Personal History Q & A

Q - Think of a place where your family used to go where great memories were made.

A - 1/4/08 - Nice question! Aunt Nancy called me today to wish me a happy birthday and we talked about that. The answer, of course, is “the cottage” as we used to call it. It was a red and white, three bedroom, two story lake front house in Puce, Ontario, Canada. Although there were three bedrooms upstairs, one of them was quite large - the size of the other two put together. There was plenty of room for four beds, so all of us kids slept in the same room. Grandma & grandpa had one bedroom and, as we got older, perhaps Aunts Nancy and Suzanne shared the third bedroom. I can’t recall. On the ground floor was a dinning room, kitchen, living room (the same size as the big bedroom upstairs), utility room where the washing machine, bathroom, and storage area was, and a screened-in porch with a picnic table where we usually ate. Since we used the cottage only in the summer, the dinning room was used more for playing board games than for eating. (The house was not air conditioned and got warm inside.) Later, we added on a family room, across the front of the house, with a full view of the lake.

Although grandma had a washing machine (with a wringer,) she did not have a dryer. Therefore, she had to hang all the laundry on the clothesline that ran from the house to the two car garage where grandpa kept his 1929 Buick, the boats, and lawn mowers, etc. Like the house, the garage was also “barn red” with white trim. Grandpa also built two dressing rooms in the garage where we could change to and from our swimming suits without having to track sand into the house. The garage and house were at the end of a gravel driveway that was probably about 50 yards long. (It was long enough that I could drive the Buick down the driveway and have time to shift into second gear.) It was similar to our driveway in Spokane except straight rather than curved. We had three long narrow lots (about 60’x300’+ each) totaling over an acre with the house on the center lot. It was another 150 feet or so from the house to the beach. Except for a small vegetable garden, the entire area was lawn, so I got lots of practice cutting the grass. Fortunately, grandpa bought a riding lawn mower. However, it was a “reel” lawn mower, not the rotary type we have now. That means the blades got stuck every time I ran over a stick much larger than a pencil in diameter. Since we had dozens of large trees, there were always lots of stick to rake up before I could cut the grass.

I could go on and on describing the cottage, but what Aunt Nancy and I talked about today was the memories. A year or two ago, after Helen was born, Philip told me that he now understood why “we didn’t go anywhere” when you were children. That is also the reason grandpa bought the cottage. (He also thought it would be a good investment but, unfortunately, that did not work out for him.) During the summers from 1951 through the late 60’s, we went to the cottage. The commute to and from work for grandpa was about the same as to our house in Detroit/Birmingham. We would just “move” during school summer vacations. We would come home for a two or three every other week to collect the mail, cut the grass, and make sure everything was OK. Then we would go back. There were a few other kids our age there but not too many. Also, since Puce was a tiny little village, there were no stores to speak of, no malls, no theaters, nothing. Also, we did not have a TV and the telephone was a very primitive hand crank model! As a consequence, we were pretty much responsible for our own entertainment - and there were always chores to do. Day time was mainly spent out of doors - in, on, or near the water (Lake St. Clair, between Lakes Huron and Erie.) In the evenings, we would play “flashlight tag” in the yard, or play a board or card game in the house, or read, or listen to the radio. We would usually go to bed early (what else was there to do?) and get up early. Spending time together as a family, playing together, and working together was really the best part of the cottage, although we did not realize it then. It is very apparent now that it was a lot better and cheaper than going on trips or amusement parks (the few there were then.)