SAGA OF A STOP AND GO FAMILY

Many years later, Uncle Joe would tell his daughter about the Lancaster general store where he worked as a boy. Butter was sold by the pound from an open tub. If nobody was looking, Uncle Joe would scoop out a bit of butter with his thumb, and eat it. He promised himself that someday he would be rich enough to eat all the butter he wanted.

They learned to make their childhoods rich in other ways. They could go fishing whenever they wished, weather permitting. Makeshift equipment never hampered their zeal for a game of hockey or lacrosse...because most of their teammates were no better equipped than they were. Their clothing might have been threadbare hand-me-downs, but they were among the hardy few who grew to adulthood without ill effects from any of the killer diseases. Vaccinations were not yet available, so contagions like measles and chicken pox were shrugged off then as rites of passage to adulthood. Every child was expected to contract them, and usually did, as soon as the oldest sibling brought the viruses home from school.

In a small village like Lancaster, there were not many differences except house size between the basic lifestyles of the poor and the prosperous. Nobody had indoor plumbing, except for a sink with a water pump in the kitchens of the well-to-do. Poorer families drew water from a town well, or from their own well outside the kitchen. When water froze, ice was melted on the kitchen stove. There was an outhouse in the back yard with one, two or more holes, depending on the size (and wealth) of the family. When the weather became too cold to use the outhouse, commodes (chamberpots) were kept under the beds for use as needed, and emptied by the housewife or, in well-to-do families, by the chambermaid.

Fireplaces were still used for heat and cooking in some farmhouses, but in towns, most had been replaced by the cast iron stoves invented by Benjamin Franklin a century earlier. A bath every Saturday night was the standard for personal hygiene, in a laundry tub placed on the kitchen floor, filled with kettles of water heated on the kitchen stove. Not every family recognized that standard, however, especially in winter. I have heard (but can't verify) stories about children who were sewed into their long johns in the fall, and wore them until spring, barring accidents. Electric power would not reach small towns like Lancaster for another 40 years, but kerosene was cheap enough to have replaced candles. It fueled the lamps by which school children studied their lessons, and grown-ups read the news. Heat was cheap, too, as long as there were trees nearby that could be cut into cordwood and stacked by the back door until needed.

At school, my father led his class in every subject but one...arithmetic. Because of his high marks in all his other subjects, he was promoted every year despite his inability to solve the simplest mathematical problems. One of Dad's best friends was the son of Doctor Faulkner, the village physician. When Dad finished grade school, the doctor persuaded him to enter the nearest high school, located in Williamstown, about 10 miles away. He even solved the transportation problem by arranging to have Dad drive the daily mail wagon between Lancaster and Williamstown.

He was now 14 years old. His older sister, Christie, was still at home, helping her parents, as she would do for the rest of her life, but his older brothers had already left town. John J., at 22, was in British Columbia, beginning his many years as a "mountain man" in the Canadian Rockies. Jim was 19, and had crossed the border into the United States, seeking work in the new industrial center that Niagara Falls was becoming

Dad had to make other personal decisions as he prepared to cross the bridge to adulthood. He knew that he would have to leave home soon, ready or not. He looked younger than his age, and was very conscious of his short stature in an area populated by tall Scotsmen. He had not been exposed to drinking at home, but the saying, "You're not a man if you can't hold your liquor," was something he heard often enough in other places to make him decide to try.

He was smart enough to experiment privately, and swallowed a few sips directly from the bottle. It had a bad taste, burned his throat, and made him so dizzy that he had to sit down before he could swallow the jug of water he had brought along as a possible antidote.

A few weeks later he tested another he-man habit. Cigarettes were not available then unless you rolled your own from a bag of Bull Durham tobacco. He didn't own a pipe, so he decided to try a cigar...a stogie, because it cost less than other cigars. The results were even more unpleasant than liquor had been. His first puff not only had a bad taste, burned his throat and made him dizzy, but it created a nausea that his jug of water couldn't wash away.

He never smoked again, and never drank any alcoholic beverages until he began to take a nightly glass of wine in his 70s, on his doctor's advice. Drinking and smoking made no sense to him. Why should he try to do things he disliked, just to demonstrate his manhood? Answers supporting his viewpoint could be found a few short blocks from home. Lancaster's only hotel also contained the village's only saloon, where the county's farmhands and other young men gathered to socialize on Saturday nights. Socializing usually ended with one or more drunken brawls between combatants trying to demonstrate their virility. On special occasions, and especially on Hallowe'en, inebriated groups would stagger through town, hoisting and tying outhouses to the rooftops of people they disliked. "Shivarees" (charivaris) were discordant wedding night serenades outside the houses of unpopular newlyweds. After the bar closed, more than one Glengarry housewife would dread the Saturday night beating she could expect from her drunken husband.