More of life in Hazenmore

The high winds of the dirty thirty stopped but the drought continued. I remember now having a couple of fairly good gardens, then only growing enough for our self. We had corn on the cob to sell so in the evenings we took fresh picked ears to some of our milk customers we were paid 5 or 10 cents a dozen for our work, then we could buy a pencil, or a candy bar for 5 cents. We filled the milk bottles then separated the rest of milk and delivered a pint of cream to a Chinese cafe in town. If we had any over we drank the separated milk & could have cream on our oat meal.

Feed for our cows was scarce so some cattle had to be sold. There was a house & barn in town for rent so we moved as a family into the Ben house just across from the school. I believe dad kept 2 milk cows, a pig & a few laying hens. Paul Haase a bachelor lived on a farm that joined the town so Ralph would take the cows out to that pasture in the summer time & get them in for milking. We had one bed room down stairs for my parents & two partly finish ones in the unfinished attic where the boys had one room & the girls had the other. It was cold up there in the winter but the boys had a straw tic on theirs which was refilled from a friends straw stack spring and fall. In winter we put heated flat irons (used for ironing) & hot water bottles in the beds each night to keep us warm.

There was a drinking water well just out our back door. There wasn't enough water to supply the house and the barn so as it turned dry with no rain we couldn't grow our garden & water it. Winters were mild, no snow so didn't need overshoes or heavy coats to wear. That fall the grasshoppers ate up a lot of the vegetation, then one morning when I went to walk out the door the army worms had arrived, every step they would squash under my feet. They crawled in the houses, in fact they were everywhere. They came in the night ate everything the hoppers had left, leaving little or no vegetation, they even ate leaves off the few trees that were in town. Cliff's dry cough continued so he was put on the train to spend several months in the sanatorium. Dad worked on building a tent like place for Cliff to sleep out side in when he returned home. It had a wooden floor & part way up on the sides, mother had ordered a thick tent canvas material from Eaton's catalogue which she sewed & dad put it on as a peak roof for Cliff new bedroom which they put on the south side of the house. Each morning the bedding, mattress was brought in the house & stored in our warmth of the house, then to be taken out each night after dad had made a fire to warm this bedroom up before Cliff went to bed. Each of us helped with these extra duty's. Ralph started school when we moved to the Hazenmore area. Each one of us were in different rooms in this much larger brick school in the village, very different from the one room country school house we were used to, there were many more children & 4 teachers for the different classes. When we had just moved there some kids were walking by our house when we kids were on the porch & we could hear them say "their dad was in the crazy house" this was shocking news for Cliff & I & for a time it really bothered me. Now that hospital has been closed for many years. Doctors now have a different way to treat patients with nerve problems. We found out years later that 2 more of my dads brothers had this walking problem, with differing side effects. Dads younger brother Tom Lincoln was in the US army hospital & he was diagnosed as having multiple serous. Uncle Tom wrote Uncle Oscar that my dad must have had the same disease. To this day Doctors aren't sure of what causes it or just how to treat this illness.