Friends in High Places

Gladys Bartlett, Harvey, Rosamond, and Daddy

For as long as I can remember, every Saturday night there was a group of people at our house to play cards.  Canasta was usually the preferred game. They started playing after Daddy finished milking about 7:30 pm and sometimes the game would continue on  until the wee hours of the morning.  Bill and Annamae Kane, Harvey and Rosamond Meadows, Paul and Gladys Bartlett, Budd and Emma Spencer, adding new members to their group as people died or moved away.  These friends stayed friends throughout their lives and did everything together. New Year's Eve they always had oyster stew together and played cards and that continued until Daddy died.

Rosamond and Harvey Meadows

We kids played board games and Daddy would play checkers with us.  His favorite game was Haystack with checkers and he was good at it. Some of my best memories are winter evenings as we sat in the little living room after Daddy had finished milking and we would listen to programs on the floor model radio like Amos and Andy.  Jerry and I would play checkers, draw, color and play on the floor and Daddy would tell us that he would play a game of checkers with us.  Man, he could see the jumps and clean up the board in a hurry and we would all laugh.  Mother would be knitting us mittens and she would think it pretty funny, too.  By 9:00 we were all in bed, but we had a radio upstairs and we always had music in the house and in the barn, and to this day, it is difficult for me to go to sleep without music.  We all loved music.

In 1952 my parents discovered a new invention that some of their friends that lived in high places enjoyed...television.  That changed card night and we started going to Uncle Ted and Aunt Catherine Goodwin's house to watch television on Saturday nights.  Mother would make snacks to take with us and Aunt Catherine would have prepared things for us to enjoy also.

Catherine and Ted Goodwin

I believe the favorite show was wrestling; I would get a real charge out of watching my dad and Uncle Ted enjoy the matches.  They about wore out the chairs that they sat in as they would watch Pat O'Connor and I can't remember the other wrestlers names they would watch.  Then there was the tag team matches, and I thought Daddy and Uncle Ted would take out the seats of their chairs, they would get right up on their knees and holler at the television, they certainly did enjoy the evening.

Sometimes on Friday night we would go to Mark and Rena Coveny's house on the Orebed Road and watch television with them.  The men folks enjoyed watching boxing.  I liked to be able to go early enough to watch Groucho Marks, I always thought he was funny.  I didn't like the fights and would usually fall asleep.  I did enjoy going to Rena's house, she wrote poetry and that amazed me and she would always let me read some of the things that she wrote.  She also had beautiful flowers and helped Mother to grow Dahlias.

Emma and Budd Spencer

Daddy finally got the idea that maybe we could get television at home if we ran a line down from the hill.  He talked to some  people in Mansfield about it and a man came over with equipment to test for a signal.  They found a signal for one, maybe two stations, and with the help of a booster or two, it could be done.  It would be expensive, but could be done.  Daddy decided he wanted to try it and wondered if Uncle Clyde and Aunt Charlotte would be interested in it also, so they split the cost.  Rodney and I were in the sixth grade in 1953 and we got a television for Christmas!  What was on television?  Football!  DARN, we didn't know anything about it, but we left it on, because we could.

Many a night Jerry and I would walk that television line with a stick to knock the snow off just so we could watch television that night without interference, or if there was a storm, a limb would come down on the line break the line and off we would go to make the repair.  It was a job we kids learned to do. We would usually do it while Daddy did the milking.  Daddy would go if it was something that we couldn't fix.  We would take the tractor part way and one of us would go up and the other one would go down to make the job quicker.  Later we added another antenna to pick up more stations and extended the line so more neighbors could also have television.  I don't remember Daddy ever charging his neighbors and if there were repairs, I suppose he and Uncle Clyde paid for it.  Quite a bit different from today's cable and satellite TV!