Chapter 19

AT MURRELL

 

The house we bought in Murrell was an old two-story stone house with a stone ell built to the rear. There was also a dilapidated frame barn. There was a good-sized lot to the rear of the barn. The buildings were in very bad repair and overgrown with shrubs, weeds and vines.

 

Murrell, East of Ephrata on U.S. 322

On taking possession, I tore down the two-story ell to the rear. It had been a later addition to the original house and was falling apart. It was a kitchen with a large stone fireplace and also an outside bake oven attached to a stone washhouse. Above were two bedrooms.

 

I cleaned away all the rubbish and vine arbors. Then I removed all the inside partitions, upstairs and downstairs, of the main house, but saved all doors and trim. The floorboards on both floors were good tongue-and-groove Pennsylvania pine, but the first floor joists had to be replaced. These I replaced one by one and built a new girder under them. After the floorboards were re-nailed to the new joists, I studded out rooms in a new layout. The eastern end of the house had been a later addition and had no cellar. That end was gutted but was to be unfinished until a later date.

 

For the original house I had the western front door entering a large foyer. The new open staircase was in this room. This was to be our living room until the large room to the east would be finished. The entire western and of the house became a combined dining room and kitchen with an island sink. Behind the stair was a laundry and mudroom. Upstairs we had three nice bedrooms and a bath. There were to be two more bedrooms over the unfinished east end.  These I also left unfinished.

 

Now all this remodeling I did while I continued to work at the knitting mill. Since I was cleaning knitting machines, my schedule could be rearranged. I was allowed to put in my eight hours between three A.M. and eleven A.M. In the afternoons I worked at remodeling. By the time our lease expired I had six rooms and the bath plastered, trimmed, papered and painted and we moved in.

 

The rest of the work we did in spare time while we lived there. I installed a bathroom and a septic tank with drain field for disposal. I also put in a new front porch and an outside cellar way. There was a good hand-dug well and I put a shallow-well pressure system in the basement.

 

The two attic chimneys were torn out and Jay and I built a large outside stone chimney onto the western gable end, which would be for a future furnace. While we were there, we used a coal-fired space heater in the dining room. We had a bucket-a-day boiler in the basement for hot water.

 

We also tore down the barn and sold some of the materials. There were, at the front along the street, the stumps of two very large trees that had been cut down. These stumps I dug out by hand in the spring of 1946. At the same time I moved a stone "mile-marker" a few feet westward to the property line. Route 322 through Murrell had been at one time a turnpike and there were markers every mile from Philadelphia west to Harrisburg.

 

All this remodeling and repairing was done in spare time before and through the summer of 1947. The eastern end of the house, one large room below and two above, I never finished. The heat plant I never got installed.

 

I will now list some events that I recall of this period. One night Ada awoke me and said that there is a baby in a basket on the neighbor's front porch; she heard it crying. I listened awhile and then I heard a wailing too. I said to Ada, "That's a cat." "No", she said, "I can see the basket and the baby is waving its hands around.” Eventually I convinced her that it was a cat and we slept again. The next morning it appeared that what she thought was a basket, was a potted plant. She took a lot of teasing for that episode. We had, that summer, a garden in the rear lot and, and that day, the day after the baby/cat affair, I was hoeing to the rear of a few rows of sweet corn. I heard Ada coming down to the lot and I began to imitate a tomcat. She picked up a handful of stones and I would have been stoned if I had not identified myself.

 

In fixing up the outside of the house, I painted the outside blinds and shutters a deep green. The paintbrush I had used, I put in a pot of linseed oil to keep it soft. One day Johnnie, who was about two years old, found this brush and painted himself all over. It took a lot of scrubbing with turpentine to clean him up. Ada threw his clothes away.

 

One day Jay was lying on the front porch and Johnnie accidentally hit him on the mouth with an iron bar. Jay's two front jackets were broken. Fortunately the dentist had given us the molds of the original jackets and he could easily replace them.

 

At some point we had replaced our first wooden washing machine with a used electric washing machine that had a swinging power wringer. It worked well for manv years, but in 1946 it began making trouble. I don't know how often I repaired the wringer gears, but on May 5th, 1946, in trying to fix it, I found it "kaput." Now during the war appliances were hard to find. That day, when I found it was unrepairable, I calmly took a hammer and smashed the cast iron gearbox to pieces. Ada was horrified. She needed a washer. I just said, with great confidence, "put on your coat; we're going to Reading for a new washer." As we drove through Shillington I kept scanning the show windows. At one store I spied a white wringer-washer in the window. I parked at the curb and said, "There's your new washer." She wondered how I knew it was there. Just lucky, I guess!

 

One evening at the supper table we heard the Ephrata fire alarm. Then we saw people running up the street. Mahlon Stauffer's furniture store, a few hundred yards west of our house was burning. It was a major fire and left much damage.

 

Johnnie was always afraid of dogs. Our neighbor, Simon Landis who was also my electrician, had some dogs in a pen across the street. They barked a lot and Johnnie had trouble sleeping. One winter he kept getting awake crying, "The dogs are at my piggies.”  We discovered that there were holes in the feet of his sleepers and when his toes slipped through these holes he thought the dogs were biting his toes. Ada did some quick mending and that solved the problem.

 

During this time both Ada and I were overworked. She was often unhappy on Sunday afternoons when I took a nap but she still had the babies to take care of. She was a good wife and mother and we lived through it.

 

The irony of all this is that, although we were paid for our work in remodeling the old house, we would have gained as much by the inflation of our house on Broad and Tenth Streets if we had kept it until the war was over. Live and learn!

 

The war in Europe ended on May 5th, 1945 and with Japan on August 14th, 1945. On October 7th, 1945 I quit my job at Moyer's.

 

As I mentioned earlier, when my parents came home from Florida, in the spring of 1942, Papa and I built a brick house, to be for sale, on New Street near the heel factory. That house was not sold until a year later, but we also built one next door. When the second one was finished Mamma became ill and they decided to move from Ephrata to that new house. Mabel took title to the property and came home from Philadelphia to keep house for them. Until the autumn of 1945, Papa worked in the heel factory just to the rear of their house.

 

After I quit my job, Papa quit his too and he took a job building a house on South Seventh Street (Route 222) for Charles Hicks, the owner of the Akron Restaurant, beside the Esso Station that he also owned. The building ban was lifted after VJ-day and the Hicks building permit was either the first or second issued in Akron after the war. I agreed to help Papa build. It was a "time and material" job.

 

When the Hicks job was finished, Papa spent a few weeks building a brick laundry-room to their (Mabel's) house on New Street. I meanwhile, built a one-room brick office building in the rear lawn of C. C. Martin in Murrell who was in the grain brokers’ business.

 

When Papa's laundry was finished he became ill with a very sore leg. It turned out to have been a blood clot that later moved to his lungs and then to a blood vessel of his heart. He suffered a heart attack and died in great distress on June 6th, 1946.

 

That same spring there were two suicides in Akron that greatly disturbed Papa and added to his distress. Harry Oberholtzer, a partner with Walter Snader in the general store business that they had taken over from Harry's father, Henry W. Oberholtzer, hanged himself. A few weeks later our doctor and Papa's, John Reynolds M. D., shot himself. I sometimes think that if Dr. Reynolds had lived and had treated Papa's illness, he would have survived.

 

Our Betsy (Elizabeth Ann) was born at home in Murrell on New Year's Day 1947. Dr. William G. Ridgway, who took over the practice of Dr. Reynolds, delivered her. He continues to be our doctor to this day.

 

On October 17th, 1946 my mother died suddenly while reading the evening paper. Mabel had gone to the neighbors for a few minutes and found her seated in a chair when she got home. She died without a struggle.

Grandma Horst, Ada's mother, died in 1947. She had lived with her daughter Anna until she became ill. She died at the home of her oldest daughter Frances, near Manheim.

Our Betsy (Elizabeth Ann) was born at home in Murrell, on New Year's Day in 1947. Dr. William G. Ridgway, who had taken over the practice of Dr. Reynolds, delivered her. He continues to be our doctor to this day.

 

During this time I continued to improve our property. Also, at some point I built a garage, with a small apartment above, near the cloverleaf at the intersection of Rte. 222 and Rte. 322, near Ephrata for Lenten Sweigart.

 

By the summer of 1947, since building was resumed, we began thinking of a new and nicer house. We advertised the Murrell house and sold it unfinished to a Mr. and Mrs. Beamesderfer on June 10th. Possession was to be given in January of 1948. After the title was transferred we paid the new owner rent for a few months.

 

So on July 3rd, 1947 we bought a lot in Akron and I spent the rest of the year building a new NEST for us.