, “Nouvelle Bagatelle,” revised and finger ed. by Wm. Scharfenberg (in the series Album Leaves for the Piano), Copyright 1882, G. Schirmer, Inc. New York.

Monday 10 April -

Thursday 14 Dec. 1922 Lucy Nord, “Spinning Song,” Auld Lang Syne, cited above.

Monday 1 May 1922 -

Thursday 25 Jan. 1923 I. Paderewski, “Menuet,” from Six Humoresques de Concert, Op. 14, no.1, Edited and fingered by L. Vollmer, Copyright 1899, G. Schirmer, Inc. New York.

Thursday 19 December 1922 -

Thursday 22 March 1923 -

Monday 20 October 1924 J.S. Bach, “Bourrée”^{^[33]} First Lessons, Book I. Compiled and Fingered by Walter Carroll, [1918] B.F. Wood Music Co., Boston.

Thursday 24 May 1923 -

Fall 1923 -

Monday 26 November 1923 J.S. Bach, “Polonaise” (in G minor), First Lessons, Book I, cited above (from Anna Magdalena’s first Klavierbüchlein).^{^[34]}

Monday 17 December 1923 P.E.V. Wachs, “Nadia, mazurka de salon,”^{^[35]} Copyright 190***, Boston Music Co., Boston.

Monday 24 December 1923 J.S. Bach, “March” (in D major), First Lessons, Book I, cited above (from Anna Magdalena’s second Klavierbüchlein)^{^[36]}

Monday 25 February 1924 -

Monday 10 November 1924 “Préambule,”^{^[37]} from another text (piece unidentified, but doubtless from Wilhelm Friedeman’s Klavierbüchlein).

Monday 14 April 1924 Georg Eggeling, “Minka Mazurka,”

Monday 13 October 1924 Copyright 190***, Arthur P. Schmidt Co., Boston.

Monday 12 May 1924 Edvard Grieg, “Morning Mood” (Morgenstimmung), from First Orchestral Suite from the music to Peer Gynt, Op. 46, No. 1,^{^[38]} B.F. Wood Music Co., Boston.

Monday 26 May 1924 - J.S. Bach,^{^[39]} “Minuet” (in C Minor),

Monday 26 January 1925 First Lessons, Book I, cited above)^{^[40]} (from Anna Magdalena’s second Klavierbüchlein).

———- ——“Musette” (in D major), First Lessons, Book I, cited above (from Anna Magdalena’s second Klavierbüchlein).

Monday 22 December 1924-

These were of course among the pieces then commonly assigned to pupils early on, though Mother somehow missed out on one or two that seemed almost obligatory. But not required to satisfy fond parents, Miss Davis could give Mother a greater variety of music to work on than to a child, expected each year to learn by heart and play with a certain facility some one recital piece.

In the same years Mother also began tutoring on a fairly regular basis. She worked with her pupils at a card table in the “den,” a smallish room straight back from the front hall on the east side of the house. They sat by the window, looking out on a strip of scuffed lawn and the bay window of 315 Lyon Street. In the background were a roll-top desk, a glassed-in bookcase, framed enlargements of camping photographs on the walls. Some of her clients were preparing for College Board examinations, needed for admission to several Eastern colleges; one or two might be prepping before “going away” to boarding school; and every so often there were the inevitable laggards.^{^[41]} They were in general capable enough, even if disinclined to learn theorems in geometry, quadratic equations, or trigonometric functions. Students, as ever, were apt to find such things “irrelevant,” although they had not yet learned the term. One, whose name escapes me, asked Mother what was the point of studying English: the adults he knew seemed to get along all right.

I don’t remember that Mother did substitute teaching in these years, though it’s possible. Tutoring added variety to the day, she was very good at it, and it gave her satisfaction. As I have often said, her secret was to retreat to the last stage well understood by the student and go on from there.

Other changes in domestic life began with the purchase of the first car, a Ford “touring car”, in the spring of 1922. Prices had leveled off, and it became less and less practical, as automobile traffic increased, to use a buggy or wagon for marketing produce, hauling supplies to the farm, and moving back and forth. Besides, old Dan was too long in the tooth. What was more, Grandpa and Grandma Shafer were getting on; he would turn 84 in August. Mother and Father evidently saw a need to go to the “ranch” often on weekends, as we began to do, and to be in a position to hurry out on short notice.

The Ford served other uses as well. Father’s Saturday duty at fall football games became easier with the car, and could be fitted in with staying at the farm weekends. As noted earlier, we could take Sunday afternoon drives, make calls. We could go on longer trips—to Herring Lake in the summer of 1922, and in later years about the state and to Ontario. Mother did the driving: Father was perhaps too used to horses, in any case was absent minded and had slow reactions. Mother in her turn took a night course in auto mechanics, in the fall of 1922, I believe.

The car also permitted my entry in St. Mark’s choir the next year (described just below) without disrupting weekends at the farm. Mother left me at Saturday morning rehearsal, shopping while we sang. Afterwards we stopped at the Public Library, while I picked out several books to read during the next week. And we came to Sunday morning service, which she willingly attended. She drove home out Madison Avenue, stopping at Riordan’s drug store, at Brown Street, a little less than a half mile north of Burton Street, where she bought the Sunday Herald (the Press had no Sunday edition) and a cone of orange ice for me. In the summers of 1924 and 1925 the car likewise served to bring Mother, Father, and Art to the Sunday afternoon open house at choir camp on Little Bostwick Lake, to the north of Grand Rapids, and east of Rockford.

So although we lived during the week within easy walking distance of school, shops, most close friends, music lessons, and choir practice (Tuesday afternoon and Thursday evening), and would always walk rather than drive, the Ford became an indispensable convenience, as for so many other families.

The first step taken by Mother, in the fall of 1922, to broaden my horizon was to take me down by appointment to see Miss Mary Lourena Davis, with whom I was duly enrolled as a second pupil from the family.^{^[42]} Usually we went to lessons at different times, and Mother strictly limited her practice to the hours when I was in school—those she had free. Nor did she press me overmuch to practice, beyond a rare gentle question, nor try to help, her inclination and Miss Davis’ advice in accord, I dare say. In the early years I kept at it, with minor lapses, willingly, and being, up to a point, apt, made exemplary progress. Art, inducted in 1925, would find the piano less congenial, studying only a year or so before rebelling. Mother’s initiative has led to a great deal of pleasure for me— less, I fear, for others.

Art and I owe her far more for having introduced us to the boys’ choir at St. Mark’s. I wonder how she happened to think of it, growing out of a talk with Mrs. Murphy? She presented me, by appointment, one Tuesday afternoon in October 1923, before rehearsal. The director, Harold Tower, about 34 then, short, brisk, going bald, fond of boys, tested me a little and cheerfully accepted me.

Days in the choir and at its summer camp are to be considered elsewhere. Here I shall tell only what the church came to mean to Mother. Apart from satisfaction in seeing us exposed to music, religion, and wider associations, she herself, over a couple of years, became very attached to St. Mark’s. The minister was then the Very Reverend Charles E. Jackson, Dean (St. Mark’s was serving as “procathedral”), a Yankee from Marblehead, only just above middle height, yet a presence of authority. Some were put in mind of his descent from a line of sea-captains. He was reserved though easy in manner, independent, deeply religious. A well-modeled head, rather long, was dramatized by a piercing gaze from deep-set dark eyes and a resonant voice, which helped carry off his rambling sermons, long on “inspiration,” short on doctrine. As that might suggest, St. Mark’s during his tenure was “low church” (“low and slow” rather than “high and dry”). Dean Jackson was widely admired and had attracted a considerable following among the congregation as well as the settled dislike of a few “socially prominent” purse-proud parishoners. It was then small wonder, even if (I fancy) to her surprise, that Mother came under his benign spell.

Late in 1925, so discreetly that I knew nothing of it, she began attending confirmation classes and was confirmed on Saturday 14 February 1926. She had need of comfort and strength in that season of her mother’s death. She did not refer to what she had done, either then or thereafter. Very like her to take such a step without a word about it—apart from whatever she may have said to Father—in no way pressing her needs and decision on her young sons.^{^[43]}

Father’s day, changed less to begin with by having small children in the house, was less affected by our conversion into schoolboys. In any case, his duties as treasurer of the high school athletic association took much of the time not given to teaching, business, and farming^{^[44]}. Many Saturdays in football season and evenings in basketball season he had to be on hand to supervise payment for and collection of tickets. Afterwards the money was to deposit. He disbursed funds as required, and had accounts to keep and render. The rest of the family had a small bonus from his duties in that we could attend games. Football games through the fall of 1922 were still at Island Park^{^[45]} or at the field in Ramona Park, in East Grand Rapids. I recall seeing at Ramona Park the 1922 football team, captained by Lowell Palmer—later to be coach at Ottawa Hills High School—defeat Plainwell 113-0 on 24 September; and, later in the season, the stocky Union High School star quarterback Rocky Parsaca at Island Park. In the two years that followed, Father had in addition, to handle disbursements—$13,000 to $14,000 in 1923/4—for construction at Houseman Field on land given to the city by the younger Julius Houseman, class of ‘08 at Central^{^[46]}. Beginning in 1923, Central’s home games were played there.

Father still had time to begin reading aloud to me. For periods during the years 1923 to 1925 he read from Bryant’s Homer and Timayenis’ two-volume history of ancient Greece, both, as noted earlier, in use at Valparaiso. He read several books of the Odyssey; the story stayed with me, but of the readings I recall only the entrance of “rosy-fingered morn” to inaugurate a new day. The history of Greece we did not get through; as I remember, we did the chapters on the heroic war against the Persians and those on the golden age of Athens, but not the later story, more applicable to our time.

Father also enjoyed occasions when the new activities of his boys were on display. Though he usually did not attend church, I recall his joining Mother at Christmas and Easter services. Of course he went to my first choir show, “H.M.S. Pinafore,” at Powers Theatre on the afternoon of Saturday, 16 February 1924. He surely attended the earliest of a series of piano recitals on Tuesday 19 June 1923 at the Williams’ house on the south side of Fountain Street just east of College Avenue; their daughter Margaret (Peg) Williams was a pupil of Miss Davis. I assume that he was in attendance on the evening of Tuesday 17 June 1924, at Miss Marguerite Colwell’s studio in the Gilbert Block, across the hall from the more modest quarters of Miss Davis and again on Wednesday evening, 17 June 1925 at the St. Cecilia. And as already mentioned, he joined Mother and Art at open house at choir camp on Little Bostwick Lake. In those days they drove north through town, out Plainfield Road across the river and up the hill, after a couple of miles swinging right onto the road to Grattan Center.

He was pleased, we may assume, to take part and “proud,” as people said, of his sons. Yet he might have thought to himself, once in a while, “How different from what I knew, how easy, not quite real.” Such musings, I imagine, moved him to tell stories of his early life, oftenest at table as we finished supper. Most of the episodes I have retold of his youth and early manhood Art and I first heard then, he sitting to the east, I sitting to the west of the round oak pedestal table. Many of them Father repeated, but they so held our attention, anyhow on first hearing, we might well have kept them in mind anyway.

From this period dates also my earliest remembrance of familiar sayings and turns of expression used by Mother and Father, so I shall record some of them here, those not quoted in another connection. I risk giving you a wrong impression by throwing together so many traditional phrases, old saws, familiar quotations, and illustrative stories. They formed a small part of what Mother and Father said at home or at the farm, and only rarely entered into their conversation elsewhere.

I could hardly list all the time-honored formulas— some idiomatic phrases and many metaphors —used sparingly by one or the other— e.g.

A few of these words (e.g. aggravate, frump) are older words with new meanings. Most of the above, as of the many other words Mother used to convey such attitudes, are still heard, though I am under the impression that educated young women today used a rather different set of words to do the job.

Mother had read the saying, from the parable, “Them that (or “as”) has gits,” said in Edward Eggleston’s The Hoosier Schoolmaster (1871).^{^[53]} Also of literary origin was a motto of her father’s, which she would repeat,

Man wants but little here below,

But wants that little long.

The source is “The Hermit (or Edwin and Angelina)” of Oliver Goldsmith. By reading “but” for “nor” in the second line, someone had neatly altered the sense, converting it to the requirements of the frugal Dr. Shafer, who expected to live to a ripe age, like his father and mother.^{^[54]}

From her parents, too, would have come Mother’s low view of leading citizens, shared, but rarely expressed, by Father. She would refer, for example, to “one of the pillows of the church,” and echo her father’s opinion, common in the area, that one family had made its fortune by buying a section of timberland and cutting all the (eight) abutting sections.

Mother had numerous old saws about the weather, e.g.

Red sky at night, sailor’s delight,

Red sky at morning, sailors take warning.

Or, “Rain before seven, clear before eleven,” which can be traced only to the mid-19th century. One, for which I have found no source, was to this effect: “If it rains when the sun shines, it will rain tomorrow;” the phenomenon had a quite different traditional meaning. As an indication that the weather might be clearing, she would say, with other local folk, that there was “enough blue sky to make a Dutchman a pair of breeches,” quite a lot, that is.

Mother’s sayings, in short, proclaimed her a traditional outlook. Father’s speech was in keeping with his taste for detachment, and therefore ran to the humorous. Was it then, or later, that I first heard him exclaim, “Gee whiz, stiggery bat, criss-cross, caraway rat!” That suggests a children’s rhyme, imitated or degraded, doubtless something read. He surely had heard his share of full-blooded cursing, but would seldom go so far even as to grumble “t’hell mit,” or “hell and damnation,” the strongest language he was heard to use. An occasional “Great Scott!”, “Great gods of war!” “Great gods and little fishes!”, “Hang it all,” “Coufound it!”, or simply “Rats!” or “Blast!” he might resort to in a moment of exasperation. For emphasis he might exclaim “By George!” or “By jingo!” (even “By jingo, ringo, stingo!”) or begin a question with “What the Sam Hill...?” “..the dickens..?”, “..the deuce..?”, “..the Sam Tunket..?” He rarely used phrase denigrating others. I have heard him say someone “wouldn’t know beans when the bag’s untied.” Or with great provocation, he might declare a man a chump, blatherskite, blowhard, jackass, or fathead—types he detested. A more sweeping term, seldom used, was “Yahoo,” not an indication that Father had read Gulliver’s Travels, though he may have. His crudest expression was to speak of someone as “the north end of a horse going south.” But I recall his saying that only once. All speech of the sort applied to men. Whatever his views or feelings, courtesy forbade employing epithets, disobliging allusions, or indictments pertaining to women, individually or collectively.

His speech was altogether free of direct references to private parts and their functions, as to other parts treated as taboo in polite society of the time; but, again, that is hardly to say that he had not heard his full share of vulgar language. I should later be caught by surprised on becoming aware of the common form of some saying. In one instance, clearly recalled, I was crossing Broadway by Memorial Hall, going toward Hammond Street (in about 1940/1) with someone I knew only casually, and said, “It’s no skin off my back,” an expression of Father’s. My companion looked at me a little strangely, saying, “I never heard it put that way.”

It goes almost without saying that Father was a stranger to stag parties, smokers, locker rooms. Several men on the Central High School staff, as was well known, used to gather at noon in the boiler room to have a smoke, and escape the suffocating propriety.

Yet he did have, in a rather mild form, some of the ethnic prejudices of the time and place. Of the commoner objects of humor, in those days, one was the behaviour of the Dutch (or, as they asked to be called, Holland) element. Father had little to say about them. Mother might echo such local commentary as on their ease in reconciling strict piety with sharp business practice; or a farmer’s answer to the census taker’s question on age: “My wife is dirty and I am dirty, too.” I never heard any such from Father, unless we include “Nichts kommt heraus (dem deutschen Haus),” properly applied of course to German settlers. The first part (as “nix come arous”) is given as commonplace by Mencken, citing a letter of Abraham Lincoln of 1854.

When Father was growing up, the Irish were the principal butt of American humor, doubtless often borrowed from them; they long have excelled at making sport of one another, and of themselves. McManus’ comic strip, “Bringing up Father,” was a popular feature in my youth. The Irish had exercised a pervasive influence on Father’s humor. But, if we except his pleasure in making “Irish bulls,” he had no stock of jokes about them, then quite acceptable. I recall only his quoting Paddy’s complaint: that he liked payches, but the stones lay hivvy on his stummick.^{^[55]}

As yet Grand Rapids had few blacks; there had been none in the countryside of Father’s youth. In his only reference to them they were coupled with the Irish: society would be well served if “an Irishman should kill a nigger, and hang for it.” To be sure, we all spoke of “nigger toes” (Brazil nuts); someone might refer to the “nigger” (more often the “colored gentleman”) “in the woodpile.” Of course, Father sang tunes such as “Uncle Ned” and “Mammie’s Little Alabama Coon.” And he may well have read with amusement, as I did, the series of Octavus Roy Cohen in The Saturday Evening Post about Florian Slappey and friends of The Sons and Daughters of I-Shall-Arise.

There was no slighting references that I recall to Jews; I believe neither Father nor Mother ever used even the then current metaphor for bargaining: “jewing him down.” To be sure, Mother had sung, and we learned, the humorous song of the nineties, “Solomon Levi,” about a second-hand clothing dealer in a college town. But that was exceptional. At the time, antisemitism, though present locally, was for the most part latent, except as it bore on acceptance in “society.” Mother did report, with interest and amusement, that while delivering asparagus to Daane and Witters, in their storage room, she overheard “old Mrs. May” (Mrs. Abraham May) saying to one of the partners as she tried their Limburger cheese, “I like it when it has skippers on it.”

Among Father’s sayings I recall a few references to, or quotations from, the Bible. He would have attended church regularly for some years, possibly from the time he began to teach in the Township of Caledonia and certainly in the year working for the Adventist fruit farmer in Barry County, in the three years at Valparaiso, and for most, or all, of the seven years in the Black Hills—over the time, that is, when he belonged to a small, closely knit community. Assuredly, he was an attentive listener. As to what he though of it all, I should imagine that, as often, he suspended judgement.

The passages Father cited from Scriptures were all from the Old Testament, to the best of my recollection. Here are five that I recall, from repetition and from the weight laid on them. The first is from Genesis:

In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread,… (Genesis, 3:19)

The second is the Fifth Commandment:

Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee… (Exodus, 20:12)

The third comes from Ecclesiastes:

Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many days. (Ecclesiastes, 11:1)

Then there is a partial quotation from Isaiah:

…look unto the rock whence ye are hewn, and to the hole of the pit whence ye are digged. (Isaiah, 51:1).

The last is an allusion to a passage in Zachariah: Despise not the day of small things (adapted from Zachariah, 4:10). These passages, of course, are from the Authorized Version, the one he knew; in one or two cases his quotations may have been slightly inaccurate.

Some sayings Father may well have heard in youth. Two not specifically rural were: “Sue a beggar, catch a louse,” an English proverb; and “You can’t get blood from a turnip,” apparently of more recent origin. He probably heard in the Black Hills the exclamation, on seeing someone unexpectedly, “What you won’t see when you don’t have a gun.” Presumably of later date: “It’s cheaper to move than pay rent,” spoken many a time when the moment approached to go home. Of much later date and still current: “You’ll never go broke taking a profit.”

A common expression of his way, “What is to be will be, even if it never is.” Later on I was to wonder whether that could have originated as comment on early nineteenth century German philosophy. I have not seen nor heard it elsewhere. Father used it in order to reflect doubt on some forecast, especially of an unfavorable conjuncture. Another, equally characteristic, went: “You can’t most always sometimes tell what you least know the most” —scepticism under the guise of nonsense.

One expression certainly was philosophical in reference “What’s matter? Never mind. What’s mind? No matter.” It gives, concisely, the Aristotelian position on the subject, sharpened by Descartes. Many years after, I should come upon it in reminiscences of Bertrand Russell, who heard the same witticism—in reverse order—from his grandmother, Countess Russell, who brought him up. She used it to make light of academic philosophy. The phrase goes back at least as far as the mid-nineteenth century.^{^[56]} Russell said, “After some fifty or sixty repetitions, this remark ceased to amuse me.” Father employed it only as diversion after the question was asked, “What’s the matter?”

We had another formula for use when asked, “How do you feel?” His invariable reply was, “I feel with my fingers.” That is likely to have been a current expression in Father’s boyhood.^{^[57]}

Several favorite lines and stories served to make light of pretentious, especially overlong, disquisitions (such as mine). One was, “He rambled, he rambled, till the butcher cut him down.” The original, which read “knacker” instead of “butcher,” I’ve seen somewhere but can’t place.^{^[58]} <59> Again, he would say my tongue must be hinged in the middle, so as to wag at both ends. Another was after Josh Billings (Henry Wheeler Shaw, 1818-85): “You know more things, son, that aren’t so,” or “…more things, and some of them…”^{^[59]} In a different context, “You’ve a head long enough to eat out of a churn.” I also remember his applying Goldsmith’s couplet on the villagers’ awe of the schoolmaster (in “The Deserted Village”):

They gazed, and gazed and still the wonder grew

That one small head could carry all he knew.

That doubtless was recalled from reading at Valparaiso.

In a more serious mood he would quote a familiar couplet from Pope’s “Essay on Man”:

Hope springs eternal in the human breast;

Man never is, but always to be, blest.

He would often recite a pair of lines from Shakespeare, at times a little altered, as, for example, this passage from “Henry IV,” Part I, between Glendower and Hotspur:

G. I can call spirits from the vasty deep.

H. Why, so can I, or so can any man;

But will they come when you do call for them?

Another, from “Twelfth Night,” as read by Malvolio from the gulling letter:

…some men are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.

In one connection or another, he might give the couplet of Augustus de Morgan (revised from Swift):

Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ‘em

And little fleas have lesser fleas and so ad infinitum.

Very characteristic of Father’s outlook was the saying, again after Josh Billings, “I’d rather take two lickings now than one licking postponed.” Of similar origin, I imagine, would be the remark by a small boy that it was not so bad to stub your toe, it felt so good when it stopped hurting. He was fond also of an observation I have heard attributed to Lew Fields, of the vaudeville team Weber and Fields: “Vot a country and vot a pipples!”

Father enjoyed playing with words, and had a supply of such expressions as “the saccharine subsequently.” He did not fully share his generation’s fondness for puns but might quote one, such as the following: The great punner, having asserted he could play on any topic, was challenged: Could he on the Zodiac? He immediately replied, “By Gemini and I Cancer.” Father would sometimes recite a popular quatrain of the period,^{^[60]} a little daring verbally,

A wonderful bird is the pelican,

His bill will hold more than his belican.

He can take in his beak food enough for a week,

But I’m damned if I see how the helican.

Most of all I enjoyed Father’s old country stories and expressions. I imagine he had heard, rather than read them, though at least some must have appeared in print. One was the saying attributed to the lad that had failed to get his team to plow a straight furrow: “Gee, haw, go where you’ve a mind to; Pa says the whole field’s to be plowed.” Another had to do with the little boy that asked to have some candy charged to his father. “But I don’t know your father,” the shopkeeper objected. “You don’t?” exclaimed the little boy, “Why, I know him jist as easy.”

A well known story, in one form or another,^{^[61]} is that of the farmer that set about keeping his horse more cheaply, by introducing a slowly increased share of chaff and straw into the feed. As time passed, he would report on progress. After a while it was observed that he had stopped reporting, so someone asked, “Waal, how did that ’ere ex-peera-mint o’ yourn turn out?” “It like to’ve worked,” replied the farmer after a moment’s thought, “On’y thing, durn ol’ hoss up an’ died.”

Another, probably as well known, is that of the two old men and the bahr’l of corn whiskey, which I include, though I remember hearing it in the late twenties, after a Saturday dinner during which I had guessed at the ingredients of some dish. On first tapping the barrel, one old man, having had a swallow of whiskey, after reflection pronounced it fine, though perhaps tasting faintly of leather. The other after a pause nodded, adding that it seemed to him rather to taste a little of iron. They reviewed the question now and then as they had another glass. Finally, one day, the whiskey was all gone, and they found at the bottom—a leather-headed tack.

Perhaps the prize, also told at my expense, was another widely told story—Russell Hale heard a different version as a boy in upstate New York—that had to do with a man so bone-lazy he gave up trying to stay alive. His neighbors were taking him in a wagon to the graveyard, a box ready for him, when they met a man from the next settlement hauling a load of corn. He asked, and they explained, what their errand was. Said the stranger, “That seems a shame; tell you what; I’ll stake him this load of corn.” One of the man’s friends called to him to repeat the offer. He asked plaintively, “Is it shelled?” and, hearing it was not, said, “Drive on, boys.”

If I have given the impression that Father was forever making fun of me, I should at once correct it. As with old turns of phrase, quotations, and stories generally, so with those on me, he was sparing. And when he spoke, it was in good humor, from amusement, never in company, without giving offense. I daresay a good teacher can be expected to be a thoughtful parent, firm as necessary, detached in manner, comment congruous with the occasion.

Still in the vein of country humor would be his statement, when faced with a tall tree, that you would have “to look twice to see the top.” I remember Father’s saying just that by Green Lake, near Interlochen, at noon, the last day or so of the first week of August 1923.^{^[62]}

Two traditional country rhymes—in part traceable to the seventeenth century—he would now and then repeat, slightly varied from the written form. One had to do with bees:

A swarm of bees in May is worth a load of hay.

A swarm of bees in June is worth a silver spoon.

A swarm of bees in July is not worth a fly.

With some change in the last line, he might add,

A swarm of bees in August isn’t worth sawdust.

I remember him well, wearing protective hat and veil, long canvas gloves—a warm costume of a summer day—and holding a small bellows stuffed with smoldering paper to make smoke, perched on a ladder to collect a swarm from an inconvenient branch, having prepared a hive to receive them. They might or might not stay, at the pleasure of the queen.

The other rhyme had to do with fishing. His version ran as follows:

When the wind is in the east,

The fishing it is least;

When the wind is in the north,

Fisher goes not forth;

When the wind is in the south,

The bait blows into the fish’s mouth.

When the wind is in the west,

The fishing it is best.

That runs fairly close to a version reportedly given by J.O. Halliwell in Popular Rhymes (1849).^{^[63]}

Besides sayings and quotations, Father had a few favorite humorous songs, one having a particular association with my boyhood; I still remember that in the summer of 1922 or 1923, Father sang it one Sunday before dinner in the sitting room at the farm, near the door to the little front porch. It begins:

There’s a sto-ry handed down in Irish hi-sto-ry

Far beyant the days of King Boru

That the best of luck is always waitin’ on ye

If ye pick up on the road a harse’s shoe.

Then the refrain:

Oh, come gather the fam’ly round me Sunday marnin’,

Let the babies roll upon the floor.

But to one and to ahll I give ye timely warnin’,

Nivver t’ take the harseshoe from the door.

(The music, transcribed by Jamie, as I remember it, follows this page.) There were several verses, telling of the bad luck that came once from taking down the horseshoe. Father sang them in a light tenor with a faint Irish brogue, and I used to wonder whether he had heard and learned them from the Irish settlers in the Township of Caledonia.^{^[64]}

music for Never Take the Horseshoe from the Door

Another favorite, also in a common genre, was “Miss Kate Pennoyer”—a young fellow serenades Kate only to be told, in the second stanza:

“Young man below da’

Dat play da banjo da’

De song ‘at you play is exceedingly sweet, But Miss Kate Pennoyah

Lib fo’ doahs below yah

Down at de cawnah ob Warshin’ton Street.”

Oftener sung, however, were the verses of Robert Burns—Flow Gently, Sweet Afton; Comin’ Through the Rye; Auld Lang Syne; Scots, Wha Hae; the Banks o’ Doon. He would also sing Annie Laurie, which I should long associate, in ignorance, with the songs of Burns; words and music probably are those of a later countrywoman (Lady John Douglass Scott); she, too, used older materials, here the racy original of William Douglas (1672-1748). And Father shared with Mother a fondness for other “old favorites,” especially Stephen Foster’s, and two songs popular in the war: “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary…” and “Pack up Your Troubles (in your old kit bag and smile, smile, smile)”.

In a different vein, he sometimes would cite Mark Twain on “The Awful German Language,” from Appendix D of A Tramp Abroad. published in 1880 and perhaps used by Prof. Roessler in German classes at Valparaiso. Mark Twain outdid earlier humorists in exploiting the “culture shock” resulting from American travels in Europe, a timely topic. Encounters with foreign languages were a favorite motif of his. The approach is suggested by the short dialogue between Huck and Jim on French, ending with Jim’s: “Is a Frenchman a man?”… “Well, den! Dad blame it, why doan’ he talk like a man?” All that Father recollected of “the awful German language” was the description of grammatical gender and word order. I quote the two passages, one at length, italicizing the phrases I recall verbatim:

…in German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl…

…finally, all the parentheses and reparentheses are massed together between a couple of king-parentheses, one of which is placed in the first line of the majestic sentence and the other in the middle of the last line of it—after which comes the VERB, and you find out for the first time what the man has been talking about; and after the verb, as far as I can make out—the writer shovels in “haben sind gewesen gehabt haben worden sein,” or words to that effect, and the monument is finished.

The only German phrases I remember Father’s using (apart from those quoted elsewhere) were these: “Scheiden tut Leiden” (parting is sorrowful, or painful), a rare acknowledgement of sentiment; and “Macht’s nichts aus” (it’s no matter); und so/geht es (and so it goes);…und so weiter (etc.).

The few French words that figured in his conversation he conventionally mispronounced, as “dishabilly” (déshabillé), “conowser” (connoisseur), and “billy-do” (billet-doux). To try to reproduce unfamiliar speech sounds would have seemed pretentious to Father and his friends. He could, however, render Irish immigrant speech passably, from much listening and some practice. And he was alert to unusual locutions. For example, some North British friend—I have forgotten the name—would say of a stew that it had potatoes “intill’t,” cabbage “intill’t,” and so on. Father would repeat with a laugh this Scotticism.

Father’s life at school hardly changed in this decade. He moved from room 106, at the northwest corner of the “new” building, to room 136, at the northeast corner, where he was to rule from then on. It was, I believe, at this time that he became known for two long quotations, on thrift and on education, the latter printed on a card at the front of the room.

The first was a pronouncement by a railroad magnate and financier James Jerome Hill (1838-1916) of Minnesota, who said:

If you want to know whether you are destined to be a success or a failure in life, you can easily find out. The test is simple and it is infallible. Are you able to save money? If not, drop out. You will lose. You may think not, but you will lose, as sure as you live. The seed of success is not in you.

The career of J.J. Hill, who accumulated a fortune by risk taking, energy, imagination, and sharp practice, could not be said to illustrate the virtue of thrift. But in Father’s view, the name lent authority to the words.

The second quotation, that on education, Father pronounced without attribution; he may not have realized who first said it. He or his intermediate source made it more categorical than as first stated. His quotation, as you may recall, ran as follows: “The business of education is to teach the mind and the will to do the thing that ought to be done, at the time it ought to be done, whether you like it or not.” The name of the originator, T.H. Huxley (1835-96), the ally of Darwin and founder of a distinguished family, had the wrong associations. Huxley, noted biologist, paleontologist, educator, professed agnostic—he coined the term—had begun more tentatively (in Technical Education, 1877):

Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it…

He went on to say:

…it is the first lesson that ought to be learned: and however early a man’s training begins, it is probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly.

Students, who respected Father, to the extent to their capacity, seem to have found his two recommendations tiresome, irrelevant. I recall feeling much that way about them myself. What they could hardly have understood—I had some notion of it—was that he was trying to pass on two rules by which he had survived and made a place for himself. He will have understood how his students felt, hoping still that the ideas, recalled later, might help.^{^[65]} Perhaps they did. At least the words were never to be forgotten by those that sat in his room.

By the mid-1920’s Father was teaching his first students’ children, who in turn discovered that there is no royal road to geometry. One of them composed the following:

Mr. Snell is my teacher,

I shall not pass.

He maketh me to explain hard propositions

And expose my ignorance before the class.

He restoreth my sorrow;

Yet, though I study ‘til midnight,

I shall gain no knowledge.

For originals trouble me,

Pyramids and prisms distress me.

In the presence of the Seniors

He giveth me a low mark.

I don’t know who composed this—or passed it on; the hand is unfamiliar—but Father saved it.

His salary increased by about three-fourths (in current dollars) from 1912/3 through 1924/5, in the war years by $50 to $100, afterwards by $100 to $150, $2,700, more or less.^{^[66]} Although Mother and Father always spent much less than his salary—plus her earnings from tutoring—their savings came increasingly from “unearned” income, to which in the postwar years, should be added substantial capital gains.

With the materials at hand—a great deal has been thrown away, first and last—estimates of savings and assets are at best rough; the first comprehensive information I have is for the early 1930’s. By mid-1919—half way through the period Mother and Father owned contracts on five, possibly six, houses, to an aggregate value of $15,000 or more. All but one of them were in Wyoming Park.^{^[67]} Mother and Father had begun to build, or buy houses there in 1916, probably at the urging of Isabel Chalmers, who had left teaching in 1914 to work for S. H. Wilson, C., one of the firms developing the area. She would later join the firm.

Mother and Father also held government bonds to the face value of $10,000—then selling for perhaps $9,000—to judge from entries on interest received in the first four months of 1919. They held at least one mortgage, on the old Leavitt/Richards farm cattycorner to the Martin place, 99.5 acres of prime, well-located farming land, bought some years before by Henry van Sledright, with perhaps $6,400 to be paid.^{^[68]} Together with two or three stocks held since the early 1900’s plus personal notes held and something in bank accounts, the total amounted to well over $30,000, as against nearly $15,000 at the end of 1913. Most of the increment represented savings.

From then through 1925, I should guess that their assets again doubled, reaching more than $60,000. Rather less than one-half of the increment represents a rise in the value of securities. For at that point, Mother and Father began buying common stocks of national companies, a break with their practice till then. The intermediate stage, that of buying government bonds at a large discount, had been an easy one. As Father would later explan: “If the government’s credit is not good, what is?” But common stocks of national companies were another matter. A good deal later—in the mid-1950’s—Mother on a visit to 3100 R Street would tell Tee that she had persuaded Father to take this step. Even had she remained silent, I should have thought it likely. She perhaps listened to A.H. Holmes and Art Sparks, both of whom had gone into the bull market. However she arrived at the conclusion, she saw the great industrial expansion set in motion by the war and was convinced that demand for metals and energy would again become strong, and that stocks would rise in price. Later statements would show that Father had adopted the reasoning as his own.

Mother was influential also in the selection of shares in particular companies, including the Consumers Power, Calumet and Hecla, Anaconda, Commonwealth and Southern, and Standard Oil of New Jersey. It was, on the whole, a very good move; industrial and utility stocks nearly doubled in value from 1921 to late 1925.^{^[69]} And I am persuaded, as Father was to claim, that their own choices were better than those made by Lemuel Hillman, their broker during this time. Indeed, Father, like others, would one day say—perhaps exaggerating for effect—that he never made money on what he was advised to buy, never lost backing his own (and Mother’s) judgment.

Besides, they continued older patterns of investment, acquiring a contract to sell a piece of property in Wyoming Township to Henry K. Boer, and extending mortages to the two unmarried Roelofs brothers on a sizable farm to the east of the city, and to Rainy Metts on a fruit farm lying between Hart and Shelby.^{^[70]}

Their gross current money income (both capital gains and income in kind excluded) rose from perhaps $2,300 in 1913 to $3,500 in 1919, and to at least $6,000 in 1925.^{^[71]}^{^[72]} In real terms, it declined somewhat during the war, doubling in the next six years. In most years Mother and Father were saving half or more of current income. By the mid-twenties, while discreetly maintaining the same style of living, suitable to Father’s salary and “station,” they were approaching modest affluence.

As I should come to understand later on, they worked hard at investing, not only in buying and selling securities or in deciding to extend or foreclose a mortgage—for them never just a business matter—but even more in dealings in houses. As illustrated in Mother’s journal for early 1919, the basic transactions themselves could be long and tedious; once having sold a property on contract, they might be put to a lot of trouble to make monthly collections. They themselves computed the new balance and the next instalment due; checked the payment of taxes and insurance, saw to repairs. Father, who bore only part—less than half—of the burden, would one day advise, “Real estate is always there, you can keep an eye on it and see that what must be done is done, and they’ll never make any more of it—don’t ever buy any!” He was to say that in the Depression. In the early ‘twenties, I didn’t hear, at least didn’t take in, complaints about unpredictable, dilatory, devious purchasers, lawyers, local officials, real estate agents. Mother and Father were still, I believe, too intent on the objective to stop and think of their effort required.

Nor did they see themselves as “sacrificing immediate to deferred gratification,” in the ordinary sense, much as they approved of it. It suited them to live as they did, having no taste for “conspicuous consumption” and being without any social ambitions. In other circumstances—say, as the rising young tradesman he had once hoped to be—Father might have indulged judiciously in these amiable, reputable vices. As a schoolmaster getting on in years, he was not tempted. And Mother had a horror of “showing off” and shied away from the society of all save family and close friends. Their chief unsatisfied want, one might say, was to be “well off,” the secret, almost illicit ambition that had grown on them.

By the early 1920’s, Mother bought most of ther meat and groceries “cash and carry.” I recall walking with her to an early “self-service” establishment on Michigan Street, one of those of the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company. To supply something on short notice, one might be sent running down Lyon Street to the little shop above Barclay Avenue, at the time still called Hinds Grocery, though by 1920 it had been taken over by Milton J. Gelock, who kept it much as he had found it, even to the familiar sign recommending Salada Tea. Beginning in 1922, when she had the Ford, Mother began shopping for the farm at Madison Square, picking up supplies at the same time for 311 Lyon Street.

Shopping was not so greatly different then. There were fewer standard brands, some regional, of canned and packaged foods, salt, sugar, vegetable oil, flour, and coffee and tea (these last sold often in bulk), soaps and cleansers (but no detergents; the best known were Gold Dust, Bon-Ami, and Old Dutch Cleanser). Packaged bread, not as yet presliced, was available for housewives in a hurry. Mother still made her own bread, cakes, cookies, and pies, otherwise preferred to go to a bakery. Meat, fish, and fowl were not prepackaged; even so, a butcher shop was thought to offer better quality. Frozen foods were yet to come. One must make do with waxed paper, no plastic wrapping or aluminum foil. Paper towels and napkins, the latter kept if at all for picnics, had not replaced washable, reuseable cotton and linen for daily use at home. Most fresh produce, as earlier stated, was still procured locally, and the assortment was small in the cold months.

Retail prices of a few foodstuffs in big cities in 1908, the year considered earlier, and 1925, the last year of this period, suggest the effects—above all—of the World War:^{^[73]}

Percent

Cents per unit increase

Unit 1908 1925 (1908 = 100)

Flour 5 lbs. 16.5 30.5 85

Pork chops lb. 16.0 37.0 131

Bacon lb. 20.7 47.1 128

Butter lb. 32.8 55.2 68

Eggs doz. 29.7 55.4 87

Milk,

delivered qt. 8.0 13.9 74

Potatoes 10 lbs. 19.0 36.0 89

Sugar 5 lbs. 29.5 35.0 19

The BLS index for “all food at home” shows an increase of 97 percent.^{^[74]} That’s probably somewhat high for our household, given that we bought less meat than most families. Retail prices presumably went up in Grand Rapids at about the same rate as in big cities, although our local produce cost rather less than theirs.

The family lived comfortably, if in some ways frugally. There was enough to eat, and to spare, in considerable part from the farm. Meals were nourishing and attractive, daily included eggs, milk, home made bread, fruit and vegetables. But inexpensive meat was the rule; most of it went into stew or meat loaf. The exceptional roast came out well done, dry indeed, supplying plenty of gravy to cover the ever-present potatoes. Leftovers were ground up and put in hash.

In the winter, Mother turned more to chipped beef, some of the previous season’s hens from the farm, and Gorton’s salted codfish—from Gloucester, Mass. in a flat wooden box, almost the size still used for a dozen of fine wine—not to mention baked beans, with salt pork and brown sugar. And one would be told to “save room,” as if boys ever need to do that, for hot, fragrant apple pie, in very short crust (even if made with the white hydrogenated corn oil called Crisco).

Mother had small use for canned goods, aside from what she and Grandma Shafer had “put up.” She served packaged cereals—Cream of Wheat, oatmeal from the cylindrical box of Quaker Oats. But commonly we had for breakfast, and liked better, our own wheat, partly ground in a hand mill, steamed for some hours, served perhaps with raisins, otherwise to be topped with brown sugar, maple syrup, comb honey, or—best of all—wild blackberry jam. For variety, Mother prepared waffles—which very young I called window-cakes—or sometimes French toast or flapjacks, the latter in memorable years made with flour of our own buckwheat. (Of course, these did not come out of electrical appliances; Mother prepared them over a gas flame, using a waffle iron, toaster, or griddle.) With waffles or flapjacks came invariably bacon. Breakfast especially was intended to “stick to your ribs,” and surely we ate too much, but didn’t think so. Mother would recite Poor Richard’s advice: “You will never regret having eaten too little” with its curious double meaning. And she would repeat sometimes the story of her grandfather John Shafer. As an old man, joining in at harvest time, he had only a bowl of milk at noon. The hired hands ate and ate. In the afternoon as they began sprawling in the shade by the side of the field, he went on working. The abundance Mother provided was more persuasive than her precept and parable together.

Nothing went of course for wine, beer, spirits, or tobacco. Seldom if ever, did we eat out. A movie or concert was an occasion. I don’t remember going even to the Family Theater on Michigan Avenue more than once or twice, nor do I recall minding that. Mother spent hardly a thing on her own person and sewed, knitted, darned, and mended for us all. Yet she bought good clothes and shoes for Art and me, and Father was always respectably dressed in bespoke suits, made by Carr, Hutchins and Anderson; to be sure, he wore them for a long, long time. His shirts, after the fashion of the time, still had detachable and replaceable, even turnable, collars and cuffs.

Father or Mother might have liked to see more spent for some purpose, as, for example, he might have liked her to buy nicer clothes for herself; or she might have liked to go out with him oftener to a concert or play. Their actual style of life may have been rather plainer than either would have preferred.

On the other hand, they were both ready to spend money for some things: to bring Henrietta Loucks in once a week, at a dollar to a dollar and a half a day; to have Miss Marsh to help out after Art was born, to keep a fine camera and to use it freely, to provide for music lessons and have a new piano—the Knabe upright that Jamie still has—to buy and to operate the Ford, which cost, c.i.f. Grand Rapids, some $440, including self-starter and demountable rims (optional equipment then), and regular replacements—chiefly, that is, for services and durables.

Though without any household accounts for these years, one can be sure that the family’s ordinary living expenses began to rise again after the sharp drop in prices in 1921. By 1924, Mother had dispensed with domestic “help”—for two years, as it turned out—but that did not offset increased outlays for two growing boys, keeping a car, and going away on longer and longer trips. And Mother and Father probably made a point of paying higher rent to Dr. Shafer. In 1925, living expenses came to about $2,000, an estimate that does not include purchases of consumer durables, chiefly a Dodge touring car, which cost about $600. The new car raised the amount spent on durables in 1921-25 to an average of about $300 a year, including the new piano and a new sofa (which replaced the old one in black leather). Family expenses, then, in 1925 were $2,300 or $2,600, depending on whether we use the average or the amount spent in 1925 on durables. Not more than $500 went for food and perhaps $500 for rent; the rest, in much smaller amounts, for apparel, fuel, and utilities; for driving and maintaining a car; for all other goods; for profesional services. If for comparability we add food from the farm, valued at retail prices, the total would rise to between $2,700 and $2,800 (or $3,000-$3,100), which would be somewhere about the ninetieth percentile for American urban families (no directly comparable figures are readily available). Shares of food, housing, and durables were above, of clothing and entertainment—and, of course, of tobacco and beverages—well below, average, for families with about the same total consumption.

In speaking about Father’s salary in 1903/4, I observed that the goods and services he bought, or such substitutes as might be most readily purchased, would have cost nearly 10 times as much in 1980 dollars.^{^[75]} And in the same way we might say that the goods and services we consumed in 1925, including food from the farm, would have run to more that 5 times as much in 1980 dollars.^{^[76]} To be sure, a schoolmaster’s family in 1980 with over $13,500 in hand after income taxes, Social Security deductions, insurance, and savings—some may have spent a good deal more—had quite another mix of commodities to choose from, some transformed and others wholly new, relative prices of the principal groups greatly altered. Such a family could hardly have lived in our way, had they wished to, as they wouldn’t have. Nor are they at all likely, in my judgment, to have lived so well, although less laboriously. (For Mother and Father, to be sure, much of the extra work served as recreation, or renewal.)

Farming operations were considerably influenced by the birth of two sons, as by Uncle Percy’s death in April 1917; he was killed falling from an apple tree. With the passing years, Grandma and Grandpa Shafer were less active. In 1914, sales from the farm remained at about $400, dropping only to about $350 in 1915, with the value and volume of sales of strawberries rising to new peaks. Baby Edwin, as I hope to tell elsewhere, was left at the house safe in his crib until some point during the summer of 1915, and his mother worked hard. But in 1916, with a second child—and a first child on the move—she had little time for gardening; no strawberries were sold, sales of both raspberries and cherries fell off, and total sales dropped correspondingly to only one-third of the peak amount, though prices were up. Thereafter, sales began to rise again, more in value than in volume, exceeding $300 in both 1919 and 1920, when eggs first appeared in the accounts. But they were sharply off in 1921-22, when only asparagus, eggs, and hens were sold, to about $125.

There the account stops; I doubt sales ever recovered. Strawberries and hay—the two big items in earlier years—were not sold in such quantity after 1919. Yet some produce, notably asparagus, was still marketed for years. Orchards were cared for, and the crop picked and dealt with one way or another. Inertia had a lot to do with it; Nature’s and that of Mother and Father, who were loath to let things go. With two growing boys at table, they could use, strawberries and asparagus aside, about as much garden as ever, notably large plantings of Bonny Best late tomatoes, Hearts o’ Gold muskmelons, and Golden Bantam corn, the full range including some items I have not mentioned before, e.g. leaf lettuce, celery, radishes, spinach, pumpkins, butter beans, Hubbard squash, carrots, onions, cabbage, horseradish—it was planted down by the south orchard—and turnips, or else rutabaga. They didn’t keep so many hens, rented the field south of the tracks, usually on shares. In the mid-twenties it would lie fallow a couple of years growing up to quack grass, wild oats, “pussley” (purslane), sandburrs, goldenrod, ragweed, Canada thistle, and—everywhere, it appeared—milkweed. It pained Father to see that. So with a view to resuming cultivation, he at length decreed that the family adjourn every evening for a couple of hours after supper from late July through August—that may have been as late as 1929—to hoe and pull up and rake off all those weeds, a time-consuming task over about ten acres, not accomplished without grousing from some quarters.

There was always enough to do, “and then some.” Father raised flowers—two beds of showy peonies^{^[77]} in front of the house, tall effete blue and white flags (iris) at the foot of the yard, by the drainage ditch. There was another bed of mixed flowers, among them glads, salvias, petunias, and roses, in front of the “playhouse,” and a bed of nasturtiums to the east of the “back part.” Best of all, it seemed to me then, were the blooms that took care of themselves: in the spring, violets at the east edge of the south orchard, by the road, near where Greatgrandfather Martin was said to have burnt wood to make charcoal; the choke cherry tree on Laraway Road by the foot of the drive; lilies of the valley encroaching on the lawn in the shade of the northwest corner of the house; two lilac bushes, one by the north side of the “playhouse,” the other down the drive on the east side; a flowering currant bush outside the dining room window. (The orchards in bloom were somehow too overpowering to enjoy.) In the summer, a spiraea bush and beds of pinks across the driveway come into bloom, a catalpa tree, with bell-shaped white blossoms (afterwards a mess of pods in the grass), a snowball bush down by the drive, and wild roses on the other side of Laraway Road, across from the old hickory tree. The list could be extended to include many others from dandelion through the clover, vetch, and black-eyed susans to milkweed and ragweed.

One new task was added in l924-25, the first planting of seedlings furnished free by the state, of native white pine. These were transplanted to the higher ground along the road east of the railroad. Later on we planted Ponderosa pine, originally from California, which we moved to a wasteland by the grove south of the railroad. The gooseberry bushes had to be pulled up; an extension agent said they were subject to a disease that attacked the pines.

Asparagus and, while sold, strawberries and bush fruits were taken to market, to Daane and Witters as before, for a time to the Drake Market, at 751 Wealthy Street, and then to J. Kos and Company (John and Hendrika Kos), another grocery for the “carriage trade,” at 324 Terrace Avenue (the first street west of Madison Avenue) north of Wealthy Street. In the early 1920’s sour cherries were still sold to a cannery. Other products—tree fruits, garden vegetables, eggs and hens—were taken from 1916 on mainly by grocers, notably the Klunder brothers, who well into the 1920’s toured the near countryside once a week buying and selling; their headquarters was a grocery on the west side of Kalamazoo Avenue, just north of Adams Street. Neighbors in the country continued to buy produce occasionally, and all the hay and grain sold off the place.

Prices received dropped generally in l9l4-l5, recovering in l9l6-l7 and rising sharply in l9l8-l9, with mixed results in l920. In general, prices paid the farmer moved with the consumer price index. There were wide seasonal differences in those days, when grocers carried chiefly local produce; receipts varied somewhat with the proportion marketed early at top prices. That also is reflected in the rise in prices (average unit values) of asparagus and the principal fruits sold between 1913 and 1920, as computed from the household accounts (see table on the next page.

Average Unit Values of Selected Commodities

Sold from the Farm in 1913-20

(in dollars)

Product Unit 1913 1914 1915 1916 1917 1918 1919 1920

Asparagus dozen bunches .77 .57 .72 .77 .69 .64 1.09 1.36

Strawberries quart .16 .14 .10 .— .15 .24 .23 .—

Cherries bushel — 1.90 1.53 1.95 1.95 3.25 4.58 4.11

Raspberries quart .15 .12 .11 .12 .— .— .28 .37

Apples bushel

summer .78 .77 .53 .96 .— 1.05 1.50 .97

fall and winter .95 .76 .— .— .— 1.29 1.33 .93

Memories of the farm are evoked by two scenes (following p. ***), both photographed, I rather think, by Father, who had a weakness for the soft effects obtainable on a lightly overcast morning (cf. p. ***, below). The view of the house dates from the winter of 1922/3 or not long after. A “play-house,” built for Art and me, is vaguely visible to our left in the background. (As you might expect, it will be used in fact for storage.) Off stage, farther to the left, are the grape vines. Back of the play-house at the top of the hill stood the first house on the place, put up by Thomas Martin in 1864. (Many of the hewn timbers he reused when building the present house.) A boy may kick up potsherds there, wandering among the apple trees. Just back of the play-house, presumably from the old garden, grows a clump of rosemary. Just beyond is the row of firs (some of them visible) set out by Mother and Father after their honeymoon.

The outside of the farm house had changed little in the two decades since the Shafers began coming out in the summer, indeed not at all on the sides we see, except that the side porch to our left has been screened in. The only big change made so far, I don’t know when, was to add the “back part” at our left, for a “summer kitchen” and lumber room, with shelves. The “slop pail” that holds kitchen waste is kept there, using an enamel basin placed upon an old washstand. To the stoop come the cats, hoping to get fed.

Just visible, in front of the screened-in porch is the pump. The well taps a spring where water was drawn at one time. We do without any plumbing. The backhouse is at our extreme left; we call it the “pomme-garten,” I suppose from the Rheinfränkisch heard as a boy by John Shafer. The metal plate in the snow, some way toward us, is the top of a new acetylene system, installed in summer 1922,^{^[78]} to provide gas light to the house, superseding the familiar kerosene lamps. Farther to our left and somewhat toward us, off the scene by the path to the barn, lies beneath the snow the cold frame where tomato (and cabbage?) plants will soon begin incubating in flats. The hitching post in the middle foreground would shortly be taken out.

The tree in the left foreground, is a Jonathan apple tree planted by Greatgrandfather Martin, probably about 1880, when he built the house. This and two other Jonathan trees of the same date, one back of the photographer, one at his right, are still going strong, though so tall it is hard to spray them, and apples must be picked from a long ladder.

Out of the picture to our left, near the photographer, is the ice house; to our right, also out of the picture, the spot, sheltered by several young firs, where the three (or four?) improved Langstroth beehives are placed in season; in winter they are stored in the front part of the ice house. Ice is kept below ground at the back; the cakes are set in layers, each layer covered with sawdust.

The second photograph, mounted in an album with the caption “The Northern Spy—Blossom Time,” is of about the same time—say, 1925. (It, too, is taken with the Graflex.) “The” Northern Spy, in the left foreground, was planted not long after 1900, to replace an older tree, I believe. The tart fruit is picked last (as noted earlier) and eaten from mid-winter till well on into spring. The tree stands on the west side of the orchard on the hill. We are looking west of south, across the railroad track—which along here runs below the slope of the land—to some scrub trees. The trace behind the Northern Spy is the path from the house over the hill to the garden on the bottom land to the west. Nearest us at our right is another tree—I’m not sure of what kind—planted by Thomas Martin at about the same time he set out the Jonathan trees mentioned above. The tree visible at the far right would be the Talman Sweet (or Sweeting), also of his planting, though rather later. Standing near the south end of the grape vines is a tree, of roughly the same age, bearing Primates, greenish-yellow summer apples with “water spots” under the skin. On the other side of the railroad, beyond the farm crossing, stands a tree bearing Snowapples (Pommes de Neige, or Fameuses), with the whitest of flesh, soft and tasteless. That was planted years before the railroad went through, probably soon after the great windstorm that blew down the sugar bush, or at about the same time as the Jonathans.

The trees planted by Thomas Martin bore more than enough for a family; plantings by the Shafers and Father early in the 1900’s were inspired by a hope, only partly realized, of producing a saleable crop.^{^[79]} Many varieties Father may well have known in his youth when working for an apple grower— Baldwin, Steel’s Red Winter (earlier Red Canada), Wagener, Dutchess (of Oldenburg), Rhode Island Greening, (Esopus or Newton) Spitzenberg (also known as Spitzenburg), late Strawberry, and Gravenstein, the first three named along with the old Jonathan trees accounting for much of the crop.^{^[80]} Some had been introduced later: Wealthy Stark, Grimes Golden, McIntosh, Shiawassee Beauty, the insipid Wolf River, and the despised Gano and Ben Davis, much like, but inferior to the Jonathan. Except for Jonathan and McIntosh, all these varieties would soon begin to give ground to those, notably the Delicious, that have since come to dominate the national market.

The birth of a first, then a second child precluded summer outings for Mother and Father in 1914-18. But in 1915, Father, along with A.H. Holmes, accepted an invitation from the Spains to visit them at an 18 acre island owned by a man called. Blaine, in Mace-Day (now Lotus) Lake, at the northwest corner of Waterford Township, north of Pontiac. Father arrived on Monday 16 August, via the Michigan Central slow train for Detroit, which dropped him at the resort village of Windiate.^{^[81]}

The Spains came to fetch him in a “brand new” Ford, which Dr. Spain had “trained to hit only the high places” on the road, called “execrable, otherwise ‘rotten,’ muddy, hilly, rough, and full of pitch holes.” Time had passed, and the Spain girls had “grown entirely out of my recollection;” Dorothy, the eldest, tall and big-boned like her father, had just finished high school. As was soon to be seen, she had “a very regular caller” driving a car: “he sends that Auto some, too.” The parents also were altered. Dr. Spain had “grown fleshy,” diminutive Mrs. Spain was thinner, though she was looking “but little older… her disposition as sunny as ever.”

Guests were always coming and going—twelve for dinner one night. The Spains were, said Father, “somewhat like the Powers’, best pleased when they have a crowd around,” then added, “though I think that the girls do not enjoy so much extra work.” But Father and Mr. Holmes had their privacy, each with a tent to himself. Father proposed—in vain—taking his meals at the Hotel Windiate.

The three letters that he wrote home (he also sent three postcards) during his ten-day stay allow us a rare chance to overhear him express his feelings during this time. The first letter he began on 18 August, at 5.30 in the morning; as he said, “My ranch habits still cling.” He had passed a chill night on a cot; the wind blew from the north, the tent had no sod-cloth, and Mr. Holmes, who had arrived first, had “appropriated the extra comfortable,” for he was “no warmer blooded than of yore.” Father closed, after a chat with Mr. H., at 8 o’clock, when breakfast was ready. Other mornings he went on rising with the sun, “wandering” in the hours till breakfast.

The main occupation, shared with Mr. Holmes, was taking photographs along the lakes, Mace-Day being one of a chain. On the 19th, Father reported, they rowed to Waterford, about two miles, taking pictures

…spending about half an hour on each picture. He is the “limit” as you know when it comes to picture composition, but I like it, we have plenty of time and I am always learning something in that.

On the 20th, they went out after a breakfast of blue gill, at about 9 o’clock:

The time seems ideal for pictures, soft hazy light, no sharp shadows. I don’t know how my pictures will come out, rather doubtful. I usually forget something when I manipulate the camera.

They spent the day at it:

How many do you think we took? Just five two in the A.M. and three in the P.M. We spent from half an hour to an hour, I think, in composing some of them. Don’t know about my judgment about exposure. I am so decidedly amateurish that I presume that they won’t amount to much. I have been giving way to my old obsession, stepping down and increasing the time. I seem to have some trouble sometimes with the release of the shutter.

These humble reflections, which he would hardly have shared with anyone else, suggest or echo exchanges with Mother (as well as with Mr. H.); skills came easy to her, as they did not to him. And indeed his Blaine Island photographs, added near the end of the 1906 album, show care but lack sharpness and contrast. To be sure, such effects were in vogue.

Photography was interrupted on the 21st, when Mr. Holmes was “seized with a very serious attack of what seems to be—appendicitis, I should imagine—” remaining in great pain during the day. He had had several such attacks in the last half year, and the son of Mr. Blaine, a doctor—who very likely had come up to the lake to spend the weekend—examined Mr. Holmes and urged him to go at once to Detroit for an operation. Father, hesitant to advise, believed from the first that his friend “ought to go slowly.” The crisis once past, Mr. H. decided to wait until he was back in Grand Rapids.

Father also tried fishing, with small luck. During the afternoon of the 19th the Spains, Mr. H., and he went to try for blue gill, bringing back 32:

…but yours truly did not figure much in the catching. It isn’t my kind of fishing anyhow. We have just finished getting outside of most of the catch…

he wrote the next morning. “To get outside of” for “to eat” is a curious expression I don’t remember hearing away from home, but Jamie was pleased to hear it used just the other day (late February 1980).^{^[82]} Father also tried his kind of fishing, “the casting game,” with no better result. “Plenty of frogs for bait but the bass don’t rise.”

He found the lakes agreeable, and ideal for the Spains—convenient to Detroit—but was less taken with them than Mr. H. (an avid bluegill fisherman):

H. is very favorably impressed with a certain location over on the south side of one of the lakes in this chain, but I am not interested. This is all right for people from D., but I think that G.R. folks can do better. The lakes are pretty and there is quite a diversity of scenery etc. but nothing can wholly atone for the lack of the “big” lake.

Father may also have felt rather overshadowed by the Spains.

He took note of home news, first, “progress in farming operations”:

I should think that they would get after those raspberries. I suppose that looks like work. The tomatoes certainly made a jump after I left. I had no idea that there would be any ripe so soon.

Even so it was late for tomatoes; usually the first had ripened by 3 August, Grandpa Shafer’s birthday. And the farm accounts show a late season—first asparagus sold at the end of April, first strawberries on 23 June, first cherries on 1 July, the second latest from 1908 to 1920; in 1917, things were a day or two later still. A cool season, with a good deal of rain, also at Blaine Island. It may be added that sales from the farm had stopped some days before Father left for his little outing, although Percy was doubtless about, except for two bushels of summer apples (Primate or Dutchess), sold on 20 August.

On the 23rd Father expressed to Mother his great pleasure “that you are making some of those proposed visits, calls, etc. It is a good thing all around, keep it up.” (I wonder upon whom she was reluctantly to call?) Once again I hear the echo of a muted dialogue, this one about Mother’s disinclination to perform social duties.

Finally, a word on family logistics:

So far as I know at present I shall be at home as planned on Fri. [the 27th], and move [to town] Sat., perhaps you had better find out if we can get Ploeg’s light wagon on the occasion.

Four years later, in 1919, Mother and Father judged that their little boys were big enough to be taken on an outing—not a boating trip, to be sure; they would have concluded, rightly, that Art and I were too restless and quarrelsome for that. Instead, they went to stay at J.H. Howard’s cabin at Herring Lake, where we flourished. And the family passed a month or more there each of the next three summers, or through 1922; in a few later years, staying only some days.

The cabin stood on the east side of the lake in a clearing in the woods not far up from the water. The amenities were those we prized—the sounds of the woods, a view of the lake, the absence of neighbors. The cabin was walled with untreated boards, and there were chinks and knot-holes that let in light. We slept on straw-filled ticks—Mother might say, “It’s time to hit the straw”—in a wide double-decker bunk built in along the north wall. Art and I slept on top. We cooked on the shore and ate in front of the cabin, seated on plank benches. Our dining table was also of planks; they were notched on the side to keep count of big fish caught. Fish not used were lightly salted, wrapped in a sack hoisted to hang from a limb. We walked far into the woods for our private needs, disturbing the insects amongst rotting leaves and pine needles. Sometimes I gathered wintergreen to chew while thus occupied.

Hoping to recount elsewhere my memories of camping days, I restrict myself here to giving glimpses of how they seemed to Mother, reflected in her letters home. She wrote to keep in touch, reporting on weather, crops, visits paid and received, with an occasional description of camp life, and a comment about things back at the farm. Letters only from 1920-21 seem to have survived; I have selected several for quotation.

On Saturday 31 July 1920 the family set out by an early train—due to leave while it was still dark—arriving late in the morning. One item of unfinished business left at the farm, mentioned in the postcard sent on arrival, was to deal with an expected shipment of a swarm of bees, long overdue. The first letter related our doings on arrival, which I shall tell later from memory, went on with the poor cherry crop, scabby Dutchess apples, and dinner brought to camp by Mrs. Howard and Mason: stew, “lettuce sandwiches,” black raspberries, sugar and jelly roll cake, and three quarts of coffee with “plenty of cream and sugar.” Afterwards:

It was nice and warm in the sun on the beach but when the sun got low it began to get cold and we climbed into our woolen blankets and slept till seven o’clock this morning. To-day we haven’t done anything but eat and loaf. We’re going out for a walk pretty soon to keep from going to sleep. We got some new potatoes here for $1.50 a half bu. Most everybody has new potatoes so guess we can get all we want. We are going to get our mail with Mr. Hansen in place of Mortenson, as it is about half a mile nearer. They have had plenty of rain here and crops are looking fine. There are about 40 people down in the hotel at the end of the lake, but as they wear white shoes they can’t get off the porch except when they go in bathing.

Mother closed with some instructions on any correspondence about the bees and with the notation, “Well we’re going out to see what the prospect is for blackberries.”

Arthur Kraft’s hotel stood near the east end of a row of cottages, the remodeled company housing of the old sawmill. The tenants, mostly from about Chicago, kept to themselves, though J. H. H. seemed to be well posted on all their doings. Besides the hotel on the south shore, one other new building could be seen, a dance hall (the White Owl) at the northeast corner of the lake, dark and quiet except on Saturday night. Aside from these buildings hardly a thing had changed in the view from the lake since well before Mother and Father first had seen it in 1909. In a decade the trees had grown a few inches; that was all. Other recent buildings—Mr. Howard’s shack and at the north side two or three year-round cottages of local people—all stood back well hidden among the trees. Nor were the middle-aged owners of these cottages much more in evidence than the hotel people and their neighbors. We had the lake almost to ourselves

About a week later the Shafers were notified to expect delivery of the bees. On Wednesday night, 11 August, Mother wrote the following instructions:

…Ed says to open the hive and take off the honey board and lay the case of bees, unopened, just as they come on top of the frames, then put cover on hive without honeyboard and leave them 24 hours, then open the hive and give the bees in the hive a good smoking, also those in the cage and put the cover on the hive and leave them. After two or three days take cage off and put on honey board. If they fight I don’t know anything to do except to smoke them all again.

That was all the letter, except for a note on food:

We had a fine johnny cake for dinner today. Mr. Holmes said it was better than most of them baked in a stove and this one was baked out doors in the wind in a reflector baker like this.^{^[83]}

A drawing followed. Short sprawling letters from Art and me were enclosed, mine boasting about a bass. Note that Art was writing a letter at 4 years old. Although small for his age, he was in other ways advanced.

At next writing, 14 August, Mother acknowledged letters from home, including an instalment of Grandpa’s illustrated saga for the boys of life on the farm, asked the folks not to worry about the bees: “…if they come through they will and if they don’t they won’t and that’s all there is to it.” Then the weather:

…Wish you could get some of the rain we are getting. There was a very heavy storm (electric) out over Lake Michigan all Thursday afternoon we could see it but didn’t get any. But about 6.30 that night it began to rain here, there was no thunder or wind but it just drizzled all night and Friday until about two o’clock. Then it stopped but didn’t clear up any. This morning (Sat. morning) it doesn’t rain but there is a very heavy fog and mist almost like a rain. The fog horn at Frankfort booms three times a minute and has been at it since some time in the night.

Art and I were getting along in spite of rain:

They have five or six nice wooden boxes that we had our groceries packed in and some that we found on the beach and they can play train & boat and automobile to their heart’s content and not get scolded because they scratch the floor or mar the furniture.

In other respects, too, Mother was content:

The rain has been quite obliging so far as it stops about meal time and we get out and cook and then eat in the house. Yesterday we fried two pans full of fish and boiled potatoes. Well guess I had better get busy and mend some holes in the children’s stockings before it clears off. As when it don’t rain can’t possibly stay in the house long enough to mend and sew.

There was still a moment for talk about wild life near camp:

We have two big cranes that live in our front yard in the lake and its lots of fun watching them wade in the water on their long legs and catch fish. Saw a flock of wild duck on the lake the other night. They say in the fall that in the early morning the middle of the lake will be black with wild duck. There are two big flocks of partridge live near us in the woods and we scare them up most every morning.

Then she closed: “Well fog is all gone, sun will be shining pretty soon so bye till next time.”

On Thursday 19 August she began on the dry, warm weather, observed that the bees must have come “if they were going to send them in time for next year,” mentioned a visit by the youngest Howard son Walter and his family from Detroit, added that fishing was “some better”: “Arthur got a black bass that broke his fish pole and Ted lost a nice one that wasn’t well hooked.”

The first news on Monday 23 August, when the final letter was written, was again about weather—welcome rain followed by even more welcome cool weather. “The days are glorious, the air is as clear as a bell...” We went over to the Big Lake, where we could

see the lighthouse and pier at Frankfort almost as clearly as though we were only blocks away in place of [about five] miles. The lake was very calm this morning and Lake Michigan scarcely had a ripple on its surface so we went out the channel and rowed down the beach about half a mile and called on the Mortensons. The road is very sandy and Mr. Holmes can’t walk on in.

A rare day, she observed. Later in the week we were to have dinner with the Mortenson’s, whose house overlooked the “Big Lake,” and soon after we must have returned to the farm and school.

The 1921 outing lasted five weeks; we came up on 28 July and went back on 1 September. I should rather like to quote all nine letters, none so very long, but shall summarize, skip, and pick out some passages. The second was about arrival, dinner at the Howards’—Mother and Father did “not like to impose,” but Luty Howard said it would be more work to take it to the cabin. So we shared a “nice dinner of bacon and creamed potatoes and canned peaches and cookies and lemon pie.” A long night’s sleep. On the 29th, we rowed over “to see the big lake again,” and the day again just passed. Mr. Howard’s apples—chiefly Northern Spy and Hubbardston (Nonesuch)—looked “beautiful.”

The fourth letter, of Sunday 7 August, is mostly about a trip the Howards took to Grand Rapids, weather and crops, and Jessie Sparks’ recipe for pickles. On camp life Mother said:

We had two good messes of nice sweet corn this week and some fish and lots of blackberries. The berries are getting smaller and need rain. We haven’t been fishing since Friday as the wind blows too hard, it is blowing like sixty to-day and we can hear the big Lake pounding. It isn’t cold yet but if the wind changes into the north it probably will be, so far the weather has been fine…

The next letter, of Wednesday 10 August, remarked that we had sweet corn from the Hansons, and cucumbers from the Howards; no tomatoes, though. Mother hoped “the bees make some honey from the buckwheat,” grown in a field between the cherry orchard and the chicken coop. The honey, strong and dark, we liked almost as well as buckwheat flapjacks. Some of the ripe grain was cut and given to the hens to peck at. Father encouraged them to “work for” their food—so assuring that the hens we ate would be fit, if not fat—for which purpose he also grew sunflowers, hanging them up in the coop in the cold season so that the hens could pick the seeds out only by jumping. In warm weather they got enough exercise foraging about the barn.

Grandma Shafer, only 72 but heavy and slow, had walked west down the road to the Ryans’, opposite the Ploegs’, less than a half mile, to get some sewing done. Mother commented that it was “quite a walk for you…” continuing, “Where do they put so many people in that little house? Don’t see how she would have time to do much sewing…”

Mr. Holmes, in the hospital with a broken leg, hadn’t answered Father’s letters. Mr. Howard was concerned over the price offered for apples: “It will cost him 40 or 50 cents a bushel to pick and deliver them so he won’t make so very much for growing if he has to pick them and board the pickers.”

As to our goings on: “Arthur wrote about all the news yesterday and Ted says he is going to write tomorrow, so it don’t leave much for me to write.” But she had a story, about blackberries:

They say the Hotel at the end of the lake is full, they are out every day scouring the country far and wide for blackberries which they make into jam for the Hotel. There are two big patches of tame berries near here. One of the patches belongs to Mrs. Howard’s sister [Mrs. Mike Gavigan] and is almost beside the house, yet some people from the Hotel came up there one day and went to pick and were quite sassy when they were requested to leave.

According to Mrs. Howard, so many people from town had been picking berries that the farmers hadn’t enough to put up for winter. Mrs. Trollope would have understood, not only the freedom taken to pick anywhere—as we too did in the woods—but also the taste for blackberries, she observed (in her notebooks), “I am almost sure I shall be laughed at if I say that the blackberries of North America are almost the finest fruit I ever tasted of the berry kind, but so it is.” Wild berries, I wonder, or cultivated? In any case, one form or another of rubus nigrobaccus, the wild berries being sweeter, not so fat.

On the next Sunday, the 14th, Mother wrote chiefly about weather—finally rain, blackberries again big and plentiful, a shortage of ice for sale over most of the state, the first signs of the approach of fall—“to think of plums getting ripe…beginning to have colored leaves…” She closed with the visit of Hans Hanson, who took in our mail, let us draw drinking water at his well, and sold us milk and vegetables:

…he was out for a walk and stopped to visit. He is a Dane and speaks with quite an accent, I like to hear him talk.

Perhaps Mother already had in mind trying to write something about him.

Mr. Hanson was bent over, with arthritis, very gentle, though firm in manner. Mother may have known, as I should read much later, that he had been a strong handsome young man, as told by Mr. Howard:^{^[84]}

“Big Hans” we used to call him in the days of his early prime. Hard labor has stooped him, but he was once so erect and of so commanding personality that he was selected for one of the Danish king’s bodyguard before he came to America… When vessels were loading lumber from Herring Lake pier, in the busy days of the big sawmill, Hans was almost indispensable as a helper.

On Wednesday the 17th, after acknowledging letters from home, writing of more rain—“now everybody wants sunshine for their apples”—and reporting that Luty Howard seemed better, had indeed walked part way around the lake with Mother, she told of a discovery on Monday morning, “…we found a place where no one else had been and we picked five or six quarts [of blackberries] in a little while.”

But the main event on Monday had been a social call by the handsome Mortenson girls, Carrie and Undine, who invited the family for dinner Tuesday:

So yesterday we spent the forenoon dressing up and went over there for dinner. We had a fine dinner, fried chicken, good gravy, potatoes, creamed carrots, sliced tomatoes, rolls, and butter, apple pie and coffee. After dinner we had peaches and Yellow Washington plums...about the finest eating plums I ever saw.

Mother liked and admired the Mortensons. She and Father had known them since coming to the lake in 1909, had liked their proud son Johnny, killed in the war, seldom mentioned. They were easy, quiet and—pour comble—effortlessly erect in their straight backed chairs, setting the example for unformed youth, much more apt, alas, to be influenced by evil communication—to pick up “bad language” from the two nearly grown Hanson boys, Chester and Arthur, who helped a little on the farm and worked sometimes on the state roads. The Mortensons gave us a parting gift of two bags of peaches “and about a peck of very fine Yellow Transparent apples.” Finally, the bread truck going between Manistee and Frankfort had got stuck in the soft sand by the road near the Hansons’ farm, and Father, happening by, had bought four big loaves. “So we were pretty lucky in every way yesterday.” Today it was raining, “a gentle rain from the east, so no telling how long it will last.”

The rest of the letter concerned, first a report—from J. H. H.?—of a 9-year old girl at the Hotel, a prodigy on the violin, who must practice four hours a day “and was not permitted to play with other children;” then Wilmer Howard’s new 3/4-ton truck, with which he had made $30 on Monday, by taking ripe peaches—too ripe to pack—to Traverse City and peddling them. “It is about 55 miles to Traverse, quite a trip for one day.” And there was a note on the Mortensons’ pet lamb, “which amused the boys very much”—no recollection of this.

Rain and colder, reported Mother on Monday the 22nd—49 degrees Saturday at dark, and 51 degrees Sunday—more berry-picking, and a Sunday drive with the Howards, preceded by a chicken dinner—with “biscuit, green corn, cucumbers, cabbage, apple pie, peaches and cream and coffee”—followed by a “cup of tea with sliced peaches, bread and butter, cheese, and coconut cake.” The ride, which I remember, took us to Crystal Lake,^{^[85]} Onekama, Portage Lake—“lots of rich Chicago people”—and Bear Lake. Back to camp “after having annexed two dozen eggs at 35 cents a dozen.” Mr. Holmes had finally written; he was sitting up in a wheel chair.

On the Thursday that followed, Mother reported weather, “just about ideal”; terms of sale for Mr. Howard’s apples; and fishing: on a Monday “Ed got a black bass and yesterday Ted got two and lost one.” Vegetables, canning, and letters from home.

A last letter, of Sunday the 28th, reported hot weather and “the largest bass of the season, it weighed between 3 1/8 and 3 1/4.” Mother didn’t say who caught it; evidently she did. More rain, and a visit from the Art Sparkses and their friends the Al Hammers, who had somehow found us. Saturday, more berries and fishing, “got a 3# bass,” also unattributed, once again Mother’s. Then plans for leaving on Thursday 1 September in the afternoon “if it doesn’t rain.”

Our final long stay at Herring Lake, was in the summer of 1922, again with Mr. Holmes. He had his own well-appointed tent, on a wooden platform, in a clearing nearby. He had as well his own boat in which he went out, as always, for blue-gill. Quick reactions explained his usual success; and the delicacy of the art, his pleasure. He at times took fish of more than a pound. We looked only for bass, except when we had drawn a blank. The Father might row over to a sunken log to let us try our hand with rock bass (“goggle-eyes”) as a consolation prize before calling it a day. Small boys get impatient when “nothing happens,” other than a dragonfly’s alighting on the tip of your pole (said to bring good luck). Rock bass, small and hungry, at moments perceived in action, offered effective diversion.

The next three summers we went touring in the Ford—circling the “Lower Peninsula” in 1923, to southern Ontario in 1924 to visit the “Canadian cousins,” up across the “Upper Peninsula” in 1925. I don’t recollect wondering, much less asking why we went on the road, but reasons can be supplied.

For one thing, J.H.H. decided to have a cottage built on his land at Herring Lake, in place of the primitive cabin. Mason probably had a voice in the decision, perhaps, also the Howards’ widowed daughter Ethel Travis, a schoolteacher in Chicago, who liked to come and visit of summers, but not to stay with her parents. Understandably, for J.H.H., thoughtful and charming in company, was selfish and unreasonable at home, and his frail wife was fading away. Mother and Father did not really want to vacation in a cottage, still less to interfere with Mrs. Travis or keep J.H.H. from earning something on his investment. So we stayed briefly thereafter.

Besides, one can imagine their saying, “Now that we have the machine…and the boys are growing…” They themselves may have become a little restless during a month at Herring Lake; in any case they would expect the boys to get bored, off by themselves in the woods. And very likely they added that touring would be educational.

The trip about the “Lower Peninsula” in 1923 was not quite a maiden effort. In 1922 we had motored to Herring Lake and back—two days each way—camping overnight at the state park on the Big Lake by the Muskegon channel. Apart from the one trial run, it was the first time we had stayed in a tent, making and breaking camp, if not daily, then every second or third day at most stops. We started on 25 July, going east to St. John, where we paused to eat our sandwiches and fruit before continuing nearly to Flint. We camped overnight in a country schoolyard. The next day we drove up to Saginaw Bay and round it to East Tawas, where we stayed for two days in the state park. On the 30th we turned to the west to Onaway and Black Lake, a short drive; on the way we stopped to pick six quarts of huckleberries. Our route shifted to the north on the 31st, past Cheboygan, on to the Straits of Mackinac on 31 July. We were there on Saturday 2 August, when President Harding died, the first time I registered an event in U.S. political life. There must have been something that struck me in the reaction of Mother and Father, for I recall the time of day when the news spread, mid-afternoon, and the orientation of the tent to camp and the water. After a couple of days of seeing the sights—last of all a trip by ferry to Mackinac Island, then less visited and more fashionable—we started back down to Green Lake, arriving by 7 or 8 August. There we tented a couple of days near the lake, visited the music camp at Interlochen, and one morning went to pick “crackle-berries,” so called, like shrunken dried-up huckleberries, growing in a burnt-over field by the railroad. Thence off for a week to ten days at Herring Lake. As I recollect, we camped out in the clearing in which we had left the car in 1922. And it was time to go home.

For this trip, as for later ones, no letters have come down, just a few postcards. Mother and Father were right to trust their judgment and feelings. Sitting still does not come easy to boys, but they knew that and drove a short day, with a long stop at noon by the side of the road. And touring was more fun then. Traffic was generally light, a road wound—or sometimes ran straight, as on the narrow paved strip, slightly trending and occasionally jogging south from west of St. John’s to Owosso, Flint, Lapeer, almost to Port Huron—through country, woodland, villages and towns, not through its own green camouflaged corridor. We bumped, or coasted, along at only 25 to 30 miles an hour, watching ahead for cattle and hay wagons. We had time to look around. There was an element of adventure as well. Road signs were still infrequent. Had we taken the right turn back there? How far to the next town? And how to follow the road through town? There was some unavoidable guesswork, for Father did not like to ask, his reluctance provoking occasional mild altercation. What would camp be like? Mother and Father of course had an eye for crops, livestock, new buildings, weather, old landmarks. They enjoyed meeting other campers, made some friends, notably one couple called Knickerbocker. As I recollect, Art and I too, found it stimulating too. Maybe one was more easily amused than children are now.

The next summer we started in late July, some time after choir camp, my first season, on a longer trip into Ontario, still going slow. We drove a day to Flint, this time camping in a public park (in town, if memory serves), going to just over the Huron River, by car ferry, and a few miles beyond Sarnia, camping at dusk in an orchard. That evening Father acquired rutabaga seed of the farmer. The third day we came to Cousin Robert Snell’s at his gore farm^{^[86]} outside Norwich. We camped in a grove, near a stream at the back of his farm, where we stayed for ten days to two weeks. One day we were shown about his creamery-butter factory run by Roberts’ lively daughter Ethel. Then we spent a few days in the village of Waterford, stopping with the Jack Marshalls—Jack’s wife Myrtle was the elder daughter of Cousin Robert. Jack Marshall owned and operated the Boston Creamery, confusingly so-called, being in Waterford. The village of Boston is nearby; we drove there to call on (perhaps stay overnight with) Jack’s mother. Finally we stayed over a couple of nights at Woodstock with Cousin Mary Snell Swance and her husband Jake and passed an afternoon with Father’s second cousins on his mother’s side, Mary Alice Nobbs and Emma Edith Nobbs Treffry, also her husband George, at Hawtrey, near Norwich.

Recollections of our stay in Ontario belong with other surviving memories of childhood. Mother and Father renewed acquaintance made in 1913, talked about family matters, out of my hearing. Since 1913 there had been only an occasional letter—and a visit by Cousin Ethel Snell in 1922—but connections were quickly reestablished. The experience gave a great deal of pleasure to Father, and that in turn gratified Mother, who dropped into these relationships as if born to them.

On the way back, on 23 August, we drove through a memorable hail storm, before stopping overnight with the Spains at Kingsville, where they were for the summer; in passing went to see Jack Miner’s bird refuge. Finally, we made an afternoon call on Father’s only surviving uncle, John Snell, living with a grandchild at Marysville, south of Port Huron. We returned home late in August.

Our tour in 1925, the last till 1929, began earlier, in mid-July. Mother was driving somewhat faster, in our new, and more commodious, Dodge touring car. We drove quickly back past familiar scenes to the Straits—Hart,^{^[87]} Traverse City, Petoskey, Mackinaw City, Mackinac Island. Across the straits we were in new territory. The first stop was Sault Ste. Marie, where we took a day’s look at the traffic in the locks, then across to Munising on Lake Superior, to see the Painted Rocks. Exploring a short-cut from Munising south, we made a false start; returning on our tracks, we found a road through the state park, which led us into a regal stand of virgin timber. We began seeing smoke, finally approached a sizeable forest fire. Rabbits, birds, perhaps a deer, began to appear, racing for safety. A new blaze flared up at our rear. The rangers were of opinion we just might get through later, if one wooden bridge hadn’t burned out, but Father prudently decided to go back to Munising, and start over.

From there we took a country road farther west, to Rapid River, then back to Manistique. We stopped a couple of days to fish at Lake Manistique, some six miles long and between two and somewhat more than three miles wide, and nearly 16 square miles in area, nowhere more than 25 feet deep. Following directions received from someone who had been camping alongside, we rowed far up the lake, took our bearings, and dropped anchor. We were close; another party chugged up a little later, dropped anchor twenty yards away, and began to catch pike one after another. We took only sizeable perch. But we had the consolation, when a storm came up, of being towed back by our fortunate rivals; else we should have had to beach the boat and tramp back in the downpour.

From Lake Manistique, we went via Manistique and Rapid River to Escanaba and Iron Mountain, and north to Covington, Houghton, and the Calumet and Hecla copper mines. Shafts went down over a mile, too deep to be worked at low postwar copper prices; the only activity was reprocessing tailings. Then to Fort Wilkins, at the very tip of Keewenaw Point, on a hot day, plagued with flies. On the way back we drove by way of Marquette, stopping at beautiful Presque Isle to see the Spains for a day or so. Dr. Spain had left the Detroit school system (to which he would later return as the deputy superintendent) and he was then teaching at North State Teacher’s College. At the end of the first week in August, we started home, after leaving the Spains, partly retracing our steps. The trip took less than a week.

This jaunt reinforced, I believe, the taste Mother and Father were developing for motor tours. There was indeed as much of interest as could readily be found over such a short distance—low mountains, rocky Lake Superior, forests, the Soo, the mines. Family duties keeping them close to home for the next three summers, they may on winter’s evenings have looked forward to the time when they could set out for new, more distant places.

A few items of the last years of the period remain to be noted. In the spring of 1922, as already mentioned, Cousin Ethel Snell paid a second visit to 311 Lyon Street.^{^[88]} She was then 31, fetching, a pretty woman with warm brown eyes and long lashes, a voice gurgling and bubbling up and an agreeable speech, owing something to the many Scottish settlers about Norwich. She could be briefly coquettish, though some years running her father’s creamery, very professionally, were already visible in muscle and girth. I had heard talk of her engagement to a dentist in Toronto, but nothing would come of it; perhaps she felt her father needed her too much, or in the end she couldn’t give up her independence, or the dentist concluded she was too much to take on. I wondered whether she was in love with her brother-in-law Jack; there is precedent. But there was nothing at all between them, I believe, then or later, except a bond of unavowed sympathy. In the absence of a record, or any recollection, of what went on during her visit, I can only pass on the guess that Ethel again met the Powerses and Shafers, again toured the high school. Her visit confirmed a specially close relation with Mother and Father, which would endure till the end of Mother’s active life.

On a summer day in 1923, the Powerses held in their back yard the wedding of Marion to Albert Bates, mentioned earlier. I recall only the scene, that of our first meeting Albert and Edwin, Mr. Bates’ children by his first wife.

In 1924 the family exchanged visits with the Percy Snells. If I recall correctly, we drove to Cadillac in the winter, perhaps over Washington’s birthday which fell on a Monday—just after a bad ice storm. The following spring, or fall, Percy and his wife Carrie came down for a return visit, of which, again, I recall no detail. Whatever interest Carrie had was not apparent. She was plain, ruddy, and fleshy; her demeanor was sedate and domestic. Percy, a first cousin of Father, was angular American Gothic, with salient Adam’s apple, pursed lips, but also a quizzical expression in his slightly protuding eyes that set him apart. He was gifted with plants, handtools, machinery, and wild animals,—i.a., a proficient deer hunter. In spite of looking like a deacon he was wryly observant and would surely have relished a drink or improper story, when in the right company. He was then going on 48 (his birthday was in May), and enjoying his greatest prosperity; besides a greenhouse he had an automobile agency (Packard? Cadillac?), as I remember. He always seemed to hit it off with Mother and Father,^{^[89]} and they were fond of him. Blood is indeed thicker than water, but there was also a certain mutual understanding, which puzzled me when I thought of it.

In February 1923 came the first of a series of deaths, that of Mother’s aunt Ellen, widow of “Uncle Mase.” In April 1924 the time clock chimed once for Mother. She went to the funeral services for Julia Barlow’s aunt Hetty; a note of acknowledgement from Julia (Mrs. Arthur Denison) was written on the back of a short printed account of the death of her second stepson, also named Arthur, who had grown up in the neighborhood; he was lost at sea in February, aged 30.

Yet another note of anno domini had been struck for the death of Luty Howard on 8 December 1923 at the age of 58, a gentle woman, long unwell. Mrs. Howard née Hunt, was born near Herring Lake on 6 September 1865. Her parents, recent settlers, dissatisfied with the poor farming land, returned to Ohio, near the lake port of Ashtabula. In 1880, J.H.H., having tried his hand for three years at teaching district school in the village of Conneaut, Ohio, a short way to the east of Ashtabula, was apprenticed to the firm that printed and published the Ashtabula News. The agreement, I might note, read that the firm was to provide “board and ordinary washing and to pay him fifty dollars at the end of the first year, seventy-five dollars at the end of the second year, and one hundred dollars at the end of the third year.” During his apprenticeship he met Luty Hunt; in 1884, when his term was completed, they were married. They moved to Brooklyn, where he worked as a printer for several years, I believe on the Eagle. But he suffered from asthma, and they came to Benzie County in 1890 in the hope that he would find relief, as in time he did.

In January 1924 he sent a long letter about the circumstances of her death. Terribly lonely that winter, passed on the farm, he resolved to get away for the next one, and came to Grand Rapids, staying mostly at the Y, writing verse and hobnobbing with cronies. A favorite saying was that the world was “a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel” (a sentiment of Horace Walpole). He struggled to regain composure and detachment.

One of his friends did a feature story about him in The Grand Rapids Herald (28 December 1924) entitled: “The Bard of Benzie Hibernates in G.R. with his Muse”:

Besides writing verse, and following such obtruse [sic] hobbies as astronomy, chess and Kantian philosophy in his leisure moments, Mr. Howard has found time to raise a family of four children, and establish one of the important apple orchards of Benzie county.

His physical prowess was noted:

It is Mr. Howard’s boast that he can outswim any or all of his three sons; as his farm lies half a mile from Lake Michigan and half a mile from Herring Lake both he and his sons have had plenty of opportunity to practice aquatic arts.

He was indeed a physical culture enthusiast, a disciple of the egregious Bernarr McFadden. He had been known to drive about by sleigh in mid-winter in his shirtsleeves, also to swim in Herring Lake after chopping an open space in the ice. On workdays in the summer he could always take a quick dip in cold water; he had installed a ram in a spring-fed stream across the road from his house and orchard, pumping water to the house, to a fishpond by one of the outbuildings, and to a large metal tank up in the orchard, used for spraying but also for cooling off. His favorite prescription for a fit society: require every adult one day a year to stand naked, exposed to view, in the town square.

I should hesitate to vouch for his knowledge of Kant. But he had read William James, whom he was fond of quoting, and something from the popular writings of Bertrand Russell. More to his tase, perhaps, were the utterances of “the great agnostic” Robert G. Ingersoll. I should imagine he was only a fair chess player—a potzer— but must have been ready for anything. Not only had he played matches on a regular basis with William C. Barnes, “the champion typesetter of America,” but had “once essayed a game with the chess master, William Steinitz.”

He had numerous friends in the newspaper business, among them Bert Leston Taylor, who had long written a “colyumn” in the Chicago Tribune (“A Line O’ Type or Two” by B.L.T.), and his successor C.W. Taylor, author of “In a Minor Key”. He had “been for many years a steady and valued contributor” to “most of the Detroit daily papers at one time or another,” especially, as I recall, the Detroit Free Press, whose best known columnist, Charles B. Lewis, known as “M-Quad,” was another of his friends.

He occasionally was talked of in a column, as when C. W. Taylor answered an inquiry “What’s become of Howard?”:

Sir, you may tell the bunch,

No news this column reaches,

And yet we have a hunch,

He’s gathering in his peaches.

That winter, sponsored by Mr. Holmes and Justice Harry C. Creswell—a well-known local character—he was initiated into “‘the bards,’ an organization that he defines as a ‘poetico-bund.’” But he had come to Grand Rapids in great part for the society of Mr. Holmes and the Snells, who had known him, and Luty, in Benzie County. He needed help not only to forget but also to remember without remorse. He may have succeeded. I recall only that he was into everything; reading our John Martin’s Book, he came across a story by a woman he had once known, and began a correspondence with her that would go on for years.

[1]As indicated by my birth certificate, which shows Grandpa Shafer as attending physician.

[2]Mother’s cousin Arthur Martin was the closest relative so called. The name, apparently popularized in England by Malory, was in use from the 16th century, although it was uncommon until well into the 19th century. Raymond is an old French name, introduced very late into England and the U.S.

[3]I remember only “Miss Marsh,” but Ruth Marsh is the one nurse of the name listed in the directory, which shows her as working at the new Blodgett Hospital.

[4]In 1916, Percy no longer appeared in the city directory.

[5]I assume; there was also a small room at the back.

[6]See Mother’s journal, entry for 4 January 1919, p. ***, below.

[7]Then almost new, though bearing the name of an older school that had stood until 1910 on the site of present Central High School. The school I attended, built in 1916, is on College Avenue at Lyon Street, on grounds left vacant when the Union Benevolent Association Home and Hospital had moved to land donated by the Blodgett family, becoming Blodgett Hospital. In the fall of 1910 through the spring of 1917, pupils from the area had attended Central Grammar School beginning with kindergarten (in a separate building) on through the eighth grade. The new Fountain Street School went only through the sixth grade. Under the “6-6” system, students then transferred to Central.

[8]The Treadways moved away by 1912/3; Heman Barlow died in August 1916, and his widow Julia is not listed in the directory of 1917. A.W. Meech had died in early 1905, and Catherine Meech had moved away. She was to live for some years thereafter.

[9]He later became foreman, then inspector. In 1928/9, The Murphys moved to 335 Lyon Street.

[10]From Division Street west to Buchanan Avenue.

^{^[11]}Will Swank’s 120 acres were part of the 160 acres of the old Squier farm Effie M. Squier inherited at her husband’s death. By the early ’80’s she had sold half of it, 40 acres to Will Swank’s father. Will, having taken care of his widowed mother, had in due course inherited the land. The 80 acres of Mrs. Squier had passed to her son Manley. Carrie kept house for him and inherited on his death.

^{^[12]}Apart from 1-tube set I was given for Christmas of 1926. I kept it in the back room upstairs on Lyon Street.

^{^[13]}She had boarded with Mrs. M.A. Ball (at 30, later 156 Lafayette Street) from 1894 to 1910, lived at 307 Lyon Street in 1912-16, and at 127 Lafayette Street in 1917-20.

^{^[14]}Elwyn Bellows. He owned “real estate interests” and a cherry orchard. The family money came from timber. J.H. Howard, The Story of Frankfort, City Council, Frankfort, Michigan, 1930, pp. 38-9 and 45.

^{^[15]}Alfred W. Holmes, born in 1833 in Wayne County; he would live to be 99, dying on 17 January 1933.

^{^[16]}A clear view of Miss Stout is to be seen in the group photograph (of 1907) following p. ***, above. Mr. Holmes looked rather like Sir Arthur Sullivan. He is shown to good advantage in the camping picutres (of 1906-12) following p. ***, above.

^{^[17]}Quotations from The Grand Rapids Press, 5 November 1924, p. 28.

^{^[18]}Before the Powers family moved in, 315 Lyon Street was let for a year or two to Noah Gohey, a mason, who followed the Veenboers. The Will Powerses were succeeded by Edith (widow of Boyd) Alexander, who long worked at Eli Cross Florists, 150 Monroe Street. With her lived her sister Maryatt C. (widow of James B.) Holmes, who kept house, and Mrs. Alexander’s very stylish daughter, Maxine, about seven years older than I, and remote.

^{^[19]}She was not in town when the first photograph was taken, having left for a year (1922/3) of study in Paris.

^{^[20]}Played with wooden rings on a board with a rim, of about the size of a card table, with pockets at the corners; vaguely like pool. He was also said to have been able to catch a housefly in flight and palm it, pretending to eat it.

^{^[21]}The Missouri Houn’ Dawg Song (of another generation), widely known from its use by Champ Clark in the election campaign of 1912.

^{^[22]}The phrase from the Anglican burial service has appeared now and again in verses, at least once in an 18th century rhyme strikingly parallel:

Ashes to ashes, and dust to dust,

If God won’t have him, the devil must.

^{^[23]}A version of the former is given in Carl Sandburg’s The American Songbag, New York, 1927. Different versions appear in other collections of the ‘20’s and the early ‘30’s. It is often referred to by the title Mad’moiselle from Armenteers (or Armentières). The latter seems to be found only in illegal fake books.

^{^[24]}In January, e.g. ratification of the 18th Amendment, the assassination of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg in Berlin, opening of the Paris peace talks, inauguration (by Geoffrey de Haviland) of the first commercial air service Paris-London.

^{^[25]}In the country the Shafers, later the Snells, took the morning Herald, which came the same day.

^{^[26]}Grand Rapids Herald, Sunday, 19 January 1919, p. 3.

^{^[27]}Jane Gibson was not one of Mother’s close friends from high school nor one of the students she had known in Ann Arbor. On the latter point I am obliged to Mr. Edward C. Loyer, Assistant Registrar of the University of Michigan.

^{^[28]}See photograph following p. ***, above.

^{^[29]}See p. ***, above.

^{^[30]}Notes for the fragment probably were made in 1921/2.

^{^[31]}Charles N. Colwell, organist and music teacher, lived, as already noted, at 106/127 North Lafayette Street from 1906/7 through 1912/3. Marguerite, his daughter, began teaching while they still lived there.

^{^[32]}And with the last known date assigned.

^{^[33]}A second Bourrée was assigned at the same time from some other text.

^{^[34]}Of 1722, title after Schweitzer; it also has been called the “Notenbuch” or “Notenbüchlein”.

^{^[35]}Mother’s copy has vanished, and the title is not catalogued in the Music Reading Room, Library of Congress; copyright date is before 1907.

^{^[36]}Of 1725, see note [34] above.

^{^[37]}“Preambulum” in the original; in a recent edition, called “Invention”.

^{^[38]}Arranged for piano by the composer in 1888; apparently no. 3, Anitra’s Dance (Anitras Tanz) also was assigned.

^{^[39]}Of unknown authorship.

^{^[40]}The last date entered in the lesson book.

^{^[41]}The only students’ names that I recall from these years are Charles Sligh, Jr., class of 1924, though I believe he did not finish; Sophie Grombacher, class of 1925, a dark, smiling girl, who seemed to me most attractive; Baxter Woodman, class of ‘26 (he, too, didn’t graduate)—from his father the Snells bought beekeeping supplies. The first of whom I have a record is Helen Field, whom Mother tutored, probably, in 1917/8.

^{^[42]}The first datable appointment is on Thursday 23 November 1922, entered in a lesson book by Effa Ellis Penfield, Constructive Music Book, copyright by her, 1922.

^{^[43]}In due course, Art was confirmed; I was not.

^{^[44]}Father was treasurer from about 1919 through 1925/6. In the late winter of that year we moved to the farm, and it became too burdensome for him to go to Central’s home games, given that he did not drive. Presumably then at his own request he was relieved, being replaced by Alfred Epps, instructor in mechanical drawing, a wry, tallish, stubborn Englishman, from about Manchester, as I recall, speech, views, and tastes still intact. Father remained for a couple of years on the Board of Control and got on well with him.

^{^[45]}On Island no. 3 in Grand River. The river was filled in later to make the islands part of the business district.

^{^[46]}Lying between Houseman and Diamond Avenues and Lyon and Fountain Streets. Houseman Avenue also had been named for the family, who will have owned a good deal of land thereabouts.

^{^[47]}Some are not at all easy to classify at sight. “Dead as a doornail,” for example, is arguably a “familiar quotation,” in common use from the mid-fourteenth through the nineteenth century in the works of well-known authors, including Shakespeare and Dickens. See N.E.D. under “dead” (32b) and Bartlett. In any case, the expression was certainly in common use in England. Yet Maurice A. Weseen, as cited by Mencken, in 1934 listed the expression as an example of American slang, and Mencken himself seemed to classify it with “nonce words.”

^{^[48]}As printed, the first line reads: “Waste not, want not, is a maxim I would teach”; the third line, “Do not let your chances like sunbeams pass you by.” The first and fourth I remember as published.

^{^[49]}Attributed to Punch, Vol. X, p. 16, 1846.

^{^[50]}From a nursery rhyme, quoted in the Opies’ Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes.

^{^[51]}The original: “One may live and learn, and be hanged and forget all.” James Howell, English Proverbs (1659).

^{^[52]}Attributed to Frank Ward O’Malley, Epigrams (c.1906), respectable usage having softened “damned” to “darn”.

^{^[53]}Another reference, which I can’t quote exactly, was to the tenacity of the family bulldog. The novel contains, by the way, a lively description of a country school of Father’s youth.

^{^[54]}Dr. Shafer might even have made the change himself, but I doubt it. The poem, first published as Chapter VIII of The Vicar of Wakefield, is included in an anthology of Goldsmith’s work found among the Shafer books. The relevant couplet was adapted from one in Young’s Night Thoughts. (Earlier still is a couplet of Dryden’s.) Father’s Autograph Album contains a different takeoff on the same couplet. Goldsmith’s poem provides, by the way, one of the early literary occurrences (1766) of the name Edwin.

^{^[55]}Another example of humor at the expense of the Irish: a photograph near the end of Down the Muskegon, showing two men pumping a railroad hand car, and the legend: “Irish express.”

^{^[56]}It is said to have appeared in Punch, Vol. XXIX, p. 19, 1855, in the order Father used.

^{^[57]}Ignacy Kunin the tailor said the same reply was current in Poland (among Polish Jews?).

^{^[58]}A knacker bought and killed old animals, notably horses, for hides, gelatin, fat, and other materials.

^{^[59]}The original read: “The trouble with people is not that they don’t know, but that they know so much that ain’t so.”

^{^[60]}Attributed to Dixon Lanier Merritt, 1879-19??. Another version with minor differences is ascribed to Anon.

^{^[61]}Terczi Frisch heard it as a girl in Austria.

^{^[62]}See below for the summer outing of 1923.

^{^[63]}The above version and Halliwell’s differ mainly in the second line, which he gives as follows: “‘Tis neither good for man nor beast.” Other versions differ in order and sense.

^{^[64]}It is just possible. The song comes from the third of the shows to feature the theme of the Mulligan Guards (The Mulligan Guards’ Chowder), which opened on Broadway in August 1879. The score was published in 1880. The words are by Edward Harrigan (1845-1911), of the highly successful team Harrigan and Hart; the music, by David Braham (1839-1905). Tony Hart had a part in the show, apparently wrote none of the music. But Father could have heard the song later. Although less famous than the Mulligan Guards March, it had a long life, even in Ireland—perhaps it was taken up by some popular singer—for a generation later the young Sean O’Casey in Dublin wrote a political ballad with the following awkward refrain:

Gather the Party round, Sinn Feiners scorning;

Let your voices roll across the floor.

The constitutional movement, now take warning,

Must go on, and on, and on, for evermore!

Martin B. Margulies, The Early Life of Sean O’Casey, The Dolmen Press, Dublin, 1970, p. 79.

^{^[65]}In the same vein Dr. Thomas Arnold (“of Rugby”) said his aim to be “if possible, to form Christian men, for Christian boys I can scarcely hope to make.”

^{^[66]}Annual changes from 1906/7 through 1918/9 are shown for each salary group and class of teachers—Father was at the top for high school teachers “under the rules”—in the state paper cited earlier: “A Study of the Salary Status of Teachers of Grand Rapids Schools Extending over a Period of Thirteen Years,” written for the School Board in 1919. Father’s salary in c. 1926 was $2,850, reported by Mother. Art recalls that it reached $3,000, almost certainly by 1928.

^{^[67]}The evidence is from Mother’s journal, on pp. *** as shown above. They had sold houses to Ira L. Allyn (229 Valley Avenue SW), Daniel E. Peppler (126 Greenfield Avenue SW), William K. Nickerson (933 Cottage Grove Avenue SE), Fred W. Pickell (607 Northgrove, later 2114 Oregon, Avenue SW), and Peter Wierenga (222 Marion Avenue SW). They may have financed a house for Louis B. Applegate (see entry for 27 January).

^{^[68]}The original 101 acres were reduced by 1.5 sold to the county in 1859 for building Paris Township school no. 5. The indebtedness on the mortgage is inferred from payments included in listed income from investments in the first trimester of 1919, given at the end of the journal notebook, on the assumption, which gives the best fit, of repayment over 20 years, beginning in the second quarter of 1915, with interest payable quarterly at an annual rate of 6 1/2%. An initial principal of $7,680, plus a modest downpayment, is in line with local land prices early in the war. If payments were made regularly through 1929, and only the interest in 1930—as seems likely—this solution is in keeping also with the interest payments made in 1931.

^{^[69]}Overall indexes are given in Historical Statistics of the United States/ Colonial Times to 1970, Part 2. Series X 495-498, p. 1004.

^{^[70]}The mortgage on the Roelofs farm, apparently for $8,500, appears to predate 22 April 1922, when Father registered a mortgage with the county. Payments in 1930-33 suggest that $5,500 was outstanding at the beginning of 1931 and interest due semiannually at the annual rate of 6%, with scheduled repayment at $500 per year, missed in 1928-30 and 1932-33 but mostly made up thereafter. The mortgage was renewed on 12 April 1949 for $1,000, to be paid over 5 years, as indicated in Father’s diary.

The mortgage, probably smaller, held on Rainy Metts’ farm seems to date from 1924 or 1925; Mother and Father stopped to see him on our summer trip northward in 1925. See pp. ***, below. The amount finally paid off in the fall of 1940 came to $3,587.51, as recorded in Father’s diary for 5 October 1940.

In addition, after Grandma Shafer’s death in January 1926, Grandpa Shafer, to simplify matters—probably on advice from Jake Steketee—deeded to Mother and Father all the real estate he owned, including the houses on Lyon Street and the farm. The transaction will have closed the books on loans earlier extended, and on Father’s purchase of the farm in 1907. See Courtship and Marriage, fns. ***, pp. ***.. Mother had already been taking over entire responsibility for his household and other expenses.

^{^[71]}In this connection, I should note that Mother and Father paid little Federal income tax in these years. Through 1916, they will have paid nothing; thereafter, a small amount, rising by the 1920’s to about $50 a year, somewhat more in the unlikely case that in 1924 or 1925 they realized part of the potential capital gains on stocks. Michigan then had no state income tax. Federal income tas rates for the period are recapitulated in Historical Statistics of the United States…, cited above, Part II, p. 1095. Supplementary information on tax schedules and average rates for various income groups through 1923 is shown in Encyclopaedia Brittanica, 13th edition, New Vol. II, pp. 422-3.

^{^[72]}Their income stood, at a guess, in the 95th percentile of U.S. family incomes, or possibly the 96th; to make a firm estimate, one would need fuller information about their income, including realized capital gains, if any, and would be obliged to take a look into the data underlying the figures in Historical Statistics of the United States…, cited above, Part I, pp. 287-88, 300-02.

^{^[73]}See Historical Statistics of the United States/Colonial TImes to 1970, Part I, p. 213. The prices of a number of commodities in the series are lacking for 1908.

^{^[74]}Ibid., p. 211. Moreover, prices had gone up by 11% from 1904 to 1908, thus bringing the increase to 119% for the 21 years 1904-25. The increase in the cost of living, on the other hand, apparently was less than 110%, as for example, in Paul Douglas’ index with weights of 1901/2; converted to base 1903/4, the index number for 1925 is only 208. See Historical Statistics…, cited above, Part I, p. 212. His index excludes rent, for which data do not go back of 1913; with rent included, the number for 1925 should be some points lower. Of course the BLS and Douglas used different weights and samples.

^{^[75]}See p. ***, above.

^{^[76]}The standard BLS index, made with 1967 weights, shows a cost of living in 1980 not quite 4.8 times that of 1925. In the present case, however, a somewhat greater rise is appropriate; the implied weights are taken from our 1925 consumption. About 30% consisted of food (including our consumption from the farm), the 1980 prices of which (to be sure, with 1967 weights) average nearly 5.5 times the 1925 level. In the BLS index, in contrast, the weight of food beverages “at home” is just one-fifth. For years after 1970, see Statistical Abstract of the United States. For earlier years, see above-cited Historical Statistics…, Part I, p. 211.

^{^[77]}As Art recalls, dahlias or perhaps zinnias.

^{^[78]}An “Improved Lighting System” sold and installed by John S. Noel Company at 112-118 Division Street S. The price was on the order of $500.

^{^[79]}An early Michigan authority, T.T. Lyons, considered 100 a reasonable number of trees for a “farm orchard,” one for “family use.” To be sure, he added that a surplus would remain to be marketed, preferably of long-keeping winter apples that would fetch a good price by spring. Otherwise, I should wonder, given our experience with an orchard not so much larger, what on earth a family would have done with all the apples. See his report, along with reprints of earlier articles in Transactions of the State Agricultural Society of Michigan… for the year 1858, pp. 206-71. This volume was kindly lent to me by William F. Hale.

^{^[80]}These, together with the Northern Spy, Talman Sweet, and Snowapple, were all mentioned by T.T. Lyon in the above cited source as established in Michigan, but there was a question about the Northern Spy, originally from Western New York.

^{^[81]}The nearest town was Waterford, just east and north of the lake, but mail went to Clarkston.

^{^[82]}An expression that dates only from the late 19th century. It is not given by Mencken, nor is it in the NED, but it may be found (with two meanings, one of them obscene) in Eric Partridge, A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English…, first published in 1937, later much enlarged and revised and often reprinted. New York, Macmillan.

[83]It is shown in an earlier photograph, following p. ***, above.

[84]From the Bard of Benzie (John H. Howard), A History of Herring Lake, Christopher Publishing House, 1929, p. 73.

[85]For which Mother wrote “Bear Lake.”

[86]Here a gore is a wedge of land left by surveying north/south lines without allowance for the curvature of the earth.

[87]It was, I believe, on the way out on this trip that we slept on the hay in the barn on a farm between Hart and Shelby. Mother and Father had stopped to talk with the farmer, Rainy Metts; as noted above, they had a mortgage on his farm. Cherries were his main cash crop.

[88]As mentioned earlier, Ethel had visited Grand Rapids in the fall of 1913. See p. *** above.

^{^[89]}No automobile sales agency or agent appears in Cadillac in the 1923/4 edition of R.L. Polk & Company’s Michigan State Gazetteer and Business Directory. Percy Snell is shown as a florist.