Franecdotes

by Fran Crawford

One of the really nice things about having grandchildren is that every once in a while they do something that bounces off your memory bank and gives you the chance to relive little flashes of your earlier life over ...like the ‘trailers’ of a good movie or ‘deja vu all over again’. Gavin and I were dodging piles in the backyard dropped by two dogs.

I did most of my growing up in Monaca, a small steel town in western Pennsylvania.Dad had migrated to a glass factory there from Dowagiac, Michigan. (I love knowing how to spell Dowagiac.) He was hired as a glass designer for lighting fixtures. My Mom already worked for the company that was later called Phoenix Glass Company.

My folks had three of us... I was in the middle with an older brother and a younger sister.

Most families from Monaca’s location along the Ohio River summered at ‘the shore’ along New Jersey’s Atlantic Ocean coast in beautiful homes that are now referred to as ‘Time Shares’. I think that term was borrowed from the west coast or maybe Lake Tahoe. That was back when everyone was trying to imitate California.

Many folks who sought less crowded vacations would spend their time along the beaches of Lake Erie or Lake Michigan because they were easier to get to from western Pennsylvania.

June was still pretty cool around the Great Lakes but it was warmer in July and August ...and got pretty crowded then. My parents were among a group from Monaca that sought out a place with less crowding and commercialism but close enough to the activity that day trips to those areas were treats for youngsters and grown-ups alike.

Mom and Dad fell in love with a small lake in southwest New York state. It was only eight or ten miles from the Pennsylvania state line and maybe twenty miles from the shore of Lake Erie at Northeast, Pennsylvania. They bought a small cottage and a boat and we ‘summered’ there at Findley Lake, New York, for many years.

A neighboring cottage was owned by a woman names Mrs. Alpers and her daughter Janet. They were Spanish teachers in New York somewhere. A fascinating thing about their cottage was what they had chosen to cover the walls ...LIFE magazine front covers... hundreds of them. Looking at them was like a history lesson.

They had two small paddle boats each about five feet long and two feet wide and maybe ten or twelve inches deep with one seat in the middle. The oar was a five foot pole with a paddle on both ends. They let us borrow them whenever we wanted to. We took good care of them when we played with them so they didn’t refuse us when we asked them if we could take the little boats to nearby French Creek to paddle on moving water.

We were given permission under one condition ...we had to speak to them in Spanish, NOT French.

My brother had a friend with a pickup truck so we loaded up and headed off to adventure. The creek was across the meadow from the road we traveled and was pretty wet so the guys said they would carry the boats over. My sister and I decided we could carry our own boat so we kicked off our shoes to keep them clean and dry.

I took the front end of our boat and she took the back and off we went dodging cows and their droppings ...soon I had a great idea.

My sister could not see the ground in front of her ...but I could see it in front of me. About halfway across the pasture I watched a cow take a dump. There was no way I could pass up an opportunity such as this. I got it all lined up perfectly. I didn’t want her to slip and fall into it because I didn’t want to spend the rest of the day smelling her.

She screeched loud enough to startle the cows, and me. Luckily I jumped ahead pulling the boat forward and out of her hands far enough so the edge of the boat did not fall on her foot. It worked beautifully. I even turned around in time to see the warm stuff ooze up between her toes.