Saturday, October 17, 2009, 18:49
Hazardous Lives
Over the past week, I have had the opportunity to look through some of the old newspapers down at the newspaper office. Actually, it was just part of the newspapers for three different years, 1910, 1925 and 1934.
But it struck me, as I was carefully paging through the brittle old pages, how hazardous life was in "the good old days."
One young man, who was around 20 years old, was killed while he was working at a saw mill. The saw grabbed some of his clothing and slammed him up against part of the machinery, breaking his neck.
Another young man was killed while he and some companions were digging a hole for a foundation. A 400 pound chunk of frozen sand and gravel broke loose, landed on him and killed him.
There were instances of teams of horses being spooked. Once by a team of Shetland ponies and another time by a squirrel. When horses spooked, depending on how bad the spook and where it occurred, people were either thrown out of the wagon or carriage and injured, although sometimes they were thrown out and killed.
Several children were shot and killed by siblings. One boy found an old gun in a shed, found some bullets for it and was going to target practice with a tin can when his three-year-old sister walked in front of him. He ended up shooting her in the head and killing her.
In another incident, a six-year-old boy fell in the mill pond and would have drowned if an adult hadn't happened by, went in after him and saved him.
Another time, three young boys dared each other to drink the water from ice melting at the meat market. All three became violently ill -- but survived.
Several children, in separate incidents, were burned so severely by either boiling water or an open fire that they later died from their injuries.
One man was severely injured when the dynamite he was using at the quarry blew up in his face. He died a few days later. (The remnants of the quarry are there yet, and I drive through it every day on my way into town. We still have buildings in town that were built with sandstone from that quarry, and the stone was of such good quality that it was shipped to Madison and Chicago for buildings.)
Another man had a sinus infection. Since there were no antibiotics then, the infection ran rampant until it entered his bloodstream, and he died a while later.
There was also a massive flood one year (1934) that wiped out the bridge and part of the downtown area. A residential area near the bend of the river was inundated with water. It had rained 12 inches in the beginning of April, but the ground was still frozen so the water could not soak in. To rescue the people in the houses by the bend of the river, they broke out bay windows, floated boats into the houses and rescued the occupants from the upper stories.
In another incident, while they were building an addition onto the school building, vandals flooded the basement and broke out the cement stairs. School did not start until the middle of October that year.
And this was all only over a couple of years, and just a part of those years at that.
On the positive side, a man from Minnesota came to the office this week looking for an obituary of his great-great-uncle, who had at one time been the sheriff in our county. He asked if I had ever heard of the sheriff, and surprisingly enough, I had.
I debated, though, whether to tell him why I knew of the man. In the end, I told him about a taped conversation with a cousin of my mother's who just a boy at the time when the man in question was the sheriff. The neighbor had a still, and the Internal Revenue Service agent came to look for the still. Moonshine was selling for $22 a gallon at that time, but the sheriff always got his for $16 a gallon. While my mother's cousin and the Revenue man went out in the woods to look for the still, the sheriff stayed behind, sitting on the porch, sipping his moonshine. My mother's cousin knew where the still was, so when they got to the area where the coil was wrapped around a tree, he fell down on purpose by the tree. The Revenue man looked at him, said he was a clumsy kid, and walked right on by the tree.
When I told the man who came to the office this story, he laughed and said he wasn't surprised because many of the sheriff's relatives were bootleggers.
As it turned out, we were able to find the obituary. The former sheriff died at the age of 87 in 1953.
Sometimes I have a tendency to think I am leading a somewhat stressful life, but maybe, all things considered, it's not so bad at that. . .
LeAnn R. Ralph
Wednesday, October 14, 2009, 05:20
53! (Squash, that is)
Since it was such a cool, dry summer, I didn't think it looked too good for my acorn squash. I planted a bush variety, and they sat there through June and July, not doing much -- until we got some rain in August. Then the bushes went to town. Too late, I thought.
Then came the very warm temperatures in September, and I wondered if there might be hope yet, only to have my hopes dashed by a strong cold front at the end of September.
We've had several hard freezes this past week when it was 28 degrees up by the house and maybe colder down by the squash patch since the squash were growing in a low spot beyond the barn.
After I woke up to snow on the ground Saturday morning, I figured I'd better pick my squash. I went to a craft sale as a vendor during the day, and if the reduced number of vendors and the far fewer number of people attending as compared to other years is any indication, the economy is still on the way down. The experts say the recession may have bottomed out, but it has been experience that the economic experts don't have the vaguest idea of what "recession" means for ordinary folks.
At any rate, when I got home from the craft sale on Saturday, I decided to pick my squash. More cold and freezing temperatures were in the forecast, and I didn't want them to freeze solid.
Randy and I took two paper grocery bags and the wheelbarrow out to the squash patch. I am happy to report that we did not have any squash bugs this year. None last year, either, so if the drought ever ends, maybe Randy can plant his big pumpkins again.
We started picking squash and putting them in the grocery bags we had set in the wheelbarrow. We picked and picked. Finally one of the bags split, so I was glad we had brought the wheelbarrow.
Randy's incision from the lipoma surgery is still healing, so I pushed the wheelbarrow around the barn and up the driveway to the basement. We brought the wheelbarrow inside, and as we transferred the squash to a big box, I counted.
All together, there were 53 squash -- from a patch of three squash plants.
It's a good thing I love squash, because I'm going to be eating a lot of it this winter.
LeAnn R. Ralph