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My dad was a genius, he only had an eight grade education, but in my mind he knew so much and planed ahead so well that I still put him an a pedestal.  He grew up on a 60 acre farm near Swift Run Gap not far from Elkton, Va.  The Maiden cemetery is just south of the entrance to the Shenandoah National Park on highway US 33.At a young age he was asked to go to work to support his older brother going off to Asbury College at Wilmore, KY, a Methodist Seminary.  He took a job at the new local Coca Cola bottling works and after a couple of months they had to give him part of his pay in stock options, that did not meet his requirements so dad took his stock options and moved on to the Baltimore Ship yards where he was apprenticed to a German machinist that dad admired.  One of dads jobs was to lap in the thrust and shaft bearings of the ships being built for WWI.  That consisted of applying abrasives of finer and finer grades until the friction of the bearing was minimized.

Of course he learned to operate all the machine tools of the era and he was making pretty good money for a kid that was too young for the armed forces that were gearing up for the war in Europe.  Oh yeah, that first winter was pretty rough, he slept in a big card board box and used news papers as blankets.  He eventually made enough money to share a room with a buddy, they double bunked each one working different shifts.  Dad sent money home reluctantly but still sent it home till the first World war ended and jobs in the ship yard dried up.

Next he found his way to the Pacific North West where he took a job on a tramp steamer, an old sail boat that had been converted to steam, they took produce north and brought lumber south, he made several trips but eventually quit because in bad weather the waves would crash over the bow and the deck leaked letting the cold water soak them while they tried to sleep up under the fore deck.  He and his buddy went back home and Dad caught hell for not sending enough money home, he was pissed, and went west and joined a thrashing crew that worked the wheat harvest all the way to Winnipeg.  Grandpa Maiden was a product of immigrants from England and Wales but there was Huguenot blood in there too.  Grandma Maiden was half Cherokee and was ugly as sin but produced two sons and four daughters three that where absolutely beautiful aunt Hazel and aunt Lotty never married.  Lena, Lotty’s twin married well and became a lawyer and worked for the state government of Kentucky, her husband was a gentleman farmer and some times had jobs with the state when Republicans were in power and other times he worked at the Keenland horse racing track handeling the money they took in. aunt Peggy the baby married Neil Barley who eventually became one of the top exec’s for General Electric of South America, they were the one’s that I visited with on my second trip to Sao Paulo, Brazil.  Pete their only son did well with TRW a big auto parts company in Cleveland.  They had several sons that I have lost track of but Pete and his wife are still living in Utah where he was last employed.

My Mom was born in Carlton Place, Ontario, one of twelve siblings, Grandpa, James Dunlop and Grandma, Susan B. Kelly came to Canada on the same steam ship, she had got passage as an indentured servant and after completing her service they married and settled in Carlton Place, he as a stove molder and she as a home maker and mother of twelve, oh yeah the older children had to help, Mom and several of her sisters worked at the woolen mill and she became an expert with a peddle operated sewing machine, when I was a kid I used to marvel at how fast she could make her sewing machine go and what she could do with it, she was an expert seamstress.  Grandpa Dunlop died at a fairly young age he simply breathed in to much of the molding sand and dust.  Grandma and the rest of the children immigrated to the Detroit area where some of her older children had found jobs or spouses and had settled with theer.  Mom and the younger siblings went with their mother to Detroit all of them were illegal immigrants but that all worked out over time.

Dad was working at Dodge Brothers when he met Mom, but Dodge was bought out by Chrysler and in the process Dad and his boss Bob Milliard, who Dad liked a lot went their separate ways.  Bob went with City Auto stamping in Toledo that made truck bodies and fenders, Dad went with Mullins Manufacturing in Salem, Ohio that was really into innovation, they made Monel counter tops and even Monel Kitchen sets that were typical in diners and fast food restraints of that era. You know the diners that were made to look like a converted railroad dining car.  They had a boat division and even a utility trailer division.

They even built a few small Monel boats for the US Coast Guard, the first that would neither rust nor rot, yeah they were expensive but salt water did not bother them at all. They had 100 HP Lycoming marine engines in them and were pretty fast for the time and were used to chase the rum runners between Cuba and South Florida during the Prohibition era, they even built a few with two and  three 100 HP engines for use in running down the smugglers on the Detroit and St Lawrence rivers, Dad said those boats were really fast.

Mullins bought an idle factory in Warren, Ohio, Dad was transferred there commuting to work 26 miles each way.  He had to leave early and he got home late but it was the depression and he was glad to have a steady job.  We eventually moved into a house on Roosevelt street just across from the grade school, I entered first grade and I think my sister Louise entered forth grade being three years older than me.  Miss Hole was my teacher and she had a paddle that she used any time one of us got out of line, I got my share of paddlings but it did not hurt me much, sure I was embarrassed but I still grew up Ok.

In July 1941 Dad cashed in his Coca Cola options and some Avco stock he had acquired along the way which was enough to make the down payment on a run down 60 acre farm about four miles north west of town.  I liked it because it was only two and a half miles from the airport. Dad was a regular at the Airdrome Tavern stopping every evening after work for some beer with his buddies, some how I got permission to ride the school bus to the airport each day after school, spend an hour or so being an airport bum and then ride home with Dad when he was ready.

There was plenty of fixing up to do on the farm.  No electricity at first, no central heat, no indoor plumbing and every one of the out buildings and the house needed repair.  Dad was a good scrounger, he managed to acquire a couple of abandoned out buildings from a near by farm, he dismantled them piece by piece, stored the materials on the barn floor to dry out, he even stacked the wood a certain way to prevent warping.  I think we used every scrap.  WWII started that winter, building materials were hard to find, The Rural Electrification Program eventually ran electricity into the house but we had a hard time finding the wire to run electricity to every room, I don’t think that task was finished till after the war.  The government sealed the hangers so my airport activity just dwindled to nothing.  We did get a furnace and ran a heat duct to each room but the house was not insulated so that first winter we stayed pretty close to the heat duct.  We eventually got the house insulated and got some extra ducts to better distribute the heat, before the insulation was installed my bedroom got so hot that I abandoned it and slept on our north facing sleeping porch, I loved it, Northern Lights on clear nights, heat lightning from storms some nights and rain on the tin roof other times, all fond memories.  I slept on that porch until I joined the Air Force in the fall of 1951, I moved to the porch after the last snow of spring and would move back to my bedroom with the first snow of fall.

Back to the 60 acre survival kit, the soil tests were so bad the county farm agent sent truck load after truck load of lime and fertilizer, we planted the whole farm in soy beans and just plowed them under to help build the soil quality.  The county Agent was sure helpful and I think the government paid for most of the soil building to support the war effort.  The soil tests had improved enough that one of the ten acre fields was planted in wheat and another ten acres in oats, both crops where fruitful.  The weakest field got another crop of soy beans to be plowed under again and the other field was planted in alfalfa and would be tested in the fall to see if we should plow it under or harvest it for cow and horse food, we got to keep the alfalfa.

By then we had a bunch of chickens, a few young pigs and Guernsey cow that was due to deliver in the spring, that was the bull calf I took to the county fair as a 4H project and sold him to Armor Star because he had won a ribbon, it was not a blue ribbon, but they bought him any how.  We bred her again an made plans to buy another heifer in spring this one a Jersey, Dad said they gave more butter fat which mom could use for barter, if you remember nearly every thing was rationed by then.  Us small farmers did pretty well during the rationing.  All our friends and neighbors came to the farm and bartered with Mom and my Grand mother who came to stay with us each summer, tended the garden and the orchard,  Dad tended the bees, I took care of the pigs, cows, the manure piles and helped the share croppers with the harvest. My sister Louise took care of the chickens and the other odd foul we had acquired, the banty rooster and turkey eventually learned to avoid each other.

By the end of the war the farm was in pretty good shape, all the soil samples the county agent took showed a good Ph  and soil nutrients were in the safety zone, the county agent had sucessfully saved a family farm that was indeed a survival kit, yes it was a lot of work but if the war had gone on much longer we would have had to sell all our excess to the government, the county agent had warned all along that as our farm became more fruitful we may be required to sell or give our excess for the war effort, he had put so much effort into our farm, how could we refuse, I wonder how many other family farms he saved, we really loved him, he came to visit every month or so and would have recommendations, he even brought a bunch of young pheasants and they migrated to the woods and would feed on the wheat, oats and corn near the woods.  It broke my heart when the reaper or combine would cut the legs off one of them because they preferred to run rather than fly,  we would stop, wring its neck send it to the house for supper.

Our straw pile started to get out of hand, each year the straw pile got a little bigger because we had more grain production than animals to bed down so the imbalance showed up as a bigger and bigger straw pile each year.  Well a young buck deer before he had any horns learned to push a board aside and help himself to the hay from our mow.  After a year or two he had acquired a harem and one snowy morning when I went to milk the cows there was a bunch of commotion at the back of the barn, there was our young buck stuck inside the hay mow not knowing how to get out his horns had grown enough that his head did not fit through the slot any more, we wrestled some but I finally got his horns out side the barn and he hopped down un harmed, but the interesting part was our straw stack now looked like a toad stool.  He and his harem had apparently been  nesting at the edges of the straw stack and over time had dug deeper into the stack for more comfort from the cold.  A neighbor came with his baler and we split the procedes and I would see one or more of the deer at edge of the woods some mornings or evenings.

What I have described is a ten year saga of learning to survive, making soil fertile planting seeds watching them grow into abundant crops harvesting, storing and sharing the bounty, learning so much about life and love that animals have for us that feed them, cows and mules lean on you when you are near, horses and dogs showed real love, the pigs would sqeal with delight when I came to feed them and cats just tolerated you, even our pet black snake, about six feet long, would come when you called him and he though you had brought him some scraps from the butcher shop.  Yeah it was an experience I shall never forget, you can’t buy and education like that and I got it for free.  Oh yeah, there was a lot of work involved  but still every minute was worth it.