Ken and Jane Dolley

Growing Up: A Rural Summer By Kenneth R. Dolley

            Since retiring from Maine to North Carolina eleven years ago, my wife and I have traveled through several areas of our adopted state. 
Map coordinates aside, the rural, small farm areas of both states are remarkably similar. The pastures with their well nibbled grass, pale gray 
boulders and bed rock poking through match my 70 year old memories.  My guess is that they looked the same in colonial times

            At the start of every summer vacation during World War Two and through the 1940's my mother deposited me on the "Milk Train" 
which rocked along the banks of the Kennebec River between Augusta and Waterville. The twenty five mile journey was interrupted with stops
at Kennebec, Riverside, Vassalboro and Winslow-not exactly a bullet train. The service was pretty good though; the conductor addressed me
by my first name and handed me a glass bottle of chocolate or strawberry milk. Once, I even got to sit in the engine "looking cool", waving 
from my superior position through the open window. The fireman wouldn't let me use his shovel but I did get to toss a few nuggets of coal 
on the fire. 

            My grandfather picked me up in his rarely used 1930 - something Ford. At the farm my grandmother handed me another bottle of 
plain, raw milk from the ice box and my summer clothing: cotton shorts and tee shirt for the warm days and long corduroy pants and sweatshirt
for the cold days. Footwear was optional: shoes or no shoes, no socks. If you went to town you wore high top black sneakers; otherwise you 
went barefooted with a rare dispensation for cold or working in the woods. Nana managed her life and the lives of those around her with simple
principles: it was hot or cold, wet or dry, cloudy or sunny; you were hungry or full, good or bad, on time or late. Navigating these principles was 
easy. I always knew the score. 

            We lived in a simple world. We didn't have electricity until 1945. Oil lamps provided light. We had an outhouse, water was manually 
pumped from a dug well and ice provided refrigeration. Gramp and I would drive our team of horses to the ice house and drag a few big blocks
from the sawdust and bury them in saw dust at the farm. After the war we had the ice man deliver. The Blacksmith came to shoe the horses 
and the Grand Union truck offered salt, pepper, spices, sugar, cream of tartar and other items we couldn't grow. We milked the cows manually
very hard work and too much for a scrawny kid to handle. The milk sat until the cream rose to the top and we skimmed it off. We churned 
butter and packed it into shape with rectangular pieces of wood etched with flowers and animals and drank the residual butter milk. Excess milk 
sat on the back of the stove fermenting until it became cottage cheese. 

            Life was conducted in the kitchen with its big, black wood stove. The rest of the house consisted of unheated bed rooms and the parlor,
with a rarely used kerosene stove for heat and all the furniture covered by sheets. The only times I recall the parlor being used was when 
relatives visited from Massachusetts or when Mrs. E. visited. Mrs. E. was a very tall, well nourished (someone that NC or Duke would love 
playing power forward) imperious lady with a beauty parlor hair do, from a big chicken farm down the road. Upon arriving she would always 
pat me on the head but Nana said she was very nice. Nana then made it very clear that Mrs. E. was no better than us or anyone else and that 
she had better not see me behaving as if I was better than anyone else either. Nana included “Negroes” in her equality lecture but also had 
a children's story book with Little Black Sambo, which I read with amusement, in her meager library. My narrow, comfortable world avoided 
divisive social issues such as poverty and civil and gay rights that would soon divide us. Although she only had a grade school education Nana
was a thoughtful woman. She talked to us about the horrors of the Atomic Bomb, and I remember her telling me we had better “watch out for
little Rushy” (Russia.) I don't know where she obtained her knowledge. 

            I was encouraged to read and discuss all of our books. We read Grimm's fairy tales and a book of heroic stories such as Horatio at 
the Bridge The Stand at Thermopylae, and Robert Bruce and the Spider I was exposed to exciting literature like Twenty Thousand Leagues
Under the Sea and Robinson Crusoe.

            Most exciting for a little boy was a series of World War I books for children with titles like Our Boyson the Western Front and Our 
Boys and Their Aeroplane. The books were long on propaganda and short on facts where war was presented as adventure and camaraderie, 
and nobody died. 

            Although today's cardiologists would cringe, we ate well. Breakfast was fried eggs, fried salt pork (hold it by the rind and nibble), 
stewed beans, Johnny cake and fried potatoes-all cooked in gobs of butter. Lunch and dinner were more of the same with slabs of meat 
often venison in the fall. This was provided by my mother’s brother, Uncle “Rummy” (not a drinker, just a gambler) who was the family 
hunter. Unc taught me how to hunt and set very strict rules: load weapons only when you started to hunt, push your rifle through a fence 
before crossing, and unload before you got on the property. I can't imagine anyone getting shot by accident. Humor was provided by such
things as suggesting I try the 10 gauge shotgun, thus going air born for several feet before landing on my back. 

            We planted potatoes in the spring, cutting the remainder of last year's crop into pieces with an eye in each. Gramp built a row 
digger with boards, pointed at the bottom that one horse dragged across a neatly harrowed field. Straddling a row we would move along
dropping a handful of phosphate covering it with dirt, dumping a ladle of water and, finally depositing the seed potato before covering it
with a few inches of soil. Haying was a communal effort. Gramp drove the mowing machine, realizing that if I fell off I might be chopped
in two, discomfiting his daughter. I drove everything else but the plow. We harnessed the team for the big wagons and one horse for the 
spring toothed harrow and hay rake. With luck, after mowing, we would have several dry, sunny days that dried the hay. After raking it 
into windrows we would pitch it into hay cocks with a three-tine pitch fork (dung forks were five-tine), pitch it onto the hay rack and get 
it to the barn as fast as possible. Heat, hay chaff and dust along with strong men pitching hay conspired to drive me out of the mow in 
tears. But big boys don’t cry (at least in public) so I gutted it out. Bad luck was rain before raking, sending everyone into the field to
turn over the hay to dry. Very bad luck was rain after raking which meant shaking out the windrows or cocks and spreading the hay to dry. 

            Drying hay was a very serious business. My grammar school dropout grandfather clearly explained spontaneous combustion: 
“The oxygen wants to mix with the hay and this makes a lot of heat even if it's cold.” Indeed it did. We were told stories about farmers
that were lazy and “didn't do it right,” often resulting in the loss of the entire property, since our rambling New England farm buildings
were often connected as add-ons. We did lose a remote barn out in a field. It went in the middle of the night. The fire provided a 
frightening early experience of total loss of control. Everyone stood around so close to the flames that we had to turn our bodies away 
every few seconds but nobody backed away, somehow absorbing the loss. The next day there was lots of muttering about smoking 
and arson but nothing came of it. At least we didn't lose any animals. And, of course, there was no insurance. Otherwise there were 
few tragedies. Animals usually gave birth with no complications and no human assistance. 

            Animals got old and seemed to always die at night. Suffering animals were dispatched by Gramp, and I was not allowed to watch. 

            Of course there was a war going on until 1945. We kids were always fighting the Germans with our “elastic guns” made from 
carved wood, spring clothes pins and cutup inner tubes. The Japanese got a pass, maybe because of propaganda and our inclination to 
relate to Europe and the Atlantic. I remember adult talk that characterized the Japanese as alien. Stories of Pearl Harbor made it very
clear and simple as to why we were at war with Japan. It was less clear as to why we were at war with Germany. Roosevelt's Europe 
first strategy didn't filter down to the public, and we had no knowledge of the atrocities being committed. The Holocaust was underway 
but “in the interest of prosecuting the war” our leaders told the public nothing. Although I am sure Nana would have been sympathetic, 
we kids had never met a Jewish person, and in our egalitarian world would probably not have understood the problem. Unc roamed 
around at night with a blue tin hat as an air warden and we dimmed our already dim lights with blackout curtains, but day-to-day events
always eclipsed the war. 

            As kids we had lots of time and opportunity to play. There was no Little League. I don't think we knew what soccer or lacrosse 
were. We organized ourselves and made our own rules. In baseball someone tossed the bat. You caught it and then the “tosser” and 
the “tossee” alternated hands around the bat until there was no more room at the top. Someone would smash another bat on top and if 
you didn't have to let go of the bat because of the pain you got to choose first. Although many of today's social scientists and teachers 
would not have been pleased, it was a big deal to be chosen first and, of course, the littlest, least coordinated kid got chosen last. I have
no idea whether there are any negative or positive correlations between success in life and choice position. I do remember that John, 
a last choice kid I later went to high school with became a B47 pilot. We engaged in the inevitable ball or strike, safe or out arguments. 
We always resolved them and the game went on -without adult mediation. The entire day was spent outdoors. We played “kick the can:” 
everyone runs and hides for 10 seconds; whoever gets back first and kicks the can wins. “Simon Says” always provoked arguments. 
Everybody lines up a few yards from “Simon” who tells everyone to take a number of steps -forward, backward, umbrella, sideways, 
etc. He closes his eyes for three seconds. Anyone caught moving when he opens them goes back to start. We picked wild blackberries, 
raspberries and strawberries. It was hard work; the strawberries were tiny so we usually ate them. The only time we brought berries 
home was when we went picking with Nana. 

            In our simple world everything had a generic name. There was the road, the culvert, the woods, the spring, the brook, the store. 
We spent lots of time at the brook, about a mile away. Sometimes Nana, in her long house dress, corset and black tie shoes, would 
accompany us with a picnic basket. Her concession to beach attire was a wide brimmed straw hat. The water came up to our shoulders 
and there was a big rock in the middle that we could dive from. The brook also had a dam designed to trap eels that we were told were 
sent to New York. This reinforced our image of the Big Apple: an exotic place with strange people who would actually eat eels. We 
weren't interested in girls but had a great time getting them to scream by waving big, fat eels in their face. A marker of the times 
occurred every day around 4:00pm. Someone would yell “four o'clock” and everybody would leave the water as the day's dye batch 
from the woolen mill upstream would float by. Nobody was concerned; nobody was tested for exposure to toxins. I don't know when 
the dye stopped. I imagine economic realities closed the mill long before the environmentalists got a shot at it. Business, Government
and citizens had a casual attitude regarding the use of common lands and waters. Municipalities dumped sewage directly into rivers. 
The state of Maine (called the “Paper Plantation” by the few, ineffective opposition) was dominated by the paper companies in those 
days. The companies’ dams controlled the level of many lakes and rivers so logs could be floated down to the mills. This destroyed 
fish spawning areas and polluted the rivers with excess acidity from the bark. Once, on a dare, a friend and I walked across the 
Kennebec River on the logs (a dumb kid act, but we didn't drown.) The Environmental Movement would arrive many years later. 
Although I am sure there were citizens concerned about the above issues, they never intruded on our idyllic life on the farm. 

            Time passed, the 1950's arrived and so did high school. Nana and Gramp got old; and new friends, sports and other activities
intruded and changed my life. I have had a great time for the last sixty plus years; but there were a few times when it would have
been nice to be able to press a button to take a  time out from our postmodern world by returning to a summer at the farm. 

Jane Dolley informed me the above story was recently written by Ken for their local Senior Games.  He won a gold medal in the “Life Experience” 
category which qualified him to enter it in the state final to be held in Raleigh this September.     Good Luck, Ken!!

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