World War, 1939-1945 -- Personal narratives, American; World War, 1939-1945 -- Prisoners and prisons, German
This area of Bristol was sparsely populated in those days and there
was no house between the cabin and Honeoye. Sometimes we would need
extra groceries and would go to Treble's store in Honeoye for them.
After high School I went with his daughter Althea for a while. We
bought most of our groceries in Canandaigua before we left for camp
and could get enough food for two of us for a week for $5. We bought
them at a little grocery store on South Main Street owned by Ernie
Watts. Most of our meals consisted of boiled ham, Pancakes and jello.
We probably had other things but these are what I remember. Most of
our meat is what we got hunting. We often had fried squirrel, rabbit
or partridge. We used to start hunting partridge right from the back
door of the cabin and once Gordon got a bird about 100 feet up the
hill. At times in the winter we would get up in the morning and see
deer and fox tracks in the snow within ten feet of the cabin. The
cabin was in a valley with a hill to the west so it would be almost
dark by 4:30 PM so we would start a fire in the fireplace and eat our
dinners early. We would heat up the sliced boiled ham and eat it with
pancakes. We had a large round cast iron griddle and cooked with it on
top of the wood stove. Clarence would make his pancake (always about
one foot across) and then sit at a table in front of the fireplace to
eat. While he ate his, I would cook mine and he would be done when
mine was ready. We took turns like this until we were full and then we
would eat our dessert together. We didn't have to hurry any as the
evenings were long.
Sometimes in the summer we would go up the Lower Egypt Valley Road to
where the spring was (I'll tell more about that later) and there was a
lane that went up the hill to where a farmhouse once stood. There were
found a lot of blackberry bushes which we called thimbleberries
because they were big, over 1 1/2 inches long. We would have them for
dessert with sugar and evaporated milk. We had a concentrated
flavoring mixed with water to drink. It was called HO-MIX and came in
flavors. Whenever we got thirsty we'd stop for a glass of HO- MIX. It
was probably the forerunner of KOOLAID.
The only lights we had in the cabin were Coleman gasoline lanterns and
we would read by it at night. We had an outside "john" about 30 feet
up the hill in back of the cabin with stone steps cut in the bank. It
was a one holer surrounded by blinds we took off an old house
somewhere. You could sit inside and run the slats up and down to see
out. Sometimes we would take a gun with us and watch for partridge
while we sat.
One weekend we arrived at camp to find a dead partridge on one of the
beds. It had flown through a window and couldn't get out again.
Another time a red squirrel got down the fireplace and really made a
mess of the cabin. He even chewed off the wood around the glass in the
windows. He didn't get out and we found him in there dead.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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