Fitzgerald Shovels of Glory

1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-6678-7981-9
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet/DL/kein Kopierschutz

E-Book, Englisch, 214 Seiten

'Shovels of Glory' details the author's misadventures in the atomic age while growing up in a rural American town. Enjoy a few laughs and gain an understanding of the lives of rural Americans.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Fitzgerald, David

Leseproben

Chapter 5 Building the Fireplace The first home my parents purchased was on Forest Street in Hillsboro Oregon. We moved from the Hawthorne farms farm house rental witch would eventually be sold to Intel. They day we moved it rained and the new house was cold. I picked up the phone in the kitchen and there was someone talking. Not knowing what a party line was I thought there must be someone else in the house. It was an exciting day that Mom and Dad topped off by driving to Beaverton so that we could have pizza. Beaverton was the closest place to Hillsboro with pizza at the time. The house was a 3 bedroom ranch home on a small city lot. You entered in through the living room with the kitchen on the left and a hallway leading straight back to three bedrooms and a single bathroom, to the left of the kitchen was a laundry room and garage. It was a big change from our small country house on Hawthorne farms where we had been surrounded by wheat fields. Here our nearest neighbor was 15 feet away instead of 1 mile. The house was built in 1958 the same year I was born making it 60 years old as of this writing. When we moved in it was 6 years old, the primary heating in the un-insulated house was forced air gas. The furnace did the job but not to my father’s satisfaction. He had grown up using fireplaces and woodstoves and knew how much more comfortable and inviting a home heated with wood could be. Once Dad decided he wanted to heat the home with wood, he and Mom made the decision to put a fireplace in our living room. There was no discussion as far as I know about who would be cutting and splitting firewood but I suspected that my brother and I would be nominees. We would need materials and as my father grew up in the latter half of the depression saw no reason to purchase when it could be salvaged. The first bricks that Dad identified were on the Hillsboro sewer treatment plant property located South of town on first street adjacent to Jackson bottom. The spring had been very wet and there had been flooding all over. When we got down near the old Carnation plant there were police and a road block. Highway 219 where it went through Jackson bottom was covered with water. There was no doubt to the water height as there was a fellow sitting on the roof of his Ford pickup as it floated in the water over the road. This was great entertainment at the time and we spent a significant part of the morning talking with the police and watching them float a small boat out the to the stranded motorist. The officer there was Sargent Poe, many years later after his death my father and Poe’s widow would move into together to share a house. Eventually the water went down and we were able to access the old brick building on the Jackson Bottom Slough, today this is called the wetlands preserve. Dad and I hitched up our utility trailer behind the old 1949 Chevrolet pickup and headed to the sewer treatment plant on Saturday. Dad backed the truck and trailer up to the old building, picked up his sledge hammer and walked into the building through the door. The old wooden roof was long gone. Dad placed his hands against the front wall and without swinging the sledge brought the whole thing to the ground. Shortly after all four walls were lying on the ground. We then started the loading. The bricks were mostly still stuck together with mortar so we were moving large chunks onto the trailer and finally bringing the sledge to bare breaking down the largest chunks. We pulled out the sewage treatment plant turning left and headed south on highway 219 towards the town of Scholls. About 5 miles down road we came to a 4 acre plot of land East of the road. Dad had purchased this property in hopes of building our first home on the location. The front two acres were pasture and the back two acres were much the same but included a few large douglas fir trees. The property had a shallow well that Dad had hand dug and used a surface pump to the draw the water. This is also where Dad kept our old 1920’s steel wheel tractor along with the plow and disk harrow and spike harrow. This tractor was my first exposure to using a hand crank to start a vehicle. With an excessive amount of groaning, shoving and pushing the clumps of bricks were unloaded into a pile, we then climbed back into the truck and headed for home. The next day armed with hammers, an old angle grinder and safety goggles and ear plugs we descended on the bricks. Mom, my brother and I chipped away at the mortar on the bricks while Dad used the angle grinder to smooth off each brick. Weekend after weekend we spent chipping at the 50 plus year old mortar. It was a satisfying feeling when a large chunk of mortar would fall away but was quickly be replaced by a grimace as small pieces of mortar stung your face. We spent several weekends chipping at the mortar then loading the bricks back into the pickup to be hauled back to the Forest street house and then unloaded once again. During one trip Dad found a nest of mice, my brother and I played with the mice for a while and then decided to take them up to our tree house. The tree house was really only a platform of boards nailed to a tree 10 feet off the ground. We played with the mice and constantly herded them away from the edge of the platform so that they would not fall to the ground. At one point we had the mice all heareded together near the tree when as if on queue the mice exploded into there won great escape. They each headed in a separate direction almost as if they had planned the escape. We were 10 feet up the tree and just in time to see the mice reaching the ground and all running away, again each in a different direction. We descended the tree by the ladder to look for any injured mice but the escape had been clean and as far as I know none of the mice were ever captured. This was the year between my first and second year. I had not done well in Mrs. Peach’s class and thinking I might be having trouble seeing the black board she moved progressively closer to the front of the room as the year proceeded. When I reached the first row I still couldn’t make out the black board so it was time to make a call to my parents. Dad made an appointment with an optometrist in town named Alfred Furie. Doctor Furie would end up being a longtime friend who was understanding and had a deeper knowledge of acedemics then my parents. Dr. Furie first sat me down at a device that was looking through a pair of binoculars. He then placed different cards in the device and asked me questions. This I would come to know tested my vision for color and depth perception among other things. He then took me a long room with a chair at one end and a funny device that I had to look through. Using this device with various lenses he was able to determine my vision requirements. Then with Dad’s help I selected a pair of frames. This was the easiest step as Dad pointed at the cheapest pair of black plastic frames. The next week we went back to Dr. Furie where he took his time carefully fitting the new frames to my face and making sure they wouldn’t fall off my face if I looked down. With greatly improved vision I returned to the class room to finish the year, but the damage had been done and I would have to attend summer school to catch up with my class. I started summer school at the same time we were cleaning bricks on the property. This wasn’t to difficult as there were only a handful of students and I rapidly made up all of the class room work that I had failed. After class in the morning Dad would pick me up and we would go over to Hillsboro to do errands or on some days we would go to Artic Circle for a burger, fries with ice cream afterwards. For many years this was the main burger joint in town until in Burgerville USA opened in 1966. A few years later the McDonald’s opened across the street from Burgerville. My first pair of glass were doomed to only a short few months of life. One summer in the late afternoon my friend Donald and I were playing in his garden. He lived across the street where the house each sat on a half-acre lot. We had a hoe and shovel and dug vigorously in the dirt then would run Donald’s toy trucks in and out to haul away the dirt. During a break we were talking about my new glass when Donald declared that they would break easy, not to be daunted I replied they were made of safety glass and could take a beating. This interplay continued for several minutes until I jumped up, tossed my glasses to the ground, then picked up the hoe and struck the glasses a vicious blow thinking I would show him. But it was not to be, the frame and the lenses both broke leaving me bug eyed with mouth hanging open. I picked up the pieces of my broken glasses and ran home. That night Mom and Dad asked what had happened to my glasses, I showed them to the broken pieces and then told them the story. I must have mightily embarrassed as that is the only reason that I can think of that caused me to do what I did next, I told them how Donald grabbed my glasses and smashed them with a hoe. With this Dad went across the street to speak with Donald where as you might guess he got a different story. Well I’m a lousy liar and admitted that it was my fault and I was sorry. Then I had to apologize to Donald. Unfortunately this damaged our short relationship beyond all repair. A few months after this they moved away. During all of this we were clean bricks every weekend and hauling them back to the Forest street house. Dad then hired a man to build the fireplace who had previous experience. Dad had some experience laying bricks but had very little...