Dart Hill Road goes East to State Route 83, where it ends, and I believe is called something else the other side of the state road. That intersection is known as Ogden's Corner. Named after old lady Ogden, who used to keep cows. But later, as I was growing up, it had been bought by Kennith Gibson. He had been "dispossessed" by having his farm flooded over by the Barkhamsted Reservoir. You can see his former farm on a brass plaque map at the base of the dam. He farmed some at Ogden's corner, ran a gas station for a while. I once walked down there for my mother and bought a loaf of bread for ten cents. Later I encountered him working at the dairy at the University of Connecticut.
Rizy's lived at the northwest corner of Dart Hill Road and Route 83. I believe Mr. Rizy worked in Hartford at the State Capitol.
There was a trolly line on Route 83, and Mother would take my sister and me on it up to Rockville on Sunday mornings to the Union Congregational Church. We would also sometimes take it to visit my Blankenburg grandparents. It took "tokens", and the seats were rather hard. Once my Grandpa Blankenburg took me on the trolly to Hartford to see a movie, my first. It was "Trader Horn", and we sat in the balcony, "so the lions wouldn't get me".
Later the trolly was replaced with a bus, and the asphalt was replaced with cement. This happened maybe in 1934. I remember I was in the 5-grade one-room school house on the north side of Dart Hill Road, between Rizy's and the Hockanum River. I looked out the school window, and we all remarked, "Oh, look, there is a brand-new 1934 streamlined car!" It may have been the same year Route 83 was made cement. Construction was interesting to watch. The cement was poured between wooden forms, and then two workers, each one end of a 2 x 4, worked it back and forth to smooth the cement.
I remember the 1932 election. Mother was for Hoover, Dad was a Socialist at that time and was for Norman Thomas. Brewster Skinner came to school wearing a little rectangular button that said "Roosevelt".
I had a few piano lessons from Jesse Lane. Just a few. Later we couldn't afford it. But Jesse and Farnum Lane were a most unusual couple. I believe they had never left home. Their father had been a successful Dentist. After he died, they just remained. He tried to be a "gentleman farmer". But he made no money. His sister Jesse gave piano lessons. They had a magnificent old colonial house that became shabby for lack of paint, which they could not afford. They both were quite pleasant, but impractical. He had a nervous twitch in one eye.
When I was little, I was afraid of the dark, and would sit at the top of the stairs crying, because I was "seeing things" in the dark. Once I remember my dad saying to "Be quiet or I'll give you something to cry about!" When I was a little older, sometimes we would leave a kerosene lamp in the upstairs hallway, and left turned down quite low. My sister and I would have fun, pulling one hair out of our head, holding it over the lamp chimney, watch it schrivel up, and make an extremely strong smell as it roasted. What fun!
I was always facinated by electricity, and radios, since we didn't have either one. But one day my Great Aunt Louise Blankenburg in Providence, RI, gave me a crystal set. I got our hired man to climb the tall Norway spruce tree in the back yard, and fasten a wire for an antenna, which I terminated at my bedroom window, and lo, I had a radio, using one of our old pair of earphones. I could get WTIC and WDRC in Hartford. Later I took it apart to see how it was made, and I made more of them and sold them to the kids at school for 25 cents, calling it the "Neilliola". I bought the crystals from Allied Radio Corp, 833 W. Jackson Blvd, Chicago, IL for 6 cents each, plus postage.
I remember once listening to a speach by Hitler rebroadcast from Germany, with a running translation. It would make you shudder the way he said "Das Juden!" Later, I ran wires into my sisters bedroom, and got her another pair of earphones, so that after we both had retired for the night, we could listen to the radio. My favorite was Fred Allen at 9PM on Wednesday nights. One night I listed to Governor Alfred Landon of Kansas in 1936, running for President.
In the morning sometimes we listened to Ben Hawthorne.
In the beginning, the house was heated by the kitchen stove, and also a stove in the dining room that was assembled and set up for the winter months. It had an isenglass window in the door. Both burned wood. We had a wood lot way up past Raymond Skinners to the next corner, where you turn left, and go maybe 1/2 mile, and our woods was on the left side of the road. My dad and the hired man would hitch up the team of horses to a wagon, and go up and cut a wagon load of fire wood. Bringing it down to the back yard and put in a pile. There, after drying out a while, it would be cut up by a power saw set-up. It consisted of a big wheeled saw on the same shaft as a big flywheel and a pulley. The pulley had a belt on it connected to another pulley driven by the same Model T Ford engine that on occasion drove the generator for our sometimes 32 volt electrical system. So each long length of wood was cut into about 15 inch lengths and thrown through the vertical trap door into the adjoining wood shed, - an old building that also had hand-hewn beams. My job was to stack the wood in neat rows, and carry it in to fill the wood box in back of the kitchen stove as needed.
Winters were interesting. Sometimes Mother would heat up flat irons on the kitchen stove, and go upstairs as we were ready for bed, and run the iron over the sheets to take the chill off. Other times, we would have some wood placed in the kitchen oven, then wrap it in a towel or something, and take it to bed to keep our feet warm when first climbing into bed. Not many farms had indoor plumbing and neither did we. Sometimes there was a big drift between the back door and the outhouse!
We had lots of fun sliding on sleds. Once there had been a heavy snow that half melted, then froze, and then there was freezing rain. We took our sleds way up past Gunthers to the top of the hill where it levels off, took a run, and a "belly flopper", and away we went. Once I practically made it from way up there, past our house almost to Skinner Road. No cars in sight in those days.
When a little older, I took to using skiis. Once I went skiing up behind Luther Skinners, a real nice hill. Only trouble was at the foot of the hill was a barbed wire fence. Just as you got up to the fastest speed, you had to make a 90 degree turn, "or else!" At about that same age we neighborhood kids would go tobaggening. The best hill was somewhere around what became Gauzes place, just past Nick Mar's place, which was just East of Gibson's. It was interesting. We would go no matter what. One cloudy night in the dark of the moon (no street lights, no "light polution" that later developed), I accidentally walked into a parked car in front of Mars place when we were on the way to toboggen.
I was always fooling around with electricity. Once I climed a tree through which ran the phone wires. I took a pair of earphones with me and connected them to the wires. The operator said "number please". I shouted in one of the earphones "four five one ring one two". Charlie Thrall's grandfather answered the phone and I asked for him, but he wasn't home.
One year in the early 1930s we had a Holland brand hot air furnace installed. The furnace would burn either wood or coal. So we didn't freeze to death in the winter anymore when going to bed at night.
Thralls had an interesting place. Their farm was on the west side of Route 83 just at the end of Thrall Road. Their barn was on a hillside so that the stantions were on the lower level, and the loft and workshop were on the upper level, both accessable by wagon. The workshop was interesting. It had an old automatic cherry pitting machine, probably purchased years earlier by Charlies Grandpa Thrall, who lived with them at times. Charlie being my best friend, I was well acquainted with the family. I have a copy of a story by Barbara Thrall (Hambach) on growing up on the farm. Maybe some day I should OCR it and put it in the blog. (For the uneducated, OCR is Optical Character Recognition)
Wallace Thrall married Lillian Schwartz from Brooklyn, NY, and they took over the farm from his dad. They had Wallace Jr., Barbara, William Preston, Marjorie, Charles Mason, and Marion. Charlie was always over at my place, and vice-versa. In the wintertime, Thralls put the plug in a dam across a brook that ran through a low-lying meadow, and they had a beautiful pond, quite reasonable in size and perfect for skating. Even one night my dad, the hired man and I went skating. Usually it was just us kids. Thralls did use the pond for harvesting ice too.
Ed and Ethel Worcester had three daughters, Della, Irene, and Marion. Irene was my age. She, Charlie and I were all good friends. I remember once I was at Worcesters, and (being a little tyke and slow of speech), I said that "I needed a comb to part my head". Mr Worcester picked up on that mis-speaking, and said that I would "need an axe for that!" He later died in his early 60's of a heart attack, and his body was placed in their living room. Irene or Marion got me to touch him!
Ultimately, Mrs. Worcester, with a farm to run, married Mr. McGreagor originally from Canada I believe. He also later died, and she had several people come to run the farm for her, one being "Smitty", who had an Ausin miniature car. While Smitty was there in place, first the barn burned down, and then later the big tobacco shed of theirs burned down.
Della marrried Everit Gardner. But after they had one son, she later died quite young of cancer. I remember once walking past Worcesters on the way to Thralls, and Della was sitting next to Bill Thrall on the back steps of the path to Worcesters house. They made a joke saying "Don't tell on us". Which I didn't, until j
ust now. I don't really think there was anything to tell anyway.
Rizy's lived at the northwest corner of Dart Hill Road and Route 83. I believe Mr. Rizy worked in Hartford at the State Capitol.
There was a trolly line on Route 83, and Mother would take my sister and me on it up to Rockville on Sunday mornings to the Union Congregational Church. We would also sometimes take it to visit my Blankenburg grandparents. It took "tokens", and the seats were rather hard. Once my Grandpa Blankenburg took me on the trolly to Hartford to see a movie, my first. It was "Trader Horn", and we sat in the balcony, "so the lions wouldn't get me".
Later the trolly was replaced with a bus, and the asphalt was replaced with cement. This happened maybe in 1934. I remember I was in the 5-grade one-room school house on the north side of Dart Hill Road, between Rizy's and the Hockanum River. I looked out the school window, and we all remarked, "Oh, look, there is a brand-new 1934 streamlined car!" It may have been the same year Route 83 was made cement. Construction was interesting to watch. The cement was poured between wooden forms, and then two workers, each one end of a 2 x 4, worked it back and forth to smooth the cement.
I remember the 1932 election. Mother was for Hoover, Dad was a Socialist at that time and was for Norman Thomas. Brewster Skinner came to school wearing a little rectangular button that said "Roosevelt".
I had a few piano lessons from Jesse Lane. Just a few. Later we couldn't afford it. But Jesse and Farnum Lane were a most unusual couple. I believe they had never left home. Their father had been a successful Dentist. After he died, they just remained. He tried to be a "gentleman farmer". But he made no money. His sister Jesse gave piano lessons. They had a magnificent old colonial house that became shabby for lack of paint, which they could not afford. They both were quite pleasant, but impractical. He had a nervous twitch in one eye.
When I was little, I was afraid of the dark, and would sit at the top of the stairs crying, because I was "seeing things" in the dark. Once I remember my dad saying to "Be quiet or I'll give you something to cry about!" When I was a little older, sometimes we would leave a kerosene lamp in the upstairs hallway, and left turned down quite low. My sister and I would have fun, pulling one hair out of our head, holding it over the lamp chimney, watch it schrivel up, and make an extremely strong smell as it roasted. What fun!
I was always facinated by electricity, and radios, since we didn't have either one. But one day my Great Aunt Louise Blankenburg in Providence, RI, gave me a crystal set. I got our hired man to climb the tall Norway spruce tree in the back yard, and fasten a wire for an antenna, which I terminated at my bedroom window, and lo, I had a radio, using one of our old pair of earphones. I could get WTIC and WDRC in Hartford. Later I took it apart to see how it was made, and I made more of them and sold them to the kids at school for 25 cents, calling it the "Neilliola". I bought the crystals from Allied Radio Corp, 833 W. Jackson Blvd, Chicago, IL for 6 cents each, plus postage.
I remember once listening to a speach by Hitler rebroadcast from Germany, with a running translation. It would make you shudder the way he said "Das Juden!" Later, I ran wires into my sisters bedroom, and got her another pair of earphones, so that after we both had retired for the night, we could listen to the radio. My favorite was Fred Allen at 9PM on Wednesday nights. One night I listed to Governor Alfred Landon of Kansas in 1936, running for President.
In the morning sometimes we listened to Ben Hawthorne.
In the beginning, the house was heated by the kitchen stove, and also a stove in the dining room that was assembled and set up for the winter months. It had an isenglass window in the door. Both burned wood. We had a wood lot way up past Raymond Skinners to the next corner, where you turn left, and go maybe 1/2 mile, and our woods was on the left side of the road. My dad and the hired man would hitch up the team of horses to a wagon, and go up and cut a wagon load of fire wood. Bringing it down to the back yard and put in a pile. There, after drying out a while, it would be cut up by a power saw set-up. It consisted of a big wheeled saw on the same shaft as a big flywheel and a pulley. The pulley had a belt on it connected to another pulley driven by the same Model T Ford engine that on occasion drove the generator for our sometimes 32 volt electrical system. So each long length of wood was cut into about 15 inch lengths and thrown through the vertical trap door into the adjoining wood shed, - an old building that also had hand-hewn beams. My job was to stack the wood in neat rows, and carry it in to fill the wood box in back of the kitchen stove as needed.
Winters were interesting. Sometimes Mother would heat up flat irons on the kitchen stove, and go upstairs as we were ready for bed, and run the iron over the sheets to take the chill off. Other times, we would have some wood placed in the kitchen oven, then wrap it in a towel or something, and take it to bed to keep our feet warm when first climbing into bed. Not many farms had indoor plumbing and neither did we. Sometimes there was a big drift between the back door and the outhouse!
We had lots of fun sliding on sleds. Once there had been a heavy snow that half melted, then froze, and then there was freezing rain. We took our sleds way up past Gunthers to the top of the hill where it levels off, took a run, and a "belly flopper", and away we went. Once I practically made it from way up there, past our house almost to Skinner Road. No cars in sight in those days.
When a little older, I took to using skiis. Once I went skiing up behind Luther Skinners, a real nice hill. Only trouble was at the foot of the hill was a barbed wire fence. Just as you got up to the fastest speed, you had to make a 90 degree turn, "or else!" At about that same age we neighborhood kids would go tobaggening. The best hill was somewhere around what became Gauzes place, just past Nick Mar's place, which was just East of Gibson's. It was interesting. We would go no matter what. One cloudy night in the dark of the moon (no street lights, no "light polution" that later developed), I accidentally walked into a parked car in front of Mars place when we were on the way to toboggen.
I was always fooling around with electricity. Once I climed a tree through which ran the phone wires. I took a pair of earphones with me and connected them to the wires. The operator said "number please". I shouted in one of the earphones "four five one ring one two". Charlie Thrall's grandfather answered the phone and I asked for him, but he wasn't home.
One year in the early 1930s we had a Holland brand hot air furnace installed. The furnace would burn either wood or coal. So we didn't freeze to death in the winter anymore when going to bed at night.
Thralls had an interesting place. Their farm was on the west side of Route 83 just at the end of Thrall Road. Their barn was on a hillside so that the stantions were on the lower level, and the loft and workshop were on the upper level, both accessable by wagon. The workshop was interesting. It had an old automatic cherry pitting machine, probably purchased years earlier by Charlies Grandpa Thrall, who lived with them at times. Charlie being my best friend, I was well acquainted with the family. I have a copy of a story by Barbara Thrall (Hambach) on growing up on the farm. Maybe some day I should OCR it and put it in the blog. (For the uneducated, OCR is Optical Character Recognition)
Wallace Thrall married Lillian Schwartz from Brooklyn, NY, and they took over the farm from his dad. They had Wallace Jr., Barbara, William Preston, Marjorie, Charles Mason, and Marion. Charlie was always over at my place, and vice-versa. In the wintertime, Thralls put the plug in a dam across a brook that ran through a low-lying meadow, and they had a beautiful pond, quite reasonable in size and perfect for skating. Even one night my dad, the hired man and I went skating. Usually it was just us kids. Thralls did use the pond for harvesting ice too.
Ed and Ethel Worcester had three daughters, Della, Irene, and Marion. Irene was my age. She, Charlie and I were all good friends. I remember once I was at Worcesters, and (being a little tyke and slow of speech), I said that "I needed a comb to part my head". Mr Worcester picked up on that mis-speaking, and said that I would "need an axe for that!" He later died in his early 60's of a heart attack, and his body was placed in their living room. Irene or Marion got me to touch him!
Ultimately, Mrs. Worcester, with a farm to run, married Mr. McGreagor originally from Canada I believe. He also later died, and she had several people come to run the farm for her, one being "Smitty", who had an Ausin miniature car. While Smitty was there in place, first the barn burned down, and then later the big tobacco shed of theirs burned down.
Della marrried Everit Gardner. But after they had one son, she later died quite young of cancer. I remember once walking past Worcesters on the way to Thralls, and Della was sitting next to Bill Thrall on the back steps of the path to Worcesters house. They made a joke saying "Don't tell on us". Which I didn't, until j
ust now. I don't really think there was anything to tell anyway.Here is a photo of Lila & Judith Blankenburg (Arnold & Edna Blankenburg's daughters, my cousins), and myself in the 1930's.
I must jump ahead a bit some years for a moment just to include this. I was an avid stamp collector until I once gave my entire collection to my cousin Judith or Lila Blankenburg, probably for Christmas. Anyway, I was walking home from school with Irene Worcester, and invited her to come home with me to see my stamp collection, which she did. I was engrossed in the stamps, and I don't remember the exact situation, but she said "What kind of a suitor are you anyway?" I don't remember what I answered, but I never was a suitor, just a friend!
In I believe the late 1930's, the meat man, Mr. Hinks and his wife bought a section of land from us on the west-most end of our property on the north side of Dart Hill Road. They had an older married son Harold, and a young daughter Dorothy, who was six years younger than me. I have to admit that I was exceedingly attracted to her from about the time I was in 8th grade and all through high school. But I was also exceedingly bashful. With such a combination I guess you could say it kept me out of trouble.
We got electricity about 1938, finally. We hired a cheap electrician, and bought cheap fixtures. The chain of one of the fixtures had broken off, so we took to screwing the bulb in and out instead. Only trouble was, the electrician had wired the outside threaded portion of the socket to the "hot" side! One evening after a bath, I was standing bare-foot on the metal hot air register to warm up and dry off, and with my left hand I attempted to screw in the bulb, but instead I had grabbed the electrically"hot" metal thread of the bulb! The electric current passd down my left arm through my heart and into my feet. I believe my heart temporarily went into ventricular fibrulation, and I had to lay down on the bed a few minutes.
One summer after we had electricity I went to work for Luther Skinner and earned over $12 working on tobacco. He came down to pay me, and said "Now don't spend it all in one place." I said "I'm going to buy a radio", and he said "Uh oh, there it goes!" And I did. A superhetrodyne, 5-tube radio from Allied Radio Corp. I got to experimenting with it, and found that I could modulate the audio with an earphone connected to the grid cap of the last audio stage. And I found out how to drive earphones with the output. So I built a switchboard, and made a switch to "send" and "receive" on the same wire, using a ground for return. In this way I could run a wire a long distance and talk back and forth on it. At one point and at various times, I had wires running over to Thralls, Kashady's, Rizy's, Worcesters, Hincks, and Natziski's. But of course not all at the same time. Thralls was the longest lasting. I had an old Victrola, and attached the workings of an earphone to the metal link of the mechanical pickup amd was able input the audio into the amplifier. In this way I played records to my friends, and we could talk back and forth.
People used to give me their old radios, and I would take them apart to see how they were made. I remeber one night I had to climb over nine radios I had taken apart just to get into bed. Some years later I believe that incident was a part of an experiment by my mother to see just how cluttered my bedroom would get before I straightened it out myself. Once someone had given me an old "cone" loudspeaker, where there was a powerful magnet, and a voice coil driving a rod attached to a cone. I disconnected the cone from the rod, and used the rod to "drive" the wall, so that the wall was used as a loudspeaker.
In high school physics I learned that white reflects radiation and black absorbs it. I came home and went over to a Holstein heiffer staked out to eat grass in the sunshine which was shining brightly. I felt of her white fir, and then of her black fir. There was quite a noticable difference. Another time, I learned that the North magnetic pole dips down quite some few degrees as observed in Connecticut, and that soft iron is easily temporarily made magnetized. I took a stove poker from the kitchen stove and alligned it with the North magnetic pole. When I did so, I could pick up a needle with it, which would drop off when I turned the poker away from North pole.
Later I found out how to modulate the local oscillator, and was able to broadcast illegally for about 1/2 mile on the broadcast band.
Well, I'd better go now, and maybe next time should be my high school years, etc.
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