Events before 1955 – Page 2

A Small Farm

In the early years of the depression when we lived in Akron my father lost his job. Living was hard for those who were out of work since there was no Social Security or food stamps – only soup kitchens in some of the cities. My mother told of the time she was pushing me around in a stroller and spotted an old potato lying on the sidewalk. She wanted to pick it up but was afraid someone would see her and thus discover that we were poor. Fortunately for us we were soon able to move in with my grandparents in Randolph. They had a grocery store and were relatively well off, so I never experienced the hunger that many people suffered at the time.

Randolph is located on US Route 224 between Atwater and Akron. This road passed in front of the Lang family business. Randolph is about 5 miles from Atwater which has a busy rail line, and trains passed through there every day. During the depression there were many men looking for work, and some were hitching rides on freight trains. Since there were possible jobs in the rubber factories these “hitch-hikers” sometimes jumped off the train in Atwater and walked into Akron, a distance of about 20 miles. For food these transients depended on the generosity of people living in the houses or stores that they passed. They often were carrying all of their worldly possessions, including pots, pans, skillets, bedrolls, etc. Many had these articles in a cloth feed sack hung over their shoulder, and some had pots and pans hung under their coats so they looked like penguins walking down the road with their arms stuck out at an angle. The utensils banging together under their coats announced their presence as they walked.

Most of these people were hungry, and Grandma Lang would never refuse food to a hungry person. Many times I would see one sitting on the front steps eating a sandwich. It was a sign of the times.

Later Dad obtained a job and we moved into a house next door to the Langs. On one occasion he invited a beggar into the house to sit at our table during dinner. After having a fine meal of pork, mashed potatoes and sauerkraut the man was feeling rather prosperous. When dinner was finished he thanked us for the meal. He then tilted his chair back on its rear legs, tucked both thumbs under his armpits, and asked:

“Does anyone know where a man could buy a small farm around here?”

Now here was a man who didn’t have a dollar but was too proud to admit it – even to himself. My dad saw the humor in this and told the story many times about the penniless beggar who wanted to buy a small farm.

The Outhouse

When I was a small child, indoor plumbing was just beginning to appear in Randolph and outhouses were standard equipment at every dwelling. I remember one of my great aunts saying that living under the same roof with a crapper was a revolting thought and if someone brought one into the house she would move out. Later when I was a teenager almost everyone had indoor plumbing but there were many outhouses still standing, either as a backup in case that new-fangled indoor facility quit working or as a spare when relatives visited and the crowd became too big for one toilet. In those days it was unheard of to have more than one toilet in a house.

One of the most popular tricks for pranksters on Halloween was upsetting outhouses. They were tall and narrow and usually fairly easy to push over, one just had to be careful not to fall into the “goober” pit. If that happened a clean-up session at the creek would be needed because you would smell too bad to sneak into your own house.

Kenny and I did not usually partake in this pastime because it was too mundane, took no imagination, and anyone could do it – we needed more of a challenge. Fortunately we did not have long to wait for the golden opportunity to appear.

We were sitting in the local bar one evening when “Mr. Robert” walked in. After a few beers he started bragging in a strong German accent about his outhouse. It went something like this:

“By Godt, nobody vill be upsetten MY shithouse zis year. Zose halloveeners tried for ze last 10 yearss at Halloveen und zey were chust not strong enough to do it”, he bragged on and on.

Well now that definitely got our attention. This was like waving a red flag in front of a bull!

We knew that Mr. Robert would be in the bar for awhile bragging about “his shithouse” so we went over to check this thing out. It was a fancy facility with curtains and plaster and wallpaper inside. What he had done to foil the tricksters was place 2 inch angle irons all the way up each outside corner of the outhouse and set each in a large block of concrete. This made the building very stable and I don’t think a truck could have pulled it over.

This called for extreme measures. We considered two options. Option number one was using a torch to cut the angle irons, but we rejected this idea because it called for heavy tanks of acetylene and oxygen, and we just might end up burning the outhouse down instead of upsetting it. So we decided on option number two – sawing the angle irons.

The next day I went up to Montigney’s Hardware in Ravenna and bought a dozen of the best hacksaw blades I could find and mounted them in frames. We knew Mr. Robert and his wife would attend the bingo game at St. Joe’s the following Saturday night so we planned our attack for then.

We talked two of our buddies into helping with the operation. We spotted Mr. Robert’s car at St. Joe’s, knocked on the door to make sure nobody was home, and started sawing – one person at each corner. After about an hour of labor and several broken saw blades we finally sawed through the angle irons. We then gave the outhouse a shove – and over she went!

Later that evening we stopped at the local gas station and the owner Jim Jones told us that Mr. Robert had driven in squealing his tires and fuming mad. He said that he was looking for the people who upset his shithouse and when he found them he was going to shoot off their kneecaps and other things that I won’t mention. Jim told us we had better go home and keep quiet about this if we wanted to live.

After this incident Mr. Robert appeared to be a changed man. He never did set the outhouse back up, no more bragging, and seemed to have lost his spirit. It looked as if this outhouse was the most important thing in his life. Seeing this made me feel somewhat remorseful and sorry for him.

But then you should never go into a bar and challenge young people that way. It just isn’t prudent!

The Teenage Brain

I firmly believe that many teenage brains are late in developing the part that controls judgement and promotes survival. In looking back at some of the shenanigans that my friends and I pulled as teenagers, I’m convinced that we had that kind of undeveloped brain. Here are some examples that I believe support this theory:

Unique Greeting

Kenny, Mahlon and I had an agreement that when we passed on the road driving in opposite directions, instead of greeting each other by waving, we would swap lanes and pass each other on the wrong side. This was our way of saying hello – also it would scare the bejesus out of any one riding with us. It worked quite well except for the following notable exceptions:

One day I saw Kenny’s car coming toward me and I pulled into the left lane as agreed. What I didn’t know was that it was Kenny’s mom driving his car to shop for groceries. She didn’t know about our secret greeting so she ended up in the ditch.

Another time I saw a big red dump truck in the wrong lane coming straight at me at a high rate of speed. In order to keep from hitting it head-on I took to the ditch. I learned later that it was Mahlon, who had just been hired by Herman Miller to drive a big red dump truck. I did not know about this, but that didn’t stop him from saying “hello” in the agreed manner.

Busted!

One evening Kenny and I were slowly cruising around downtown Akron. Kenny was driving and we were each slowly sipping on a bottle of beer. One of the city policemen spotted us and pulled us over. I set my beer on the floor beside my leg hoping the cop wouldn’t notice it, but Kenny just kept on drinking.

“GIMME THAT BEER”, the cop said to Kenny in a loud demanding voice.

Now I have to explain that Kenny had somewhat of a stuttering problem. When the cop asked for the beer, Kenny handed the bottle to him, looked him straight in the eye, and said with a stutter:

“Doooooo you want a glass?”

The policeman looked at Kenny in disbelief. Suddenly he burst out laughing, handed the bottle back to Kenny and said, “Get out of here and don’t come back”.

So we did – and didn’t.

Scamming The System

Another thing our teenage brains told us to do was always try to scam the system. Here are two examples:

In every gas station and bar there was a peanut dispensing machine. Each machine had a glass bowl about the size of a soccer ball full of salted peanuts. Beneath the bowl was a lever along with a coin slot and dispenser chute. To get a handful of peanuts you put a penny in the slot and moved lever to the right. Then put your hand below the chute, moved the handle to the left and the peanuts would fall into your hand. We found that we could take a piece of stiff wire, bend one end into a circle the size of a penny, and place it in the slot while holding onto the wire. We then put a paper sack under the chute and moved the lever back and forth until the sack was full or the machine was empty.

Another thing every restaurant and bar had was a juke box with small kiosks at the bar for selecting songs. These were hooked to the main machine by 3 wires. We learned that we could take a straight pin, puncture the insulation of two of these wires, and when we moved the pin rapidly in and out, a series of clicks could be heard over at the main machine. A little practice with this setup would allow us to play every song on the jukebox – for no money! When the man came to empty the money bucket on the jukebox, he would look around suspiciously at the customers because the money box would be almost empty, even though the counter showed that hundreds of songs had been played.

We didn’t particularly like peanuts, nor did we care to listen to the music on the jukebox, but we had beaten the system and impressed our friends. That made our undeveloped teenage brains happy.

In today’s world these shenanigans would probably also make us convicts!

Dynamite

When I graduated from high school in 1951 my first job was at a strip mine in Deerfield working summers and weekends while I attended Kent State University. There I drove a dump truck, ran a D7 bulldozer, welded bucket teeth for the power shovels and dragline, repaired tires, set dynamite, and other odd jobs. At times the company would buy surplus equipment from ordinance depots in various parts of the country and I would ferry these back to the mine.

The first summer I was put on a dragline as an oiler. A dragline is a large machine with a 120 foot boom that sits on top of the mine pit and uncovers the seam of coal. This one was run by a 2 man crew – an operator and an oiler. The oiler keeps the dragline fueled and lubricated, runs the bulldozer to build the ramp on top of the high wall where the machine sits, keeps the light plant running at night, and does various other jobs. Since the dragline ran 24 hours per day each crew worked a “swing shift” – one week 7AM to 3PM, next week 3 to 11, and the 3rd week 11 to 7, etc. This was exciting work for me but difficult physically because my body never got used to the change in hours, and I always felt fatigued.

The dragline operators were very skilled at their job but were a wild bunch of individuals. For them sex was not a spectator sport. They did not greet you with “Good Morning” or “Good afternoon”, but with “Are ya gettin’ any? ”. After their night shift they would often visit the “Homeworth Laundry” and come back with wild tales about Peaches LaFluf, Lena the Hyena, or Linda – the girl with the magnetic tongue. This was quite a bit to handle for a naive 17 year old kid with a strict Catholic background.

One night my operator ran out of matches and could not light his cigarette. He asked me for a match but I didn’t carry them, so he poured some gasoline on the catwalk, lit it with a torch lighter, and dipped his gloved hand into the flaming gasoline. Now he had 5 flaming fingers which he held up to his grinning face and lit the cigarette. In the dark he looked like the devil himself when those flaming fingers lit up his evil-looking face.

Sometimes when I was working the night shift one of my buddies would visit me. My favorite thing was to have them ride with me on the D7. Riding on a dozer at night in a strip mine is quite a scary experience to someone who has never done it. I would push a load of dirt over the high wall, dropping the blade over the edge. The heavy blade would cause the dozer to pitch forward giving the sensation that you were about to take a 70 foot plunge into the dark abyss riding a 26 ton machine. More than once my rider would abandon ship and “jump for his life”.

Now for the dynamite. The dynamite was used to break up the rock so the dragline could uncover the seam of coal. Each stick was 6 inches in diameter by 2 feet long and weighed 12.5 pounds. They were packed 4 to a 50 pound box. A driller would drill a series of 9 inch diameter holes each 60 feet deep into the high wall. He would drill maybe 12 of these holes 20 feet apart. Then we poked 15 to 20 sticks of dynamite into each hole with a long pole. We plugged the hole with dirt and connected the whole works together with an explosive rope called primacord, attached an electric cap with a long wire to a generator-plunger, and took cover. When the explosion occurred, the earth shuddered with a tremendous jolt and the sky blackened for several minutes with flying dirt and large rocks.

On inspecting the spoil banks during one of my night shifts I noticed that not all of these dynamite sticks had exploded. Some had been dug out by the dragline undamaged, and since they were never going to be used again, I could pick them up and take them home.

This opened up a whole new set of interesting possibilities!

After consulting with Kenny, my idea man and partner in crime, we decided that these large sticks would be ideal for celebrating New Year’s Eve. We set up two sticks in the woods on top of Sand Hill. I put in a cap and fuse and lit it at 12 midnight, making sure nobody was too close.

Sand Hill is about one and one half miles from Randolph Center. The explosion reportedly knocked dishes off of shelves there.

That night my friend Tom Hogan was working at the Sohio station across the road from my home. We stopped there later and Tom told me that my dad had been in and asked if he knew where Gene was. Tom told him that he hadn’t seen me. “Did you just hear a loud noise?”, Dad asked Tom.

You can fool most people most of the time but you can’t fool Dad! I will say that Dad never brought it up, but this is how he let me know that he knew.

Not all of the sticks I found were as large as the high wall blasters. Some were only a foot long and one inch in diameter. These were good for smaller jobs – like fishing. We could throw one into a pond and the concussion would cause fish to come to the surface. We then paddled around the pond and gathered them up. It sure beat putting a dirty old worm on a hook!

Then there was the well on Kenny’s parents property that had gone partially dry. Kenny’s mom complained about this so we decided to do her a favor and loosen it up a bit. This well had a piece of pipe sticking out of the ground about 2 feet and was open at the top. We dropped in a stick of dynamite and fired er’up.

That thing went off like a cannon, shooting rocks bigger than baseballs high into the air. I have no idea how they all got out of that small pipe. Neighbor Frank Lang was sitting in his yard across the road and big rocks were falling all around him. Fortunately God was with him that day and he didn’t get hit.

Our theory on well-restoration was not very good because not one drop of water was ever obtained from that well again.

Jane

Jane was my mother’s sister and the youngest member of the Clem Lang family. She was a student in high school when I first lived at the Lang household. I remember her as a vivacious, light-hearted fun loving person. Her beauty could rival that of any Hollywood star, and she would light up a room when she entered. She liked to giggle, and because of her pleasant personality she was quite popular.

She had many male admirers. During WWII many of these were soldiers on leave. After a while she got tired of so many boys hanging around bothering her and she would sometimes treat them poorly. I remember one soldier in particular who came all the way from Detroit to see her, but she wouldn’t come out of her room to say hello to him.

“I told him not to come”, she said in her own defense.

At the start of WWII Jane was hired by Goodyear Aircraft of Akron, a company that made planes and other devices for the military. Goodyear Aircraft’s trademark symbol was the winged-foot of Mercury and they published an in-house paper called “The Wingfoot Clan” whose purpose was to disseminate information to the Goodyear employees. In one edition Jane’s picture appeared on the front page in a swim suit as a “pinup girl”. During the war pictures of girls in bathing suits were called pin-ups because the GIs would “pin them up” on their walls and lockers. They also painted them on war planes for good luck.

Pin-ups

Some employees sent the edition with Jane’s picture to family members who were stationed overseas.

Someone also happened to send one to Fr. Bertram.

Now Fr. Bertram was not a huge fan of pinup girls! He was also suspicious of anyone who appeared to enjoy life as much as Jane did. Anyone having that much fun, especially a girl, must be up to something devious or sinful. This pin-up picture confirmed his suspicions, and the result was a month or more of fiery oratory from the pulpit at Sunday Mass. My poor saintly grandmother sat there with her ears burning, listening to her family being castigated from the pulpit Sunday after Sunday in the presence of her fellow parishioners with words like decadent, scandalous, and horseflesh. The scolding was general and no family names were ever mentioned, but everyone in the congregation knew who the villain was.

Later Jane met Chuck Weber, a quality person who had a fun-loving personality similar to hers. After a while they decided to wed, however there was one large problem – Chuck was not a Catholic. To marry a non-catholic In those days in that community was considered to be as serious as the highest form of treason.

When it came time for the wedding Jane and Chuck visited the priest to face the music. When Fr. Bertram asked Chuck which church he attended Chuck replied, “I am a Protestant”.

“WHAT ARE YOU PROTESTING?”, the priest demanded in a voice so loud that it could be heard all the way to Purgatory.

Evidently Jane and Chuck survived the grilling because they were eventually married, had three wonderful children, and lived happily together for many years.

At a family reunion after Chuck’s death many years later I asked Jane how she was doing without her life-long companion.

“I am doing fine”, she replied. “As a matter of fact, right this minute he is sitting at home on the mantel” (he had been cremated). Then she added with a light-hearted giggle, “I turned on the TV when I left the house, so he’s watching the baseball game”.

The Grapefruit Incident

Randolph High School in the 40’s had a student population of about 100 students. My class of 1951 consisted of 29 members. Because of this small number almost anyone regardless of talent could join any program offered and we were all encouraged to do so. I was privileged to have been able to participate in a variety of programs including sports, plays, minstrel shows, etc. In some of the shows I played a guitar and sang with a harmonica around my neck the way Bob Dylan did years later.

One activity I remember in particular was a class play in which I was to appear in drag and wear a woman’s dress. Our director was Mrs. Lillian Franks, the English teacher. During performances she stood on the side of the stage behind a thin curtain to prompt those students having trouble with their lines. The curtain did not go all the way to the floor so all that appeared of Mrs. Franks Carlile were her shoes and ankles.

A dress rehearsal was performed in the afternoon for the entertainment of the student body. Before this event my classmate Mahlon Carlisle informed me that my figure didn’t appear womanly enough in the dress, so to help remedy this deficiency he handed me two large grapefruits. Without giving it much thought I slipped the grapefruits into my dress, the belt around my waist holding them in place. The effect was striking – those spheres did wonders for my figure. After all, this was only a dress rehearsal, so how could this departure from the plan possibly cause a problem – it might even add interest to the show.

One minor problem did occur when my belt became loose, and I had to keep my arms folded and do some major shoulder-shrugging to keep the grapefruits from moving out of their expected position.

Later in the play when my character’s true identity was discovered I had to remove the dress and “turn back into a man”. I hadn’t thought beforehand about what to do with the grapefruits and now had to improvise, so I reached in the dress, pulled out the grapefruits, and calmly placed them on a nearby table in full view of the audience.

The crowd went absolutely bonkers! It took several minutes for people to calm down and quit laughing so that we could finish the play. I happened to glance over at Mrs. Franks’ ankles and noticed they were turning a deep shade of purple. I didn’t know whether to bow or to run!

Since the grapefruit routine had been so well accepted by the audience during the dress rehearsal I asked Mrs. Franks if I could use it that evening when we presented the play to the townspeople. She told me I would have to obtain the permission of the school principal, and he would certainly refuse.

I went into Mr. Cutting’s office and made my request. He rubbed his chin for awhile trying to look serious and scholarly, and finally said I could use the grapefruits as long as I “didn’t move them around inside the dress so much”. At the evening performance I again did the routine with the grapefruits and the reaction from the audience was even more intense than it was for the rehearsal. I was now a town celebrity!

Usually the events in high school plays that caused the most interest and comments were the kissing scenes, but in this case the kissing was pre-empted by “the grapefruit incident”. For almost a week it was the most talked-about subject in Randolph.

The Fly-Paper Caper

When I was in high school I became interested in an unusual aeronautical project. As a result of weeks of research and scientific experimentation (actually it was goofing off and wasting time instead of studying for my classes) I learned that the common house fly had enough power in its wings to carry more than its own body aloft. As a matter of fact it could also carry a piece of white cigarette paper, the size of which was directly proportional to the size of the fly. After deducing this earth-shattering fact, all I needed to do was determine a method of attaching the cigarette paper to the fly. Upon further experimentation I found the ideal method. I could take the corner of a cigarette paper, twirl it between my thumb and forefinger to make a sharp point. The fly could then be gently “goosed” with the point and hopefully take off and fly around the room towing the paper along.

This was all very interesting but it was still just an unproven theory, so it needed to be tried and refined. A fly was obtained and the paper was prepared and attached in the afore-mentioned manner. After a few practice trials, a successful flight was achieved and the fly-paper system started floating around the room. The fly was quite small compared to the size of the paper so it was hardly noticeable. To the observer it looked as if the paper was levitating around the area by some magical means.

Several days later I was sitting in study hall with nothing to do, so I decided to try out my new discovery and present it to the unwashed masses. I caught a fly, attached the paper and launched the system. The fly and attached paper took off and flew around the study hall. Every so often the fly became tired and the paper would spin in a downward spiral like a maple seed. Before hitting the floor the fly would become invigorated and take off again. He finally ran out of gas and crashed into the wastebasket.The students in the room were awestruck and greatly amused.

Unfortunately the study hall monitor, Mrs. Lillian Franks, was not. For some unknown reason she picked me as the culprit behind this unusual apparition and instructed me to leave the room and report to her office after school.

At the designated time I approached the door to her room. I figured that Mr. Harry Cutting, our mean old principal, would be there with a paddle and I would get a good old-fashioned whooping.

Much to my relief Mrs. Franks was there alone seated behind her desk. I entered the room and she told me to take a seat. She then said, “Gene, if you show me how you did that I will let you go”.

I went through the whole ritual for her and after some hand-wringing and the mandatory scolding she did let me leave as promised.

Thinking about it recently I came up with the conclusion that If I had studied more in Mrs. Franks’s excellent English classes instead of goofing around I would be able to construct and compose much better stories for this website.

But then maybe I wouldn’t have anything to write about.

Memories of Living With The Langs

Lang Family picture taken on my mother’s wedding day

Seated L-R:Edith, Clem, Dolores, Jane, Trina, Irene

Standing L-R: Dorothy, Claude, Paul, Alice, Walter

Dec 26,1932

When my father lost his job with the Goodrich Company in Akron we moved in with Clem and Trina Lang, my maternal grandparents. We lived there from the time I was two years old until I was nine, 1935 to 1942. At this time Dolores and Jane Lang attended Randolph High School, Walter taught science at Randolph and later attended Western Reserve University. Paul was a mechanic at Jenior’s Ford Garage until he was killed in a motorcycle accident in 1938. Dorothy and Alice were married and did not live at home, Irene worked for a doctor in Akron and courted Leon May whom she later married. Claude ran the gas station and repaired electric motors, Edith (my mother) ran the post office which was in the front part of the store, and later taught 6th grade at Randolph School. The Lang family together with the Roliff family of four made for quite a large crowd under one roof.

The residence, general store and warehouse were in the same large building. The gas station was in a small building adjacent to the store. The living quarters consisted of a large kitchen, living room, and many large bedrooms and storage rooms upstairs.

The Kitchen

In the kitchen was a pantry, coal stove, gas stove, ice box, sink with counter, and a large table. There was no running water. A hand pump on the counter was piped to a cistern which was filled with run-off from the roof. This water was used for washing and cleaning. Drinking water was obtained from a well in the neighbor’s yard. A pail was filled from this well and placed on the kitchen counter where drinking and cooking water were dispensed with a long-handled dipper.

The icebox held the perishable food. The ice man would come with his horse-drawn cart, carry in a large block of ice on his leather-padded shoulder and drop it in the box. He would sometimes take his ice pick and make popsicles (icicles?) for the kids.

The coal stove had an open rectangular reservoir on one side which was filled with cistern water and heated for baths.

Baths were taken in a round galvanized tub filled with hot water from the stove reservoir. Clothes drying racks surrounded the tub with hanging clothes to provide some amount of privacy. This momentous event occurred maybe once a week.

The Living Room

In the living room (or sitting room) was the usual davenport and chairs along with a piano that played songs from a punched paper roll when pedals were pumped. There was a large steam radiator that went all the way around one corner. There were religious paintings hung on the walls. In those days when someone died, they were laid out in the living room. I remember both Uncle Paul and Grandpa in their caskets with neighbors coming in to pray and offer condolences.

Also this is where the Lang girls entertained boyfriends and did their “sparking”. With a crowd that large living under the same roof privacy was a rare commodity. I remember hiding in the doorway drapes during some of the sparking sessions to see if I could pick up any interesting conversation or useful techniques that I might be able to use at a later date.

The Outhouse

There was no indoor plumbing so we had an outhouse about 100 feet from the house. This was a deluxe version with 3 seats for grownups and a small seat for little people. It had plastered walls and curtains on the windows. There were newspapers and a Sears & Roebuck catalog for the paperwork or for reading, or both. I don’t know why there were so many seats. I can’t remember being in there with anyone but Mom. Slaked lime was used to cover up the “goodies” after every use. This also kept the flies and other critters away. There was hardly any offensive odor as in the port-a-potties one encounters nowadays at a ball game or rock concert.

I must say it was quite a thrill making the walk to the outhouse in the middle of the night during the winter.

The Cellar

The cellar was large and dark. It appeared to me that one could get lost down there forever. The joists overhead were logs, and the floor was dirt. In one corner was an old well that went out of service before I arrived on the scene. I was told that one of the pet dogs drowned in there.

There was a large black boiler taken from a steam locomotive that provided steam heat for the whole facility. It looked to me like a train had run into the house and got stuck in the cellar!

There was a separate room in the cellar with straw on the floor containing several cider barrels. I remember seeing old farmers sitting in there wearing knee boots, drinking cider while telling tall tales, jokes, and war stories.

In the fall all family members would gather in the cellar to make sauerkraut. Grandma Lang would shred the cabbage heads. The slaw was then put into 30 gallon crocks along with layers of salt. A round wooden float wrapped in cloth was then put on top with a gallon jug of water for a weight. Several months later sauerkraut was born.

Meals

There were 3 meals per day – breakfast, dinner and supper. If I recall correctly two of those meals nearly always had mashed potatoes, gravy, vegetable and some kind of meat.

Since the Langs were very strict Catholics, on Fridays the meat was replaced with something else. Fresh fish seemed almost impossible to obtain around Randolph before airlines and refrigeration. If you tried to cook the so-called “fresh fish” you had to leave the kitchen! On Friday salted cod that came in nice wooden boxes with dovetailed corners and sliding covers was used to make some kind of white gravy to serve with potatoes and green beans. I also remember having soup with canned oysters floating in white broth. It reminded me of mice floating around in milk. We ate this with little round soda crackers.

It was rough being a Catholic in those days!

Grandma Lang also made a sweet cake that she called “simmit kookel”. It was like a pizza, except it was rectangular and the topping was cinnamon, brown sugar and milk. She put dents in the dough with her fingers. Upon baking, these dents filled up with gooey sweet stuff. It was my favorite dessert.

Wash Day

Every Monday was wash day and every Tuesday was ironing day. There was a room off the kitchen called the wash room where the washing of clothes occurred. It contained an Easy Washer with a copper tub and a large agitator that was belt-driven from an electric motor. There was also a wringer with a crank that wrung the clothes which were then hung outside on a line or in the kitchen on drying racks. Grandma Lang spent most of the day every Monday washing clothes and the next day ironing them. She never had to worry about gaining weight.

The Warehouse Rats

Connected to the store was a large warehouse in which all kinds of parts, pulleys, belts, oil lamps, plow shares, animal feed, lard, grain, and other items of merchandise were stored. It was a treasure hunter’s dream. it was also the playground for huge rats. These were brown rats that were so large that the cats were afraid of them. They were also so smart that nobody could catch them in a trap – except for my dad.

Dad would take a plant flat, which is a wooden tray 3 feet square with 4 inch sides, fasten steel traps to the bottom, set and carefully cover the traps with chicken feed, making sure not to block the trigger mechanism. The rats would play in the feed at night and get caught, many times two or more at a time. Dad had to be careful when he killed the trapped rats not to get blood on anything or the wily rats would never come close to the box again.

Evidently Uncle Walter did not know anything about this trapping technique. One night he was absent-mindedly running his fingers through the chicken feed. Soon steel traps were hanging on both valuable hands of this future pediatrician.

At the time I was living there the store business was winding down but the gas station was still going strong. Later Mom told me that Grandpa Lang was very generous in handing out credit. He was used to dealing with the old farmers who always paid their bills on time. When the new and less honest element moved into town, they took advantage of Grandpa’s generosity and the business suffered. The store could no longer support the family the way it did in the old days.

In 1941 Dad bought the house next door. We didn’t have enough money to move there so he rented it out for a year. The following year we moved into our new house. I lived there until I was 22, at which time my friends and neighbors selected me to serve in the military.

I shall never forget the pleasant and exciting times I had living with the Lang family.

See related pictures here

The Randolph Brewing Company

One day my friend Kenny and I were sitting around having deep thoughts and philosophical discussions about what our community was lacking and what we could do to help. We decided that what the town of Randolph needed was a good brewery, and that we were just the ones to remedy this situation. I had a magazine article with directions and recipes for making home brew so we had all the information we needed.

We bought several gallons of Pabst beer-making syrup from Hap’s grocery store. We added sugar, hops and water, heated it up a bit over a camp fire, added some Red Star yeast, stirred it with a tree limb, and poured it into a 30 gallon crock. We hid this vile mixture in a patch of elderberry bushes somewhere along Johnnycake road and gave it time to ferment.

After waiting about two weeks we could hold out no longer- we just had to try this concoction. Since it was a hot summer we figured the little yeastie beasties had done their job by now, so we proceeded to the bottling stage.

The yeast along with other little goobers and snake-heads settled to the bottom of the crock. We didn’t want that stuff in our final product so we siphoned off the “good” liquid using a few feet of windshield wiper hose taped to a stick that kept the end of the hose about 4 inches from the bottom, thus preventing the yeast from entering the siphon. We didn’t have any bottles but we did have gallon jugs, so we filled up the jugs with the home-brew. The stuff was dark, warm, flat and skunky, but the price was right and it definitely did the job.

We didn’t have any place to hide the beer from our parents or other authorities so we dropped the jugs at intervals in the ditches and weeds along the roads around the township.

Kenny was a couple of years older than I and he had a car. He would sometimes be driving down the road with a car full of rowdy friends and someone would exclaim, “Gee, it sure is hot in here, I would give anything for a beer.” Kenny would immediately slam on the brakes, jump out of the car, pull a jug of home brew out of the weeds, and pass it around.

Everyone was surprised – and also very impressed.

But wait, there’s more!

If a town has a brewery, it also needs a distillery.

I found an old pressure cooker in our basement. With the cooker used as a boiler, a copper coil from an old water heater and a 1 gallon lard can used as a condenser, Kenny and I put together what we thought was a first class still.

Since I always had crocks with deer hides from my taxidermy business curing in our basement, another crock containing whiskey mash wouldn’t cause any suspicion. We mixed together a concoction of chicken feed, sugar, water and yeast, and let it do its thing for about a month. Then taking this mash and the still, we headed for the creek to start our careers as moonshiners.

We heated the pressure cooker with a gasoline weed burner and boiled the mash. When the steam came through the copper coil we cooled it with creek water which caused the steam to condense. Out of the end of the coil slowly dripped what we hoped was top quality first class hooch.

It didn’t quite work out that way. The final product was so bad that even our dog wouldn’t drink it. It tasted like the whole Russian army had used it to wash their socks, so we abandoned that endeavor and moved on to other interesting ways to improve our community.

In the likely case that the reader thinks all this stuff is only in the imagination of the author (I sometimes wonder myself), let me present the following untouched photo of the still, along with its proud owner.

c.1947

The Shitepoke

When I was in 6th grade I saw an advertisement in an outdoor magazine for a course in taxidermy. It was a mail order course and the company would send a new lesson when the previous lesson had been completed. The whole course cost ten dollars and consisted of maybe 25 lessons. I didn’t have the money so they allowed me to send one dollar per month until the tuition was paid. I had problems raising the money on a couple of occasions and was sometimes late with the payment. This would cause a letter to arrive threatening me with prison, excommunication, castration, and other dastardly consequences. I finally paid off the bill without damage to my body or loss of any organs.

My mother provided a room off of the kitchen for me to ply my trade. One nice thing about growing up in a small family with a large house and a liberal mother was having a room for each of my endeavors – one each for taxidermy, photography, telescope- making, etc.

As you can see from the photo, I became rather proficient and ended up with quite a menagerie over the years. Many of the animals were shot by hunters but some were killed by accident, perhaps hit by a car or by flying into the side of a building. Mom was rather lenient about different kinds of animals coming into the house. People brought in hawks, owls, ducks, geese, large fish, foxes, deer heads, deer hides, as well as small birds and mammals. The only time I remember having trouble is when my buddy Kenny showed up in the driveway with a skunk – Mom met him at the door.

40 lb Sturgeon mounted for Leon Sabin, a Randolph business man

I did mount many specimens for other people, mostly deer heads and pheasants. I could mount a pheasant in about 6 hours and I charged six dollars for each. The money from mounting pheasants helped put me through college. In 1951 tuition at Kent State was $40 per quarter. I lived at home and commuted to school, so my expenses were minimal.

On one occasion someone brought in a large heron that had been killed by a trigger-happy hunter. The locals called these birds “shitepokes”. I didn’t have time to mount it then but I wanted to save it since getting one of those strange-looking critters was quite unusual. I skinned, preserved, and dried it so I could soften it up later and finish it when I had more time.

Well, I never found the time. So here I was with a long-necked-large-billed strange medieval-looking animal on my hands. I asked my idea man Kenny what we could do with it. He thought we should take it to a movie. It was stiff enough that it could sit in a seat with its long neck and long bill sticking up above the seats and would be a rather unusual sight to the average theater-goer.

Thinking that was a good idea, I gently folded up the shitepoke, being careful not to damage the feathers. I put it into the large pocket of my trusty hunting jacket and we headed for Lowe’s theater in Akron.

The theater was almost empty since it was early afternoon. We set up the shitepoke on a seat in the middle of the theater and then sat in the back to watch the reaction of the movie fans. I must admit it looked rather cute just sitting there by its lonesome self with its long neck sticking up, intensely staring at the screen.

We watched for awhile as several people came into that row. After a scream or two they would back out very quickly and move to another location, every now and then glancing in the bird’s direction. After awhile we decided we’d had enough fun and didn’t want to stretch our luck any further, so we gathered up the shitepoke, took it into the men’s john, sat it on a toilet seat and quickly left the theater.

I have often wondered if the lady who cleans the toilets quit her job the next day.