In Hurricane Hazel, I talked about moving from our little farm in the Kingdom to Barbara Lane, where we lived in a tiny house trailer for over a year or so until we were able to move into our new house that my father built on the lot just down the hill from and next to the trailer lot.

After we moved in to our trailer, a man we called "Mac" moved in kitty-corner across from the Viau's house just up the hill. He built a large workshed structure the size of a house where he worked as a kind of handyman/blacksmith/equipment operator. "Mac" was big, bearded, and burly and he smoked cigars. He resembled Bluto in the Popeye cartoons, but I never heard him speak. We stayed away from him. He parked all sorts of construction equipment in the yard around his big shed, which he never painted, and which had no windows, only big garage doors.

Mac would come and go at odd times; he would disappear into the big workshop. and we would rarely see what he was up to, although sometimes he would leave the big garage door open when he was welding or working on something big, and Gary and I could see his big oxy-acetylene bottles and the flames and sparks and Mac with a welding hood on, and we would scoot by the place quickly if we were walking home from school. We could see that he had a living space in the back of the shed in one corner, and it had a window. Mac had a black road grader and a bulldozer and a dump truck other rusty pieces of equipment. Everything was old.

Dad hired Mac to haul in loads of gravel and spread them out to level out the slope make a building pad on the lot next door. Dad would build our new house on this pad. The gravel was full of little round rocks that we would pick out of the yard for years as each winter the frost pushed them to the top and in spring they got sent flying by the lawn mower blades. "Picking rocks" was something we would be sent to do if we annoyed Dad. He knew we hated it.

A few years later Mac would bring an old black "steam shovel" that used cables and pulleys, and a his dump truck, and arranged with farmer Melvin to mine gravel down the hill where there were no lots on the other side of Barbara Lane and the farm ran right up to the dirt road. Mac dug a huge pit, but after digging down eight feet or so hit ground water, but he kept digging as long as the steam shovel was on dry land, eventually giving up, and leaving behind a big treeless and weed-free gravel pit with a big pond about four feet deep. "The Pit" and "The Pond" would become a fishing and swimming hole and occasionally an ice skating rink, and a place to ride a mini bike, and a killdeer nesting place, and a place for endless fun.

My sister Lorraine had been born in October 1954, two weeks after Hurricane Hazel. My Dad added a room which we called "the annex" adjoining the trailer to make a little more space for us. We had Thanksgiving dinner in the annex that year, with turkey, mashed potatoes, and Hubbard squash, which I liked. although I mixed the potatoes and the squash together, and that wasn't satisfactory at all.

Lorraine was allergic to cow's milk, so Dad bought a nanny goat and kept the goat on a long chain and fed her hay and alfalfa and milked the goat in order to feed my sister. Everything was hunky-dory.

That Christmas my brother Gary got a brand new little tractor, and I did not get one, which caused me to pitch a fit. Apparently my parents were not aware of my all-consuming obsession with tractors. Our little farm had been right next to a farmer's field , and as the John Deere tractor came around to plow the field the "Pup Pup Pup" of the tractor was the most soothing and fascinating sound my little baby ears would ever hear. A neighbor boy had a little line-up of red Farmall and green John Deere and gray Ford model tractors, which dazzled me. They actually owned a little John Deere tractor, which to my young eyes was the equivalent of the Mona Lisa. When I was four years old and still on the farm my Dad had taken us to the New York State Fair nearby in Syracuse, and David and I were riding on a midway ride that had swings with seats like a bucket and leg holes suspended from arms that spun around and around, and as we came around he handed us each a box with a brand new little tractor in the box. But that tractor had been left behind when we moved into the trailer

So, in a very uncharacteristic fashion, for he was loathe to tolerate cry-babies, my Dad somehow ran out that very day and came back with a tractor for me, and all was hunky-dory once again. My Mom had a bed covering with rows of little tufts on it, which I pretended were cabbages, and I would drive my little tractor up and down the cabbage rows. I wanted to be a farmer when I grew up.

That spring our nanny goat not only gave us milk for my sister, but the goat also performed the service of eating the weeds in the yard that grew waist-high in summer. One morning we woke up and the nanny goat was trailing behind her a long sinewy and bloody cord of afterbirth. She had given birth in the night to two baby kid goats, a male and a female. Now my sister would share her milk with the two baby kid goats. Our new neighbors happily came by to see the new baby goats, but what no one realized as that in amongst the weeds was a patch of poison ivy. Everyone got it. My Mom got poison ivy so bad it was all up and down her legs, and poor Mom's legs were raw from scratching. Something had to be done.

So that night after Dad got home from work he put me in the car and we drove far out into the country, on a road with big trees on either side. A full moon was out that night, and as we drove along the road the moon appeared and disappeared behind the trees as it lit up our way. Dad said that we were on our way to an old lady's house to get some Witch Hazel for my Mom's poison ivy. To my six-year-old mind, we were going to see a witch, but I was not afraid, I was fascinated, because I was with Dad. Eventually Mom's poison ivy went away, and the nanny goat ate it all up. but it still persisted at the edge of the woods where I would play and get poison ivy on my hands for a few years until I learned to stay away from the three shiny deep green leaves.

The baby nanny goat kid was sold to a family somewhere and we never saw her again, but the male billy goat was sold to out next door neighbors, the Ford's, and for years was only good for eating the weeds down as he was kept on a chain and moved about in their yard. . He grew up to have big curved horns, and he was smelly, and one time he broke loose of the chain and chased us kids to climb up on top of my Dad's brand new 1957 Studebaker, which caused my Dad in exasperation to refrain from completely freaking out.

That summer Dad would build our house. I remember the cobalt-blue blueprints laid out on a piece of plywood on two saw horses. Dad dug a new well near where the house would be. He found the spot he picked by fashioning a divining rod from a slender set of Y-shaped willow branches joined at a crotch Holding a branch in each fist, with his pinky finger side turned away from him, he twisted the branches outward, and he pointed the crotch of the branch in front of him as he walked around. The twisting of the branches made the crotch end unstable, and as he walked over the water place the crotch end dipped downward pointing to water. That was the idea, anyway

The reality was that Dad could have dug anywhere and hit water within a few feet. The big hill we lived on is a giant mound of gravel left behind by the glaciers of the last Ice Age. Each year the melting snow and rain seeps down into the earth. There was a big swamp and the far end of our property with a "crick" where a spring emerged to run down an old ditch dug on the property line by the adjoining farmer, that ran down all the way to the Seneca River a quarter mile away. In some places near us you could hear the water running in underground streams below the surface. There was a second "crick" along our southern property line in a similar ditch. So Dad and David dug a big hole about 6 feet deep or so to put the pump to supply the house. Farther away and down stream of the underground water he put the septic tank.

Dad built the foundation of concrete blocks and mortar, and built the subfloor, and then the walls of the same concrete blocks. One of the neighbors, Mr. Taillefer. newly arrived like the Viaus from Canada, was an experienced mason, and he laid blocks quickly. Dad put me to work with a hoe and a wheelbarrow keeping the mortar turned over so it didn't set up. Mr. and Mrs. Taillefer, daughter Francine and son Dennis (the menace). would move in to our trailer after we moved in to the new house, and they lived there for years, after which a childless couple, Mr. and Mrs. Manwarren bought the place.

Along with Mr. Taillefer, other neighbors lent a hand as well, and Dad paid them for their work. My uncles, Dad's brothers Gil and Gabe also came out. They had to work quickly because the house had to be finished before winter, and so they did. Dad built a wood frame inside the concrete walls, so the finished house would have extra thick walls that made it very snug in the bitter cold winters. When the roof rafters and sheathing were ready, My brother David andmy uncles quickly nailed on the singles. Dad put the kitchen on the south side of the house where it would be warmer, with sunny windows for Mom on the south and east The kitchen had walls of varnished knotty pine that provided endless imaginings of various exotic animal faces. The living room adjacent to the kitchen had a big double-paned "picture window" and on one entire wall Dad put a wallpaper mural - a photograph of the Mojave desert mountains and sand dunes in the foreground that had not a blade of grass. It was exotic and wonderful to look at and reminded Mom and Dad of their time in Arizona. The front door, which was never used except for company, had three little windows arranged diagonally, which was a popular style at the time

One bedroom each for the boys and the girls on the north end of the house. Dad never got around to putting a door on the closet that opened to each side to be shared by the boys and the girls. The bedrooms were big enough for a bed and a dresser and not much else. Early on I swatted the wall lamp and the globe fell off and broke, and it was never replaced. The pull chain on the lamp soon broke off, so from then on for many years the lamp was operated by twisting the light bulb in and out.

The house was 800 square feet. It had a utility room where the oil furnace and the water pump and the washing machine were kept, and the water piping and the wood studs were exposed. There were boards nailed to the studs like a ladder up to the attic where I would sneak through the hatch and try to peek at Christmas presents or hide from my Mom. . It was the warmest room in the house, and on really cold days I would snuggle up on the floor in front of the furnace where the hot air traveled under the floor along the space between the floor joists to come up through the registers in the floor in the various rooms. Next to the utility room was the bathroom, and then Mom and Dad's room, and then the girl's room.

Dad added a back room for the oil tank and tools and later on a covered porch with window walls which was intended to be a sun room but wound up being storage space. It was there that I would find the trunk full of Dad's keepsakes from Japan, and the guitar that the Petersen's would store temporarily when they moved, and my first motorcycle, and the storm windows, and so on.

The exterior was concrete blocks painted pink. Not very attractive, but so it remained until I was 14 years old, at which time we had aluminum siding installed, which greatly improved the appearance of the house. My mother gifted me the small transistor radio that the aluminum siding company gave away as a promotion. My most prized possession, I carried it with me constantly, and went to sleep with the little ear speaker playing Top 40 all night.

We had a very large front and back yard. The lot was 90 feet by 140 feet. . It took me and my brothers what seemed like hours to mow the lawn each week. Dad stuck a willow whip in the front yard which grew into a massive weeping willow tree with a trunk three feet in diameter. Willows love water and wet places. In the back yard we had large gardens, and the very back along the farmer's field for the last 25 feet or so it was swamp, with cat tails that hid the big burn pile where we burned our garbage. On the far property line next to the crick an old choke cherry tree grew

This was the house where I would live with my brothers and sisters until I was 18 years old and a Senior in High School. Eleanor (Mom), Bernie (Dad), David, Dicky, Gary , Marilyn, and Lorraine. It was home, and soon Pamela, Stuart & Joanne would join us. For a while Dad rented our trailer to the Taillefer family, who later purchased it. Other neighbors were moving in, most with trailers. Some of them also built a house, like Dad did. Some, like our next door neighbors in either side, never did , but lived in the trailer for the duration. Two doors down, a family started building a house, but ran out of money, and the bare house frame stood for many years abandoned. Once I found a robins nest with chicks in the framing. . A couple of neighbors on the other side of Barbara Lane from us had the house built from scratch without living in a trailer first. As time went on there would be 13 new neighbors across and down the hill from us on Barbara Lane, with a couple of empty lots in between some of them. These were the families that made up our little world as I grew up. The families up the hill from our house and the now Taillefer's trailer were in a different little world, one with which we "down the hill" families had little interaction - and partly because the woods uphill on one side, and Mac's place uphill on the other side, with .a steep incline right at that spot on Barbara Lane, all made a natural dividing line.

Ahead would lie all the days of childhood and growing up with upwards of twenty boys and girls on this dead-end little universe planted between the farmer's fields and forest, streams and river. It was the most wonderful place to grow up that I can imagine. My Dad picked a perfect place for me, my brothers and sisters. Except for the winters.

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Floor Plan	Map