Chapter 4

AT JACOBY'S PLACE - Part b:

 

 

In the last section I wrote about spending much time playing alone. I would suppose that that would account for some of the moods of mine that I remember. I can still feel the "self-pity" at sunset or watching the "fireflies" on a warm summer evening.

 

We had a woodpile to the rear of the house and west of the shop. (When I was an early teenager, it seems now, I spent whole summers chopping wood. I guess I only played at it!) Well, when I was very young I found a place in that woodpile where one upended, un-split log was a convenient seat. It happened that two other logs on either side made nice armrests and one large piece of wood made a good backrest. When I felt "blue" and lonesome and persecuted I would go to my woodpile seat and pity myself.

 

One time Papa had left a loosely rolled section of wire fencing standing on end at the edge of the garden. It was so loosely rolled that I could walk in and around to the center. On a warm summer evening I went into that roll of fencing and sat down to watch the stars. It wasn't long until I had hypnotized myself into one of my "sad moods.”

 

I remember another time when I felt persecuted. Whenever Papa was working at home with his tools I was underfoot. This day he was working on some timbers on a pair of sawhorses. When he had put down an auger he had been using, I picked it up to look at it. Then I set it down with the point on the ground. I suppose he was "out of sorts" for some other reason, but he took it out on me. "Landis", he yelled, "never set a sharp tool on its point; if you do that again I'll cut off your little finger!" Well, I went up to the front porch and had a good cry. I was sure he wouldn't do that, but I still wondered, “Would he?” As I look back now I often wonder if I had a touch of paranoia. Maybe I still do!

One whole summer, it must have been when I was ten years old, I was "hired out" to "Liz" Buch. The Buch's owned the farm across the road from the Metzler Church. The buildings are just west of the cemetery. I had become so lazy that I grumbled about everything that Mama asked me to do for her. I can still hear the judgment given at the supper table one evening when Papa got an especially bad report. "All-right. We'll hire him out.”

So that summer I rode my bicycle five days a week the four miles round trip to Buch's farm. I was to be Liz's houseboy. The Buch's were to give me breakfast and lunch. I came home for supper. The pay was twenty-five cents per day, to be paid at the end of the summer.

Of course I arrived after the Buch's breakfast was over, and my egg, fried in lard, was cold. I ate it with a piece of bread and a glass of milk in the summer kitchen next to the cream separator. Some of you may remember how a separator smells! I didn't like my breakfasts.

I helped Liz with the housework; washing dishes, cleaning, and running errands. Liz was a heavy woman, and I think she had bad feet. I mowed and trimmed the lawn, and worked in the garden. It seemed terrible to me, but I know that I also spent hours on end on the screened-in back porch looking at farm magazines.

One hot day Dan, Liz's husband, was working in the west cornfield. Liz said to me, "I'll make some lemonade and you can take some out to Dan." Of course she had given me some, and I set out for the cornfield with a lard pail full of lemonade for Dan. It was very warm and the corn was tall. The rows of corn seamed endless. I took the lid off of the pail and sampled the lemonade. It was good; Soon I was thirsty again. I drank some more. Now I was afraid that Dan would ask me why Liz didn't fill the kettle, but he didn't. I think he knew!

On another day, I suppose she was tired of hanging around. Liz said, "Go out and ask Dan if he has something for you to do." Dan was rolling a plowed field with a pair of mules hitched to the roller. Dan said, "Yes, you can walk after the roller and pick up small stones. At the end of the field, you can give me a handful to throw at the mules." So all afternoon I walked through the dust after that roller and handed stones to Dan. I don't suppose that the mules minded one bit about the few stones that landed on their backs or flew past their ears. I guess Liz and Dan had a good laugh that evening.

Little did I know that warm day that I was within a stone's throw of where my parents would he burried in 1946 and my dear Ada, in 1979. If the LORD tarries, I will also be buried there. (The new eastern end of the Metzler Cemetery was taken from that field.)

The Saturday before school started that fall, Dan Buch came to our house and gave Papa a check of $17.50. That went into my piggy bank. After that summer I think I was more willing to help mama!

 

As I indicated above, my father was a carpenter and spent most of his time away from home working at his trade. Since building at that time was very seasonal he began making brooms in the winter, even as his father had done.

 

Landis in Front of the Broom Shop

It must have been when I was about six years old that he began building, in the shop, the former cigar factory, a broom rolling machine copied from the one his father owned. He bought a used broom press or sewing machine and a straw cutter for trimming the sweeping end of the broom.

 

In the beginning most of the broom making was custom work, i.e. farmers would grow a half acre or so of broomcorn and have brooms made by a broom maker for a cash charge per dozen.

 

Later he began buying western broomcorn by the bale from dealers in Illinois or Kansas and sold the brooms retail and wholesale. Some years later he made brooms full time.        

 

Now when Papa worked in the shop I was usually there too. Some year or two after our neighbor, Mr. Sauder, lost his wife, he being a farmer, spent many winter days with Papa in the broom shop. They of course talked "Dutch" and I understood little and cared less.

 

One day when I went back to the house to Mamma she said, "What are Papa and Amos talking about?" I said that they are talking about "harrowing." Now I had often seen Mr. Sauder using his spring harrow or his spike harrow in his fields, but since they were talking "Dutch" the word I heard as "harrow" was out of context. When Papa came to the kitchen for dinner Mamma said, "Landis says that you and Amos were talking about "harrowing." They both began to laugh. The subject under discussion was mere, or "to marry" or "marrying." Mr. Sauder was thinking of finding another wife, which he later did.

 

For a few years, when I was ten or eleven, Papa grew some broomcorn for himself on rented land on the hill just northwest of our home. When the brush part of the corn was cut off, there was of course the fodder or long stalk left over. This he used for bedding for his little steer. He had a large shock of this corn fodder stacked just East of the barn and I made a practice of climbing to the top where I had a nice nest to lie and enjoy the sunshine and the birds. Now I had two copper pennies, a treasure, in my pants pocket one day and when I came down from my "nest" they were gone. For years I "scratched" around that area, but I never found them.

 

Papa taught my sister Mabel to make brooms when she became a teen-ager. Some years later she took over the broom making full time. I learned to sew brooms but was never very good at "rolling.” I must have sewed hundreds of dozens of brooms, Even after I was married and Ada and I lived for a while with my parents on East Main Street, I helped to sew brooms.

 

Mowing Hay with the Ford

As I have already mentioned our lot or field was kept in alfalfa and the meadow in timothy grass; so there was a lot of haymaking in my youth. When I was small papa mowed the hay fields with a scythe, tedded the hay with a "Shaker fork", and brought it to the barn in the spring-wagon. When I was old enough I helped to ted the hay and then loaded it on the wagon while he pitched it up. Later he taught me to use a scythe and we mowed in unison.

 

Sometime in the early twenties, after we had the 1919 Model T Ford, Papa bought a used McCormick reaper. He removed the long tongue and replaced it with a hitch that connected with a trailer hitch on the Ford. After that we no longer used the scythes. To mow the hay he put chains on the rear wheels of the car and mowed only down hill. I operated the controls of the reaper while he drove the Ford. At the top of the field I would lower the cutter-bar, jump on the running board of the Ford, and Papa would drive to the lower end; then I went back and raised the cutter-bar and he drove up "empty." That way we made hay for some years. He also had made a two-wheel, flat trailer for the Ford and we used that to haul in the hay.

 

Papa was always making improvements to the place, so I also got much experience in mixing concrete by hand. We stood on opposite sides of a pile of gravel, sand, and cement, and occasionally pouring on water, shoveled the pile from one side to the other.

 

Each fall Papa bought a little steer at Lancaster. One certain year he had arranged for his steer to be driven with a herd coming toward Ephrata. He planned to "cut out" his steer just below the Lauver School House and drive him east to Diamond Station and so to our barn. I went along and we met the "drive" at the appointed place and time. The drovers helped to "cut out" our steer and we got him going for a while, but he continually tried to get back to the herd. Instead of going east that little steer ran on into Akron and we chased him through people's lawns and gardens; but eventually we got him home. That was the last time Papa tried being a "cowboy".

 

I have already mentioned how I often painted the flat tin roof on the house, but there is another thing Papa "left" me do one summer while he was working away at his trade. I was twelve years old and he had me "shingle" the eastern end of the barn with green asphalt roof shingles. He taught me how to strike chalk lines every five inches and how to alternate the notches every six inches in a running bond. When the rows got out of my reach he built a scaffold and raised it in the evenings when needed. It seems now that I spent the whole summer at that job, but I doubt it. It is now fifty-eight years since I put that siding on that barn and the same shingles are still there, but much the worse for the weathering.

 

Besides carpentering and broom making, my father had another vocation. He attended public sales and bought furniture that was broken or needed refinishing. He would make the necessary repairs and strip the finish. Mamma did most of the painting and varnishing. She repainted and striped many sets of decorated kitchen chairs.

 

I went to many sales with Papa and helped load the trailer. I often went along to help him when he took the refinished furniture to the monthly auction at New Holland. That auction was held in the lot to the rear of what is now Rubinson's Store.

 

At many sales Papa agreed to be penny man. Any thing that was so worthless that no one would bid on it was knocked off to the penny man for one cent.

 

One day among his penny purchases was an old battered steamer trunk with a few old books in it. One of those old books had a profound effect on my life. This book was published in about the third quarter of the nineteenth century. The title was "Natural Philosophy" and was written by a "Professor Comstock". The subject of the book was what is now called "Physics" or "Natural Science".

(Ed. Note: I recently found a copy of this book on ebay. I purchased it and it is now part of my old book collection. What a thrill it would have been for Dad if I had bought it while he was still alive. It really gives a picture of what science was like in the mid-19th century.)

Besides explaining the basic natural laws of the universe, it also contained details of some of the "newer inventions" of that period; like the telephone, the telegraph and photography.

 

I think I must have been about nine years old when I first began reading that book. At first I was intrigued, but mostly by the diagrams and illustrations. I read and reread that physics book until I began to understand it. By the time I was a teenager the binding had completely disintegrated and it was truly, a "loose leaf book." By the time I got to High School I had such an understanding of Science and Physics that I was a continual marvel to my teachers and the subject of jealousy of my peers.

 

One of the subjects that appealed to me was electricity. We had nothing electrical at our home except the telephone and the batteries for the ignition of a 'small one-cylinder gasoline engine.

 

When I was about ten or eleven I made myself a laboratory in the basement of the shop. In the northeast corner there was a small room about eight by eleven feet with an eye-level window to the east. Two walls were of rough stone and the floor was ground; but it was mine!

 

I found an old "board-and-batten" door and with it built a "laboratory bench" under the window. My laboratory equipment was kept in the old steamer trunk. Most of my equipment was electrical in nature; things I found in a dump I passed on the way to school. That dump was just above the "ice pond" on the northeast corner of the intersection of what is now East Fulton Street and Akron Road in Ephrata. That dump was always smoldering and Mamma complained much about me always stinking of the "dump".

 

I had pieces of copper wire, insulating porcelain knobs and tubes, snap switches, Ford ignition coils, parts of telephones, binding posts, parts of electric motors and much other nice electrical "junk".

 

In my "Philosophy Book", as papa called it, was a description of a galvanic wet-cell battery. Since I needed a ready source of electricity for my experiments, I planned to make a battery. I did have permission to take the four one and one-half volt dry-cells out of the gasoline engine, but it would be much more convenient to have a ready current of electricity at two binding posts at the corner of the table.

 

Papa agreed to get me a pint of sulfuric acid at the drug store. I went to the tin shop at I. G. Sprecher's Hardware Store and begged a small strip of copper and one of zinc. The book said a current of electricity would flow between two wires connected to a strip of copper and a strip of zinc immersed in a solution of sulfuric acid. Now I knew that sulfuric acid was very dangerous. so I put the pint jar of acid on a hidden shelf under the stair steps of the shop and ran a piece of twisted telephone wire from the battery to two binding posts on my “lab bench.” When everything was connected and the copper and zinc strips were in the jar, I poured in the sulfuric acid. Well I got a very active reaction on the metal strips; they began to dissolve and I got no current at my bench. I had failed to notice that the directions called for a dilute solution of acid and not full strength. I also did not know that 1 would not get 110 volt current or even the six volts that I got from four dry-cells. The current of a wet cell is measured in milliamperes and in microvolts. I went back to dry cells!

 

In my "philosophy book" there was a chapter on astronomy and related subjects. In connection with a description of the seasons of the year there was an illustration of the sundial. So I made a sundial and mounted it on a fence post in the garden. Since sidereal time and solar time coincide only at the summer solstice or the winter solstice, I waited until the twenty-first of June to calibrate my dial. That was one of the few of my experiments that worked. Even the sundial didn't work on cloudy days or at night!

 

Mabel and Landis Weaver

Photography was very primitive when my book was printed. There was a formula for, and directions on how to sensitize paper for photography. There was also a description of a pinhole camera. I must have been about eleven years old when I persuaded Papa to get me some silver nitrate and other chemicals to make the hypo solution to sensitize a piece of paper and then "fix" the picture. Papa was usually ready to help his budding "philosopher".

 

I had already made a "pin-hole" camera out of an oatmeal box. I used our cellar for a dark room where I mixed my chemicals. On a bright sunny day I mounted my oatmeal box camera on a post facing east to a farm on a hillside. I had already inserted the piece of tablet paper soaked in the silver nitrate solution into the rear end of the box. The exposure was to be about one-half an hour. In about that time I took the camera to the cellar and "fixed" the paper in the "hypo." I could hardly wait to show Mamma the beautiful picture of Abie Stoner's farm. What a disappointment when all I had was a faint line of the horizon. Even so it was a picture of earth and sky.

 

The aftermath of that experiment was very disturbing to my mother. In a few minutes of my emerging from the dark cellar both of my hands began to turn black. I didn't think to keep my hands out of the nitrate solution.

 

Mamma became frantic and scrubbed my hands with everything she could think of; even a weak lye solution. She had to quit because the epidermis was coming off. In a few weeks my hands had healed and the black skin was gone. That experiment was a disaster and shamed me considerably. I was lucky not to have had silver poisoning.