A STORY OF MY LIFE

                        A STORY OF MY LIFE

                             PROLOGUE

     This story of my life is by no means a complete tale of that life.  I have put it together for several reasons; to give a sample of what life was like in earlier years (no telephone, plumbing or TV), what shaped my life and thinking, and to show the merciful providence of the Almighty in my life.

     "The Lord called me from birth, from my mother's womb He gave me my name."  Isaiah 49:1.

                            CHAPTER 1

     Charles and I were married May 20, 1944, in Holy Guardian Angel Catholic Church in Almond, Portage County.  The wedding was small.  My sister, Margaret, was my only attendant; his brother John, Charlie's only attendant.

     That morning John had driven to Almond, bringing with him Charlie and their parents.  After the wedding mass we had a "breakfast" at our home in Almond.  Aunt Laura (Martin) Mehne, a sister of Aunt Ada, served the meal.

     After eating, some pictures were snapped outside our home before John took Margaret, Charlie and me to Stevens Point to have our wedding pictures taken by a professional photographer.  After the pictures were taken, we stopped at my god mother's house in Stevens Point so I could change from my wedding gown to a street dress.  Next John drove us to the Grey Hound bus station and left Charlie and me there.  We had made no plans for a honeymoon, but decided to take the first bus out of Stevens Point regardless of which direction it would go.  The next bus headed north, so we bought tickets to Wausau.

     When we got to Wausau we walked from the bus station to a nearby hotel and registered.  During most of our honeymoon we walked the streets or found some place to sit and rest.  We found a nearby Catholic Church where we attended mass Sunday morning.  Sometime during our walks we found an outdoor scale, the kind you stand on, drop a penny in a slot and watch the pointer to see how high it would go.  Surprise!  We both weighed exactly the same, 150 pounds.  During our lives together I don't think that Charlie ever weighed more and I never weighed less.

     Saturday night when we prepared to go to bed I knelt down at the side of the bed and started to lead a rosary just as my god-mother did each night.  I had become a Catholic, and wasn't that what all Catholics did?  Charlie kneeled down beside me and responded.

     Early Monday morning we boarded the bus for our trip back to Green Lake.  We got off the bus at Kradwell's Drug Store and walked from there to the home of Charlie's parents.  They lived in a large old house on the corner where South Lawson Drive turns into South Street.  Today that house is gone and several condominiums are built there.

     As soon as we arrived at his parents home, Charlie walked to Maplewood where he was working for V. S. Kutchin.  Some people referred to Charlie as the Maplewood Farm Manager, but Mr. Kutchin was "where the buck stopped."  Although Maplewood chores had been entrusted to other men while he was gone on his honeymoon, Charlie still felt anxious about them.

     Charlie was also concerned that some of his "friends," who had not been invited to the wedding, would try to shivaree us, an event he wished to avoid.  He told me that according to custom they wouldn't raise a ruckus unless they could find us together.  He told me he would come back in the evening but he did not want me to meet him in case some of them would tail me.  After dark he managed to slip past Hattie Sherwood Park and even cross the bridge without being seen.

     Shortly after we were married I was in my in-laws kitchen talking with Charlie's Dad, when Dad looked out the window and saw John Mirr, a close friend of his, cutting across the back yards.  Dad opened the back door for John and greeted him.  Thinking that these two old men were not interested in me, I drifted back into the dining room, out of sight but not out of hearing.  What I heard was

     John: "Who is she?"

     Dad: "Why that's Charlie's wife."

     John: "Yes, I know.  But who was she?"

     Dad: "Why - a - a, now her name was - a - a.  Now her uncle's name was a - a -"  He couldn't remember.

     "Where is she from?"

     "A a - a - a, now what was the name of that place?  A - a, She's from up north someplace."

     "What breed is she?"

     "A - a"

     "She's not Polish?"

     "No, she's not Polish."

     "She's a husky one."

     "Ya, she's a husky one all right."  The sum total of what my father-in-law knew about my background.

     Charlie was receiving room-and-board as part of his Maplewood Farm wages.  Before we were married he had talked to Harriet Kutchin, who managed the Maplewood Hotel, about my working there.  She had agreed to hire me for the summer.  I would also receive room-and-board as part of my wages.  So after a few days of staying with Charlie's folks, we moved into the Hillside Cottage at Maplewood where Charlie had been sleeping.

     Hillside Cottage was located northeast of the Hotel.  To reach it from the hotel kitchen you left by a side door, a door seldom used except by the men who brought the ice in from the ice house, and put it in the large ice box located in the kitchen.  In Winter the men harvested the ice by cutting it out of the frozen lake and hauling it into the ice house, packing it in sawdust.  Outside the side door of the kitchen was a low cement platform with a water pump located on it.  Here the sawdust was hosed off the ice before the ice was taken into the kitchen and placed in the ice box, (not a refrigerator.  The hotel did have a refrigerator for keeping ice cream, milk and possibly some desserts.)

     A path led a short distance from the hotel to the ice house, and then continued downhill to the Hillside Cottage.  North of the path was an area, secluded under some trees, for several cars to be parked, usually used by the hired help.  Beyond and north of these trees was the north arm of the driveway that circled up the hill from the two stone entrance posts on Lawson Drive, passed behind the motel, and then descended down the hill and back to Lawson Drive.  There were many trees around this area which curtained it from the sight of other Maplewood areas.

     Hillside Cottage had a large room facing the lake and opened to a railed porch.  This front room had a chimney, and had previously contained a wood burning stove when men had wintered there.  The cottage also had two other smaller rooms and a bathroom.  Charlie had been sleeping in one of the smaller rooms, which now became our bedroom.  It contained a double bed, a dresser and several chairs.  The other rooms were bare of any furniture or equipment.

     On the dresser in our bedroom was a huge pile of odd objects, things Charlie had, at one time or another, thrust into his pockets as he worked,  Whenever he had gone to bed, he had emptied his pockets, leaving unwanted items on the dresser; bolts, nuts, screws, nails, anything and everything.  I decided to clean up.  I dumped all the junk into a cardboard box and put it out in the empty back room.

     That night when we were getting ready for bed, Charlie brought his forefinger straight down on the dresser top and asked me, "Where is that shingle nail that was right here?"  I wanted to know why he wanted a shingle nail when it was time to go to bed.  Well, it wasn't just any old shingle nail.  It was his very special shingle nail.  Some time before he had broken the stem off his watch.  He had taken a shingle nail, cut off its point, and filed the round shaft into a square shaft the right size to fit into the hole of his watch where the stem had been.  He could then wind his watch with the altered shingle nail.  Now, without that shingle nail he could not wind his watch, and without that watch working, he would not know what time it was to get up and milk the cows.  Milking always had to be done on schedule!  He had to have that shingle nail before he slept!

     We brought in the box of things I thought should be dumped, and began looking for that nail.  I tried to help even though I didn't know what I was looking for.  I picked up a nail and asked, "Is this it?"  Very disgustedly Charlie told me that that was a roofing nail, not a shingle nail!  There was a difference between them?  It was a rude awakening into our vocabulary differences.  I was to learn that this man could pick up a common nail and tell immediately whether it was an eight pb (pfennig) or a ten pb nail.

     Charlie did not find his "good shingle nail," but he did find and earlier attempt to turn a nail into a watch winder.  It wasn't as accurately made as the one he was looking for, but he did get his watch wound so he would know when to get up in the morning and go milk the cows.

     That summer of 1944 I worked as a waitress and kitchen help, doing such chores as washing dishes, preparing vegetables, kneading the bread dough the cook had set and putting three balls of it into muffin cups for Maplewood's famous "cloverleaf rolls."

     I started working before the hotel opened for the summer, getting ready for Memorial Day weekend.

     That summer Charlie's cousin, Peggy Dugenske (later Barden) also worked at Maplewood.  Her mother, Charlie's Aunt Lily, had worked there many years before.  Aunt Lily came to visit Peggy one day.  She asked me how Maggie was.  I didn't know who she was talking about.  Everyone called John and Charlie's mother "Mrs. Shikoski" and I had not learned what her first name was.

     Though both Charlie and I received board as part pay for our labor, we did not eat together.  Charlie ate with the other farm workers in the "men's dining room," a room between the kitchen and the main dining room where the hotel guests ate.  When the cook saw the men walk through the kitchen and cross to the men"s dining room, she would send in their food, served "family style," not from a menu as were the hotel guests.  The kitchen help ate after all others had been served, picking up whatever foods were left over, while standing or sitting, either in the kitchen or the men's dining room.

     In 1944 rationing was in full swing.  Maplewood required all employees who received board to hand in their sugar ration coupons as soon as they became due.  Sweetened Jello powders, honey and syrups were not rationed, but they were very high priced and hard to get.  At Maplewood they were kept under lock and key with the sugar supply

     Off the main kitchen was a smaller room called the "dessert kitchen."  All pies, cakes and desserts of every kind were kept here as well as ice cream and milk.  This room was "off limits" to everyone except the cooks.  Canned fruits and vegetables were also rationed, but Harriet Kutchin had a horticultural degree.  She managed a large vegetable garden.  Someone would pick vegetables early in the morning and bring them to the kitchen for that day's preparation.  Maplewood was widely known for its fresh vegetables.

     Meat was rationed but Maplewood raised its own beef.  Steers raised on the Maplewood Farm were sent to the locker plant in Ripon where they were butchered, packaged, frozen and stored in their locker.  Every morning Mr. Kutchin stopped in the hotel kitchen to find out what supplies would be needed that day.  He would pick up the required items from the locker plant in Ripon or from the grocery store.  The farm also provided plenty of fresh milk daily.

     Since my marriage I had not been feeling well.  I was beginning to have doubts about marriage.  Charlie urged me to go see a doctor.  I went to Dr. Kelly who had an office in Green Lake at that time.  He told me it was too early to tell but he said that nine chances out of ten I was pregnant.  Pregnancy tests were unknown at that time.  I felt too sick to work, and quit working at the hotel, though I still continued living there with Charlie.

     When July 4th began looming, help was hard to get; and Mrs. Kutchin had planned on my help.  The doctor said I could work, but I should not carry heavy trays.  Mrs. Kutchin asked a boy who served the guests by carrying luggage etc. to serve as a busboy to carry the trays for me.  He wanted to be seen in the dining room just as little as possible.  Instead of bringing the trays to the nearest convenient serving table as he should have done, he would leave them near the kitchen door, and I would have to walk back and forth farther than necessary.

     The second cook was a single mother with a half-grown son.  He spent much of his time around the kitchen where his mother tried to keep an eye on him.  Sometimes he liked to liven up his life.  I was paying him no attention one day when I wanted to sit down on a chair.  Just as I sat he pulled the chair out from under me and I sat down, hard, on the floor.  The sudden jar in my condition unnerved me and I broke out in hysterical crying.  I was helped down to my bed in the Hillside Cottage.  I don't think the boy had the least inkling of my condition but his mother did, and I believe she worried about me all night.  By the next morning I was again feeling normal and went back to work.  Nobody was more relieved to see me back than the boy's mother.

     I had already started working that summer when I learned that when Charlie had talked with Mrs. Kutchin about employing me, he had stipulated that I be free to go to church on Sundays.  Green Lake resorts were full on summer weekends, and resort workers were expected to put every effort into serving the guests.  Common practice was to put customers first over any employee who might want to go to church.

     Our Lady of the Lake Church offered masses in the original church which was very small for the summer increase of worshipers.  As a result the bishop gave Our Lady of the Lake Parish priests special permission to offer three masses each Sunday during the summer.  (Saturday evening masses were unknown at that time.)  Masses were offered at 6:00, 8:00 and 10:00 am.  Charlie borrowed his brother John's car, and we went to the 6:00 o"clock mass.  I was always in the kitchen reporting for work by 7:00, sometimes the first one to report after the cooks.  I think I was the only employee who went to church on Sunday.  One of the other girls was a good Seventh Day Adventist.  That religion was very active in Green Lake then.  She regularly went to their religious meetings on Wednesday evening because she was not allowed to be "off" Sunday mornings.

     Charlie and his brother John had bought the farm that their father owned.  It had been rented out to their sister Mary and her husband, Walter Abraham.  Their family was living on the farm.  Their lease would be up on October 1, 1944, when possession would be turned over to John and Charlie.  The two men were busy that summer making plans.  World War II was still raging.  Machinery companies were making war goods, not farm machinery.  Farm prices were high and farm products in demand.  To keep the lid on things the government put price limits on certain goods.  They formed the OPA, Office of Price Administration.  Ceiling prices were put on used farm machinery.  The Shikoski brothers badly needed farm machinery.  John went to every farm auction he could and boned up on OPA prices.  If the auctioneer asked for bids on a machine that John wanted, he would immediately call out the OPA price for it.  The auctioneer could not legally accept any higher bid so John would be declared the highest bidder.  Auctions became very much less entertaining.  Whatever John bought for the farm Charlie paid him for his half.

     August was busy. Labor Day came and went in a whirl.  Only a few guests remained.  The other waitresses went off to school or other work.  Charlie had not been paid for his labor all summer.  We had lived on my wages.  When necessary Charlie had paid John from his savings account.  When he and Mr. Kutchin had bargained, Charlie had asked for a higher wage than what Mr. Kutchin had offered, and they had never really agreed on the wage amount.  But when Charlie prepared to leave, Mr Kutchin gave him the full wages

that Charlie had asked for originally. 

                            CHAPTER 2

     While John and Charlie were making plans to farm together, their Ma was excited too.  She gave me advice, and went shopping with me to buy the household items I would need.

     On October 1st the exchange was made.  Walter Abraham turned over to Dad the same number of livestock head that he had received from Dad two years before, plus half the increase.  Dad immediately turned it all over to John and Charlie.

     While their dad passed on to John and Charlie all the animals and feed that he was owed at the time of the exchange, it did not include the machinery and other items Dad had sold at the auction he had held when he quit farming and rented the farm to Abrahams.

     When Abrahams left, we took over the house.  Any household items left in the house by Charlie's folks for Abrahams' use, became ours.  This included the kitchen range, the kitchen table and chairs that had been given to Charlie's mother for a wedding gift by her parents, several beds and a few other items.

     Dad and Ma helped us move in.  John and Charlie brought home what machinery they had managed to buy, as well as two teams and a single horse.  Charlie was responsible for feeding the cattle; John for feeding the pigs.  Both milked the cows.

     Before Charlie and John bought the farm, milking on it had always been done by hand, but both men had worked for Mr. Kutchin and were familiar and trained in using milking machines.  They immediately had a milking machine installed in their own barn.

     John and Charlie were excited about owning everything and decided that they wanted to eat some of their own chicken which had come with the farm.  They asked if I knew how to cook chicken.  I assured them I could cook it if they would butcher it.  They assured me that they always butchered for their Ma.

     Charlie chopped off the head of a chicken, plucked the feathers and brought it to me.  When I pointed out that the chicken was not "drawn" he said that drawing was part of the cooking.  I told him that drawing was part of the butchering.  He told me that Ma had always done the drawing.  He left the chicken and went.  It was a good thing I had worked in the kitchen at Maplewood, so I had at least seen chickens being drawn.  It was not a smooth job but I managed to do the drawing and cooking.  They ate what I cooked.

     The hard work the men did gave them good appetites.  They rose early to start chores and milk the cows before breakfast.  Breakfast consisted of cereal (usually oatmeal), bacon, eggs and fried potatoes.  The hardest part for me was to remember not to have bacon on Friday mornings.  They wouldn't eat it if they knew it was Friday, but depended on the cook to know it was Friday.

     Charlie's Dad was a great fisherman.  (The 1898 militia roll for the Town of Brooklyn listed his occupation as a commercial fisherman.)  He well knew Green Lake, Lake Puckaway, other small lakes and the Poi Sippi area.  Practically every week on Thursday evening or early Friday morning he would bring us some fish already cleaned and ready for the pan.  Ma was so afraid I would seduce the boys to eat meat on Friday.

     In the beginning we had no washing machine, so Ma washed all our clothes at her home. She prided herself on how early Monday morning she had her washing done and hanging on the clothes line.  We had to collect our dirty clothes and give them to her Sunday evening.  She always had them sorted and put some to soak before she went to bed Sunday night.

     Apples were picked and stored in the basement of the house.  Charlie and I managed to bring some furniture from Almond, a round dining room table, chairs, china cabinet with curved glass, a dresser, and the Big Three washing machine, so I could wash our clothes at home.

     William Wuske owned several milk routes hauling milk to the local Brooklyn Creamery.  With so many men tied up in military service or defence jobs he had trouble finding drivers for his trucks.  He hired John and Charlie to handle two routes, using the same truck for both routes.  Their usual practice was to start chores as soon as they got up in the morning, do their milking, and then eat breakfast.  After breakfast John would go on the first route while Charlie finished any other chores or farm work that needed to be done.  Either John or Charlie would take the second route.

     Milk was gathered in ten-gallon milk cans.  The same number of empty cans were left with each farmer as the number of full cans picked up.  The milk was taken to the creamery and dumped.  The cans were scalded with live steam and left at the creamery where they were exchanged for the empty cans needed for the next route.  Each farmer was given the same cans every other day, that is, each one had two sets.  The cans were marked with a number or initial to assure that each farm received cans reserved only for that farm.  Cans from the two routes were not mixed.  When cans from the first route were emptied those cans were stored at the creamery and the cans used for the second route were loaded on the truck.  After the second route the cans were reversed.

     While John was the usual driver, Charlie could and would take over the milk hauling if needed.  On Sundays, in order for both of them to go to church, they each took a route.  John took the first route while Charlie and I went to the 8:00 mass, using John's car.  When John came home after the first route, Charlie took the second route while John went to the 10:00 mass.

     When Our Lady of the Lake church was built in 1908, men's felt dress hats were the fashion.  All well-dressed men wore hats to church, but were prohibited from wearing them in church.  To accommodate them large pegs had been installed in the entry of the church to hold their hats during church services.  The entry occupied the lowest section of the steeple between the steps and the interior of the church.

     As you entered the entry the rope used to ring the bell was tied down on the left wall.  Near it was the "Poor Box" where people could deposit alms.  On the right side of the entry were two rows of pegs installed at a slight upward angle, and spaced at a distance wide enough for a hat to be hung on each.  Because of the great similarity between the hats in color, shape, material and style, it was not unknown that a hat which rode to church on one head, rode away from church on an entirely different head.  Charlie was not the only one who doffed his hat in the entry, carried it into the church proper, and tossed it on one of the wide window sills of the church where he could keep an eye on it during mass.  (On the other hand, women were required to wear a hat in church.  I remember a day when the wind blew my hat into a mud puddle.  I picked it up, brushed off as much mud as I could with my handkerchief, put my hat back on my head, and wore it in church.  I hated hat pins but they did have a purpose.)

     One warm Sunday when we came home from church, Charlie decided to again gather the eggs that the hens had laid since the early morning gathering.  Charlie didn't want to bother taking his hat into the house, so, considering that the hat needed cleaning and blocking anyway, he decided to leave it on his head while "picking" the eggs.  The next day, Monday, he drove to Ripon and took the hat to the cleaners.  He was told that they no longer cleaned and blocked hats there.  Too many men no longer wore such hats.  The equipment used to clean and block hats no longer paid for the cost of maintaining them.  If Charlie wished, they would send his hat off to another company for such processing.  Of course it would take more time to be ready than it had before, and the expense would be greater than it had been previously.  Charlie decided to ditch the hat.  So the last place where Charlie wore a felt dress hat was in the chicken house.

     Charlie had an urgent desire to own his own car.  All he had when we were married was "Susie."  Susie was a marsh tractor he had made out of an old automobile.  It consisted of a chassis without a body.  It had a seat only for the driver.  Susie could pull a small wagon  or a trailer.  Charlie used it to go to lake shore places where he sometimes did odd jobs for the cottagers.  If it rained when he used it, he got wet.

     Charlie had had cars before, but when his sister Dorothy had graduated from nursing school, she wanted a car that she had seen for sale, but had no money to buy it.  Charlie supplied the money and they had shared the use of the car together, which worked out fine as long as both of them lived at home with their parents.  When Dorothy left for the Army, Charlie had full use of the car.  This was during the time he was courting me.  But several months before he married me, Lt. Dorothy Shikoski came home on leave.  When she left again for the Army, she took the car with her, leaving Charlie without a car for his own use.

     It was almost impossible to buy any kind of a vehicle.  Auto companies were producing war machinery.  When people could not buy new cars, they hung on to their old one, so even used cars were not available.  John had been generous to let Charlie use his car, but Charlie desperately wanted one of his own.

     What he managed to get was an old seven-passenger Graham Paige touring car, having a 129 inch wheel base chassis.  It was dug out of a scrap heap and cost him $50.00.  It had a driver's seat and a passenger seat in front.  It had a car-wide seat in back to accommodate three passengers.  Each front seat had attached to its back a seat which folded down toward the wide back seat.  On each of these two seats a passenger could ride backwards, facing the rear seat passengers.

     The car's transmission (fitting the 129-inch wheelbase) was irreparable, and a replacement not available.  Because of the length of the car, any of the common transmissions that were available were too short to reach between the front drive shaft and the rear axle.  Using his ingenuity Charlie hooked up two ordinary transmissions in tandem, so together they could reach the needed additional length to transmit the power from the motor to the differential.  Each transmission had three forward gears and a reverse.  Theoretically this arrangement created nine forward speeds and several reverse speeds.  When both transmissions were in reverse, the car went forward.

     The fuel pump was also irreparable and could not deliver gas to the motor.  Charlie mounted a very small tank above the motor, using gravity to feed the gas to the motor.  With such a small tank the car quickly ran out of gas.  Charlie carried a five gallon gas can and a funnel in the back of the car so he could fill the tank on the road whenever it ran out of gas.  The car worked!  Eventually I even learned to drive it myself!

     Charlie had trouble getting a license for it.  State records showed that the car with that motor number had been junked years before.  If that car was still driveable they asked that he either pay the state license fee for all those years during which no license had been paid, or else prove that the car had not been driven on a public road for that many years.  I am not sure how this difference was settled but he did eventually get a license to drive this monstrosity on Wisconsin highways.

     I had depended upon Charlie to take me wherever I had to go.  He then told me that I had to learn to drive a car because he would not take me every place I wanted to go.  A neighbor woman thought it terrible that he would refuse to take me everywhere I wanted to go, but I think it was some of the best advice he ever gave me.

     Before I was married my Uncle John had tried to teach me to drive Margaret's car.  He kept telling me not to "ride the brake," warning me that doing so would wear out the brake.  When Charlie taught me to drive he kept telling me, "Don't throw the brake away."  I finally learned when and how to use the brake!

     I took my driver's test from the Green Lake County sheriff.  From the sheriff's office I drove once around the block (Gold, South, Mill and back on Hill Street.)  He granted me a license.  I never did learn to parallel park decently.

                            CHAPTER 3

     Margaret asked us if we would take in Uncle John Kissinger, Grandma's brother.  He had been staying alone in our house in Almond while Margaret roomed near the school she taught.  He smoked a pipe and had accidentally started a fire in a waste paper basket when he threw in a match he had just used to light his pipe.  Margaret was afraid to let him continue to live alone in our house in Almond.  Charlie agreed to let him stay with us.  Brother John had been paying half the grocery bull, but with another mouth to eat and the twins beginning to need solid food, grocery bill was adjusted, so Charlie began paying for most of the groceries.

     An old fashioned dish-towel-drying rack had been left attached to the wall in the kitchen, not too far from the kitchen range.  Slats fanned out from it to hold dish towels while they dried.  I had some pretty embroidered towels, wedding gifts, and I would hang one of them on the foremost slat to hide the less fancy ones drying behind it.

     My pretty embroidered towels kept mysteriously getting black marks on them, marks that didn't appear on the towels used for wiping dishes.  Ma, though she no longer did our laundry, complained about it.  She thought Uncle John dirtied them.  He denied it.  Ma told me she watched him but couldn't catch him at it, though she was sure he did it!  Uncle John told me that he thought Ma did it.  He tried to catch her at it but couldn't!  The bickering between them irritated me no end, until one evening I caught the culprit!  Charlie!  I knew that every night he ate an apple before he went to bed.  What I didn't realize was that he would bring up an apple from the basement where coal dust had settled on the apples.  He would rinse his apple off with water, but then wiped it off on my pretty embroidered towels because "they looked to be the cleanest."  Peace between Ma and Uncle John at last!

     Our Lady of the Lake parish had no meeting place except the church where mass was offered.  It had an organized "Altar Society" which had its meetings in the private homes of its members.  To make some money the Altar Society ladies cut small pieces of cloth into apron shapes about six inches large.  They sewed large pockets on them, pockets which covered most of the small aprons.  In the pockets they put a copy of a poem asking for a penny for each inch of the receivers waist line.  I had not been to any of their meetings, but two women from Green Lake came out to our farm to see me, welcome me, and give me one of the little aprons.  This was shortly before the twins were born.  They took one look at my waist line and told me I didn't have to put that much money in the apron they gave me.

     After we left Maplewood, Mr. Kutchin hired a married man named Wilbur Sell to help with the Maplewood farm work.  Wilbur had a wife Anne, and a daughter Wilma.  None of the cottages at Maplewood had a kitchen where a family could live and do their own cooking, so Mr. Kutchin rented the vacant house at Bel Aire for them to live in.  The Bel Aire owners had gone bankrupt and were not using the house.  Several times Mr. Kutchin asked Charlie to come and help Wilbur with different tasks.

     I had met Anne several times.  She and Wilma walked over from Bel Aire to see me.  She had also become acquainted with Sarah Good.  These two women wanted to give me a baby shower, but neither felt that they could handle it in their own home, Anne's was to small for a shower, and Sarah felt too old to prepare for a party.  They asked me if they could have it in my house.  I agreed.  The date was set for February 7th.

     On February 6th I started preparing for the shower.  I spent all day cleaning, planning, etc.  That evening I was tired and felt cold.  I wanted the furnace stoked up.  Brother John had already left and probably wouldn't be back until late.  Charlie was out in the barn or shed, working on a project, and unlikely to come in the house for some time.  I couldn't trust Uncle John with the fire, so with three men living in the house, I went down and shoveled some coal into the furnace.

     I was so tired.  When I got half way up the stairs I wondered if I could reach the top, get through the door and reach a chair by the kitchen table.  All I wanted to do was rest.  As soon as I reached the kitchen chair to sit down, my "water" broke, but in my ignorance I did not know what had happened.  I cleaned myself up and went to bed.

     I slept a part of the night, but then I woke up with a terrible back ache.  Pacing the floor helped some but not much.  I did not know what was wrong with me.  In the morning I told Charlie I wanted to see a doctor that day.

     Dr. Kelly had left for the army; Green Lake had no doctor.  Charlie, remembering that his own Mother had died after childbirth, wanted me to have the best doctor available.  He had taken me to Fond du Lac to see Dr. Twoig.  He now prepared to take me back to see him.

     It had snowed furiously that night.  Our driveway was blocked.  Charlie and John had done the chores and John managed to get the milk truck out to the highway.  Charlie still had to shovel snow in order to get the car through the snow bank which had blown across our driveway.

     Charlie told me I should take along my nightgowns as the doctor might want to put me in the hospital, an idea I promptly dismissed, but at his urging I did take them along.

     It was ten o'clock by the time we left the farm.  Highway 23 had been plowed, but had left only a narrow road bed between large banks of snow on both sides.  We came up behind a slow truck which took the middle of the road and refused to let us pass.  Charlie kept honking, but the truck driver continued to block our way.  It was noon by the time we reached Fond du Lac.

     Charlie told me the doctor wouldn't be in his office at that time so he took me direct to St. Agnes Hospital.  The nurses put me in a seven-bed maternity ward and started "prepping" me.  They called in the head nurse who was a nun.  She took one look at me and ordered "put her on a stretcher."  To me a "stretcher" meant something to carry dead people, and if they put me on a stretcher it meant that I was dying.  I kept thinking of the Catholic ejaculation I had learned from my god-mother, "Jesus, Mary, Joseph" and tried to use it.  But I didn't want to die so I changed it to "Jesus, Mary, Charlie" to show heaven that I still wanted to be a part of earthly life.  Charlie was in the hallway when they rolled me to the delivery room.  He waved to me, looking very glum.

     They put long white sterile leggings on me.  I was chilly, still shivering from the long highway ride from home.  I was so glad that they did something for my cold feet.  But they also put my legs high up in stirrups and strapped me down, including my hands.

     I heard a nurse ask, "Why doesn't the doctor get here?"  I thought "These dumb nurses!  When the doctor gets here he will let them know that just because a pregnant woman comes to the hospital, it doesn't mean that her baby will come any time soon."  My baby wasn't due for another month or so, and I was sure it wouldn't come until then.  I was thoroughly convinced that something else was wrong with me.

     Someone put a drop of ether on a piece of gauze and told me to take a deep breath.  I inhaled just as deeply as I could, and my head went spinning off into the wild blue yonder.

     When I awoke I felt a wonderful peace and quiet.  No pains, no straps.  I was lying on my back.  My hands were resting calmly on my much smaller body.  Someone beyond my feet somewhere was talking.  I heard the word, "twins."

     "Twins?"

     "Yes, Mrs Shikoski.  You have twins, a boy and a girl!"  Then a nurse brought a little baby wrapped in a blanket.  "This is your daughter!"  Then I was shown another little baby in a blanket, "This is your son!"  He scowled, wrinkled up his little face, and looked so small.

     Does this sound like an unbelievable fantastic tale of ignorance to you?  Remember the difference in time and customs.  I had been raised by Grandma who had come across the ocean from the old country when Queen Victoria ruled England.  In Victorian times girls were not allowed away from home without an escort or mentor.  They were told the "facts of life" by their mother the evening before they were married.  I was sixteen when Grandma died.  I had never been given the "facts," and I was too shy to ask any such questions.

     Before the twins were born more births took place in homes than in hospitals, where the more problematic cases were handled requiring more stringent methods.  Charlie's mother had died from childbirth, making Charlie very concerned about me, wanting the best possible care for me, insisting on a hospital delivery instead of using a mid-wife.  Sterile leggings, stirrups and straps were common in large hospitals at that time, though they were already declining in use and faded out not long afterward.

     Why hadn't my doctor told me I was going to have twins?  He must have known there was more than one because he had scheduled me for an x-ray the next week.  He probably did.  He had worked closely with Charlie's sister Dorothy, and probably thought I understood medical terminology and procedures, but I did not understand any of them, nor did I ask questions, and any knowledge that I would have twins went right over my head.

     I did remember having been in Almond during my pregnancy when I had lifted a dipper of water to my mouth and the thought popped into my head that I would have twins, but I had dismissed it as a foolish imagination.

     They wheeled me back to the seven-bed maternity ward and put me to bed.  The doctor decided that I would not be able to sufficiently nurse two children so he prescribed a drug to dry me up without explaining anything to me.  The nurses took away my drinking water and I became very thirsty.  Then I found out that if I ordered more drinks with my meals, tea, milk, juice, etc. from the kitchen menu selection, I would get more to drink, until the nurses discovered what I was doing and took them away.  I told them I would hit the water pail as soon as I got home.  They told me I would be sorry.  (When I got home I drank dipper after dipper of water and it felt wonderful!  None of their predicted ill effects developed).

     Across the hospital room from me, was an unwed teenage mother who kept lamenting her sins.  The story circulated that several days before she had climbed to the top of a silo and had to be talked down before she jumped to her death.

     The woman in the bed next to me had a lovely diamond engagement and wedding ring set.  She wore a beautiful bed jacket.  The green eyed monster raised its head.  Her second child had been born.  Then she confided to me that the engagement ring had not yet been paid for.  She didn't know how they would ever pay the hospital bill or their other debts.  The green eyed monster began to fade when I began thanking the Lord for what blessings I did have.

     Yes, I was the mother of twins, a mother who had no diapers, no bottles, no little shirts or blankets.  My mother-in-law was pressed into going shopping for me to buy what I would need to take the babies home.  The diapers she found for sale were mostly oblong and gauze.  She had used heavy flannel square ones.  She could not find the kind of baby bottles she had used.  Things were so different from what she remembered, and I knew nothing about such things.  She fussed about everything, but I don"t know what I would have done without her.  I tried my best to let her know that everything she had done would be all right.

     The baby shower planned by Anne Sell and Sarah Good for the 7th of February was never held.

     When I was in the hospital Charlie did the cooking for the men.  Uncle John, who had bached it at times before, helped what he could.  Charlie asked Uncle John how much salt to put on the potatoes he was boiling.  Uncle John replied, "Oh I just take a handful.  You can't put too much salt on potatoes."  When Charlie started looking for some salt he found the crock with my course pickling salt in it.  He scooped up as much as his big hand could hold.  The men learned most definitely that you can put too much salt on potatoes.

     Charlie did what he could to prepare for the homecoming of his children.  The old fashioned iron crib which Ma had used for her children was still in the attic of the farm house.  He brought it down and set it up in our bedroom.  At first both children slept in the same crib.  Later Aunt Lily Dugenske gave us the old fashioned iron crib she had used for her children.  The two cribs were put in the small bedroom located off from our bedroom.

     Once when Ma and I were in the  bedroom and I was trying to attend the babies, she told me not to rush past the children so fast, that I was creating a bad draft for them.  I caused a draft?  Hadn't she noticed that the bedroom window was open?  When we moved into the house, the bedroom windows had been so thickly painted that they could not be opened.  But Charlie believed in clean, fresh air for all his animals, including children.  While I was in the hospital he had used a sharp knife to cut through the paint around the sashes of the double-hung bedroom window.  He had opened the storm window at the bottom and lowered the upper sash of the inner window, thus allowing the outside air to enter at the bottom of the storm, rise up between the two windows, and enter the bedroom at the top of the inner window.  I kept mum about the window being open.

     Charlie also brought down from the attic the two high chairs that were there.  Ma called the larger one Charlie's and the slightly smaller one John's, though I am sure their sisters also used those chairs.

     Ma even made arrangements for the twins' baptisms while I was still in the hospital.  She had gone to the priest who had offered mass in our parish.  (Our Lady of the Lake Parish did not have an assigned priest at that time.  It was being administered by a Berlin priest.)  Peggy Dugenske and her brother Dominic were sponsors for the twins.  They were baptized in Our Lady of the Lake Church by Fr. Anthony Czaja who at that time was the pastor of St. James Catholic Church in Neshkoro.

     Ma told me to stay home when they were baptized, quoting an old saw that "sows stay home with their piglets longer than that."  I didn't have the nerve to tell her, but I felt that if the piglets were taken to church the old sow would have followed them there.  I obediently obeyed my mother-in-law.

     When I was in the hospital my sister, Margaret, called our house.  Uncle John told her that I had given birth to twins.  She was not sure if that was true, or if it was just another tale like the ones Uncle John used to tell.  She wasn't sure until she talked to me.  She came to visit the first Sunday I was home from the hospital.

     Days became a whirl for me, taking care of two small children and feeding three men.  I had a book on child care telling me what babies should do what, when and how.  One day I looked in the book to see when they should be given orange juice.  Oh, oh.  I should have already been giving it to them, and without reading the entire section, I started spooning some into them.

     Then one day the county nurse stopped in to check on the babies.  She asked me if I was giving them orange juice.  When I said I had, she asked me how much water I mixed with the juice.  Water?  Was I supposed to mix it with water?  The nurse was surprised the twins took it without watering it down.  In spite of my ignorance I muddled through their care, and somehow the twins survived anyway.

     While we grown-ups drank our own farm produced, unpasteurized milk, we did not give any of it to the children.  For about the first year we bought commercial formula in powdered form from the drug store and mixed it with boiled water.  Later we bought an electric pasteurizer, using it before feeding any of our own milk to the twins.

     Toward spring the men began to make plans for raising crops.  Fields needed to be plowed.  John and Charlie had managed to buy a good sized plow, but had not been able to buy a tractor large enough to pull it.  They had acquired five horses to supply the needed "horse power" and wanted to use them as efficiently and as practically as possible.  Charlie devised and built a special evener set which allowed him to form a five-abreast team to pull the plow.  In that arrangement the work was evenly spread among the five horses.

     Charlie plowed and planted oats while John took care of the milk routes.  After the oats had come through the soil and began to grow, John looked the field over.  He complained that Charlie had seeded the field too thickly, that plants growing that crowded would become too spindly and not fill out the heads properly, producing a small yield.  Charlie didn't say much.  He was afraid John might be right.

     Next came corn planting time.  Again Charlie did the field work while John drove the milk truck.  Because they could plant it early, they chose seed corn bred for a longer growing season, which produced larger stalks.

     Charlie plowed the vegetable garden and marked the rows so he could cultivate them later, but it was up to me to sow it, plant the tomatoes and weed it.  He planted the potatoes with the old fashioned hand planter, where you step on the planter to drive it in the ground, push forward with a motion that let the potato eye drop into the ground, and then step down where the eye had dropped to firm the soil around it.

     1945 was a good growing season, and the crops grew well.  The oats headed out better than expected, and the corn grew big and tall.

     Charlie had never had a checking account.  He had used a savings account both to store funds temporarily, and to save for the future use.  He decided it would be better to have a checking account.  Ella Craft at the Green Lake State Bank waited on him.  She told him that my name should also be on the account.  Though neither of us had thought about that, Charlie did go ahead and include my name.  His usual practice when writing a check was to write down the amount of each check but he left me to keep a running account.       I had no money of my own, but I had Charlie's permission to take any cash I needed out of his billfold which he usually kept in the pantry.  Afterwards he might make a comment about an elephant having stepped on his billfold, but it was always in a teasing manner.

     When Dad was farming our land he had joined a threshing ring with other farmers living along Highway 23 from Kutchins to Radkes.  When he rented the farm to Abrahams he passed on to them his share in the ring.  It had now passed on to Shikoski Brothers.

     A meeting of the ring membership was called each year before threshing began to decide the charge per bushel threshed and the starting date.  Each member paid the ring so much per bushel threshed for him.  These charges were totaled, the ring's expenses subtracted, and the remains divided equally among the members.  Expenses were for fuel, lubricants, and any repair parts needed for the threshing machine.

     The threshing machine was moved from farm to neighboring farm.  The "ring" was a straight line along highway 23 which at that time followed what is now South Lawson Drive.  In 1945 it started at Kutchens and moved along the highway from Kutchin's to Radke's; it was Kutchin's turn to be threshed out first.  I believe it was the last time that any threshing was done at Maplewood.  After they were through at Kutchin's, they moved on to our place to thresh.

     Ma came out to the farm to help me feed them.  She had always prided herself for providing the best meals in the ring, and she wanted me to do no less.  The old farm table was stretched out in our big kitchen.  Those men who wanted to do so could wash their faces, more as a cooling gesture than as a cleansing one.  Raymond Good was the only one who combed his hair before he came to the table.  Some men smirked and said Sarah had trained him well.

     After threshing for awhile the men began to realized that the oats were running very well, and began to wonder how high the crop would yield.  John basked in the compliments, and promised the threshers that he would buy each of them a pony of beer if they threshed out 3,000 bushels.  When they passed 3,000, John promised that if they threshed out 4,000 bushels, he would buy each of them two ponies of beer.  As the number climbed higher and higher, more and more men watched the counter on the threshing machine to see, and speculate, the end result.  4,179 bushels were threshed, the highest in the ring and the highest ever produced on that particular farm.  The ring charged .03 per bushel or $125.37 to thresh out the Shikoski Brother's oats.  John treated those thresher men who went to the tavern with him.  Charlie was one of those who did not celebrate with him.

     In 1945 the threshing had begun at Maplewood on the east end, but those farmers who banded together to shred corn began on the west end of the line.  By the time the shredding crew got to the Shikoski Brothers, the last farm to shred that year, stormy weather had set in.  It was cold and rainy.  The corn stalks were very large, and hard to push through the shredder, especially if they were somewhat frozen.  For five days the men struggled with the corn stalks without accomplishing much.  Ma came out to help feed them, and complained that she didn't know what to feed them anymore.  She had the idea that you couldn't serve the same kind of food as what you had fed them a day or two before.  Finally the blowing snow made it impossible to work in the field, or even outside.  It was agreed by all to quit shredding and leave the corn shocks out in the field until better weather, until spring if necessary.

     Sometime that fall John and Charlie had the opportunity to buy a 10-20 McCormick-Deering tractor which would be large enough to pull their plow.  It had all steel wheels, the back wheels were lug wheels.  However it needed to be overhauled, and Charlie planned to do the work.  He parked it in the work shop and started to take it apart. 

                             CHAPTER 4

     On the morning of December 18, 1945, I had been sleeping in our bed after Charlie had gotten up and gone out to do chores.  I woke to a lighted room.  I jumped out of bed thinking that the sun was already up, the men would be coming in for breakfast and it wasn't ready yet.  I was already standing up before I realized that the light I saw was not sunlight shining in the window, but the floor burning in our bedroom.  The furnace was in the basement underneath our bedroom, and the smoke exhaust started in the basement underneath our bedroom, but the chimney started in the hallway upstairs.  Between  the furnace and the chimney the smoke traveled through a large pipe coming up through the bedroom floor to the ceiling above and into the upstairs hall to the chimney.

     I grabbed a rug and tried to beat out the flames, but I started to choke on the smoke that this action produced, and realized the futility of it.  I ran to the foot of the stairs and hollered up to Uncle John that the house was on fire and that he should get out.

     I raced back to the bedroom where the twins were sleeping.  I had to pass within about five or six feet from where the floor was burning.

     In order to keep the twins covered those cold winter nights, I had made them sleeping bags out of strong, tough feed sacks, and tied the bags to their iron cribs.  In trying to untie them, I had knotted the ties and couldn't get the children out.  I worked and yanked.  Meanwhile that floor kept burning not far from where I would have to pass to get out of the house.

     I felt a panic,  I call it a panic for want of a better word.  It started in my feet, and I could feel it rise up through my legs and through my body.  When it hit my head my mind went blank.

     The next thing I knew I was outside before the barn door.  I had the two children in my arms as well as two large blankets and a quilt from our big bed.  I tried to open the barn door but one blanket and a twin fell to the ground.  Then Charlie opened the door from the inside and helped me to take them to rest on the hay below the hay chute.  I was bare foot with only a thin summer nightgown on.  Charlie gave me his sheepskin jacket to wear before he raced after John to the house.

     I sat on the hay as the twins lay and gazed around them.  The calves in the pen near us also looked around curiously.  They came to the side of their pen and Bobby started crawling toward them.  I had to prevent him from crawling into the pen with them.

     The Green Lake Fire Department responded.  Many neighbors came as soon as they saw or heard about the fire.  Some braved the fire to rescue some things before they were destroyed by the flames.  Someone pulled out a dresser that stood very close to the outside bedroom door.  It was the only item saved from that part of the house.  In it was my engagement ring.

     Charlie entered the pantry and started handing things out the window to others.  Irwin Berger stayed just outside the window trying to hold onto Charlie's clothes in case the floor under him would collapse, and kept urging Charlie to leave,  In his shock, Charlie saw the bread pudding I had made and couldn't think of it being destroyed.  Afterward we found the pudding out under the old oak tree.  The cover had been knocked off and soot had settled on the pudding.  While this did save a covered casserole for me to use afterwards, Charlie's billfold and the milk check had been left to burn.  The Brooklyn Creamery replaced the check but the cash left there was destroyed.  The evening before the fire we had sat around the kitchen table eating peanuts, leaving the shucks on the table.  During the fire someone had wrapped the shucks in the tablecloth and saved them from burning.

     The Green Lake County sheriff came in the barn and told me that they would take me to the Bierman house across the road.  A squad car was parked as close to the barn door as it could get, but was still a few steps away.  Because I was barefoot, he proposed carrying me from the barn to the squad car.  I had no desire to be carried by him, or anyone else, and said I would walk to the car.  After all, I had gotten from the house to the barn barefoot, and I could walk barefoot those few steps from the barn to the car!  He refused to let me step in the snow.  During our argument someone came up with Charlie's bedroom slippers which he had left by the back door when he had put on his heavy work shoes.  Someone had saved them from the fire.  They were way too big for me, but they allowed me to shuffle enough so I could get to the squad car without stepping barefoot in the snow.  Both the sheriff and I were relieved that he didn't have to carry me.  Then he drove me and two other men, each carrying a twin, to Bierman's.

     Agnes Bierman welcomed us.  She often told the story afterward about how a man carried a twin into her house with a big sized blanket wrapped around the head and the wet diaper exposed.  How awful she thought, but then the second man brought in the other baby in the same condition, wrapped up head and exposed wet bottom.  Neither the twins nor I suffered any physical damage from our ordeal.  Someone said it was eighteen degrees below zero that morning, but there was little wind.

     Mrs. Bierman was a much smaller woman than I was, but she managed to find some clothes for me to wear as well as some cloths to use as diapers.  Later we were taken to Charlie's parents.  Generous donations came pouring in: children's clothes, blankets, clothes for me including shoes.  None of the shoes fit my feet.  That afternoon I was taken to Duescher's, still shuffling in Charlie's slippers, from the car to the store.  I bought a pair of shoes.  Yes, in those days you could buy a pair of shoes in Green Lake, for men and/or women, good, sturdy, long lasting shoes, though only work shoes, nothing fancy.  Duescher ran a shoe and harness repair shop.  He also sold harnesses and harness parts -- different sized leather straps, rivets, buckles and other supplies for mending your own harnesses.

     Shoes and harnesses were not the only things available in Green Lake at that time.  Next to Duescher's was Spencer's Hardware (then managed by Sadie Spencer) where you could buy nails, bolts, screws of all kinds, and small household or farm equipment.  After our fire Sadie gave me a dish pan and kettle she had taken from her merchandise.

     Up the street, in the next block, was Brooks Mercantile, which sold food items like cheese, sausage, crackers, etc., yard goods, bias tapes, laces, thread, pins, sewing machine bobbins, and much more.

     During the fire there had been a very light northwest wind blowing. This allowed the Fire Department to hose down the pump house attached to the northwest corner of the house, and the woodshed attached to the northeast corner of the house.  They had chopped down the connections between them and the house, thus saving these two small buildings from destruction.  One tree very close to the western side of the house received severe burning but continued to live for many years afterward.  Some trees near the east and south of the house did not survive the fire.

     The day after the fire Charlie took me out to the farm to see the remains of the house.  The field stone foundation, blackened and sooty, guarded the remains.  The twisted kitchen range, the washroom sink, the furnace and much debris were scattered in the blackened basement.

     I looked down into that yawning expanse and saw the blackened, twisted iron that had been the twins' cribs.  I thought about them lying in those iron beds when the bedroom floor was already on fire.  How close they had come to being burned!  Horror and thankfulness mingled in my heart.

     A few days later I happened to be in the grocery store when someone cracked a joke.  I laughed.  Another customer looked at me, remarking how insensitive I was, that I should be able to laugh after such a tragedy as our fire.

     Yes, the fire was a blow, but I was thankful that God had preserved all our lives, the lives of all six people who had been living in that house (not counting my unborn child).

     Brother John and Uncle John as well as Charlie, the twins and I, were taken in by Fred and Maggie.  Almost immediately Margaret made arrangements for Uncle John to travel by train to live with his sister, Sophie, in Locke, New York, where he stayed for the rest of his life.

     We were informed that if no one lived on the farm the fire insurance would become void.  Bud Norton had a twelve by sixteen foot building that he had built for a rod shop, a place where he could store and sell fishing rods, bait, etc.  It had skids underneath so it could easily be moved.  He offered it to us as a temporary living place.  It was transported to the farm and we moved into it shortly after Christmas.

     We acquired a small wood-burning laundry stove to provide heat and cooking facilities.  It stood in one corner of the rod shop, leaving space around it to allow the heat to be dispersed.  We had a narrow, rough, home-made table pushed up under a double window.  Three could sit at the table to eat, but we usually kept only two adult chairs by it, keeping the other chairs (which had been saved from the fire) in the woodshed.  Other furnishings in this shack were the two high chairs saved from the fire, two cribs we bought at Rhyan's Resale in Berlin, a double bed for Charlie and me that had been donated, and the dresser that had been saved from the fire.  Charlie built some shelves in one corner, and put up a high shelf in another corner with a rod underneath it to hold clothes hung on hangers.  All this in a 12 x 16 ft. room.  There was little room to walk and the twins spent most of their time either in their cribs or playing on our bed.  If they were on the floor they had to be watched very, very carefully to keep them away from the stove.  The twins, especially Bobby, learned to climb before they learned to walk.

     After the twins were born, a wag in Green Lake had quipped, "No wonder she had twins.  She had two men living with her."  This remark so provoked John that afterward he would not let me be anywhere near him, or come into any of the sheds or barn which he shared with Charlie.  Now with the winter cold and snow, John's antagonism to my appearing outside the shack, and the constant care of the little ones, I often felt cabin fever.

     The Big Three wringer washing machine and the copper wash boiler had been rescued from the fire, and were stored in the wood shed.  When I had to wash clothes Charlie filled the boiler with water after supper.  It covered the entire top of the laundry stove and warmed during the night.  In the morning it was given a 90 degree turn and rested across the stove on the back lid, leaving the front lid free for me to make breakfast.  After breakfast the boiler was replaced over both lids to continue heating the water.  While both twins played together in one crib, Charlie carried the other crib and the chairs outside to make room in the shack for the washing machine and tubs for rinsing.  Charlie managed to carry all this equipment from the woodshed into the shack so I could wash clothes.  It was extremely tight quarters.

     One day I managed the washing until nearly the end.  After I had hung some clothes outside, I accidentally caught the edge of one of the rinsing tubs and upset it.  The water surged out on the floor and ran to the lowest point, which was  under our bed where we had stored clothes and other articles in  cardboard boxes.  The cardboard was soggy; the clothes in the cardboard boxes wet with dirty water.  I ended up with a big mess and more clothes needing washing than what I had managed to wash that day.  I was tired and frustrated beyond belief!  I had no hope of anything ever changing!  It was the lowest day of my whole life!

     One day when the twins and I were alone in the shack, Bobby climbed up on a chair.  I hadn't noticed what he was doing until he fell over backwards and hit the floor, hard.  Afraid he might have seriously hurt himself, I let him lay until he got up by himself and moved around.  He seemed quite normal and I thought all was well with him.

     Several nights later he went into a convulsion.  He was taken to the Ripon Hospital.  Polio was suspected at first, and he was put on a liquid diet and kept in isolation.  I was allowed in his room only after wearing white sterile coverings over my clothes and hair.  My hands had to be scrubbed before and after my visit.

     One day when I was in the hallway outside his room scrubbing up, I overheard a woman in the room across the hall.  She talked about that poor little boy (Bobby).  She had taken him some "goodies" to eat but a nurse caught her in his room and scolded her.  She could not understand why this little boy (on a liquid diet and isolated) could not be allowed to have some of her home-made delicacy.

     The Ripon doctor's final diagnosis was osteomyelitis in his left shoulder blade, which he had injured when he had fallen backward to the floor.  An incision was made and the infection was cleaned out.  When I visited Bobby in his hospital bed, what good news that he had pulled an eye off his teddy bear, a sign that he was getting better.

     But Bobby continued to have trouble.  The infection continued to eat at his shoulder blade.  Charlie took him to St. Agnes Hospital in Fond du Lac.  Dr. Twoig operated, cutting deeper into his shoulder blade.  Much of his shoulder blade was removed.  At first Charlie had been allowed to watch the surgery.  He could see Bobby's lung expand and contract.  He started fainting and had to be removed from the operating room.

     When we did not yet know what was wrong, Charlie left a stipend with Maggie and asked her to contact Fr. Steve for a mass for Robert.  The next time Charlie saw her, she gave the stipend back to him.  Fr. Steve had offered up a mass for Bobby but returned the stipend saying that he knew we were struggling financially.

     We knew Bobby was getting better when the nurse said he had learned the bed was on wheels.  He stood up in the crib and gave the wall a good shove.  The crib rolled across the room to the opposite wall.  He would then give that wall a shove and the crib would roll back to the beginning.  It was a good thing that the bed had high sides.  They decided then that he was well enough to go home.

     The doctor was concerned whether the bone would grow at the same rate as his other bones.  When he was six years old, x-rays were taken of both shoulder blades and compared.  The injured blade had grown at the same rate as the other, but was of a deformed shape.

     One day an elderly man came and knocked on the door of our shack.  He wanted to see a man he called something like "Carl Zeke."  I told him that there was no man living on the farm by that name.  He seemed very puzzled and said that he had been told that the man he wanted to see lived on our farm after having bought it from his father.  I told him that yes, my husband had bought the farm from his father, but that wasn't his name. The man acted very puzzled, but finally turned away to leave.  I paid no attention to him as he left me.  Later Charlie told me that he had seen and talked with the man after he had left me.  Charlie was indeed the man he had wanted to see.  He was a Polish fellow from Princeton who had known Charlie's father well many years before.

     When I first met Charlie he did not always sell his name the same; sometimes with a "w," sometimes ending with a "y."  I told Charlie I didn't care how he spelled his name but that he should always spell it the same.  He served in the US army as "Charles J. Shikoske," though army records later corrected it to "Charlies J. Shikoski."

     Charlie wanted to build a house but he wanted John to pay for half the cost of building it.  John said Charlie could build if he wanted to, but John would not pay for any of it.  Charlie said if he built on land half owned by John, John would then own half the house even though he had not paid anything toward it.  John was well set.  He received half the income from the farm and lived very well with his parents.  Charlie supported a wife and family with no more than John had for just himself.

     Whenever Charlie wanted to discus the situation John would turn a deaf ear, or find some excuse for not doing anything about it.  Charlie became discouraged and began to think that the only way out of the situation would be to sell his half interest of the farm to John.

     Charlie had been taking the 10-20 tractor apart to overhaul it.  Its parts were scattered all around under the shed.  Now in his discouragement he had no desire to put the tractor together if John would become the sole owner.

     Charlie hired a lawyer.  John agreed to buy Charlie's half interest in the farm.  They held a meeting to make the transfer legal.  When the lawyers tried to draw up the agreement, John demanded that Charlie and his family vacate the premises by 12:00 midnight that very same day.  Charlie had all his carpentry tools scattered throughout the out-buildings.  Housing after the war was very scarce.  (John was living with their parents, the only relatives near enough to suddenly take us in without warning.)  To pack up a family of four with all its belongings within twelve or thirteen hours and leave was unthinkable.  Charlie refused to vacate in that short time.  The negotiations fell apart.  The frustrating situation continued.

                            CHAPTER 5

     Charlie finally decided that he would fight for the farm.  He had always wanted to farm.  He knew this farm and what it could produce.  He became determined to do his utmost to work for it!

     He needed money to swing a deal with John.  He went to the Green Lake State Bank seeking a loan.  He was told that for a loan that large he would have to get approval from the bank president, I. O. Sherwood, the same I. O. Sherwood who had sold the farm to his father, Fred Shikoski, in 1918.  Mr. Sherwood no longer went to the bank every day.  Charlie had to go to his home to ask for his approval. They had a long talk, and Charlie was given the approval he had asked for.

     In March, 1946, Charlie sued John to have the partnership dissolved.  A meeting was set up between John, Charlie and their lawyers.  John expected to pay Charlie the same amount for which he had previously bargained, and receive Charlie's share of the farm.  Charlie let his own lawyer do the talking.  His lawyer spoke and said that his client wanted the farm, and raised the bid for a half-ownership of the farm to more than that which John had offered.  John began a tirade about Charlie's sins against him, and against their family.  John's own lawyer told him to shut up.  "We are here to settle the matter at hand, not rehash old family problems."

     John was silenced.  He did not raise the bid to buy a half interest in the farm.  On March 21, 1946, John signed a quit claim deed offered for his signature and took the money Charlie offered.  As Charlie told me about it later, he said he thought that John's lawyer had done as much to help him (Charlie) as his own lawyer had.

     Charlie came back to me jubilant.  The farm was his!  But then reality raised its head.  The wood pile was extremely low; the tractor laid in pieces; last year's corn shocks sat in the field; the land contract called for its yearly property interest and a down payment on the principal; and the yearly property taxes were due.  Charlie's own lawyer had advised him not to take over the farm.  Why?  Because "You will never make it!"

     First things first.  Charlie hitched up a team and wagon and headed for the woods.  He gathered the dead wood and brought it home.  He hired a buzz saw and asked several neighbors to help with the sawing, so we at least had fuel for heating and cooking.

     Charlie paid the yearly property taxes that were due.  He paid his father all the interest that was due on the land contract, plus one hundred dollars on the principal, the lowest payment allowed in the land contract.

     Fred's good friend, John Mirr, was also selling his farm to a son.  John Mirr was boasting how much his son had paid him toward his farm.  Fred lamented that he had received only one hundred dollars toward the farm he had sold, and he could not live on a hundred dollars a year.  What he did not say was that he had received all the yearly interest that was due to him, (which was very much more than the hundred dollars paid on the principal).  Plus he had been paid all of the money from the fire insurance which had been paid directly to Fred for the loss of the house because he still owned the deed to the farm.  Charlie had not received anything for the loss of the house. He felt badly about his father's attitude, and determined that he would pay off his dad entirely, before starting to build a house.

     Charlie wanted to continue the crop rotation that had been practiced on the farm ever since the time that Fred had first bought the farm and started it.  An oats crop was scheduled to be planted on last year's corn field which still contained last year's corn shocks.  Charlie rounded up the corn-shredding neighbors to come and finish the corn shredding, thus getting the shocks off the field.  It was getting very late in the year to plant the oats.  There was no time to put the 10-20 tractor together so he re-assembled the five-horse team to plow the field.

     The horses had done little work all winter and were very out-of-shape.  Early in the morning Charlie would do the milking, eat a quick breakfast, hitch up the team and plow until the horses were tired.  He would then loosen their harnesses and tie them up to a fence to rest them while he finished his chores and any other necessary work before returning them to their plowing. When the horses were hot and tired Charlie would allow them a short drink and turn them into the barn to mangers with ample marsh hay.  After they had cooled down he let them have their fill of water and return to a generous helping of oats.  He would paint any sores on their shoulders with a veterinarian liquid used to ease and harden such sores.  While the horses were resting in the barn at the end of the day, Charlie would clean the hair and blood off the pads used under their collars.  If necessary he would also mend the harnesses which were old and well used.

     Things became much easier for me with John gone.  The twins and I could go outside and into any of the buildings we wished.  Sometimes I would keep Charlie company while he worked.  I tried to do what I could for him.  I learned how to put the milkers together and how to close the stanchions when the cows reached their heads in for their silage or ground feed.

     I could wash clothes in the milk house.  The milk/swill house was one building separated by a light board wall with a door that could be opened between them.  The swill house had a large iron kettle with a fire box under it made to heat swill for the pigs.  Charlie fed his pigs ground feed and did not use the kettle for his animals. The milk house had cold water delivered to it from the windmill and well.  Charlie had taken the washing machine to the milk house.  He carried cold water from the milk house to the kettle, built a fire to heat it, and carried the hot water to the washing machine.  The milk house had plenty of cold water for rinsing the clothes, and a drain to get rid of the dirty water.  There was plenty of space to move around the washing machine and the rinse water tubs.  Even in cold weather I could wash clothes out in the milk house as the fire under the hog kettle would warm both rooms.

     The washing machine was the same one that I had bought used in the late 1930's for five dollars.  It was a Big Three brand made by Barlow and Seelig, the fore runner of Speed Queen.  It was powered by an electric motor sitting on a shelf underneath the tub. A belt ran from it to the upper unit.  The tub was more square than round, and had wooden legs.  The agitator was attached to the cover which was hinged to the side.  The agitator lifted up out of the tub when the cover was raised.  When the agitator wore out Charlie attached the cover of a ten gallon milk can to the end of the rod.  In rotating back and forth the milk can cover swished through the clothes scrubbing them.

     Acquiring money and meeting payments became a constant concern.  The usual practice was for Charlie to write down in the checkbook the amount of any checks he wrote, but left me to keep a running account of the balance.  When he would deposit money without the checkbook, the bank would give him a duplicate deposit slip which he would stuff in his pocket.  When I washed his clothes I would find it and enter its amount in the check book.

     One day Charlie asked me what the balance was.  When I told him what my balance showed, he said there must be a mistake; we had more money than that!

     After going through my record several times, I could find no error.  He asked me if I had written any checks, and I had.  He berated me for being such an expensive wife.  I told him if he thought I was expensive it was just too bad that he hadn't married a truly expensive wife!  For almost a month Charlie did not talk to me unless it was absolutely necessary.

     Then one day we got a bank statement.  What had happened was: Charlie had sold four cows and a semi-load of corn.  He had deposited the money and received a duplicate deposit slip which I had never found.  The money, unknown to either of us, had been in the bank all the while.

     "You said you wrote some checks."

     "Yes, for groceries and necessities.  If you had told me how much money you were missing, I could have told you that I hadn't spent that much!"

     "I didn't know how much."

     I knew he had sold the cows and corn but had never given a thought about what became of the money.  It was a great relief to both of us to know that the money we argued about was safe in the bank.

     One day in late May, 1946, Charlie asked me several times to look at his eye.  He said it felt like there was a foreign object in it, but I couldn't see anything.  He went to a Princeton doctor who couldn't see anything either.  The doctor gave him some eye drops to use, but the eye continued getting worse and the other eye started a sympathetic reaction.  He could hardly see to do chores.  He wanted to keep his eyes closed constantly.

     That evening he asked me to guide him.  He carried a large tub of silage for the cows while I led him, trying to indicate where he should walk, when to stop, when to turn toward the manger, face it and drop the silage.  Instead of looking to see how much silage he was distributing, he used his hands to  feel the amount that he left for each cow.  It was frustrating for both of us.  I grabbed the tub to do it myself, but he came close to tears. "Don't carry it yourself. What am I going to do if you have to go to the hospital?"  My baby wasn't due yet but he was afraid of what could happen if I strained myself.

     If Charlie became blind now, how could I support all of us?  A third child was already on the way.  Why had I not finished my college education before I married?  Another three semesters of college and I would have been qualified as a Science-Math teacher.  Science-Math teachers at that time were more sought after than English-History teachers.

     After again stumbling through chores the next morning, I drove the old Graham Paige to Fond du Lac to take Charlie to see an eye specialist.  I parked, leaving the twins in the car while I guided Charlie into the doctor's office.  As soon as he was seated, I rushed back to them.  They had already gotten into the noon lunch I had brought along.  Every sandwich had at least one bite missing, but none had been eaten completely.  (No seat belts were available in cars at this time.  We didn't even think of anything like them.)

     The specialist had stronger lights and greater magnifying glasses.  Charlie had been using an emery wheel when he first felt anything in his eye.  The only thing the doctor could see was the hole in the eye ball where a piece of steel had entered.  He used a magnet and managed to draw the tiny particle out of the eye ball.  More eye drops and the eye began to heal.

     One day while I was outside and the twins were playing, they came running up to me.  They looked at me and Vergie said, "Bobby hit me."  I wanted to be a good mother, but how should a good mother handle this?  Bobby should not be hitting, but too much scolding him before Vergie might encourage hostility between them. Too much sympathy for Virginia might make her more demanding.  What would a good mother do in this case?  I hesitated, trying to decide the best action.  Then Bobby looked at her and said, "I did not hurt you." She answered, "Oh," and away they both went off to play together again.  I decided then that the best action was to let the children work out their own problems as they could.

     One day Charlie wanted to go down to the back pasture and offered to take us with him.  He had the team hitched to a wagon having a corn box.  He lifted the twins into the box, I climbed in and we started down the lane.  I don't know what happened but the horses bolted.  As we careened down the lane Charlie hollered for me to jump.  Jump?  To jump out of the wagon, I would have to jump high enough to clear the end board, about fifteen inches high or so.  I was well into my pregnancy and had never been athletic.  Besides, the twins were in the wagon with me.  I stayed put, ignoring Charlie's cries to jump.  By sheer strength and determination he managed to bring the team under control.  He then demanded to know why I had not jumped.  I told him I didn't want to leave the twins.  He said he had planned to throw them out before he jumped, but he wanted me to jump first.  "Next time I tell you to jump, you jump!"  There never was a "next time."

     Mr. Kutchin no longer hired Wilber Sell.  He had built and furnished a kitchen in Maplewood's "Brown Cottage" to provide a house suitable for a married man.  He had then rented the Maplewood Farm to Willis and Marcie Brightman.  Mr. Kutchen came to ask Charlie to help them when it was needed.  Charlie and Willis became friendly and began to exchange help.

     Charlie would come back from Maplewood and tell me about Marcie.  "She's not pregnant like you are."  "How do you know?" I asked.  "The way she jumped over that bull pen wall she can't be."  The first time Marcie and I had a woman to woman talk she told me she was expecting.

     Charlie would also tell me how clean her children were, "not dirty like your children are."  Several days later he told me that she must not have expected him then, because "her children were just as dirty as yours."  I was so happy to hear that Marcie's children were just as dirty as mine were.  Marcie and I became very good friends.

     Brightman's had hired a high school boy, John, to help.  One day he was sent to our southern field next to the woods, with our more reliable team and side-delivery rake to rake our hay.  I was out on our driveway with the twins, when I heard a loud racket.  The team was running down the side road, past the highway stop sign.  I grabbed the twins and put them in their cribs while the team ran past the shack.  The barnyard gate and barn door were closed, so the team passed them and kept on running past the barn and down the lane.  I ran after them, and they disappeared over the hill in our northern-most field.

     I ran down the lane, wavering between praying for John's life, and trying to remember all that I had learned in that first-aid class I had once taken.  By the time I got to the back hill and tried to run up it, I was winded and tired.  As I neared the top of the hill, I could see him.  The horses stood, still hitched to the rake with John still sitting on its seat.  When he saw me he called, "Where's my hat?"  "Did you find my hat?"  "I lost my hat.  It is the best straw hat I have."  "Did you see it?"  I had prayed for this boy's life! And all he could think of was a straw hat!

     Then I saw Charlie coming through the fence from Maplewood.  He had been working over there when he noticed his team and rake, which were supposed to be raking hay four fields away, standing in the back field.  I knew he would take care of John.  I turned back up the lane.  Agnes Bierman was at the head of the lane.  She had heard the racket as the horses ran past her house, and had come over to render any help she could.

     One day Willis came to ask Charlie if he could borrow a team.  Marcie was mowing Maplewood hay, but he wanted to have two mowers clip it down fast.  Charlie consented, but when Willis said he would send over his brother, Bob Brightman, who would pick up the team and drive them, Charlie had second thoughts about letting that team go if someone other than Willis would drive them.  When Willis assured him that Bob, his brother, was as good a horseman as Willis, Charlie reluctantly agreed.  When Bob came Charlie warned him about the team; they were known to run; they would walk faster than Kutchin's team; Bob was not to follow Marcie around the field; when they came up behind Marcie he was to have Marcie turn out and let him pass her; he was not to drop the reins at any time; if he had to stop for any reason he was to drive the team into a fence and tie the horses before leaving them.

     Charlie's warnings fell on deaf ears.  When Bob came up behind Marcie, he dropped the reins and started walking away.  No one knows what started the horses to run.  Both Bob and Marcie had their backs toward them.  Barney, who was a way off by a fence, saw them run, but was too far away to see what had startled them.  The horses ran straight ahead toward Marcie.  The pole between them hit the support of the seat Marcie was on.  It broke, plunging Marcie and seat to the ground.  When she had heard the racket, Marcie had looked up just in time to see the horses rise above her.  She said she saw so many hoofs flying in the air she thought both teams run over her.  Bob turned back to help Marcie.  She told him that she was all right, he should go catch the horses.  Then she looked down, saw the gash the sickle had made in her leg, and saw her bone exposed by the cut.

     Dr. Lieninger drove his car into the field and took her to Berlin Hospital.  Gangrene set in and she was in the hospital for months.  It was only through Dr. Lieninger's devoted care and attention that her leg did not have to be amputated.

           CHAPTER 6

     After haying came the threshing.  In 1946 they started at the west end of the "ring."  One day Charlie left with a team and wagon as soon as the milking was over, all the chores were done, and he had eaten breakfast.

     Toward evening the cows came home by themselves.  I put the milkers together, but Charlie had not come home from threshing.  The twins and I were on the driveway waiting for him when a man drove in.  He asked me how Charlie was and I told him that he was fine.  He said he was glad to hear it and started talking about the weather and crops.  Then he said he must go, he just wanted to see how Charlie was.  Again I told him that Charlie was fine, that he had gone threshing that day.  The man gave me a sharp look and told me that the reason he stopped was because Charlie had a run-away with his horses, and he wondered how he was.

     It must have given me a shock temporarily because I let him drive away without asking any questions.

     I prayed.  We had no telephone.  I wanted to run up the highway to see what happened, but the twins were with me.  They were too big to carry and too small to run with me.  Besides I should be home in case someone tried to contact me.  The cows were mooing for attention, but I had never tried to milk a cow.  Who would milk the cows if Charlie couldn't?  If that man who had stopped thought that much of Charlie, would he come back to tell me how he was?

     I walked back and forth from where the twins were to the highway.  I tried to look up the road to see what I could see, but it was pitch black underneath the towering maple trees.  Finally I heard the faint clip-clop of horses in the far distance.  I prayed.  The clip-clop sounded closer.  I tried to estimate how far away it was.  It came nearer but I estimated that it was farther away than Berger's farm.  Kutchin's man had gone threshing with a tractor, not horses.  There were no other horses kept between us and Green Lake Village.  If the horses passed the Sherwood farm it would most likely be Charlie.  They came closer.  Yes!  It was Charlie!  He turned into our driveway.  He was still furious at his fellow thresher-men.

     What happened was this.  Toward the end of the day when Charlie had pulled up to the threshing machine to unload, he was told not to go back for another load.  It was Saturday, and some of the men wanted to quit early so they could go to town Saturday night.  Saturday night in those days was the main weekly shopping day, when most of the farmers did their weekly shopping and visiting with neighbors.  Charlie did not want to quit early.  He felt he had as many chores to do as any of them had, and if he could work as long as usual, the others could too!  He returned to the field and loaded up his wagon again.

     As he again pulled up to the machine, the team ahead of him pulled away and headed for the road to go home.  The operator turned the thresher off.  When Charlie protested, he was told that they had warned him that they were quitting early, and refused to restart the machine.

     Charlie's wagon was full.  It was unthinkable to take home grain belonging to someone else.  Without it Charlie had no wagon on which to ride those two miles home.  The farmer who had just been threshed out told Charlie that he could use an old wagon frame.  It had no rack or box.  Charlie hitched his horses to it, sat directly on the frame and started home.  He had not gone very far down the highway when something broke.  At first Charlie managed to control the horses, but when he saw the frame again inching toward the horses, he jumped off before the frame would again hit the team.

     The horses ran down the road, then veered off along the side of the road.  When they came to a pole (either a telephone or an electric one), each horse tried to pass on the opposite side of the pole than the other one.  For awhile they fought, then broke free of each other, each horse going its own way.  Charlie stopped to clear the road of parts before trying to catch them.  One horse had run only a short distance.  Charlie caught it and tied it to a fence.  He was almost half way home before he caught the second horse.  He led it back to the first one.  In those days Charlie kept plenty of binder twine in his pockets to tie things together.  He dragged the wagon parts back to their owner, then started the two miles home, walking behind the team.  By the time he had finished milking, did the chores, mended harnesses and got to bed it was Sunday morning, and time to get up and greet the day.

     As the threshing crew moved from farm to farm they would eventually move to our farm, and expect to be fed.  How could we feed them?  Charlie reminded me about the large dining room table that could be extended by inserting its five extra leaves.  They had been rescued from the fire and were stored in the woodshed.  He suggested that we could put the expanded table out under the trees and feed the men outside.  But what kind of dinner for a dozen or more hungry men could be cooked on a small laundry stove?  For ourselves we had bought a four-quart pressure sauce pan, and our usual meal consisted of meat placed on the bottom, covered with potatoes and maybe a vegetable on top such as carrots or several cobs of corn, and pressure cook them together on the little laundry stove.  For refrigeration we put food in covered dishes, carried them out to the milk-house and put them down on the cement floor there.  The cold well water piped there kept them cool.  But feed hungry threshers in those conditions?

     Lillian Berger became our guardian angel!  She offered to feed the threshers for me.  They were transported to her home for dinner.  I went there to "help" her.  Between a late pregnancy, twins to watch and working in a strange kitchen, I was probably more of a hindrance than a help.  We were grateful for her help.

     From our farm the threshers moved to Maplewood.  The last day that Charlie went there to help thresh, his Dad came out to the farm and picked all the plums from the trees on our side of the Sherwood fence line.  He came to me with a bushel basket more than half full with plums and gave them to me.  I told him that he had picked them and he could have them, but he wanted only a small amount that he could nibble on.  He lamented, "That woman of mine won't can them."  They were good plums and he left them for me, expecting me to can what we wouldn't eat.

     I didn't feel like canning them either, but I did happen to have some quart jars and lids on hand, and felt I had no excuse not to take care of them.  I began to can them "open kettle method," a method not approved by home economists, but which my grandmother had successfully used.  Anyway I did not have the facilities to preserve them any other way.  It was tight quarters on the laundry stove to have sterilized cans, caps, and stewing plums all at the same time.  I managed, but it was a good thing I did not have to cook dinner for Charlie.  The twins were kept in their cribs.  They could watch without getting hurt or in my way.  I finished by supper time.

     I put the milkers together but Charlie was late getting home.  The threshers had worked an hour longer than usual in order to finish up the whole season's threshing.  Charlie started milking when he got home, but I was too tired to wash the canning dishes.  I laid down.

     After awhile I began to feel the first signs of labor.  When Charlie had finished all his chores and came in, I told him about the labor pains.  He told me he was so tired he could hardly move.  He wanted at least a little rest before doing anything.  We both laid down and went to sleep.

     The doctor in Fond du Lac was so far away and I had successfully given birth so we had begun using a Princeton doctor.  We had called him once when Bobby had a problem.  The doctor had promised to come around ten o'clock in the morning, but had not showed up until after supper.  At that time three other men were with him in the car.  All four of them had been drinking.  The doctor said they had lost their way, and ended up in the sand pit.  Highway 23 ran past both his office and our farm; how he got lost in the sand pit I couldn't figure out.  Some people in Princeton said he was a better doctor when he was drunk than any of the other doctors who stayed sober.  But having a drunken doctor did not appeal to us.  Between the two of us we had agreed that when the time came for my labor, I would just go to the hospital and have them call a doctor. When the twins came I had been in labor for almost 14 hours.  When labor started this time, we thought we had plenty of time to get a little rest before heading for the hospital.

     I woke up with distinct labor pains.  I woke up Charlie.  He said that after he took me to the hospital he would continue on to Almond where Aunt Ada had promised to care for the twins during my confinement.  He took one of the cribs out and lashed it onto the luggage rack of the Graham Paige.  I tried to put shoes on the twins, but they curled their toes, and my contractions interfered.  Charlie told me it was warm enough for them to be without shoes, and to put the shoes in the box with their clothes.  I told him to take all the diapers out of the drawer and put them in the box also.

     We drove to Berlin to the hospital.  The door was locked.  As I stood outside the door, waiting for it to be opened, I began to wonder if the baby would be born there on the stoop.  Finally the nurse came.  As soon as she took care of me, Charlie took the twins to Almond.

     The nurse said there wasn't time to get our Princeton doctor (as we expected), so she called Dr. Wiesender who lived only a few houses from the hospital.  Delivery went fine, and Richard was born.  When Charlie came back from Almond he stopped at the hospital.  He was told all was well and I was asleep.

     I had been taken to a three-bed room.  One bed was occupied by the mother of a new born son she named "Tom."  When she heard I had a son named Richard she dubbed him "Dick."  When the woman occupying the third bed gave birth to a son, Tom's mother insisted that the new mother name her son "Harry."  She kept obnoxiously insisting the child be named "Harry."  I don't remember the name his mother gave him, but it wasn't "Harry."

     Dr. Wiesender was of the old school and insisted his patients maintain strict bed rest for ten days after giving birth, no bathroom privileges, no dangling feet over the edge of the bed, just stagnation.  I felt my energy drain out of me.

     Marcie was still in the hospital since the horses had run over her.  Dr. Lieninger came every day to clean any gangrene from her leg.  She was in a wheel chair with her leg extending straight out before her.  She wheeled herself into my room.  We were glad to see each other and talk until the nurse found her in my room and chased her out, explaining that my new baby could become badly infected from her gangrene.

     Dr. Wiesender insisted that I try to nurse my baby even though there was no milk to nurse.  Near the end of my hospital stay the baby drew blood instead of milk.  As soon as I got home I quit trying to nurse and began feeding Dick the same commercial formula that Dr. Twoig had prescribed for me after the twins were born.  (Someone told me that if a woman once took that particular drug that Dr. Twoig had prescribed for me after the twins were born, she would never be able to nurse a baby at any later time.  I have never been able to nurse any of my ten babies.)

     Poor Aunt Ada!  She had been awakened very early in the morning.  The twins were wet and antsy and had no diapers packed with their supplies.  Charlie had gotten into the wrong drawer and grabbed all my dish towels instead of diapers!  That very day Margaret came to the farm to pick up the diapers.  She also washed my canning dishes.  But she had to go back to teaching after Labor Day, leaving Aunt Ada to take care of the twins by herself.

     Aunt Ada was very good with children, having been a teacher herself, and married to a teacher for many years.  But she was in her sixties, and full time care for two active little children became too much for her.  Margaret brought them back to me on a Sunday and I struggled to take care of them.  When she brought them home Dick was sleeping. I tried to show him to the twins but Bobby was not interested.  Instead he kept looking around elsewhere, but when I put Dick down on our bed, he woke up crying and kicking. When Bobby saw that he took one leap and landed on the bed next to Dick.  I grabbed him quickly, not knowing what he would do to Dick.

     We had no crib for Dick, not even room for one.  I had lined a wash basket and put a flounce around it for a bed for him.  During the day we kept it on our bed.  When we went to bed, Dick and his basket rested on our table where we ate our meals.

     Richard was baptized in Our Lady of the Lake Parish by Fr. Stephen Szczerbiak.

     Before Dick was born Aunt Ada told me that if that baby (Dick) was not marked when he was born she would never again believe that a mother's experience before giving birth could mark her child.  She was thinking of my experiences such as the house burning, the trouble with John and the different times the horses had run.  Dick had no birth marks, but it was only a few months after his birth when she again talked about how a mother's experience could and/or would mark their babies.   

                            CHAPTER 7

     Charlie was not afraid of heights.  Neither was his father.  His father, in order to prevent its destruction, had once climbed to the top of a run-away windmill and closed the whirling wheel by hand, a feat Charlie said he himself would never have tried, even though he was known among his neighbors as a man who would, if needed, climb up on a roof, a silo or a windmill.

     One day he had been asked to help fill Andy's silo.  In the morning as he was preparing to leave, I asked him not to climb Andy's silo.  When he returned that evening I asked him if he had climbed the silo.  He avoided answering me and I felt sure that he had.  I began to scold him, asking him who would support our children if he fell to his death?  Andy couldn't.  On his small sandy farm he could hardly support himself and his wife!  Charlie told me to shut up, and he walked away.  It was the only time I can remember that Charlie told me to "shut up."  Usually, if he didn't like what I was saying, he would just walk away and ignore me.

     Later he came back to me and explained.  Someone had to climb the silo in order to lift the silo-filler pipes into place and secure them.  He hung back.  No one else offered to go up until Standish, a man born with a club foot, began to prepare to climb.  Charlie said, "I couldn't let a cripple climb where I wouldn't."  I began to see my own selfishness, accepting for myself all the good things offered me, but unwilling to share the good with any one else.

     Charlie had long wanted to better our living conditions and with the 1946 threshing over he had a little time to start.  The shack we lived in was on skids and could be moved from place to place.  Charlie inched it closer to the woodshed and aligned one door in the shack with a door in the woodshed, bringing them as close together as he could.  He then built a very short floor, roof and sides between them, so that the two buildings became like a two room house with a very short connection between the two rooms.

     The woodshed originally had no floor, only packed dirt, where the chunks of stove wood were stored.  Charlie built a rough floor over the ground area.  He put up wall board over the walls and ceiling of the woodshed, and covered the floor with linoleum.  He installed a slate, double laundry tub, and connected its drain to the drain which had run from the original house to the old cess pool.  We now had a drain to get rid of the dirty water, rather than carrying it out and throwing it on the ground.  He installed a milk-house water heater.  We now had a limited supply of hot water on tap.  We bought a gas kitchen stove; we now had plenty of burners and an oven.  Great improvements from living in the 12 x 16 foot shack where we had been living!

     Margaret came to visit us on Thanksgiving Day.  Marcie invited all of us over to a Thanksgiving dinner.  She had left the hospital, and had given birth to a daughter, Jane, in October.  With her leg extended before her, she was in a wheel chair which she maneuvered expertly, managing her household.  Margaret, the children and I spent the day with her and her family.  Charlie came for dinner, but spent the most of the day laying up a chimney in the woodshed part of the shack.

     Now that we had a two-room shack with a chimney, we bought a large used heater stove that burned large chunks of wood.  It was a very good stove except that the lever for shaking down the ashes was broken.  To shake down the ashes it was necessary to insert the stove poker through the open ash door, raise the tip of the poker up to catch the grate and shake it.  Charlie was able to do this while standing up, but I had to lie on the floor and look up, in through the open ash door, in order to catch the necessary shaking spot.

     One evening when Charlie was out doing chores I wanted to build up the fire.  I lay down to shake the grate and the fire began to burn brightly.  I was so tired and the warmth of the stove felt so good that I continued lying there resting, almost asleep.  Charlie came in from the barn and saw me lying on the floor.  After seeing me lying on the floor, it was hard to convince him that I was all right.

     From Almond we brought a day bed, a large padded arm chair and a large cedar chest that had belonged to Uncle John.  In just a few months our living conditions had greatly improved.

     Though we had worked to improve our living conditions in the shack, we still dreamed of building a nice new house.  Charlie was confident he could build his own house except perhaps for the rafters.  He could handle the common rafters but was unsure of the cuts to form the valley and jack rafters.  We began drawing up plans for our future house.

     Charlie also said he wanted a three-fourth pitch roof on our 30 foot wide house.  We did not have any trigonometry tables, but with a three-fourth pitch I could use the old 3-4-5 right triangle to calculate the angles, which meant finding the square root of many figures.  I drew many diagrams showing the cuts and figures of various rafters.

     We studied advertisements showing house plans suitable for our use as a farm house.  One magazine showed a house plan which interested us and we sent for it.  It had an "L" shaped floor plan with a bedroom on the northwest corner and an open porch on the southeast.  Charlie wanted a bedroom on the east side of the house and a rectangular floor plan which would be cheaper and easier to build than an "L" shape.  So Charlie decided to reverse the floor plan, and build a rectangular house by substituting a closed sun parlor for an open porch.

    

     Christmas was coming.  Charlie remembered his youth when Santa Claus brought a decorated Christmas tree after the children were in bed on Christmas Eve.  He wanted the same for his children.  We talked it over and I told him we were too crowded in the shack for a big tree, and suggested a smaller tree that we could put on top of the cedar chest.  He bought a tree and sneaked it into the barn so the children would not see it.  I didn't see it either.  The morning of the day before Christmas I went to town to buy Christmas decorations.  There was not a single package of tinsel in all of the village of Green Lake!  I bought a dozen glass balls and some colored aluminum bells.

     That evening after the children were asleep Charlie brought in the tree he had bought.  It was huge!  We had an eight foot high ceiling, and the tree could not stand upright!  He said he could cut off the top to use on the cedar chest, but I couldn't see throwing away so much of the tree.  Charlie cut off the bottom and some of the tip in order to let the tree stand upright.  The lower limbs swept the floor; the tip barely missed the ceiling.  The balls and bells I had bought were lost in the tree's expanse, so from then until time for me to leave for midnight mass I cut up Christmas cards and hung the pictures that I cut out of them on the tree.  The balls, bells and pictures were hung only on the front, the back of the tree remained bare.

     I went to midnight mass alone while Charlie stayed with the children.  On Christmas he went to mass alone so I could stay with them.  In the morning when Bobby got up to go to the out house, he stopped and just stood there, looking and looking at such a tree standing in our shack, until Vergie came and they stood together gazing at it.  They discovered they could make the aluminum bells tinkle and somehow started calling them "dumb-bells," the name they called them for many years.

     Life moved along smoothly.  Charlie was busy with milking, chores, plowing snow, taking care of spring field work, etc.  I was busy with the children, homework, mending and sewing.  One day Charlie told me that I was pregnant again.  I told him I wasn't,  I just hadn't recovered from Dick's birth yet.  His comment, "You act pregnant to me."  Later I felt life stirring within me.  How could Charlie Know?  He never told me.

     

        Threshing time loomed again.  Since the ring had started on the west end the year before, it was to begin on our east end this year.  At the 1947 annual meeting of the members, Kutchin opted out.  That year he had all oats combined; 1946 was the last year any grain was cut, shocked and threshed by a thrshing ring at Maplewood.  Even then not all Maplewood grain was threshed.  Some of it had been combined.

     It was Charlie's turn to be threshed first, but at the annual meeting of the ring members, Erwin Berger asked Charlie if he could be threshed out before him.  At first Charlie refused, saying he wanted to be threshed out before my baby was born.  Berger said he had the same reason; his wife was also expecting.  Berger wanted to start threshing on Saturday; Charlie wanted to start on Monday as he did not have his granary cleaned out yet, ready to accept the new grain.  In the end it was decided to thresh at Bergers on Saturday without Charlie's help, to allow Charlie to get his granary ready.

     On Monday they finished thresing at Bergers at noon.  They ate dinner there and then moved to our place.  Margaret came to help me feed the threshers.  By four o'clock we had things all ready to feed the men except for the last touches.  I laid down to rest a little bit.  Then the first pangs of labor started.  We fed the men as they came in, Margaret taking care of most of it.  I started going around the table pouring coffee when a pain struck.  I went to the stove and stood facing it with my back to the men.  When the contraction had passed I continued to pour coffee.  Charlie came in to eat with a bunch of men.  No chance to tell him labor was starting.  He did tell us the number of men we should expect to feed.

     The men cleared out, but we were one short of those who were expected to eat.  We waited anxiously as I could hardly wash up for the hospital as long as there would be a man in the shack.  Finally Charlie came in to get hot water for milking.  We told him what was going on, and that we were waiting for one more man to come in and be fed.  He told us that he had counted his dad, but that his dad hadn't felt very well, and had gone home without eating.

     Charlie did the milking,  Margaret cleaned up the kitchen and I got ready for the hospital.  Charlie and I started out.  We stopped at Brightman's and asked Marcie to pick up the meat I had ordered from the grocery store, take it to Margaret and help her feed the threshers the next day.

     When we got to the hospital Fr. Lieninger was there.  He had just delivered our neighbor's child, Ellen Wildes.  When he saw me he ordered the nurse to take me immediately to the delivery room.  They had to wait until the delivery room had been cleaned up after Ellen's birth before they coud take me.  All went well.  Frances was born.

     Before Frances was born Charlie and I argued whether Frances (Francis) was a boys name or a girls name.  We decided to name the baby Franc(e or i)s and let the Lord decide whether the baby would be Frances or Francis.

     At that time Dr. Lieninger was not married.  He was out on a date with his future wife when he was called to deliver Ellen and then had to deliver Frances.  She spent most of the evening waiting for him in his car parked outside the hospital.  She married him anyway

     The next morning when Charlie told the men that I had given birth, they could hardly believe it.  Why!  I had served them supper the evening before!

     Margaret had finished summer school.  Until regular school started she was able to stay and take care of the children for us while I was in the hospital and Charlie continued threshing with the ring.

     Frances was baptized in Our Lady of the Lake Church by Fr. Stephen Szczerbiak.

     

     

                            CHAPTER 8

          By February, 1948, I began to realize something was wrong with me.  Charlie took me to see Dr. Twowig in Fond du Lac, who called in a consulting doctor.  They asked me if I was pregnant.  I told them, no.  They decided to do an "exploratory" surgery.  Dr. Twowig told me that, depending on what they found, I might not be able to have any more children.  He said I was lucky to already have four healthy children.

     After the operation I was back in the hospital bed before regaining consciousness.  The first thing I knew Charlie was there with a dire face and voice saying, "Oh my!  Oh My!  She is vomiting!"  I hadn't realized I was vomiting.  A nurse was cleaning me up.  I tried hard to let Charlie know that I was all right, but I was glad when he left saying he had to get back to the children, and I didn't have to make the effort to assure him that I was okay.  The nurse urged me to drink more tea.  I refused saying it was only making me vomit.  She answered, "We want you to vomit.  It helps get rid of the ether."

     The doctor had found an ectopic pregnancy and had removed my right ovary.  I had lost a child!  A priest, the hospital chaplain, came to talk to me.  My surgery had taken place in a Catholic hospital by a Catholic doctor and I had not known about the pregnancy.  But years later I began to realize more and more that I had really lost a child.  In my heart I named her Mary Terese.

     Charlie had taken care of our children while I was in the hospital.  He had his own unusual ideas about making beds.  He believed that when a person got up out of bed he should throw the bed coverings over the foot of the bed to air it out.  The proper time to make a bed was just before you crawled into it at night.  You should never, ever, make up a bed before the "animal heat" had dissipated.

     While I was gone, he had gotten the children up, threw their covers over the foot of their beds, and took them out to the barn with him to do the chores.  Along came Marcie Brightman bringing with her a dish for their dinner.  She saw the condition of the beds and straightened them all.  I don't think Charlie said anything to her, but he complained to me, "A man tries to keep the children healthy by airing out their beds and a woman comes along and covers up all the beds."

     He had the children with him in the car when he came to bring me home.  When we got home he settled me in a chair while he made dinner for all of us. The children ate heartily, which surprised Charlie.  He had been concerned because they hadn't eaten much all the time I was gone.  Now it was the same cook, the same kind of food, the same place to eat, and they dug into it with gusto.  He decided the only difference was that I was there and that they must have missed me.

     The next day he said their clothes had to be washed.  Charlie had been raised as the oldest child in a family including a sickly brother and five sisters.  He and his father had done all the heavy work on the farm; there were plenty of girls to do the housework.  He knew very little about washing clothes.  He settled me in a chair where I could watch him and tell him what to do.  He started sorting the clothes into different piles.  He would hold up an article and I was to tell him upon which pile to drop it.  It was frustrating to make him understand what was so simple to me.  I stood up and started tossing the clothes around, sorting them myself.  Charlie was practically crying because he was afraid that I would hurt myself.  "I know I'm not doing it right but just sit and tell me what to do.  I don't want you to hurt yourself and go back in the hospital."  I sat and watched his clumsy work, but it was frustrating to explain verbally and in detail the whole process of washing clothes.  He saw to it that I was safe in bed before hanging them out on the clothes line.  I can only imagine how they hung.

     After the end of World War II machinery companies turned from making tanks to creating farm machinery.  Much of the old machinery still being used was worn out and needed replacement.  Combines were coming into their own.  Mr. Kutchin had invested in a combine in 1946 and had combined some of his grain in that year.  In 1947 Willis Brightman combined all of their oats.  The larger farmers bought combines.  The threshing ring collapsed. The smaller farmers had to have their oats custom combined by those who could afford to buy combines.

     In March, 1949, Charlie and I were together in bed when I woke up with the first signs of labor coming on.  I waited a short time to make sure that it really was labor before I woke Charlie.

     "I have to go to the hospital."

     "You have to go to the hospital?"

     "Yes, I have to go to the hospital."

     "You have to go the hospital tonight?"

     "Yes. I have to go tonight."

     "Oh my!"

     He got up immediately and dressed.

     "Will you be all right for a little while?"

     "Yes."

     He disappeared out the door.  I wondered what was wrong with him.  He had taken me to the hospital before.  Why was he concerned now?  What I didn't know was that he had taken all the spark plugs out of the car and used them in his tractor. He now had to take the spark plugs out of the tractor and put them back in the car. Moreover it was pitch black outside. The car was parked too far away from any electrical outlet to let him use an extension cord light, and he had no flashlight. The only light he had was when he lit a match.  He not only had to put in the spark plugs, but he had to attach the proper wires to the right plugs so the car engine would fire in right order, all with only the light of common matches.

     Meanwhile I got ready for the hospital, wondering where he was and why he didn't come back.  I waited and waited.  Where was he?  I opened the door to look for him but it was pitch black.  I called and called, no answer.  We had no telephone for me to call for help.  Labor was getting stronger.  Where was he and what was he doing?

     He finally came in and picked up his shaving equipment.

     "What are you doing?"

     "I better shave.  There might be a pretty nurse there" he teased me.

     "You don't have time to shave."

     "Will it be all right for me to go without shaving?"

     "Yes, you can go without shaving."

     He got out his big four-buckle boots.

     "What are you getting them out for?  You have the car next to the door don't you?"

     "Yes, but there might be car trouble."

     "There better not be any car trouble."

     "Why?  Are you in a hurry?"

     "Yes, I'm in a hurry!  Bring the suitcase." and I flounced out the door into the car.

     About a week before I had read an article stating that if a woman had enough will-power she could delay the birth of a child by as much as twenty-four hours.  If any woman could delay birth by twenty-four hours I ought to be able to delay birth until I got to the hospital.  I began fighting my pains as hard as I could.

     "What are we going to name the baby?"

     "You wouldn't talk about that for nine months.  I am not going to talk about it now!"

     The pains became intense.  I could no longer talk.  I let out a cry so Charlie would stop to let the baby come.  He gave me a sharp look and stepped on the accelerator.  Well, if he thought he could make it to the hospital I'd try.  I kept on squelching the contractions.  Afterward he told me that it was when I let out my cry that he first realized the urgency of the situation.

     He went through a stop sign in Berlin.  A squad car started following us and parked behind us at the hospital.  I knew nothing about the cop.  All I could think of was how I had been afraid Dick would be born outside the hospital door.  I thought I could subdue the contractions better by bracing against the floor boards of the car than by standing on the stoop.  I remained sitting and asked Charlie to go get a nurse to help me.  He came back and said the nurse told him to bring me in.  No help from her!  At least I knew the hospital door was unlocked.  I made one bee-line through that door and down the hospital hallway.

     A nurse stepped in front of me.  "The other way, please."

     "The delivery room is that way."

     "You can't go into the delivery room.  You have to go to bed first."

     "I don't have time to go to bed!"

     "Well you can't go in the delivery room!"

     It was a standoff.  She wouldn't let me go forward and I wouldn't turn around for her.  Finally she said, "You haven't had a pain since you came through that hospital door."

     I was shocked to realize that she was right, so I tried to impress upon her how hard the pains were. Looking down her nose at me she asked, "Is this your first child?"

     "No, its my fifth."

     "Well, if its your fifth child and you think it is coming soon-"  I pushed forward, down the hall and she walked beside me.  We got just inside the door to the delivery room when the pain struck.  I looked at her to help me.  She put a hand on my shoulder and said, "We'll wait until this pain passes."

     All I could think of was that she was not going to help me.  I had to take things into my own hands.  With a quick prayer I stepped away from the nurse toward the table.  I gathered my skirts around my waist and, with super-human help, I flung myself up onto the delivery table. The nurse let loose an expletive I'll not repeat.  Before she got to my feet, the baby was born.

     The nurse called in an aid and told her to watch us while she went to call a doctor.  When the aide acted nervous and hesitant, the nurse assured her, "Nothing will happen.  Its already happened!"

     I heard the lusty cries of my baby and felt her kick the inner part of my leg.  The storm was over.  All was well in my world, and a deep peace settled down around me.

     Anna was born when the first big surge of the Baby Boomers after the second World War hit this area.  They were an unusual strain on the maternity services and equipment provided.  When Anna was born the hospital was out of the usual sutures used to tie the umbilical cord, so the doctor used a surgical suture.  They were out of identification bracelets, so she didn't get one until later.  They were out of receiving blankets so they wrapped her in a large bath towel.  They were out of bassinets so they put her in a laundry basket.

     After Dr. Wiesender had taken care of me there was no available bed for me in the maternity ward, so they put me in the labor room.  It was all backward; first the baby was born, then I was a half hour on the delivery table waiting for the doctor, after which I laid in the labor room about half a day.

     Anna was the fifteenth baby placed in a nursery designed to take care of six babies.  When the delivery nurse took her to the nursery, the nursery nurse was out delivering babies to their mothers for their two o'clock feeding.  There was no proper place to put Anna's basket.  Even the work counter was completely filled with bassinets.  The only available place was the floor, so she was put down behind a door where no one would be apt to stumble over her.

     When the nursery nurse found her and she had no I.D., no hospital receiving blanket or bassinet, and had been left on the floor, she assumed the baby was a foundling.  As she reached for the telephone to call authorities, she decided to first warn the delivery nurse that some strange person might still be in the hospital.  The situation was explained to her.

     When Anna was born the delivery nurse had called in Dr. Wiesender.  He was an older doctor who still believed new mothers should lie still in bed for about ten days after birth.  He had delivered Dick and I remembered how weak I had gotten then from laying around.  I dismissed Dr. Wiesender and asked Dr. Lieninger to attend me.  Protocol prevented him from stepping in immediately.  The nurses would not let me up out of bed because Dr. Wiesender had not allowed it.  For at least a whole day no doctor attended me.  It was a relief when Dr. Lieninger took over and gave permission to let me out bed and walk around.

     When I was getting ready to go home with Anna, my winter coat was not in my hospital room locker where I had expected it to be.  I asked a nurse about it.  The nurses searched both floors and were unable to find it.  They told me not to worry, I could go home anyway.  They would wrap me in a blanket that I could wear home and have my husband return it.  I was greatly upset.  It was a very new coat.  Since the fire I had worn only hand-me-down coats.  To lose such a nice new coat, after waiting for one so long, hurt.

     Eventually Charlie came striding into my room carrying my coat.  "Here, you didn't ask me to bring this, but I thought you might want it."  He had taken it home!  Why?  "You threw it at me.  I didn't know what to do with it."

     Charlie had all the children with him in the car.  They were all excited about their new baby sister.  I was surprised to see them all wearing summer clothing--in March.  Each child had a drawer for his clothes.  I had put their names on their drawers so Charlie would be able to find the correct clothes for each child.  But when he had gone looking for clean clothes for them, instead of looking in their drawers, he had first looked in the cedar chest where I had stored out-of-season clothes.  He had held each garment against the children to determine who was the right size to wear it.  At least one child was wearing what his next oldest sibling had worn the year before.  Oh, they were warm enough!  Charlie had them well-layered.  He had taken good care of them.  It just surprised me what they were wearing, summer clothing in March.

     Anna was baptized in Our Lady of the Lake Parish by Fr. Stephen Szczerbiak.  I had named her "Anna May,"  When Fr. Steve baptized, he baptized her "Anna Mary."  Charlie had never agreed to name a daughter "Mary."  He had never wanted a child named after himself.  I had told him that if our child was boy born on his birthday, I would name him "Charles."  Anna came a week before his birthday and was not a boy.  Charlie never had a son named after him.   

                            CHAPTER 9

     On Palm Sunday, 1949, Margaret was visiting us.  We had just finished eating dinner when someone stopped in and warned us that a burning barrel fire at Bel Aire had escaped and was heading in our direction, starting to cross the small field between our shack and Bel Air.  It was a warm day and last year's stubble on our six acre field was tinder dry.  Charlie jumped on his tractor with a plow hitched behind it, and attempted to plow a furrow in our field to prevent the fire from spreading to our buildings.  He had completely forgotten that he had drained the tractor radiator the evening before to prevent the radiator from freezing.  The motor was seized and he could not create a furrow.

     The flames raced toward us.  The fire department responded, putting the blaze out, but it had come within about twelve feet of our shack.  Margaret and I had piled the children (except Anna) in the car ready to drive off if the shack had caught fire.  Anna was a wee baby lying in her basket, and easy to grab, basket and all, if necessary.

     That night Charlie sat out in a lawn chair all night, hosing down the ground around the shack and keeping watch that some stray ember might not again flare up and threaten us.  The year before we had planted more than a dozen trees and an asparagus bed which we had mulched.  The mulch burned killing much of the planting.  The asparagus bed and most of the trees including all the plum and cherry trees were killed by the fire.  Only four apple and two pear trees survived.  Another asparagus bed was planted the next year.

     One evening after supper I had an unexpected visitor, Anne Sell.  I had not seen nor heard anything of her since she and her husband had left the house at Bel Aire, and I can't say I missed her.  I was surprised that she came to visit me.  She was very talkative, and I listened to her though I had little interest in her.  From her talk I gathered that she had given birth to another daughter, but that she had since divorced Wilber.  She spoke about a man whom she had been seeing a lot lately but never named him, calling him "you-know-who."  I listened half-heartedly, not really caring who he was.

     Eventually Charlie came in from finishing chores and talked with us, hearing about "you-know-who."  Charlie was more honest than I was and when she kept on using that expression, he told her that no, he didn't know who "you-know-who" was.  She answered him, "your brother John."

     I was dumb-founded!  Some men in town had told Charlie that his brother was running around with a "red-head," but they hadn't known her name.  All I could think of was that Anne was red-headed, and how many red-heads could there be around in this area?  I seemed rooted to the floor while Charlie walked Anne out to her car and watched her drive away.

     When Charlie came back in the house I commented that Anne must be the red-head John was running around with.  Charlie protested, saying John would never run around with anyone like Anne.  Time proved Charlie wrong.

     I was visiting Charlie's folks one day and gave them the news that I was expecting another child.

     "What are you going to do?" Ma exclaimed.

     "Do?  Why they'll do the same as we did, raise them," Dad said.

     She replied, "I had only one at a time."

     Different people reacted to our news in different ways.  When I told one guest that I was expecting again, she exclaimed that she didn't think I should have so many children "just to please the priest."  I was knocked for a loop.  Whatever the reasons were that I had so many children, "pleasing the priest" was not one of them.  By the time I recovered from this remark, I thought I had missed a good chance to express my Catholic belief, but then decided my reaction made a better statement than any I could have spoken.

     Whenever I was pregnant I felt doubly blessed because then two guardian angels watched over me, my own and the baby's protector.

     Charlie remained busy preparing to build a house as well as doing all his farm work.  He cleaned up the remains from the old house, knocking down the old field stone foundation.  The new house was to be built approximately where the old house had stood.  The field stones which had been used in building the old foundation he cleared out and piled them under the big old oak tree east of the house.  He created an incline from the ground level down into the old excavation hole, so he could drive his F-12 tractor down into the decline, using its loader to clear out and shape the excavation for the new house.  He measured and staked out the footings needed.  He poured the footings for both the outside foundation and a six foot center supporting wall.

     Charlie hired an elderly man, Ed Basing, to help mix and pour concrete.  He rented forms to pour the foundation.  He used his Dad's old hand-powered cement mixer, which he had rigged up with an electric motor, to mix all the concrete needed for the foundation.

He laid a two-block cement wall on the foundations he had poured for the house; built a cement block supporting wall lengthwise down the center of the basement; laid the first floor; built the first floor walls; and laid the second floor.  Then he was ready to erect the common rafters.

     One morning he came and asked me to help measure out the first pair of common rafters.  He had sighted down all the 2 x 6 pieces of lumber in the pile, and picked out the two straightest ones to use as patterns.  I had my figures and helped him hold the tape measure.  When the rafters were all marked out I went back in the shack while he cut them out.  He did not have a power saw at that time, so Charlie used a hand saw.  When I went out to tell him dinner was ready he had the first two rafters all cut out.  He was anxious and wanted to try them before eating.

     He lifted one rafter up in place and asked me to hold it while he put the second one up in place opposite the first rafter.  "Not bad, but slightly apart at the bottom," he reported.  He spoke about the peak where the two rafters came together.  "Oh wait!  I forgot about the ridge board."  He picked up a short board the same thickness that the ridge board would be, and placed it between the rafters.  It spread the rafters slightly apart, lifting the tip for a slightly different angle and dividing the crack.  He let go of the rafter he was holding and told me to let go of the one I held.     "It'll fall down!" I said.

     "No, it won't.  Let go."

     Gingerly I let go.  So perfect had Charlie cut those rafters with a hand saw that they remained in place, being held only by gravity and friction."

     Then Charlie said, "Let's go eat!"  I protested that the rafters would fall.

     "No, they won't.  There is no wind."

     We went to eat and the rafters stayed in place all during dinner, held only by friction and gravity.  Then we took them down and Charlie used those first two rafters as patterns for the rest of the common rafters.  Later he used my figures to build the valley and jack Rafters.

     In April, 1950, Charlie was champing at the bit, anxious to plant the oats.  He wanted to have it completed before the expected baby would come, but the fields were too wet to work.  Our soil was high in clay, rich in deposits, but subject to locking in the nutrients when worked too wet.  While Charlie felt his land was too wet to work, some Princeton farmers with sandier soil had all their oats planted.

     One night in early May as we lay in bed talking, I felt the first indication that I might go into labor.  I mentioned it to Charlie.  Immediately he got and started dressing.  He insisted that I get up too.  I protested that I was not sure yet.  He persisted.  I told him I didn't want to go to the hospital on what could be a "false alarm."  He told me he would rather take me to the hospital ten times for "false alarms" than to be too late once.  He gave me no rest until I arose and got ready for the hospital.  We drove first to Brightman's to ask Marcie to stay with our children.  She called Dr. Lieninger immediately.  We talked a little with Marcie before continuing our trip. We were already on our way to Berlin before I was really sure that labor had indeed started.  When we got to the hospital a nurse was waiting by the door.  She asked if I was Dr. Lieninger's patient.

     "He is in there pacing the floor.  He says you deliver quickly.  He is afraid you had it on the way."

     Everything went well and normal until the actual birth of William, when the doctor said, "You're lucky to have this one."

     "Why?  What's wrong?"

     "Oh, nothing is wrong, but he has a knot in his umbilical  cord."  He must have pulled it tight just as he was being born.  Dr. Lieninger said that in all his medical experience he had never seen an umbilical knot pulled that tight that the baby was not blue or dead.  He brought him closer to my head, and showed me his cord before it had been tied off.

    

     I was in the hospital bed drifting between sleep and wakefulness.  I knew I was in a hospital bed, but I couldn't remember coming there, or why.  Had I been in an accident?  How badly was I hurt?  If I could only remember the accident I might know how seriously I was hurt.  Then I seemed to glimpse an angel at the foot of the bed.  I thought "If I see an angel I must be dead!"  The thought of being dead suddenly woke me, and as I woke up I seemed to roll over and over again but came to rest on my back in the middle of that narrow bed.  The guard rail on the side of the bed from which I rolled was down, it had not been raised!  I believe my guardian angel prevented me from falling out of that high hospital bed.  She was watching out for me!

     A terrible wind swept through the area.  At the hospital it blew a very large window into the waiting room.  The floor was strewn with broken glass.  At home Charlie had taken all the children to the barn with him when he had to do chores.  The barn was old.  Charlie thought it was over a hundred years old then.  He had previously tied the two sides of the barn together with cables stretched across the mows to prevent the sides from falling out.  The wind was so bad that Charlie was afraid the barn would collapse.  He herded the children into the concrete passageway between the barn and silo where they would be protected if the barn did blow apart.  While doing chores he had to be in the barn, but he listened to every creak, every groan, ready to duck into the silo passage near the children.

     By the time the wind had abated, the land had dried out, leaving it almost too dry to plant.  Afterward he heard reports that the powerful wind had, in some places, blown the seed oats out of the ground, scattering it so far that some Princeton farmers had to replant their oats.

     Bill was baptized in Our Lady of the Lake Church by Fr. Stephen Szczerbiak.

     Before Bill was born Charlie told me about a story he had read in grade school about a boy named William John, but who was often called Billy Jack.  He said it wasn't until he was reading near the end of the story that he began to realize that William John and Billy Jack was the same boy.  We began to call our son Billy Jack, but eventually dropped the name "Jack."

     When Billy was around three years old I reverted back and called him "Billy Jack."  He looked at me quizzically as if trying to understand what I meant, then said "Mama is a Jack too."  Whether being called Billy Jack was meant as an insult or as a complement he didn't know, but whichever it was he would return it in kind.

    

     Winter weather began to be felt.  Colds and sniffles made their presence known.  Baby Billy became quite sick. Dr. Lieninger came out to the farm on a house call. He diagnosed Billy as having pneumonia, and prescribed an oral antibiotic.  That evening Billy was very sick.  If I laid him down he seemed to get worse.  He seemed to breath easier if I laid him against my shoulder and rocked.  All night long I sat in my rocking chair near the big old wood stove, holding and rocking Billy.

     Charlie dozed the first part of the night, but later got up, took care of the fire and then sat up with me.  I urged him to go to bed; he would have to get up and do chores and he needed his rest.  But he refused and stayed with me until time to go out to the barn for morning milking. As Billy's symptoms began easing, I finally was able to lay him down and make breakfast.

     Later that day Charlie confided to me that he thought Billy was dying the night before.

     "Didn't you think he was dying?"

     "No, if I thought he was dying you wouldn't be sitting there!"

     "Why, what would I be doing?"

     "You'd be getting the doctor and you'd be getting the priest, and you'd be doing something else than just sitting there."

     "I thought it was too late for the doctor and too early for the priest."

     The turning point had come and passed.  Billy continued to be an active kid.

     One day when i was scolding Billy for what he was doing he said, "Bobby teached it to me."  I replied, "You didn't have to learn it."  He replied, "Dicky learned it to me."

     Charlie built a back porch on the house.  It was meant to become a first floor laundry as well as a place to leave and store work shoes, boots, jackets, etc.  He then built a large cement stoop next to the porch.  He brought a pile of stones and rocks and left them in a pile on the ground near the back door.  He had used many of them as fillers in building the cement stoop.

     One night I stepped out on the stoop to shake out a dust rag.  No yard light shone.  The night was pitch black!  I misjudged the distance between the back door and the edge of the stoop, and inadvertently stepped off the edge.  When I felt myself falling, I started a "Hail Mary."  The ground came up and hit me before I got to the word, Mary.  As I lay on the ground I decided that Mary should not be cheated out of her prayer just because I hadn't had time to finish it.  I lay just as I had fallen and completed the prayer.  When I raised my head to try to get up, my cheek brushed against a hard rock in the stone pile, so close had my head come from hitting that rock!  God is merciful!

     At this time state law did not require schools to provide transportation for children living less than two miles from school.  These children were expected to walk to and from school.  State Highway 23 ran past our farm, past Maplewood and through the village of Green Lake.  Our house was less than two miles from school but for the twins to walk to school meant walking on the highway and crossing two bridges, hardly safe for five and six year old children.

     When the twins started kindergarten they had school only in the afternoon.  We were willing to take them to school after dinner but asked that they be allowed to ride home on the school bus.  The first day they went to school I was afraid they would miss the bus going home, so I drove to school, parked as nearby as legal, and hoped to guide them onto the bus. I watched as they came out of school, ran all over, swung on the swings and played on the monkey bars, paying no attention to whether the bus came or not.  How could they ever learn to catch the bus?  Suddenly I saw them run straight for the bus and climb in.  They had seen the bus before I had noticed it!

     Someone advised us not to pay for the twins transportation home until the school district sent us a bill.  We were never sent a bill.

     Ruth Berger, a neighbor's daughter, was the same age as the twins and entered kindergarten at the same time.  Mrs. Berger and I agreed to exchange rides.  I would take them to school for a week and then Lillian Berger would take them the next week.

     During the winter I needed dental work done. With no telephone to call and make an appointment with the dentist in Princeton, I asked Charlie to make an appointment for me when he went to Princeton.  He came back and told me I had an 11:00 o'clock appointment, and that was the week I was supposed to drive the children to school!  Couldn't he have used more sense?

     The day turned out to be bitter cold.  Charlie told me to go early to keep my appointment, thinking someone might cancel their appointment because of the cold.  Our car wouldn't start, so Charlie got out the team of horses to pull the car to start it.  I got to Princeton all right, and yes, the appointment before mine was cancelled.  But when I was through I couldn't get the car started.  I had to call out a garage and wait my turn as they had many calls to get people started.  Someone said it had been 50 degrees below zero in Princeton that morning.

     By the time I got home, Charlie had the children all fed and the twins ready for school except for tying Vergie's dress.  The sash halves were sewn into the side seams of her dress and were meant to be tied in back.  When Vergie asked her father to tie them, he insisted on tying them in front.  Their argument was quite heated until I got home.  It seems Charlie was more conscious of where I tied my maternity dresses than where his little daughter tied hers.

     After John sold his interest in the farm to Charlie, he bought the dray and taxi business in Green Lake, conveying people, shipments and whatever from one place to another.  He met all trains stopping at the railroad station north of town, transporting passengers to and from the train station, and delivering and receiving merchandise sent by freight.

     For years Charlie and John lived less than two miles from each other; they attended the same church; they visited the same set of parents; they did business with the same merchants; but as far as I know they never came face to face with each other, though each was known to defend the other against unfair criticism.

     Anne came to the farm to visit me several times but she always came alone.

     It was a beautiful June morning.  Charlie had gotten up and gone out to do chores.  I was enjoying a few more moments in bed when I felt the first stirring of labor.  I got up and began making breakfast.  At first I thought I would not need to tell Charlie about my feelings immediately, but then I thought about how he would sometimes decide to do some other work before coming for breakfast.  How could I send him a message?  Bobby was six.  I could send him out with a message, but I was afraid if I wrote a note and sent it out with Bobby, Charlie would not stop his work long enough to read it.  I decided to send Bobby out with an oral coded message Charlie could understand.  I told Bobby to go and tell Daddy, "Mama says not to do any extra work before breakfast. Do only what is necessary."  I thought that would warn Charlie that something was up. Well Bobby never repeated, "Mama says."  He just told his Dad outright not to do anything extra.  Charlie thought he had a smart alec kid telling him what to do.  He was surprised when he came in and I told him I had to go to the hospital.

     "I thought the baby wasn't due until next month."

     "The baby is due July first.  This is June 30.  The baby is due tomorrow."

     Jokingly he teased me, "I wasn't going by the days.  I was going by the months.  The baby isn't due until next month."

     We got to the hospital; but labor came only in spurts and starts.  The doctor attended me continually, but my labor did not seem to advance.  Eventually he told me that my baby was in a poor position.  He had tried unsuccessfully to turn it.  He wanted to use my labor to put it in the correct position.  With the next contraction he would push up on one side while he expected my labor to push down on the other side.  With the next contraction, I was to use the hand grips and push.  When the next pain came it felt like a knife thrust deep within me.  I gasped and everything stopped.  The doctor spoke so soothingly.  He said he knew it hurt but it had to be done.  I was not to let go of those hand grips!  Again the pain started, the knife thrust up.  I gasped, but immediately determined to pull those hand grips.  I hung on and pulled, pulled on those grips until the doctor told me to relax.  The baby had been successfully turned.  David was born shortly afterward. 

     David was baptized in Our Lady of the Lake Church by Fr. Roger Idzikowski.

     In 1951 John sold his dray business and married Anne.  On July first he and Anne started farming on Highway K south of Twin Lakes.  (Charlie had married at age forty; John first married at age forty-six.)  On June 30 our son David was born.  Two days later Charlie's sister, Dorothy, gave birth to a son.  In just a few days great changes had occurred in the Fred Shikoski family.

     Whenever Charlie had a little time he would work on the new house.  He had enclosed the house, but it was taking a long time to get things done.  In order to save time he had contracted to have the roof shingled and the siding installed.  He sent a copy of the house plans to Sears Roebuck including the size of the rooms, where windows and stairways were, the vertical distance between the two floors, etc.  Sears engineers designed the heating and plumbing systems, and shipped all necessary materials to install the systems.  Sears even loaned out some of the larger tools needed to install the systems.

     With the house enclosed we had a telephone installed.  We were able to call out!  With the ringer turned high we could answer the phone if we were near the house or in the shack where we were still living.  It was a 4-party line, the other three parties being Otto Bierman, Erwin Berger, and a lake-shore resident who used it only during the summer.  Our number was a four-digit number (3344).  Ripon, Berlin, and Princeton were long distance.

     The heating system came in June, 1951, and the plumbing came in July.  Charlie promptly installed them.  I helped what I could.  Everything fit as designed except one unit of the heating duct.  Sears had expected the first floor joists to be butted, but Charlie had lapped them, throwing the heating duct off by the width of one joist.  I used my college math to design a connecting duct to fit the opening.

     In August 1951 Charlie had bought his first combine and was anxious to use it, but we had many damp days when combining could not be done.  He kept a close eye on the weather and his oats.  Even on the better days he could combine only an hour or two in the afternoon before the oats would get too tough to thresh decently.  When he couldn't combine, he worked to install the windows in the new house.  The first day of September was the first full day of combining.

                            CHAPTER 10

     My sister Margaret lived near Mount Hope in Grant County, about a four hour drive from Green Lake, too far away to drive there and back between milkings.  Occasionally I would visit her home.  In late 1951 I planned to visit Margaret taking with me our three youngest children, leaving the four oldest children with Charlie.  The morning was cloudy.  A storm had been forecast but was not supposed to come until evening.  I thought I could easily get to Mount Hope before any storm hit.

     I got about half way to Madison when the first flakes began sifting down, nothing to worry about.  By the time I got through Madison it was snowing and blowing, but as I was half way there already I kept going.  The storm became fierce, the roads slippery.  I was going up a hill slipping and sliding.  I was glad the children in the back were quiet, not disturbing my driving.  Billy and David were sleeping.  Anna looked out the window.  She told me later that the hill side (which had been cut down when the road was built) kept moving away and coming closer to her as the car slid back and forth across the highway.  At one time I realized my wheels were rapidly spinning.  I gently let up on the accelerator and the car actually moved forward faster.  Going up a high hill I saw a semi jack-knifed in the ditch.  No movement there at all.  All I could think of was that if a semi driver couldn't make it, how could I?  I knew that if I once stopped moving forward I'd be done.  I made it to the top of the hill and kept going.

     Near the edge of Fennimore I stopped to clear some of the ice off the windshield, at least enough for me to see the road.

     I managed to recognize the turn-off to Margaret's and reached her home.  Margaret was so surprised to see me!  She had no idea I would arrive in such a storm.  The milk truck had failed to come to pick up their milk.  The cow-tester who had been expected had called saying he couldn't get through.

     But the children and I had gotten through and were safe.  God is merciful!

     One Saturday night in 1952, after relaxing for a while after going to bed, I began feeling labor coming on.  Charlie's sister Agnes happened to be visiting her parents and we asked her to stay with the children while Charlie took me to the hospital.  All went well and we got a new little daughter, Alice, born early Sunday morning.

     My hospital room mate began by telling me all, and I mean all about having a baby.  Eventually she stopped long enough to ask me if this was my first child.

     "No, its my eighth."

     "Oh, my!  Did you tell the doctor its your last one?"

     "No."

     "Well I did!"  It was her second or third child.

     The next morning Charlie took the children to the barn for chores and then came in to give them their breakfast.  He wondered why no one asked about Mama.  Finally one of them made a remark about Mama being in church.  Oh!  They realized it was Sunday and Mama always went to early mass.  But then Vergie exclaimed excitedly, "The suitcase is gone!  Mama's in the hospital!"  So Charlie told them about their new little sister, Alice.

     Charlie had bargained to sell the last two work horses that we still owned.  The man said he would come after them on Monday, (the day after Alice was born,) at seven o'clock.  The school bus was due at seven o'clock to pick up the twins in second grade and Dick who was in first grade.  Charlie had his Monday morning plans all made.  He would do the milking early, make breakfast, get the older ones ready for school and waiting for the school bus, and then help the man load the horses.

     The trouble was that the man came to pick up the horses at five o'clock instead of seven.  They had not yet come in from the pasture to drink.  By the time the horses were brought in from the pasture and loaded, time was getting short.  Breakfast was a quick grab.  Dick was slow in dressing himself, and failed to be ready to get on the bus, so he missed school that day.

     Our stop was the first one on the route so the twins rode the entire length of the route before arriving at school.  Bob had taken the seat directly behind the driver.  By the time the bus neared the school his stomach rebelled and he threw up all over his seat, the floor and the aisle next to him.  The driver kept the school children from coming forward to the front of the bus.  He opened the back of the bus and all (except Bob) left through the rear door.  The kids thought it high adventure to leave the bus by the rear.  The driver brought Bob back to Charlie with the bus, then had to clean up the bus.  Charlie cleaned up Bob and put him to bed.

     That evening Charlie kept Bob in bed and left Vergie in the house to watch things.  She was to come to the barn if Bob vomited or anything else happened.  Charlie took the rest of the children to the barn with him.

     Part way through milking Charlie got worried about what was going on in the shack.  He sent Dick in to see if everything was all right.  He came back to tell Daddy that Vergie had vomited all over the floor and was standing there crying.  Charlie came in and cleaned up her and the floor, and put her to bed.

     The next day other children were sick.  Charlie notified the doctor and they kept me in the hospital longer than usual so I wouldn't bring Alice home to sickness.  By the time I got home they were all through being sick, the house all cleaned up and the clothes had all been washed, but Charlie told me that we needed a new washing machine for the clothes.  The old Big Three washing machine, bought in the late 1930s for five dollars, had seen its last days.  The main reason he had not immediately bought a new washer was because he was too busy to go out to buy one.

     The children welcomed Alice to our home.  She was baptized in Our Lady of the Lake Church by Fr. Roger Idzikowski.

     By December the crops had been gathered in, and the fall work pretty much accomplished.  The new house was far from being finished, but we seemed to have nearly all the essentials.  Linoleum had been laid in all the first floor rooms, except the living room.  The downstairs bath was finished.  The kitchen sink and the lower cabinets were installed.

     We decided to move in.  We put up and decorated a Christmas tree in the sun parlor, and then moved into our new home.  In the first floor bedroom we set up a double bed for Charlie and I, another double bed for Vergie and Fran, a youth bed for Anna, a crib for Bill and another crib for David.  The two single bunk beds were set up in the sun parlor for Bob and Dick.  Alice slept in a basket.  We had a fully functional bathroom and running water in the kitchen.  We had electricity, central heat, a telephone, and a laundry in the basement.  We had no baseboards or trim around the doorways and windows, no inside doors, and an unfinished living room, but we felt we were living in luxury.

     While we had been living in the shack the children had needed a place to hang their outdoor jackets etc.  On a horizontal board just inside the outside door, I had pounded in a nail for each child to hold his or her outside clothing, writing his or her name above the nail.  I did not realize until after we moved out of the shack into the house that the children had written their own identifications below the nails and under their jackets.  Robert was named "Big Boss," Dick was "Little Boss," and Virginia was "All Boss."

     The twins were in second grade, Dick was in first.  Before Mother's Day their art teachers had them make greeting cards for their Mothers.  On Friday afternoon they got off the school bus, each carrying the card they had made.

     I was up on a step ladder working on the ceiling in the living room when they got home.  Virginia slipped around me, as Bob and Dick stopped to talk to me, each with their card hanging in their hand, where I could see them and recognize what they were.

     Virginia came back in the hallway, motioning to them.  Bob left and talked to her.  Then he went into our bedroom, a room we kept off-limits to the children.  I called out to Bob, asking him what he was doing in our bedroom.

     "I'm hiding something."

     Knowing he had a mother's day card, I dropped the interrogation.

     Then Bob came back in the hall, gesturing wildly to Dick who finally left me to go to Bob, who helped him hide his card, on the top of the refrigerator.  To these little children the refrigerator top probably felt as high as any mountain.  To me, I could see the card every time I opened the refrigerator.

     Sunday morning Virginia ran to me, giving me her Mother's Day card.  She got a thank-you, a hug and a kiss.  Bobby watched.  Then he got his card out of my dresser drawer where he had hid it, and brought it to me.  He got a thank you, a hug and a kiss.

     Then Dick started crying.  He had a Mother's Day card for me too, but he couldn't find it!  I had to tell him to look on top of the refrigerator.  He finally got his thank-you, hug and kiss.

     After Alice was born, I did not go outside to be with Charlie as much as I had before.  With a new baby I was busy, and Charlie had our older children with him who could do the little things for him that I had been used to doing.  I did not know that Charlie had not replaced a guard on his tractor power take-off.

     One day I was working at the kitchen sink when I heard him come in.  At first I paid no attention to him, but then wondered why he was just standing there.  I turned to look at him, and as I looked, he dropped his sheepskin coat which had been wrapped around his lower body.  He had gotten caught in the power take-off!  It had chewed up his overall leg as high as his thigh; it had ripped the pants underneath from its waist band and chewed the whole left side; and it had chewed his sock from its top down to the shoe top!  But his leg sustained only a few scratches which he had me treat with iodine; no doctor!  So many people had lost an arm or a leg in a power take-off!  I had not been outside with him enough to know that he was running the tractor without a shield!  Only because his clothes were old and worn, was he able to brace his leg against the pull of the machine, and let his clothes rip off his body.  God is merciful!

     Maplewood had closed and was no longer operating, but a certain amount of maintenance was required.  Mr. Kutchin would ask for Charlie's help but would be short of cash to pay him.  Both men were pleased to trade Charlie's labor for Maplewood hotel furniture.  By this method we acquired beds, dressers, chairs and other items to furnish our new home.

     When the twins were in the first and second grades we took them to catechism classes taught in the rectory basement.  Two nuns who taught at St. John the Baptist parochial school in Princeton were brought to Our Lady of the Lake Church to hold religious classes on Saturday mornings.  Parents paid for their weekly literature papers which were passed out to each child.  These papers were geared to the age of the pupil.  But the nun teaching the twins also gave them other religious reading material which I thought too grown-up for the children, so I ignored them.  One Saturday Virginia brought home a tract on abortion.  The nest Saturday I told Sister what I thought about Virginia receiving anything like that to read at her age!  Sister told me that what she handed out was not meant for the children, but for their parents to read.  Oops!  Sorry!

     After breakfast on Saturday mornings our children old enough for catechism and I would gather around our dining room table.  We would go over their lessons trying to answer the questions being asked by their papers.  The only catechism I had had, was sketchy one-on-one talks with the priest before he baptized me.  I learned much, if not more, about Catholic beliefs by helping the children learn their catechism.

     One morning Bob's material told the story about Mary Magdalene, and how she had seen the risen Christ who had asked her to go tell the apostles that He had risen.  In the question section the catechism asked, "Who was the first person that Jesus appeared to after His resurrection?  Why?"  Bob's answer, "Mother Mary, because she had to give Him some clothes to wear."  Not exactly the answer his paper expected.

     One Saturday morning Charlie took the children to catechism himself and met the nun who was teaching his children.  He was very surprised learn that their teacher was the very same nun who had taught him catechism some forty years before when he had been taught catechism in the basement of Princeton's St. John the Baptist church.  He was so surprised that she was still living, let alone still teaching catechism.

     Within a year or two the nuns left Princeton.  Our Lady of the Lake then had nuns from St. Stanislaus Church teach catechism in Green Lake.

     One Saturday morning it was my turn to transport the two Berlin nuns to Our Lady of the Lake.  Not familiar with their custom of praying all the time they were riding, I thought they were praying because they were so afraid of my driving ability!

     One year Our Lady of the Lake Parish held a week long mission.  The visiting missionary spoke each evening and offered religious articles for sale.  Charlie stayed home finishing chores and watching the children so I could go to hear the mission talks.  I bought a sick call set from the missionary.  It consisted of a crucifix mounted on a wooden cross base which held a holy water vial and two small candles.  The cross back could be laid down and used as as a stand to hold the crucifix and candles upright.  I hung the crucifix in a prominent place on our living room wall.

     From somewhere I received a lengthy article on the rosary.  Charlie and I had started our married life with a recitation of the rosary, but life for us had moved swiftly and taken many turns.  So many other trials and tribulations, joys and sorrows, had crowded out all thoughts of kneeling for a rosary.  This article gave a lengthy explanation of where the rosary had originated, how it had brought victory at Lepanto, and how the Blessed Virgin had appeared at Fatima and taught the children how to say the rosary.  For the first time I learned that each decade had its own meditation.     

     I knelt down before the crucifix I had hung on the wall, learned the names of the mysteries and added the "Oh my Jesus" prayer after each decade.  Charlie again came and answered me.  For the first time I began to realize that the rosary was meant to be a meditation instead of a string of empty repetitions of the "I Believe," "Our Father," and "Hail, Mary."

     As the children grew the oldest ones joined in saying our rosaries.  It became a family ritual that after Charlie came in after finishing evening chores he would take off his heavy work shoes, and announce "prayer time."  Those children who were not in bed sleeping came into the living room and knelt down.  Older ones might lead a decade.

     At first the children laid their rosary down wherever they left it.  Eventually it was taking too long for them all to find their rosary when "prayer time" was called.  So I bought a bunch of small gold hooks like the ones used on the bottom of a cupboard shelf to hold cups.  I took a short narrow board and screwed in a hook for each rosary.  On the edge I screwed two hooks to hold a ribbon used to hang it on the wall.  Each child was assigned a hook on which to hang his rosary.  There it was easy to grab it when wanted, and easy to hang it up when prayer was over.  No more frantic searching for rosaries upon hearing the words, "Prayer time."

     August, 1955, it was warm.  Charlie's sisters were in Green Lake visiting their parents.  Everybody was having a good time except maybe me.  My baby was now more than a week overdue, and I was wondering what I should do.  In the evening I received the first inkling of something happening.  Charlie's sister came to stay with the children while he took me to the hospital.  We had heard unwelcome stories about the Berlin Hospital, so we had decided to go to the Ripon Hospital for this confinement.  Dr. Lieninger would deliver at either hospital.  While the procedure was very much the same as I remembered, the physical arrangement of the delivery section was not as familiar to me.

     Things progressed as usual until I was on the delivery table.  Something seemed to be missing but I didn't know what.  My contractions continued getting stronger until I felt an enormous push to deliver the child.  I thought it was over, but I heard no crying.  I asked the doctor what was wrong.  He ignored me.  Again I demanded to know what was wrong.  He told me nothing was wrong, and repeated it...I became almost hysterical, demanding to know why the baby wasn't crying.  He told me that the baby hadn't been born yet.  Wasn't born?  I thought I had felt it being born.  I was beginning to wonder if I could believe him when the contractions began again.  When they did become strong again, the child came forth with plenty of crying and kicking.

     Carol was born on her brother Dick's birthday.  Several women thought that because I was in the hospital, Dick would not get a birthday cake.  Both Charlie's sister and Marcie each baked a cake for him, so he got two big cakes for his birthday.

     Carol was baptized in Our Lady of the Lake Church by Fr. Roger Idzikowski.

     Sometime after Carol's birth someone told me that Dr. Lieninger had quit using hypnotism in delivering babies because he was getting into trouble using it.  Dr. Lieninger used hypnotism?  Not on Me!  He had delivered five of my children and had never put me to sleep!  But the more I thought and pondered about it, the more I began to realize what had happened.  I remembered the many times he would tell me to "bear down" before I felt a contraction, or tell me to "relax" after it had passed.  He was more aware of the changes in my body than I was myself.  I began to realize that my hysteria when Carol was born was because I was seeking for that soft, quiet, hypnotic voice that I had followed before in similar situations, and it was the absence of that voice that had disquieted me when I thought I had given birth before I actually had.  I had to admit that, yes, he probably had previously used hypnotic principles on me.

     One Saturday morning I was late in getting ready to take the children to catechism.  If I washed up and put on a clean dress, they would be late for their instruction, so I just took off with the children.  I was dirty and disheveled, but I wanted something from the grocery store.  There were only a few people in town, and I felt I could quickly run into the store and make my purchase without being seen by any one other than the clerk.  All went well until I stopped at the counter to pay for my purchase.  Into the store walked Connie Naparalla, the church trustee, with our new priest, Fr. Francis Karwata.  Connie was introducing Father to all the parishioners they met, and I was a mess!  Oh well, I told myself, Father is meeting so many new people, he wouldn't even recognize me later.  Well, Father looked me straight in the face and said, "Oh, I know who you are.  You're Maggie's daughter-in-law."  So much for anonymity.

     St. Blase Day evening I left the children with Charlie and went to church to have my throat blessed.  As I drove through an intersection another car came very close to hitting me.  I began to think that I needed protection against auto accidents more than against throat problems.  What is a sore throat as compared with landing in the hospital from an auto accident?

     I went up and had my throat blessed but my mind was asking, "St. Blase, if you have any power before the throne of God save me from auto accidents."

     After service I was talking to a friend while everyone else left, and the church became dark.  My friend left and I walked to my car.  It wouldn't start!  Nobody else was around.  I finally decided to walk home.  As I passed the lake, a cold wind was blowing off the lake, and I wasn't dressed warn enough to be out in the weather.

     The next morning I woke up with one of the worst sore throats I ever remembered.  Charlie said we had to get our car off the church parking lot.  He took me to it.  It turned over and purred as soon as I stepped on the starter.

     There is a saying, "Be careful what you pray for.  You might get exactly what you pray for."

     All my life I was known as someone who would jump, jerk or make a startled cry at any sudden noise or movement close to me.  Charlie thought it was a bad habit and wanted me to learn how to control my reactions.  He would deliberately scare me in order to train me to stop it.  I tried to tell him that it was an automatic reaction that was completed before my mind had registered it.

     One day as I was working at the kitchen counter using a knife. He came up behind me and purposely startled me.  I screamed, jerked and accidentally cut myself.  It wasn't much of a cut, but it did draw blood, and I was mad enough at him to squeeze out as much blood as I could and let it cover as much area as it could while he was still behind me and could not see me spread it.  He was properly sorry and promised not to deliberately scare me again.  After that he did not purposely startle me, though living and working together, things were bound to happen sometimes to startle me and I would react.  In later years I heard of a small child who had similar reactions.  His doctor labeled it "sudden startle syndrome," so I started calling my problem "sudden startle syndrome."

     Charlie's father, Fred, had quit farming in 1942 because of his health.  First he and Maggie rented a house on South Street, approximately where the earliest condominiums were built.  Later they bought a house on Lake Street.  In the 1950s Fred, in his eighties, became increasingly disoriented and hard to control.  Charlie did what he could to help Maggie take care of him.

     One grievous day Charlie came back to me and told me that when he, Charlie, got the way his father was then, I should "put him away."  I tried to jolly him out of his mood, but Charlie would have none of my distraction.  He seriously persisted, "I'm a lot like my Dad."  He expected to some day be in the same condition as his father was then, and when that time came I was to "put him away."  "I will fight you every step of the way because that is the way that disease works.  You won't be able to handle me.  I know you won't!  But you will have to do what you will have to do.  Put me away!"

     Charlie's Dad passed away not too long afterward.

     It was about this time while Charlie was thinking about his Dad, that he began thinking of his own death, and realized that because I was so much younger than he was, that I might live a long time after his passing.  He told me then that it would be all right with him if I remarried after his passing.  He never again mentioned this, and I doubt he continued to feel this way about it.  I have never felt any urge or desire to marry again.

  

                            CHAPTER 11

          In August, 1957, again my due date was over a week late before I felt anything coming on.  I told Charlie and telephoned Marcie to ask her to stay with the children.  She drove in just as Charlie had left the house to get out the car.  The cattle were out!  Marcie told Charlie to take me to the hospital.  She would get the cattle back in the barn yard.  Charlie explained that the cows knew him better, and it would be easier for him to handle them than for her, and asked her to take me to the hospital.  She took me to Ripon Hospital and left me as soon as the nurses took care of me.

     Dr. Lieninger examined me, all seemed well, and he left.  Then a nurse gave me a paper to sign.  I read from it, "Permission to operate and administer anesthetic." Were they going to take the baby caesarean?  Why?  What was wrong?

     I asked the nurse.  She shrugged her shoulders and said it was "just a routine thing."  Routine?  I had never before been asked to sign such a paper.  Why ask me to sign such a paper now?

     What should I do?  Charlie wasn't there to help me decide, and birth was eminent.  I said a prayer, tried to trust the doctor and signed.  They wheeled me into the delivery room.  All went well and in the natural way Barbara was born.  I felt a wave of relief and thankfulness.

     I learned afterward that a recent incident in a Madison hospital had occurred in which a woman having a very normal, minor operation under an anesthetic, had died on the operating table.  In the wake of the pending lawsuits, other hospitals tried to protect themselves by asking patients to sign release forms for any and all occasions.

     Barbara was baptized by Fr. Francis Karwata.  He told me that I should be "churched," a ritual given to new mothers after giving birth.  Fr. Karwata met me at the entrance to the church with a lighted candle, blessed me and led me forward into the church.  Benediction was given me at the communion rail.  This was the only time I received this particular blessing which at one time was commonly given to all new mothers.

     I attended an Easter Night service in Our Lady of the Lake Church.  Easter Saturday services began shortly after 11:00 pm.  The church was dark.  The altar was completely bare.  There was no altar cloth or any candles there.

     At the close of the Easter Saturday service the worshippers remained seated, while all the lily plants were brought out of hiding and arranged around the altar.  The priest and altar boys came down the central aisle into the vestibule where the new fire was lit with a flint.  The priest blessed the newly lit fire and the Pascal Candle.  Priest and servers proceeded up the center aisle toward the altar, stopping on the way to show "The Light of Christ."  The lights became less dim.  Clappers sounded rather than bells.  There was singing but the organ was silent.

     Then the lights shown brightly, the organ and choir burst forth joyously.  The bells rang.  Alleluia!  The Lord is risen!  He is risen indeed!  All was glorious!  Easter mass was celebrated!

     At that time Magdalene Shikoski served the parish as sacristan, the one who took care of the altar.  But of course no woman was allowed around the altar during services.  She could only watch critically from the pew while only males had laid the cloth and arranged the candles and flowers around the altar.

     But as soon as the coast was clear she was up by the altar realigning the cloth and turning the pots to show off a slightly different side, and making sure everything was properly balanced.

     In 1958 Our Lady of the Lake parishioners, with Fr. Francis Karwata, wanted to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the parish.  They envisioned a grand, ceremonial dinner with their bishop, Bishop William P. O'Conner.  The only parish meeting place outside the church proper was the basement of the rectory, a place too small and too utilitarian for such a celebration.  Several years earlier a new school had been built in Green Lake.  The parish received permission to use the school facilities to hold their dinner.  Tables were set up in the gymnasium, and the dinner was prepared in the school kitchen.  Volunteers were needed to prepare the dinner, serve it, and clean up afterward.  Many women wanted to be free to sit down to enjoy and participate in the festivities. I agreed to help serve and clean up.  Charlie stayed home with the children while I helped serve.

     Bishop O'Connor celebrated mass in the old church, after which the people reunited at the school for dinner.  After the tables were cleared Bishop O'Connor spoke to the parish.  We servers were told that we could remain in the gymnasium while the bishop delivered his message.  I believe I was the only worker who stayed and listened to him.  He spoke about the smallness of the church, the necessity of providing Catholic facilities and asked us to start accumulating greater funds to build a larger church.

     When I got back to the kitchen the other women had already eaten their dinner and were cleaning up.  I grabbed something to eat, and wishing to stay out of their way, I took it over near the door to the pantry/storeroom.  With my back to the rest of the kitchen and facing the door I bolted my food.

     Meanwhile Bishop O'Conner, after talking privately with some people, asked Conrad Naparalla to take him to the kitchen so he could thank those who had prepared the dinner.  Neither Connie nor the bishop was familiar with the school's lay out.  They started down the hall from the gymnasium and entered the first door, thinking it led to the kitchen.  It happened to be the storeroom instead.  Upon hearing the kitchen noises beyond the other door they continued through the room and entered the kitchen from the storeroom, rather than from the hallway entrance.

     Here I was, facing the storeroom door, gobbling up some ice cream, when Bishop O'Connor started to enter the kitchen from the storeroom.  Suddenly this pre-Vatican II convert was face-to-face with the bishop!  How was I supposed to greet a bishop?  I genuflected.  The bishop extended his ring hand toward me.  I was conscious of ice cream on my lips, but I had no napkin within reach to wipe them.  As he continued to hold out his hand, I didn't want to ignore it, so I kissed his ring.  He gave me a blessing, then continued to bless the others in the kitchen, and thanked them for serving such a good dinner.  He passed on, but I couldn't help but wonder if the next person who kissed his ring could taste my ice cream.

     Fr. Francis Karwata passed away from cancer.  The funeral was held in Our Lady of the Lake Church.  Maggie had been sacristan for the parish.  Besides taking care of the altar she also opened and locked the doors, and generally looked after the church affairs.

     The house she and Fred had bought was not very well built.  Earlier Charlie had gone beneath it and shored up the foundation.  Very early in 1960 he returned to strengthen the sagging kitchen floor.  While he was working on the floor, Fr. Carl Wagner came knocking on the kitchen door.  Fr. Wagner had just been named the next pastor of Our Lady of the Lake Church.  He had come to Maggie, who took care of the altar and vestments, to ask her for the church keys.  He had been sent by the bishop with a mandate to build a larger church.  His avocation was carpentry.

     Fr. Wagner pressed forward securing building plans.  He acted as his own contractor.  He hired and directed carpenters.  Charlie volunteered as much time as he could between his necessary farm chores.  He took with him our two oldest sons, Bob and Dick, to help in whatever way they could in fetching, passing and cleaning.  The other children and I "kept the home fires going."  Charlie, Bob and Dick were present when the corner stone to the new church was set.

    

     Fr. Wagner tried to promote vocations to the priesthood.  Charlie wanted one of his sons to become a priest.  Richard agreed to be enrolled as a high school freshman in Queen of Apostles Seminary near Madison.  About this time Charlie began to feel quite sick though he didn't seem to know what was wrong.  When his school began, I drove Dick to the seminary.  When Dick and I left home, Charlie had tears just under control, believing that the seminary door would close behind Dick.  He told me that the way he felt physically he would never see Dick again.

     We soon got a letter from Dick saying that the seminarians could go home the very first week end to pick up anything that they had forgotten to bring.  This surprised Charlie who remembered the older regulations that once a fellow entered a seminary he was allowed only a very few visitations home.  I went down to Madison and picked up Dick.  After that the boys were allowed to visit their parents about one week end a month.

     Later Charlie found out that he was diabetic.  He managed to control it with diet and felt much better.

     One of the requirements of enrolling in a seminary was a marriage record of the boy's parents.  When Fr. Wagner had asked me, I told him that we were married in Guardian Angel Church in Almond in the Green Bay Diocese.  Several months later Fr. Wagner started teasing me, asking if I knew where I was married.  I couldn't figure out what he was driving at until he told me he had finally found our marriage record.  I had told him we were married in "Guardian Angel Church," the correct name was "Holy Guardian Angel Church."  I didn't realize that Holy Guardian Angel Church was only a mission of the church in Heffron where our marriage had actually been recorded.  On top of that, at the time of our marriage it was in the Green Bay Diocese, but when the Diocese of Madison was created some parishes from the LaCrosse Diocese were transferred to the new Madison Diocese.  To compensate for the loss of LaCrosse territory, some of the parishes from the Green Bay Diocese were transferred to the LaCrosse Diocese.  Almond and Heffron were in that territory which was transferred from the Green Bay Diocese to the LaCrosse Diocese, and the church records were also transferred.  Fr. Wagner finally found the record of our marriage in the LaCrosse Diocesan directory.  It had been some search for Fr. Wagner, but he finally found it.

     One Friday afternoon when the children got off the school bus, Carol complained about not feeling well.  She said her right heel hurt her, but I could see nothing wrong with it.  The next morning she was worse, wouldn't eat and was feverish.  I tried to call Dr. Lieninger but he was "out of town."  So I took her to see a Princeton doctor.  He said she possibly had polio.  He prescribed medication for pain, gave her crutches to walk with and told her to rest in bed.

     Sunday morning she was worse, refusing to eat anything, even the ice cream I offered her.  I called the doctor who had seen her on Saturday.  He refused to see her on Sunday.  When I told him I thought she was too sick for my care, and that she should be in the hospital, he lashed out at me that the hospital would not run the lab or treat her on Sunday, that I should keep her in bed and see to it that she take the prescription he had ordered.

     Charlie and I discussed it.  We called Ripon Hospital asking if we could bring her in and whether the hospital would provide a doctor.  They agreed.  They not only provided a doctor but ran the lab, the operating room and everything else she needed.  Diagnosis: ruptured appendix with peritonitis throughout the entire abdomen.  The next morning when I told the surgeon that the Princeton doctor wanted us to wait until Monday morning, he said Carol would have been dead by Monday morning, and that if such a condition had happened ten years earlier no doctor would have had the knowledge to save her.  God is merciful!

     Since my operation in 1948 I have at times been troubled with hernias.  I learned how to lie down and relax in order to reduce them.  Once in the sixties I had lain in bed all evening without my hernia reducing.  After nine o'clock when the children were in bed, I told Charlie that I needed to see a doctor.  Charlie knew that if I asked for a doctor I really needed one.  He tried to call Dr. Lieninger who was out of town.  He tried to call Dr. Lofdahl who had operated on Carol and was told to call the doctor who was on call in Ripon.  By this time Charlie was so upset he couldn't find the proper telephone number.  Anna, in bed upstairs, listened to his confusion and came down to help him.

     I was taken to the hospital, examined and taken to the operating room.  Several doctors were there wearing masks.  It was just like a soap opera.  I saw one doctor nod to another, and the needle with the anesthesia came toward my arm.  Then one doctor called, "Halt! Its reducing!"  "Don't push too hard," came the answer.  But the hernia reduced and the operation was called off.

     For two full days I laid in the hospital bed and was watched like a hawk.  I couldn't wiggle my big toe without being suddenly examined.  They wanted to see if any intestine tissue had died before operating.

     On the third day the doctors again repaired the hernia.  Eventually that repair also failed.  Since then the hernia has been continually protruding.

     While we were living in our house it was not completely finished.  Charlie worked on it when he could.  He had injured his knee and had a hard time kneeling.  For this reason he had not installed any base boards, the finishing touch of the walls where they meet the floor.  When I grew up people called them "mop boards."  Charlie, who had worked as a carpenter and used carpenter terms, would get disgusted with me when I would use the old fashioned, unsophisticated term and call them "mop boards."

     In the mid 1960s the state built the Hwy 23 by-pass around Green Lake which cut through our farm.  Charlie did not think the Highway Commission offered enough compensation for the lost value of our property.  We sued the state.  During the trial the state used an appraiser who testified as to the value of our farm, including the value of our house, both before and after the by-pass would be built.  In describing the house he said that it was not yet finished because it had no "mop Boards."

     After Charlie, the carpenter, had tried so hard to train me different, to have this "expert appraiser" testify under oath in a court of law that our house had no "mop boards" overwhelmed me.  It was all I could do to keep from bursting out laughing in that court room.  For some reason the mop board incident is about all I remember of the trial.

     We were awarded additional compensation.  The by-pass was built.  An underpass for cattle was also built but it was small and long.  The cows refused to enter it and cross over to the other side of the highway.  Afterward trucks and cars thundered past the willow bower where the deer had often settled down, and where I had been able to slip off to enter it for a relaxing rest, and feel its quiet peacefulness.  I have never since found such quiet, peaceful, outdoor secluded place for reverie.

     We seemed to have cats around, mostly in and around the barn.  When Bob was small he brought a cat into the house and declared, "I want this cat to be a house cat!"  He was soon told that we had no "house cats."  Charlie loved animals, welcomed them in his barns but not in his house.  He could pet a sitting hen.

     We had a tom cat who disappeared one day.  He had been gone often before, but usually came back after a day or two.  When he had been gone for about a week, Charlie decided that he would never be back.

     But one day this cat came crawling out from the weeds behind the barn dragging his hind body and legs.  He looked pitiful.  Charlie thought he must have been out on the highway and had been hit by a car or truck.  It had taken all week for him to drag his shattered body back to the barn.  I thought Charlie should put the poor animal out of his misery, but Charlie asked, "Why?  He has already gone through the worst of the pain.  If he wants to live so badly, let him live."  He and the children made a nest for him in a box in the barn.  They fed and watered him, gave him bedding and used bales of hay piled around the box in which they housed him to protect him from predators.  Eventually he was jumping and running around on three legs.

     Charlie was very good with animals.  He could pet a laying hen when I was afraid she would peck me.  In his later years when he was older, he would let a cat climb up his overall leg, allowing Charlie to cuddle the cat in his arm without bending down to reach and pick it up.  The cat once tried to climb up my nylon to get petted.  He soon learned that I was not Charlie!  Charlie was always more attuned to nature than I was.

                            CHAPTER 12

     In the 1960s our children began to graduate from high school and go their separate ways.  Robert continued to help his Dad on the farm, and joined the National Guard.  Richard did not continue in the seminary after high school, but joined the army.  The girls found jobs.  Even those of our children still in high school talked about when they would be free to leave home and go their own way.  I began to feel that all the children would permanently leave and our home would become an "empty nest."  I became depressed.

     Before we had married I had told Charlie that my mother had lived and died in a mental institution.  He had acted unconcerned about it, and had not mentioned it to any of his family.  About the time that my depression started, Charlie's brother John met and spoke with a woman from Almond.  She talked and discussed with him about my mother having been institutionalized.  When John told his family, they reacted.  I was not fully aware of everything that Charlie's family said or did at the time, but it seemed as if his sisters told Charlie that I could easily become mental like my mother if anything happened to me, or if I wasn't treated right.  There were times after this when I felt pressured to prove my sanity.

     After the by-pass had been built, I continued to have periods of depression.  Charlie told me to go visit my sister Margaret for a few days.  I was happy visiting with her but when I came back home depression again settled down around me.  Charlie talked with Dr. Lieninger who made an appointment for me with a doctor at Madison University Hospital.  There I was given a thorough examination.  I was put on a mind altering drug and sent home.  I disliked my reaction to the drug.  It made me jittery and disorganized.  I told Dr. Lieninger I wanted to discontinue it.  He told me not to go "cold turkey."  Instead he gave me a schedule to follow so I could discontinue using it gradually.

     I remember sitting on a chair in my bedroom pondering what it would be like to be dead.  What good was my life?  No one wanted or needed me.  As I sat I didn't hear or see any words, but quietly impressed upon my mind they came, "It is not fear but resentment that spoils our last days on earth."  In contemplating these words I began to realize that it would not be good for my soul if I died harboring as much resentment as I had then.  I must get rid of all the enmity I was nourishing before I died.  I prayed, and prayed, trying to fight the hurt feelings I was experiencing.  Gradually my resentments faded away, and when they did I no longer thought of death.

     After high school Anna attended nursing classes in Oshkosh.  She became active in a Catholic organization, the Newman Club.  The priest guiding it asked Anna to make a vestment for him, and gave her some very beautiful material to make it.  She brought the material home with her one weekend.  I was in the kitchen when she laid out the material on one end of our large dining room table, the table where our family of twelve commonly ate our meals together.  She was trying to figure out where to cut the material, afraid she might spoil the lovely material by cutting it incorrectly.

     Along came Robert into the house and plunked down a greasy motor on the other end of the dining room table, expecting to work on it there.  With one motion Anna scooped up her project and whisked it upstairs to her bedroom away from Robert's project.  I stood in awe, thinking how much just like Charlie and me these two children of ours acted!

     I applied for work as a sewing machine operator at Handcraft in Princeton.  I had always enjoyed running a sewing machine, but commercial sewing is different than home sewing.  One day my finger got caught by the needle and began to bleed.  I reported to the floor walker who took one glance and asked if I had broken the needle.  I didn't know, so she hurried to my machine to look at the needle.  I thought and resented that she was so much more concerned about a broken needle than she was about my injury.  When she saw that the needle was unbroken she started treating and bandaging my finger.  She then explained her action.  If the needle would have been broken she would have sent me to a doctor for an X-ray, to see if a piece of it were lodged in the finger.  With the needle found whole no piece of it would be in the finger to cause problems later.  So she really was concerned about my injury.

     I was laid off just one week before union membership would be necessary for me to continue working.

     I was hired by Russell P. Bohmann as a secretary.  Mr. Bohmann was a real estate agent, an insurance agent, and worked as a property appraiser.  My duties as Mr. Bohmann's secretary included answering the telephone, typing letters and help with mailings.  I might have little to do during the day, but near five o'clock he would flood me with work that "must be done immediately" just when I would want to go home to make supper for my family.

     I had taken "Junior Business Training" and "Typing" in high school, but decided I needed better training if I would become a successful secretary.  To advance my secretarial sills, I drove to Ripon one evening a week to take lessons offered by Moraine Park Technical College.

     Mr. Bohmann became a controversial political figure in Green Lake. For this reason Charlie suggested that I quit working for him, and I did.

     I started taking correspondence lessons in business accounting.  After completing the first section of lessons it was time for me to take a seven hour monitored test.  I made arrangements for it to be monitored by the Green Lake Public School.  I could take all of it in a single sitting, or take the four hour part and three hour part separately.  I chose to take them separately, on different days.

     The first day things progressed without incident and in a satisfactory manner.  The second day also progressed as expected until about thirty minutes before the dead line.  I had completed the test but the balance sheet did not balance, and how could I pass if the balance sheet didn't balance?  I searched for my error.  Fifteen minutes passed without finding it.  Another ten minutes passed.  I had about given up when I spotted the error; I had transposed two digits of a larger number.   I corrected it and followed the trail of the error slapping in the corrected numbers.  When the monitor came and asked for the papers I was still slapping in the corrected numbers--no time to check if the balance sheet balanced.

     It was a pass-fail test and they passed me.  I received a diploma from International Accountants Society dated February 13, 1973, having completed Accounting Elements, General Accounting, Basic and Advanced Cost Accounting, Business Statistics and Basic Auditing.

     The next set of lessons was on accounting for a small manufacturing business.  For a while I continued sending in the lesson sheets working toward a CPA.  Eventually I decided that it was not likely that I would ever use such training as long as I lived on our farm, and I was not really interested in the study of manufacturing problems.  I dropped the course.

     One day after a rain Charlie came running into the house and told me that there was a rainbow in the sky.  He wanted to see it from the shore of the lake.  We jumped in the car and he drove down to the edge of the lake in front of where the Maplewood Hotel had stood.  It was a beautiful double rainbow reflected in the calm lake.  With the rainbow itself and its double reflected in the lake, it looked like two huge rainbow-colored rings broken only by the narrow line of trees on the distant shore.  The rainbow colors of one ring was in reverse order of the other ring.  It was the most awesome natural sight I have ever seen, but it was beginning to fade even as we first saw it.

     In the spring of 1973 I applied for a job at The Cottage Shop, a gift shop owned by Doris Cottet.  She had inherited a large farm whose southern boundary was the same as the northern boundary of our farm.  Though our land was adjacent to each other, we lived on different roads.  Her father and Charlie had joined together to protest the building of the Hwy 23 by-pass through the two farms, but Doris and I had had very little contact with each other.  She hired me.

     At first she asked me to take inventory, then put me to selling laces and braids for a short time before assigning me to take over "The Christmas Coop," and "The Appleseed Shop."  Christmas items were sold all year whenever the shops were open; greeting cards, tree ornaments, swags, nativity sets and novelties of all kinds.  Summer hours were from 10:00 am to 5:00 pm.  After closing at five I had to count all the cash in the register, leave the basic one hundred dollars change in the register, and take the rest of the money and the sales slips to the office in the Cottage Shop.  When I first worked there the shops were closed from January until May.

     In 1973 I enrolled in Marine Park Technical College classes to study "Office Machines" and "Secretary Skills."  I bought a manual typewriter to practice my typing skills.  I drove to Ripon for evening classes.  I continued to work for Doris whenever she was open, and she began increasing hours for her shops to be open.  When she lost her accountant she asked me to keep her records of sales and sales taxes.

     One day in October, 1978, I had been working for Doris Cottet.  After coming home after work I was walking into the house while Charlie was listening to the evening news on TV.  A Polish Pope had just been elected!  I stopped and listened.  All I could think of was remembering that I had read about a visionary who had reported seeing a vision of Jesus Who told her, "Out of Poland will come a spark which will ignite the whole world and prepare it for My coming."  Immediately I wondered if Pope John Paul II would be that "spark" which He mentioned.  Later I was again to read about the nun, Faustina Kowalska, and I was convinced that John Paul II was indeed the "spark" that would ignite the whole world.

     About this time Charlie had been diagnosed as having "farmer's lung," an allergy to moldy feeds and dusts.  The doctor told him that if he wanted to live he should stay out of the barn.  Charlie sold his cows.  Afterwards he had an auction to sell his machinery too.  He wanted to develop his land and sell lots for building houses, so he enrolled in a Real Estate School.  Wives could enroll for half price and Charlie asked me to enroll with him.  Classes were held from 7:00 to 10:00 pm once a week in Oshkosh.

     Vic Swader, a very good friend of Charlie, lived in Oshkosh.  On our weekly trips to real estate lessons we would leave early and visit Vic and his wife Erna before class.

     Charlie and I both applied for real estate licenses the same day.  Charlie had had only several months in high school because his dad needed him on the farm, so he basically had only an eighth grade education.  Each applicant received a set of test questions and an answer sheet.  We had to read the questions on the test paper, but write the answer on the separate answer sheet.  Charlie had never seen or heard of such a testing system.  While he knew the answers, he wrote them on the question sheet which would not be graded by modern scanners.  He failed the test but I received a Real Estate License in 1973.

     Charlie told me about a man in Green Lake who wanted to sell his house.  He wanted me to handle the sale.  A proposal was talked about which, while not technically against the law, was frowned upon by the Wisconsin Real Estate Board.  I was taking accounting lessons, and I was more interested in accounting than in selling real estate.  I did not want any public irregularity to interfere with my becoming an accountant, so I refused to handle the selling of that house.  I have never attempted to use my real estate license, though I once had it renewed for another year.

     Vic Swader's health had steadily declined.  When he passed away his wife, Erna, notified Charlie and asked him to be a pall bearer.  She also told him that she did not have the address or telephone number of his brother John whom she wanted to also be a pall bearer.  She asked Charlie to see John and tell him about her wishes.  Charlie had not talked to John for years, but for Vic's sake he drove to the farm which John was renting, and talked to him face to face.

     Charlie and I drove to the church where the funeral was held.  John drove his car in the funeral procession, carrying the rest of the pall bearers including Charlie.  I drove our car in the procession.  From that time on John and Charlie talked together whenever they happened to meet.

     About the summer of 1983 I was working for Doris Cottet while she was operating her gallery and gift shop out of her home.  She was no longer operating her Christmas Coop and Cottage Gift Shop.  I was in a hurry and wanted something from my desk and came flying up to it, attempting to sit in my office chair.  The chair went flying off, and I fell striking the door jamb with my left side.  I got up and continued working the rest of the day.  It was not until I tried to lie down at the end of the day that my back pained so badly that I could not lie, neither on my back nor on my side  I finally managed to pile up enough pillows around and behind me to get a little sleep.

     Then began a long session of doctor's appointments.  I was told that the pain was arthritis, that it was my imagination, a lack of exercise, that nothing was wrong, or that it was a mental problem.  One doctor did prescribe codeine which did keep the pain under control, but I was afraid of addiction and I tried to cut down from using it.

     The next spring I went to church on Holy Thursday evening.  After services I started talking with Fr. Leo, but my pain was very bad.  Finally Fr. Leo looked right at me and asked point blank, "Is your trouble spiritual or otherwise?"  I poured out to him what my problem was.

     Good Friday morning Fr. Leo telephoned, he told me that he made an appointment for me with a chiropractor, and gave me a telephone number that I should call immediately and either confirm or cancel the appointment.  I confirmed it.

     On Good Friday the Chiropractor examined my spine, took some X-rays, gave me a treatment, and made an appointment to see me after Easter.

     When I returned for my appointment he examined me, said I had a vertebra out of alignment, and that he was going to try to re-align it.  He had three X-rays of my back, each clipped to its own stand and arranged so he could see and examine them as he worked on me.  I lay on my back on the examining table.  He told me to cross my hands across my breast and hug myself as tightly as I could and hold it, then put my head forward as far as I could and hold it, and then raise my left shoulder off the table.  When I tried to raise my shoulder he came down on it, hard, like a ton of bricks, and slammed that shoulder against the table.

     No one had told him about my "sudden startle syndrome," and when I had my shoulder un-expectantly slammed down against the table, I let out a scream "that could be heard in the next county."

     There I was lying flat on my back, vaguely aware of some people who had suddenly appeared through the doorway leading from the office area.  The chiropractor was gently caressing my right arm, speaking in a very soft, quiet, comforting voice, and looking directly deep into my eyes.  When I moved and spoke, I saw the relief come flooding into his eyes.  Yes, it was I who had done the screaming, but I believe that the chiropractor had suffered a much greater scare than I had.

     He ran his hand up and down my spine examining it carefully.  His adjustment had successfully re-aligned the troubling vertebra, though it still hurt when he passed the vibrator over it. After his adjustment the chiropractor gave me weekly exams and vibration treatments.  After two months I could no longer feel any difference between that area and the rest of the spine.  The pain was gone.

     One day after mass I was talking with Fr. Leo.  He made a remark about my helping to count the church collection money on Monday mornings, but almost immediately acted as if that wasn't feasible.  I told him I would help count if he wanted me to do so.  After that I helped Marnie and Gloria as we met in the basement of the rectory each Monday morning to count the Sunday collections.  Marnie took care of the financial records and Gloria took care of the other secretarial work.  When Marnie left the parish, Fr. Leo asked me to take over the financial records that Marnie had handled.

     One day Fr. Leo told me to fill out the financial statement to be sent to the diocese.  I told him I couldn't.  I had been given only the income and expense accounts, none of the assets and liabilities accounts.  Nobody seemed to know anything about these accounts until Fr. Leo found and gave me a copy of the last year's balance sheet, and asked a member of the church, who was a CPA, to help me.  After the helper left, my old trouble showed up, a balance sheet that did not balance.  The CPA came back to help me again, and we sent in a report to the diocese.

     Up until this time the church financial records had been kept in a single entry bookkeeping system.  To keep things straight I changed the system over to a double entry system.

     In the spring Barbara wanted a storm window removed from her bedroom window.  I felt Charlie was getting too old to handle the upstairs storm windows so I asked a "handy man" to come and change them for us.  Before he could do it, I came home from working for Doris Cottet and learned that Charlie had climbed a ladder and removed her storm window.  I started scolding him for doing something so dangerous at his age.  He replied that he had taken it "slow and easy."

     I wondered how "slow and easy" could he be, standing up on a ladder outside the second story window handling a heavy storm window?  I saw to it that combination storm/screen windows were bought for the upstairs windows. 

                            CHAPTER 13

     Our son David owned a multi terrain vehicle, MTV, and left it on our farm allowing his father and siblings to ride it.  Charlie often rode it around the farm, revelling in its speed.  Charlie loved speed, whether riding horseback, or racing to get more work done than someone else.

     Charlie became increasingly forgetful.  He would mislay a tool and not remember where or when he had last used it.  Bob often helped him find it.  Charlie would say, "Tell me where you find it and I will tell you how it got there."

     Charlie began "cleaning up," building fires to get rid of things he didn't want.  The trouble was that if he didn't know what something was he would destroy it, even if it was something I wanted.  I began to hide articles from him so he would not destroy them.

     Back when Charlie had helped care for his father he had said that I should "put him away" when his time had come.  I began to wonder if his "time" had come.  I went to talk to Fr. Leo.  I made the mistake of first telling him about how hard it was to live with Charlie because of his unreasonableness.  When I paused to organize my words Fr. Leo asked me if I wanted a divorce.  A divorce?  You don't get a divorce when the man needs you the most!  I fled before the tears would fall.

     What should I do?  Charlie had told me to "put him away."  He had also told me that he would fight me "every step of the way" and I had no doubt that he would.  I must not let the least inkling of my thoughts escape.  But how and what should I do?

     I prayed and prayed.  Slowly things changed.  Charlie seemed to lose more memory of the more recent troubles and irritations, and slipped back in time to earlier, happier days.  Bob was a great help in keeping him calm.  They both enjoyed mechanics.  If Bob worked on a project, he allowed Charlie to "help" him.  If Charlie started a project, Bob would deftly supply help and let Charlie think the improvements were his own.  Bob and his treatment of Charlie was a great blessing to me.

     In his happier state of mind Charlie began to think of the times when the children were around him.  His 82nd birthday was coming up and he decided he wanted a big party with all his children around him.  He had never had a birthday party of his own that I knew about.

     We started making plans.  Our children helped however they could.  Charlie had asked that we have "salad potatoes," which was what he called the potato salad I made.  In the past we had raised our own potatoes and eggs, and I made a cooked dressing much like that which my Grandma had made with milk, sugar, vinegar and mustard.  For his birthday party I remember peeling and cooking a ten pound bag of potatoes, boiling kettles of eggs, and piling potato salad into the huge bowl that I usually used to set dough for four loaves of bread.  We set up four tables in the dining-kitchen area, two of them the old fashioned, long, extended tables.  All of us (at least thirty) sat down at the same time to eat.  So close together were the tables and chairs that we could pass dishes from one table to another without anyone getting up from their chair.  Everybody had helped.  Charlie was happy!

     A song once popular when we were dating stated, "We've had our pains and sorrows.  We've had our sunshine too.  But love kept us together, and I'm still in love with you."

     Friday, January 2nd, 1987, was a pleasant day.  In the morning Charlie had used the MTV to chase geese away from his corn field, but he and Bob had spent most of the morning out and around the shed.  When they came in for dinner all was pleasant with Charlie joking.  After dinner Bob went back to the shed, Charlie went for a ride on the MTV and I drove to church.  As trustee I had wanted to work on the church financial records.  This was before the church had a computer and records were kept in the rectory basement.  I had not been working very long when Fr. Leo came down stairs and told me that a scanner had reported an accident near our house.  He implied that it was probably nothing serious, but suggested that I go home.  I would have liked to continue to do what I was doing, but he told me I should just go home to check it out.

     As I approached home there was an ambulance parked on the curve just west of our house.  Other vehicles and people were also gathered.  I parked in our driveway and walked over.  Charlie had hit a tree with the MTV and it had flipped back over him. As I approached they had started to carry him up out of the ditch.  He was bundled up in his winter apparel, strapped on a stretcher with his face hidden under a mask.

     Bob came and stood beside me.  He said, "He's not going to make it."  I thought to myself that Bob shouldn't be so pessimistic.  Charlie had gone through many accidents before and had always lived through them.  But Bob's statement prepared me for the final end.

     The ambulance drove off.  A friend offered to take Barbara and I to the hospital.  I stopped long enough to call Fr. Leo.  He simply said, "I'm on my way."  When we got to the hospital Fr. Leo's car was already parked there.  He was in the emergency room with Charlie and the doctor.  Bob, Barbara and I sat on chairs near the ER.  After awhile Fr. Leo came and sat with us, and waited until the doctor came to report Charlie's passing.  We held hands while Fr. Leo led us in prayer.

     Charlie had often stated that he wanted to die "with his boots on."  He got his wish.  Sometimes he also quoted, "Twixt the saddle and the ground, mercy sought and mercy found."  He had lived just long enough after his accident for a priest to give him the last sacraments of the Church.

      It was not until after his passing, when I found some botched remains that Charlie had hidden, that I fully realized how sick he really had been.  He had attempted to build an outside chimney against the east end of our house, the house that he himself had built.  To examine the crooked, ill-built, half chimney he had made, and compare it to the well-constructed block wall in the house foundation, no one would have believed that the same man had built both of them.  God in His own way had taken care of both of us.

     One night I had a dream.  Charlie and I were going to move away to a better place.  Each of us had our own large horse drawn wagon. Charlie's was fully loaded.  He was ready to pull out, but was waiting for me to finish loading my wagon and climb up on it.  When I would be ready we would drive off together with our loaded wagons to that better place.

     On the parish council were some retired executives who were very computer literate.  They complained that my monthly finance reports were not ready in time for their monthly council meetings, which were held very early in the month.  They wanted a church computer so the monthly reports could be ready quickly after the period ended.  I knew nothing about computers, so I enrolled in a computer class in Ripon.  Without a computer at home or in church to work with and no prior computer background, I became hopelessly lost and failed the course.  I told Fr. Leo to find a different financial secretary.  He was in exceedingly poor health at that time and failed to replace me.

     Up to this time we had counted money and kept financial records in the lower level of the rectory.  The council were told that the rectory basement was too damp for a computer, so the new computer was installed in the sacristy of the church where there was a table, chairs and shelves.  (This was the sacristy that existed after Fr. Clarke's remodeling.  This first computer was later installed in Marcie Brightman's home during Fr. Leo's remodeling of the church, and in its own office after this remodeling.)  I continued keeping records with pen and ink.

     The computer came with a big instruction book detailing all the necessary  steps to use it.  I was glad that I had already changed the records to a double entry system which the computer required.  For awhile I kept records both with paper and with computer until I became comfortable using the computer.

     One year when it became time to send a finance report to the Diocese, I made a copy of the anticipated statement to be sent to the diocese.  I took it to Fr. Leo to be approved.  He took it and immediately signed it.  I protested, "You didn't even read it!"  He answered, "Oh, I approve of it and the diocese does too.

  Again I protested, "It hasn't even been sent to the diocese!"  He replied, "Oh they have never sent one of yours back."  "I didn't know they ever did."  "Oh, yes," and he gave me the name of a person whose report had been returned for correction, a person whom I thought was a much more knowledgeable accountant than I.

     Because I worked on the church financial records using the church computer whenever I wanted, Fr. Leo had given me a key to the church.  I often unlocked the church before morning mass because I liked to go early to contemplate and pray before mass.

     One week day in January, 2001, I drove to church early and parked in the parking lot, got out of my car and started to cross the street.  The lot and street were clear except for a small area of ice at the edge of the street.  I didn't realize it was so slippery until I stepped on it, skidding and falling heavily on my hip.  I tried to get up but soon realized I was badly hurt.  I hollered for help.  A dog started barking.  Thinking no one would hear me with the dog barking I stopped.  The dog stopped so I hollered again.  This happened a few times until the dog's owner investigated the disturbance and called 911.  A police car came and a police woman held and cradled my head and shoulders up off the ice until the ambulance came.

     I had broken my hip and was taken to the hospital where they operated and screwed a metal brace to the broken bone.  After several days I was sent home with a walker.  With the frequent help of my children I managed to live alone in the farm house.

     I was at mass one Sunday morning when Father raised the Eucharist for adoration.  I looked at the Host and the thought came to me, "I know this is Jesus, but wouldn't it be nice if He would come in a form in which He could give me a hug?"  No!  I immediately thrust this thought out of my mind.  I should accept Him as He is.  As usual I went up and received the Eucharist.

     By the end of mass I had forgotten this strange thought.  I waited at the end of the pew preparing to enter the aisle when a woman came up to me and said, "You need a hug." and hugged me.  Then the man who was with her said, "In Jesus' name" as he also hugged me.  I hadn't remembered seeing this couple before, and I haven't recognized seeing them since.

     We can feel the love of Jesus in many forms and places.

                             EPILOGUE

     Blessed be the Lord, who daily bears me up; God is our salvation.  Our God is a God of salvation; and to God, the Lord, belongs escape from death.  Psalm 68 (67) 19-20.