Straight From The Hart
Joan Rowden Hart
I have had several weeks of unrelenting pain lately, and haven’t felt
much like coming up with something on my own, so for this week’s
column, I am borrowing from my dad’s autobiography again. Many of you
mentioned to him at the Hughes Center and elsewhere how much you
enjoy reading his memories.
This episode occurred the summer of 1928 when my dad (Francis “Fritz”
Rowden) was 5 years old. My Grandpa Lloyd Rowden had brought the
family, which consisted at that time of my Grandpa and Grandma (Amanda
Smith) Rowden and my dad and his younger brother, Russ, into town to
see my great-grandparents, Walter and Jane “Bee” Rowden.
They approached the city limits from the west and entered through
Young Addition. They turned right at 2nd St and passed Frank
Kimball’s blacksmith shop and three blocks farther was the Lebanon
Water and Power Plant. One block more and they turned right on to
Harrison where my great grandparents lived at 501 Harrison.
(About 15 years later in 1943, the baby who would eventually become my
husband was born just down the street at 586 Harrison, and 20 years
later when we were married in 1963, we rented our first home from
Sheriff Frances Murphy on Murphy Road pretty much just across Harrison
from my great-grandparents’ home. There’s a lot to be said about
growing up and living all your life (I hope) in your hometown.)
My great uncle Reese Rowden, who later became the Lebanon Fire Chief,
along with his brother, Kenneth, were living in the family home at the
time, and they were the first to come out and greet my dad and his
family that day.
One of my dad’s cousins, Homer “Press” Burns, also lived there. My
great-grandparents raised him after his mother died. And an elderly
distant relative by the name of Elizabeth Beard also made her home
there because my great-grandma knew she needed help and someplace to
live. For several years she worked for the Nelson Hotel and Dream
Village, making seventy-five cents a day washing dishes.
That’s what people did for family back in those days before there were
nursing homes and/or low-income apartment buildings on every corner.
This “family” of six people lived in an older four-room frame house
painted white with cedar shingles for the roof. There were three
bedrooms and one of those was also used for a living room. There was
an enclosed breezeway at the south end which led to the kitchen and
contained a huge woodburning cook stove with warming oven.
My dad writes that whether it was “100 in the shade or 20 below 0,
that old cook stove was fired up three times daily and a full meal put
on the table”.
Grandma Bee would get up very early and build a fire and there would
be 6 or 7 assorted irons on the back caps of the stove for
pre-heating. She would fry jowl bacon, then roll out biscuit dough
and cut them out with a tin can. She would make gravy by pouring milk
into the frying pan after taking the bacon out.
My dad writes that she seldom ate at the table, and usually waited
until everyone else was done. While they ate she would fill the
copper boiler on the back of the stove to use later for washing
clothes for some of the “well-to-do folks” in Lebanon. She would then
spend the day washing and ironing clothes – mostly stiffly starched
white shirts worn by Lebanon professional and business men.
Grandpa Walter was the custodian for the Christian Church here and was
paid $15 a month. My dad writes that Grandma Bee with her laundry
work “took in more than both Grandpa and Aunt Liz combined”.
There was no plumbing in the house but they had a water hydrant
outside about ten feet from the kitchen door. They didn’t get an
indoor bathroom until around 1950.
There was electricity in the house just for one light bulb screwed
into a socket in the ceiling of each room and operated by a pull
string. There were no electrical outlets or light switches on the
wall.
After my Grandpa Rowden and his family left my great-grandparents’
home that day, they went back down Harrison and turned left onto
Second St. where they passed Kimball’s again and turned right at
Lumelick’s Blacksmith Shop which had a front entrance facing
Commercial St. and a back entrance facing the alley.
My Grandma wanted to stop at a grocery store. Daddy and Uncle Russ
had never been inside a store so they begged Grandpa to let them go
in.
My dad doesn’t write in which store they shopped that day, although he
mentions that the store owner’s name was Jim, and he tells how
everything was bought by the pound from bulk containers – lard and
soda crackers and peanut butter - then weighed up and the tray was
wrapped in paper and tied with a length of string pulled from a large
overhead spool.
He writes about how he and Uncle Russ stared into the candy case
which was full of chocolate drops, coconut bon-bons and orange slices.
Grandpa Rowden had Jim sack up a dime’s worth of orange slices, which
was a whole pound back then, and when they got back to the car Grandma
Rowden took control of the “poke” of candy which she passed around.
My dad declares this to have been one of the most “fun days” he
remembers from his childhood.
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