Horning's Farm

Each morning I would wake up to a country fiddle playing "Devil's Dream". It was the theme music of some radio program that started at 5:30AM. I had a wind-up alarm clock with a switch circuit that turned on the radio. (This was before you could buy such radios with that feaature). I can still hear that music, though I've never heard it since.

Mr. Horning originally came from Kansas where he said that occasionally it would "rain pitchforks". He was a very forceful chacter with plenty of opinions, very smart and competent. He would fly anywhere, and was in one forced landing in an airliner. He didn't know anything about federal income tax, neither did he want to know. He couldn't tolerate paying so much per hour, as he calculated it, for the priviledge of sleeping in a motel, and preferred to sleep in his truck on a long land trip. He ran his dairy farm, consisting of all pure-bred Jerseys, with the goal of making his money by selling the livestock to discerning buyers for high dollars. He once turned down an $5,000 offer for his bull. He would go long distances to buy and sell pure-bred Jerseys.

Mrs. Horning was a good homemaker, good cook, and they had two daughters, the eldist in High School, and the younger one maybe in 8th grade or so. The eldest daughter was named Patricia, and occasionally I would help her with her Latin homework. The younger one was named Priscilla. Mrs. Horning also had an elderly Uncle who lived with them. He maybe was in his 90's, and hard of hearing. He may have judged Mr. Horning somewhat harshly, regarding his farming practices. This is to be expected since Mr. Horning said that he used the milk simply to pay expenses, and his main effort was to make his money by producing very high-value pure-bred Jerseys. One day I opened the gate so Mrs. Horning's Uncle could drive his car out of the driveway (about 1/4 mile from the road). The Uncle raced the engine pretty badly, I guess because he couldn't hear the noise.

Mr. Horning had contacted the electric company for a separate meter for the barn, but they did nothing. So Mr. Horning climbed up the light pole and tapped in directly. This happened before I started there. I wondered why he left the light on in the shed all the time, until I found out that the electricity there cost him nothing. He toyed around with the idea of putting an underground cable from the shed to the barn, but nothing came of it.

George Horning and his wife got along fine, but once he showed me a very expensive microscope he kept hidden above the milkhouse, putting his finger to his mouth, indicating I shouldn't say anything to anyone (due to the objection of the cost his wife might make).

Once I came down with a terrible cold, and was sick in bed, in that little house of mine. I build a big hot fire in the wood-burning stove, wrapped myself in plenty of blankets, and "sweated it out", thus shaking it off.

Horning's had a monster cherry tree in their yard, and towards fall it was loaded. They asked me to pick cherries, with a ladder and bucket, which I did. Those cherries were dark and sweet. They were delicious! I certainly ate my fill during this chore. But then that evening, guess what we had for desert: cherry pie! I think I may have declined.

Mr. Horning had a good friend who had a light plane. He dropped in once for a visit, landing in the pasture near the house. On his first pass to land, he couldn't, because the land dropped away to fast (going downhill). So on the next pass he came in from the opposite direction, and it worked ouf fine.

Seeing Susan once every two weeks was not very often, and I became restless. I asked Mr. Horning for every week end rather than every other week end. He was rather upset, giving an inuendo about square shooting and our prior agreement. But he reluctantly agreed, and said "I'll take you to Twalatin" (so I could take the bus to Portland).

This bus business was not so satisfactory either. Hornings helped me to find a Ford Model A coupe for $300, and I bought it. I painted a little white lightening bolt on the door. It ran fairly well for quite a while, and helped me see Susan much more often, and we went a lot of places together.

After a while the car developed some transmission problem, and I located a used transmission for a replacement. I rigged up a block and tackle in the shed, pulled the rear end, and insserted the replacement transmission. This is the most extemsive car work I've ever done, but it was successful.

Sherwood was still quite a ways from Portland, so I wanted to move closer. Now that I had a car, I was able to get an appartment in Vanport. Vanport was made up of wartime quonsett huts on ground in Oregon halfway between Vancouver, WA and Portland, OR, but still much closer to Portland than Sherwood. So I moved. Mrs. Horning's comment was, "So the car we helped you get is taking you away from us." Yes it was.

I signed up for the University of Oregon / Oregon State College, Vanport Extension, and took three courses that summer, which may have been Rhetoric, Physics, and Math. In retrospect, they were exceedingly simple compared to similar courses at Carnegie Tech.

I believe it was after I completed these summer courses that I was able to get a grounds maintenance job in Vanport. The work I got was with a contractor who had a "closed shop", meaning that union membership was mandatory. So I became a member of the AF of L (American Federation of Labor), International Hod Carriers. My fellow workers were all kinds of people, the likes of whom I've never met before nor since. I would say we were way over-staffed for the work we did. One job I had was a pick-stick operator, going around the grounds with a sharp pick at the end of a long handle, and spearing cigarette buts, and other trash, and scraping it off into a bucket.

On another occasion, about a dozen of us had to dig somewhere, but there were only one or two shovels. So we formed a line and when it was one person's turn, he took the shovel. The supervison would come around occasionally on a little motor scooter. Some of thses characters I worked with didn't like him, and one called him a "Son of a bitch on wheels". Another worker, it could have been the same one, said, once in a while you have to give the b------ the shovel to let him know you're a human being! I wondered if he had been a jail bird in the past.

Susan and I went lots of places in my car. On one occasion we went up to Mt. Hood, and took the ski lift up as far as it would go. She had her girl friend along who took pictures of us, (which by the way, I kept until the very night before the wedding in Pittsburgh).

Time had a way of marching on. I wanted to get a degree in EE at a top school, not Oregon. So I arranged to take a universal entrance examination, supervised by a nearby high school principal. In filling out the forms, I put down (1) MIT, (2) California Insititue of Technology, (3) Rensaleer Institute of Technology, (4) Worcester Polytechnic Institute. But there was space for one more school. A fellow applicant was applying to Carnegie Tech, which I thought was somewhere in New Jersey, so I put that down.

Due to the hugh influx of college applicants just getting out of their WWII military service, the four above colleges were swamped, and I was turned down. But there was no reaponse from Carnegie Tech. It got to be not that long before fall term would start, yet still no word. I went back to work at Horning's, and planned to take a long bus trip to Pittsburgh. George Horning talked me into working longer, and getting a plane reservation. Still no word from Carnegie. So I sent the admissions office there a telegram: "Please wire me collect, accepted or rejected. I have plane reservation". I received a telegram from them (not collect), that said "Accepted for term beginning February 2. Letter follows"

I've often wondered if my sending that telegram caused my acceptance there.

So it got to be December 1946 and I sold my little car, worked more for George Horning, and prepared to head back East. In all the time I went with Susan I never told her that I loved her, simply because I was too bashful. I always think of the saying "Faint heart ne'er won fair maiden". I know she got fairly restless, yet we never talked of the future. I seem to recall that one time she said that her parents wanted her to ask me if my intentions were honorable. It was somewhat of a joke, because of course they were.

My own intentions were first to get an EE degree, then get married.

I remember one night the three of us went to a Youth For Christ meeting. Her girl friend was usually along. Another night we made penuchi in the bacement where she lived.

But the night finally came when I must say good-bye. But it wasn't what I was expecting at all. It seems Susan had given up on me, and had arranged a "closing of the door" type of good-bye like this: She had another fellow I'd never met or heard of there, her girl friend was there, and the four of us went someplace, I can't remember where. The implication was that her girl friend and I were pared (for whom I'd never had the slightest attraction). So that was the end of that, and it hurt terribly. In retrospect, of course, it was only too obvious what the trouble was, and I was the one to blame, not her.

So I caught a plane the next morning, and never heard from her again except one time 12 years later.

Time to quit. Next time, the plane trip on some junkey air liners with maintenance and engine problems.