Memories Of Old Les In Time
As some of you already know, I'm a man of 87 years.
I was born in Houston, Texas, October 1918.
and what events have lead me to who I have become today.
I thought if I wrote some of them down,
it might explain most of the poems that I write.
Hope you enjoy the journey!!
This is a picture of my Mother and Father.
My father died the week before I was born.
After my Father died, my Mother,
my two older sisters and I returned to
St. Charles, Missouri where Mother still had family.
We lived with her sister, Hannah, who had 5 kids of her own
and a husband to take care of.
I was still just a baby.
We didn’t stay there long because of the
crowded conditions.
We then went to Warrenton, Mo., to stay
with my Uncle Henry, my mother's brother,
who had recently become widowed.
He needed someone to take care of his two children.
We weren’t there long before
he remarried and we moved on again.
My mother worked as a maid for some
people named Wistbrook.
They were friends of another relative.
We lived in a small house behind the main house.
I was about 1 1/2 years old by then.
We stayed there until I was about 3 years old.
It was while we were staying there that
I was climbing around on a fence gate
and I fell on the gate and ruptured myself.
My Mother called the doctor to come to the house.
Back then they came out in a horse and buggy.
He examined me and told my Mother
that anytime it started to hurt,
I should stand on my head.
That is how I learned to stand on my head!!
I have had many doctors since then
look strangely at me when
I tell them this was the cure they gave me back then.
Of course, by the time I was about 13
I did have to have it operated on,
so I don’t still have to stand on my head!!
(thank heavens!) HaHa
My poor Mother looks soo tired.
My Mother wasn’t making enough money by being their maid
since it only provided room and board for my Mother and us,
so we moved back to St. Charles, Mo.
My Mother got a job at the shoe factory .
She rented an upstairs room in a house that was
owned by a woman named Mrs. Paul.
Mrs. Paul babysat for me while my Mother went to work.
I guess my Mother was beginning to do alright by then
because we moved across the street
and rented a small house of our own.
I slept in a cot under the stairs.
I was about 3-4 years old by this time.
Even though we lived across the street
Mrs. Paul still babysat for me
while my sisters went to school
and my Mother went to work.
We had been in St. Charles for about 2 years.
Everything seemed to be working out fine when
suddenly my mother became gravely ill.
She wasn't sick for long,
maybe 2 weeks when she suddenly died.
I was 5 years old.
I know a lot of relatives came around and
they were all talking about what to do with us kids.
I do remember when she was laid out.
They had her laid out in the living room in a big beautiful bed.
One of my Aunts was holding me and she was crying.
I wasn’t sure what she was crying about.
I thought my Mother was just sleeping in that big beautiful bed.
As I looked around the room everyone was crying,
including my sisters,
so I started to cry too.
I don’t know that I knew my Mother was dead
but I knew something was really wrong.
My oldest sister was 12 at that time
and my other sister was 10 years old.
I do remember being at the grave site.
We were asked to throw a handful of dirt on the casket.
I knew they said my Mother was in there,
I just didn’t understand why they were putting her in the ground.
They just said that she had gone to heaven.
I will always believe she died of a broken heart.
My whole world was turned upside down.
I was too young to know what was going on
but I knew my Mother was gone and I was heartbroken.
My sisters and I were sent to live with an
Aunt and Uncle in Mt. Carmel, Illinois.
They had 3 children of their own.
my Dad's brother
My sisters and I lived there together for about 1 year.
After that first year, my oldest sister, Chloe
about 13 by then, went to live with relatives in Warrenton, Mo.
She stayed with them until she graduated from High School.
She did the housework and odd jobs for her room and board.
When she finished High School,
she came back to St. Charles to attend college.
My other sister, Lillian and I continued to live
with my Aunt and Uncle Mendal in Mt. Carmel, Ill.
During the summers we would go to visit
relatives in St. Charles, and see my oldest sister.
When I was in about the 3rd grade, I got dyptheria.
I was about 8 years old by then.
My Aunt took such good care of me that I probably
would have died if she had not been there to take care of me.
She sat with me all night long to make sure
I did not roll over onto my back and suffocate.
While I was sick,
they let me sleep in my cousin’s room.
They had to keep me away from the rest of the family
due to the illness.
While I was lying there,
I reached under the pillow and found a few small coins.
I have no idea why my cousin would have kept them there
but I was thinking this was my lucky day!
I was getting to be a pretty bad kid by then.
I took the coins and hid them
in a small shiny box she had up on her dresser.
I layed there thinking about the candy
I was going to buy with those coins!!
Maybe that’s what kept me alive,
just thinking about that candy! Haha
Anyhow, once I had recovered,
they removed everything from that room,
including that shiny little box and it was all burned.
That was how they dealt with contagious diseases back then.
Everything in the room, the sheets the blankets
and anything else I might have touched was burned.
Along with that shiny little box and my new found coins!!
I don't think I felt much about anything anymore.
After the 3rd grade,
I was sent to live with another Aunt and Uncle
on a farm in Wright city, Missouri.
Their names were Dina and Jule Pepplemeyer.
My sister, Lillian, stayed in Mt. Carmel, Illinois.
I was around 8 or 9 on here.
I had chores to do each day.
I fed and watered the chickens, gathered the eggs,
slopped the hogs and milked 2 cows before I went to school.
Just the normal stuff you do on a farm.
My Uncle Jule showed me how to do it
and from that day on, those were my chores.
They probably thought that would keep me busy
and out of trouble!
I tried to find the easiest way while making
the most fun out of doing those chores,
but that's another long story.
I wasn't too crazy about going to school and
I always seemed to find some way to get into trouble.
It was a one room schoolhouse that schooled grades 1-8.
We had a pot bellied stove in the classroom.
If you spit on it,
it would make this popping sound.
I thought that was great fun to do,
until the teacher got on me for it.
She sent me out to cut a switch
that she was going to use to whip me with.
I went out and got a slippery elm switch
and took the core out of it.
(easy to do with a slippery elm)
Once I had the core out,
I notched it about every inch before I
slipped it back into the bark.
I knew the minute she hit me with it,
it would shatter into pieces.
Well, it worked!
She hit me with it
and it immediately broke into about 10 pieces.
She realized what I had done and
went out to get a new switch,
this time picking one herself!!
That was a big mistake on my part!!!
She made me regret doing that!!
I got a real whipping with the new switch for that prank!!
On the farm, my Aunt and Uncle made their own soap.
They used a big black kettle over a fire
with hog grease and lye.
That's what we took a bath with.
We were all getting ready to go to church one Sunday.
One of my cousins was already dressed
in her fine Sunday clothes.
I was out on the back porch washing my hands
and face in the wash pan.
When I finished I would toss the water out into the yard.
How was I to know that this time,
just as I tossed the water into the yard,
my cousin was coming around the corner.
Opps!!
It splashed all over her and her nice clean dress.
She started screaming and my aunt and uncle came running out
to find out what the fuss was all about.
I only got a scolding for that one!!
Another time, while I was at the farm,
I had met this neighbor kid named Johnny.
We ran around together, probably getting into trouble.
One day we saw this guy lying on the ground sleeping.
He had a pipe
that must have slipped out of his pocket as he slept.
We waited until he woke up to leave.
He must have not looked down to see
the pipe still left on the ground.
We ran to where he had been lying
and grabbed the pipe up and ran.
We had the pipe but no tobacco.
Oh, I knew how to solve that problem!!
I knew that my Aunt and Uncle secretly smoked
down in their basement.
In those days, it was taboo for a woman to smoke.
I wasn’t going to say anything about it,
but I knew they had cigarettes down there
along with the butts in the ashtrays.
I quickly grabbed the butts and tore them open
to gather the loose tobacco.
We put it into the pipe.
We smoked that pipe and smoked it until we had enough.
We weren’t quite sick from it yet.
We walked to the barn in his backyard,
and by then we were feeling quite
sick from smoking that thing!!.
We had to run to the outhouse
and lucky for us it was a “two holer”!!
He took one side and I was at the other,
throwing up till we thought we were going to die!
When we came out,
his mother saw us and said we looked pretty sick.
She knew what to do for sick boys!!
She went inside and came back with a big spoon
and a bottle of castor oil!!!
YUCK!!
She gave us each a big tablespoon full,
which should have cured us from smoking forever!!!
(it didn’t, haha)
A neighbor who had witnessed this whole thing
decided to tell my Aunt what we had done,
she called out to my Aunt,
“are you going to give him a whipping?”
My aunt said, “I'll take care of it”.
My Aunt knew that I had seen her smoking before,
(which as I said was taboo for a woman in those days)
so she let me off light.
Told me not to smoke again!!
NO WHIPPING!!
YEAH!!!
I guess after about a year of putting up with me,
they probably had it with me too.
When I was 9 years old,
I was sent back to my Aunt and Uncle Mendal in Mt. Carmel.
My sister, Lillian was still there.
She was still in High School.
By the next summer,
my cousins there were grown up and my Uncle
decided he didn't want to raise anymore kids.
I was about 10 years old by then.
My sister was about 15.
He said it was time we went to live
with my Mother's relatives.
Lillian was sent to live with a cousin
in St. Charles. She was to take care of her children
while she finished high school.
She had some problems
while she was there,
so she left when our guardian said
she could stay with him and his wife
while she finished High School.
Our guardian, was a member of the church
that my mother had attended
and the superintendant of the Sunday School.
He was self appointed as our guardian.
He would watch over children that were in need.
He would find homes for them or act as their financial
guardian or whatever else he and his wife could do for them.
He probably did this for hundreds of kids.
He was a chiropractor and everyone
addressed him as Doc Ritter.
While she with with them, she won a scholarship
to Lindenwood College in St. Charles.
She continued to live in St. Charles while she attended college.
Before she even finished college,
she won another scholarship
to attend Washington University in St. Louis.
She was very, very bright,
and would get so angry with me
because I didn't like school very much.
I was sent to live back in St. Charles, Mo.
with my Aunt Hannah.
She was widowed by then and
all her children were grown.
She worked at the shoe factory and I ran wild.
She didn't even know where I was half the time.
I started getting into a lot of trouble
with kids I shouldn't have been with.
I was becoming quite a street urchin by then.
We used to make colored bottles of sand
that looked like rainbows.
We would sell them for a pin a piece.
I kept the bottles on a shelf
in an abandoned chicken house.
A straight pin was of great value then.
The depression was starting and people were
living from hand to mouth by then.
People ate whatever they could when they could.
My friends and I used to hang out with the bums
on the riverbank,
listening to their stories.
They sounded so exciting.
There was this one bum who
told us he used to be a chef in N.Y.C.
One day he told us to go to the butcher shop
and get some bones,
and go to the grocery store and steal some veggies.
He said he would make us some great soup.
We did it.
When that soup was done, he gave it to us in cups.
That was the best soup I had ever tasted!!!
There was all kinds of trouble we got into
and most of the time got out of
but one time in particular,
my friends had stolen some railroad spikes.
The spikes were being used to build the
railroads there in Missouri.
I was with my Aunt,
helping her in her garden pulling weeds.
It didn't matter.
Since I was always with them,
the police thought I must have had some part
in stealing the spikes.
My guardian was passing by the sheriff's office
and heard them talking about
these kids that were in big trouble.
He heard them mention my name.
He went in and talked to the Sheriff.
He told him that he was my guardian
and asked if he could make arrangements for me.
The Sheriff was happy to do it.
Back in those days,
they did try to help kids during the depression
and alot of kids were getting into trouble.
That night, my guardian came over to my Aunt's house.
He told me to sit down that he wanted to talk to me.
He asked me if I would like to have a mother and a father,
and I answered, "What is that like?"....
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