After school was out in May of 1958 Dad moved us from where
we were living in the remote mining town of Cobalt, Idaho, back to southern
Illinois, our roots, to the small community of Harco in Saline County, a former coal
mining town but in 1958 reduced to two stores, one gas pump, and one church with a smattering of occupied homes.
He drove us across country in our turquoise
and white 1956 Pontiac
stationwagon, a long drive through Wyoming,
Colorado, Kansas,
and Missouri where we crossed the
Mississippi River on our way back home.
Mom’s parents were there in Harco, living in a small home that
belonged to their daughter Lillie (Toots) and her husband Roy Devine. There was a front porch, living room, kitchen, two
bedrooms with a door between them, an outdoor toilet, and a cistern in the back
yard where they got their drinking water. Dad’s job in the Cobalt mine had
ended and he was looking for work, low on money, so we all moved into that
little house in Harco with Grandma and Grandpa Smith.
I’m sure my mom was glad
to be back in Illinois where she
had lots of family after three years of living out west where she had no one,
but for Dad it was a blow to his pride. It was quite a change for me; we were four rowdy kids,
aged 11, 9, 7, and 3, with no toys, no friends, and no pets. Not everything
went smoothly.
1958 was a tough time for Dad as jobs were scarce all over
the country and in rural southern Illinois
the options were few. He took a job in a newly opened coal mine but the
conditions were terrible. My brother remembers Dad telling him it was cramped
and wet, that he had to crawl on his hands and knees in water all day, digging
for coal. I seem to recall that one weekend when he was not working there was a
cave-in and that convinced him he needed to find other work.
My memories of that time are all about me, an eleven year
old girl who was fussy about her food. Us four kids all loved cold cereal and
were use to store-bought homogenized and pasteurized milk. While we lived there
with Grandma and Grandpa we had to drink the fresh milk they got from the
neighbor lady’s cow, milk that had cream floating on the top and was kinda
bluish beneath the cream…yuck! And the cereal we bought at Lois’s store had
been on the shelves a long time and infested with bugs. I remember adding
bluish milk to my corn flakes and seeing little black bugs float up to the
top…double yuck! I just remembered that neighbor's name, Maude Bennett.
Living with Grandma and Grandpa came to an abrupt end when
Grandpa got upset about us kids helping ourselves to his horehound candy. Dad
was offended by Grandpa’s “selfishness” and that was that. Next thing I knew we
moved out of their house and into a rental just a short walk away. It was fun
for me because I had my own room! Aunt Betty and Lucy came to see us and
brought a couple of wood pallets and a board and made me a dresser. Aunt Betty
sewed a cloth skirt to go around it and I thought it was so pretty. We had no
running water so Mom walked a few houses down and “borrowed water” from a
neighbor each day and carried it home in a bucket. There was a well inside our
house with a rope and bucket that let us lower our milk down aways to keep it
cool but the water was not fit to drink. I don’t think we had electricity
either. We stood on the back step and brushed our teeth in the morning and I
recall a tall willow tree in that yard. When I used my hands to separate the
hanging willow branches so I could enter that space there were lots of spiders
living in the branches. In the kitchen was a big cook stove where Mom built a
small fire of wood kindling and coal to cook our meals. My strongest memory
about that stove was Mom banked it each night and then came to bed smelling
terrible! I suppose it was sulphur. Mom and us four kids were all sleeping in
the same bed as Dad had gone north to Chicago
to look for work.
My memories of that summer include my brother hitting bottle
caps with a stick because he didn’t have a bat and baseball. He became very
accurate and it served him well later when he play little league and pony
league in Kankakee. And Aunt Betty
brought a hoola hoop and showed us how she could make that hoop twirl around
her as she laughed and wiggled her hips. None of us came close to her skill.
When fall came we enrolled in school at Brushy, a grade
school within walking distance of where we lived. It was the only school near
Harco. I worked in the kitchen to pay for our lunches. I liked wearing the
white hat and apron, sweeping and emptying trash. I got to be a cheerleader,
the one and only time in my life, as a sixth grader. I have never been
athletic, always clumsy and prone to falling, so I think they must have been
short on girl students that year. Mom couldn’t afford a cheerleading outfit for
me so a woman in Harco who had known Mom since she was a girl paid for my skirt
and sweater, short black skirt and white sweater.
My most memorable incident as a sixth grade student at
Brushy was being paddled by the principal for bad behavior! I deserved it, too.
There had been a PTA meeting in the evening
and I was there. I roamed around and in one classroom saw a list written on a
blackboard, names with marks next to them, keeping track of rule infractions or
something like that. I erased all that! I cried as I walked home after being
paddled and asked Mom not to tell Dad about it when he came back home.
My happiest memory of 1958 in Harco was going to the woods
with Dad and Mike and helping cut wood to take back to the house for kindling
and for heating the house as winter set in. Dad had one of those two-man saws
and Mike and I took turns being on one end while Dad was on the other. I loved
the smell of fresh cut wood mixed with damp leaves and soil in the Illinois
forest. That smell cannot be found in Colorado
where the humidity is low and there are no oak, walnut and hickory forests.
Dad was successful in his job hunt late that fall and went
to work at Ford Motor Company, their Stamping Plant in Chicago
Heights, Illinois. It was a
union job that paid well and included good benefits. Dad was a welder
repairman in a noisy environment before OSHA mandated ear protection.
When he came back to southern Illinois
to take us to live in Chicago Heights
it was Christmastime. Mom had put up a little tree with some homemade ornaments
and I recall Dad stuffing that tree, ornaments and all into the back end of
that Pontiac stationwagon before loading us kids and driving north 300 miles to our next home. He was
proud to have found a good job and had enough money to buy us all really
special gifts for Christmas that year. I remember Mom’s beautiful car
coat – that’s what they called a coat that came down about a third of the way from a
woman’s waist to her knees – it was a soft corduroy, a shade of green
we’d never seen in a coat, like a mossy green, or lichen
found on fallen trees in a forest. Dad loved to buy pretty clothes for Mom,
always.
We closed out 1958 all together again, in an upstairs
apartment in the home of an elderly Polish couple, named Kupietz, in Chicago
Heights. That next year was full of new experiences
and new places to live, for we rarely stayed in one place very long. But Dad
never again was without a good paying job, something that was most important to
him. He stayed at the Ford Stamping plant and commuted for the next twenty years. I can imagine a country western song about watching 1958 fade away in the rearview
mirror...no regrets.
