Life's Hard Lessons

"Love is laughing while being stupid together."

Canal Fulton, Ohio Photo: Ileana Johnson 2017

Ray is eighty-two years young and a natural story teller, always with a twinkle in his eyes and a smile on his face. Tall and energetic, he has worked hard his entire life and is not about to quit. He could move mountains once. He has slowed down but his energy level and drive would put many younger men to shame.

Born and raised in West Virginia, he became an Ohio resident after he met his future bride with whom he fell in love head over heels. If you ask him, he does not mind telling you that she begged him to marry him and has the picture to prove it. She was eighteen when he took her to the prom and he was a handsome lad of twenty-one.

When Ray was ten years old, his beloved mother had a nervous breakdown. Back in those days, they committed patients and treated nervous breakdowns in insane asylums. Of the five children, three of the minor boys were put into foster homes. His childhood ended then as daily chores took over his diurnal existence for the next five years. Ray had a paper route when he was nine years old but he had never made a whole lot of money as a delivery boy.

But now, placed with an older farming couple, the boys had to feed the animals, “slop the hogs,” the chicken, and milk the cows before they went to school. They learned how to work hard for their keep. They ate beans and potatoes, not so much meat, but never went hungry. There was no heat in the old farm house, the boys hated to get out of bed and step on the stone cold floor. There was a pot-bellied stove for cooking, an outhouse flushing over the creek, a Sears and Roebuck catalog for toilet paper, plenty of chores, and many life-long lessons in work ethic and responsibility.

Every Sunday they went to an old Methodist country church. If there was a revival, they went to revival with their foster parents. There were pie socials, ice cream socials, and other family-oriented activities. They were part of a family but were missing their mother’s love, a mother who was too sick to treat them with kindness and affection.

Ray went to school every day smelling like cow manure because they had to do chores first thing in the morning. In his inimitable language, Ray laughs that it did not matter a hell of beans because everybody else smelled the same.

When Ray left the foster family’s West Virginia farm, he moved to Ohio to work in a steel mill. One brother went into the Navy and one into the Air Force. Ray worked in a grocery store, on the docks, in a steel mill, and pretty much any job to make a buck.

On a blind date, a blindness from which he had never recovered, he met the love of his life, Joan. His best friend asked him to go on a double date with a woman he’d never met. As Ray tells it, his buddy was looking for a “sucker” in order to appease his girlfriend whose friend was single. He could have said no, but he was smitten the moment he saw her. A very defiant young woman with bright blue eyes, Joan was in a hurry to get married so she could get away from her controlling mother Aida.

Ray and Joan got married on Saturday and Ray got fired on Monday. But the in-laws were nice enough to set them up in a trailer, rent free. Young and immature love can cause temporary blindness but true love conquers any adversity.

Ray learned how to build trailers from scratch, to weld, to wire, to do carpentry, to brick, and to cement foundations, skills that saved him a lot of money and helped him build two homes. He is in great demand to this day because he can fix anything. Additionally, in his spare time, he served in the U.S. National Guard. Out of the tragedy of his mom going into the asylum, Ray fashioned himself into a life-long Renaissance man and weekend soldier who could fix anything with string, a paper clip, dirt, and spit.

From Ray’s blind date came love, marriage, and three beautiful children. And one day, decades later, fate brought Ray’s youngest son, a captain, across my moonlit path in Mississippi and he became my husband.

After 59 years of marriage, Ray lost the love of his life to a lengthy and painful illness. Joan is buried close to a thicket of blue spruce in the cemetery where he bought a plot fifty years ago.

 

 

 

 

Snow Up to the Waist

Photo: Ileana Johnson 2014

We had crossed the Allegheny Mountains, driving through a rock tunnel, speeding by changing wintry landscapes, bald trees, and still wind turbines dotting the Pennsylvania sky like giant spiders. After seven hours we made it to Scott’s boyhood home.

As huge snowflakes started dancing in the air, Ray opened up his memory bag of childhood stories. The first snow of the year was beginning to stick to the ground and the drab Ohio landscape was turning into a winter wonderland. But this gentle snow blowing from Lake Erie was just a fuss when compared to blizzards past.

It was 1950 and a monster snowstorm had buried the family up to their collective waist in fluffy whiteness. The small Medina Hollow in West Virginia was far from the maddening world of civilization but this time it resembled a lunar white desert. The roads were inaccessible for an entire week before bulldozers from the county showed up to free them from complete and utter isolation.

The feeling of despair never entered the minds of these resilient , intrepid, and self-sufficient country folk who used the Sears and Roebuck catalog as toilet paper and an outhouse dangling over the creek. Sometimes it was washed away by the swollen waters and had to be salvaged from the mud downstream and drug back to its stilts.

The cows were trapped in the shed when huge snow banks slid off the roof and closed off the only possible exit and entrance to feed and water the cows - their source of milk, butter, and cheese. The boys dug a tunnel through the snow to get the Holsteins out to the water.

The fact that they were cut off from the world by miles and tons of snow did not frighten them. They only went to the store in the nearby town of Ripley once a month to buy salt, flour, coffee, and sugar – everything else they grew and canned themselves. They had no refrigeration and electricity; a building dug into the hill, well-insulated with 8 inch walls of sawdust, kept everything cold and well-preserved.  Apples, pears, potatoes, and onions were covered with straw. The milk was kept fresh in the spring. The flowing water was the magical place that sustained life - it was their cooler, fishing hole, the water source for animals and humans, and their Saturday bathtub before church.

In his typical West Virginia brogue, Ray reminisced about the yearly ritual of breaking the soil, planting the garden, weeding it, watering it, and the pig they always butchered on Thanksgiving Day. They stayed up all day and half the night, up to their elbows in blood, meat, and guts. “We saved everything but the squeal and we would have saved it too if we could have caught it. And we cleaned the guts in the river and made sausage sleeves out of them. We even used the pig’s tail to grease the griddle.”

The men dipped the hogs in a barrel to scald the hair off of them and then laid them on a sled, saved the liver, the heart, and other parts to make sausages or fry them.  I wondered  why they did not take a blow torch to singe the pig’s hair like my Grandpa used to do at Christmas time when he butchered the family’s hog. But then again, I always found hairs in the pig’s hide when I was trying to chew Grandpa’s specialty head cheese.

The large family survived during spring and summer by growing vegetables, eating unwashed tomatoes right out of the patch and raising chicken and collecting eggs. When it came time to cook a chicken, they would hang it live on the clothes line and cut its head off to keep it from flopping around and bruising the meat.

“It was not easy then, that’s for sure,” he said pensively. “We did not go to town much, we sold some eggs, we sold cream from Jersey and Holstein cows’ milk, but we did not buy much.”

They made sauerkraut in steeping barrels, stomping salted cabbage with their feet. When the sauerkraut was ready, they washed the salt off. “We did not know any better - that was normal to us.”

Every morning all kids had to get up at 4:30 a.m. and do their chores first before they went to school. Out in the middle of a field, they drank water from the creek and used nature’s bathroom, with special markers for the spot, no sophistication or hygiene worries.

Many kids dropped out of school too soon but Ray’s brothers stayed through 12^th grade because their parents stressed the importance of school, “reading, writing, and Route 21.” Route 21 took many kids out of West Virginia to the “promised land” in Ohio in search of jobs. Medina was so small it only had a grocery store and a church, no chance for employment. Ripley was the big city with one traffic light.

Some kids were so poor, they brought raccoon sandwiches to school. Parents sent them to school just to get them out of the house until they got in fights and tried to beat the teacher and the cops took them back home.  

Kids wore overshoes to handle the deep mud. When the school bus would get stuck in spite of the spare gravel on the road, children had to get out in ankle-deep mud and extricate the bus by pushing it out of the ruts. Nowadays there would be a lawsuit if kids pushed the bus.

It’s a wonder Joan married Ray after seeing all the spitting, tobacco and snuff-chewing men in the main square by the Courthouse. People slept with their dogs in bed and the pig underneath the bed because winters were so fierce and cold. Ray’s uncle was considered rich by most area residents because he owned a jewelry store in Ripley, trading watches.

Joan, Ray’s wife, a city girl from Ohio, was appalled how people lived in West Virginia. She must have loved Ray very much to stick around for 55 years. And Ray’s economical lifestyle became their trademark. Living simply, God, and family remained their guiding light.

Copyright: Ileana Johnson 2014

 

 

 

The Flushing Outhouse

Ray loves to tell stories about his childhood of long ago America - his eyes twinkle with excitement. He was a teen in rural West Virginia of 1950, carefree and happy. His parents’ farmhouse lacked indoor plumbing, not that it bothered the boys that much. They bathed every Saturday evening before church in the family washtub in the kitchen after the adults in the household.

Water was heated on the stovetop and everyone took their turns in the same soapy water, gradually turning into muddy brown. The metal tub was large enough to accommodate one person sitting in a crouched position. By the time the boys got to bathe, the water was dirty and lukewarm. The adage, “don’t’ throw the baby out with the bathwater” was certainly true.

It was a royal treat in summertime to wash in the creek that crossed the farm nearby. The boys learned to swim there, frolicked in their underwear, drank the water, and took baths upstream or downstream, wherever was most convenient at the moment. The creek was their refrigerator as well. In the shallows, they kept bottles of fresh, unpasteurized cow’s milk. In August, the creek kept watermelons cold.

It did not bother Ray that the outhouse was hanging over the creek upstream on stilts, dumping its contents in the water. When a summer deluge came, the tiny creek would swell to raging rapids, overflowing its banks, and floating the outhouse away. The local bridge, a tenth of a mile downstream, would stop the outhouse from its treacherous descent.

Ray’s dad and the boys would bring it back to its resting place, closer to the farmhouse, dragging it through sand and mud with sleds pulled by horses.

The interior was always a sandy, muddy mess and the cleanup with shovels and buckets took hours. Once the outhouse was resting again on its stilts, all cleaned up, nobody was too upset over the hard work they had just completed, but everyone bemoaned the loss of the Sears and Roebuck catalog, their free toilet paper.

Happy as coons in a corn field, the boys took turns swinging naked from the trees around the banks, dropping into a deeper hole, splashing in the swollen creek. Most became good swimmers by necessity, yet it was a miracle that nobody drowned.

The creek was truly the nature’s bounty in a time when people had to be creative to survive. Nobody knew much about modern conveniences nor cared. Ray’s family’s outhouse was the only “flush toilet” for miles around.