FHTV/RV Tell me a story - 2

Has been associated with the park for 24 years.

My dad's older brothers immigrated to the United States.  They ended up living in New Jersey.  Dad was to young to come over at the time so he had to wait a few years.  While he was waiting the First World War started and he was drafted into the German Army.

He was given a rifle and a uniform and marched off to Italy.  In one of the first battles he had a bullet scrape the top of his thumb.  He use to show us the scar that developed all the time when we kids were growing up.

He decided that army life was not for him and he either kept a very low profile or hid out for the rest of the war.  He finally made his way back to Germany.  His brothers, my uncles, tried to get him cleared as an immigrant  and come to the United States.  The quota for Germany was filled so he went to Canada instead.

He got a job in Canada, married a woman, my mother, who was from the Ukraine and raised a family near Winnipeg where I still live.

FHTV/RV Tell Me A Story - 1

Tell Me A Story is a new series.  They are first hand accounts of people who live in Far Horizon Trailer Village/RV Resort.  There is not rhyme nor reason to theme subject matter.


Has lived in the village over 15 years

Part of my childhood I lived with my grandparents while mom was getting back on her feet.  It was a difficult time and eventually my aunt suggested I come live with her for awhile.  She did not live far away, just up the mountain a bit in a little log cabin. I lived with her for about one year.

That year I learned how to milk cows, churn butter, make cottage cheese, and skim the cream off the top of the raw milk.  I did not like milking the cows at first but I eventually became very good at it.

The most interesting thing I learned was how to keep a dirt floor clean.  Yes, the log cabin did have a dirt floor and once a week we would sprinkle water over it and then sweep it with a broom very lightly. Over time it developed the consistency of cement and then we just had to sweep it every day.  It was as hard as a rock.

I stayed with my aunt for about a year then went back to my grandparents house and worked on the farm.  I was no older than eleven at the time.  Grandpa was a hard task master.  He gave each one of us, my brothers and sisters, a specific job to do during planting and harvesting season, we sort of specialized you might say.  My speciality was digging the holes for the potato spuds and picking and sorting by size the tomatoes.  I did this until I was about 14 or so.

It wasn't too long after that that mom got a job with GE and all of us kids and mom were together.  The boys had grown older and had moved out by then but I did have two younger sisters.  Mom would catch the bus on an old county gravel road early each morning go to work and would not be back until very late.  It was up to me to get the girls up, feed them breakfast and get them off to school and have dinner ready for them when they got home making sure there was enough food for mom.

When I reached the eighth grade I quit school and started cleaning house in the area for fifty cents and hour.  I did this until I got married and I am still cleaning houses it seems, but not for fifty cents and hour.

Snakes Again-A Very True Story

Or I guess I should say one snake, but one snake might as sell be more when facing it at nine o'clock at night with a machettie that needed sharpening. Beverly was talking with a neighbor after dark and when she returned to our humble abode and told me she saw the head of a snake coming out from under our front steps. She went back out to get a closer look then cam back in again and told me it was a rattle snake. I told her to get me a flash light while I went out the back door to get my machettie, dull or not. It was the only thing I could really think of. I spotted the snake as it wedged itself between the wooden steps and concrete slab. I could not get a good shot or I guess you might say a good angle for a whack but as it began to slither back under the steps I lunged the point of my machettie and stabbed its side. This only made the snake mad and it curled up in a striking position. It startled me and some how I found myself on my back in the middle of the street. A passer by, just out for a night stroll, thought I was drunk and came over to help me up. I showed him the problem and we both watched the snake as it watched us. Bev soon showed up with a shovel from a neighbor, (the neighbor had decided not to come in our hour of need) and with a machettie strike here, and straight edged shovel chop there and a rock crushing blow to the head with, what else, a rock, I dispatched the snake to where ever snakes go when dispatched. It was a small rattle snake, but the smaller the deadlier,about two feet long. This morning I will have to look further under the steps and hope that the stories I here about snakes travelling in pairs is untrue.

Do you know ....?

Received from Bob Smith.


The question many of us asked at our mini reunion was who is Jack Schitt, he is not in the 1965 Van Horn year book ? ? ?

For some time many of us from Van Horn have wondered just who is Jack Schitt?

We find ourselves at a loss when someone says, 'You don't know Jack Schitt'! Well, thanks to my genealogy efforts of Donna King Gibbens, you can now respond in an intellectual way.

Jack Schitt is the only son of Awe Schitt. Awe Schitt, the fertilizer magnate, from Sugar Creek who married O. Schitt, the owner of Needeep N. Schitt, Inc. in Sugar Creek. They had one son, Jack.

In turn, Jack Schitt married Noe Schitt. The deeply religious couple produced six children: Holie Schitt, Giva Schitt, Fulla Schitt, Bull Schitt, and the twins Deep Schitt and Dip Schitt.

Against her parents' objections, and a near riot in Sugar Creek, Deep Schitt married Dumb Schitt, a high school dropout. After being married 15 years, Jack and Noe Schitt divorced. Noe Schitt later married Ted Sherlock, and because her kids were living with them, she wanted to keep her previous name. She was then known as Noe Schitt Sherlock.

Meanwhile, Dip Schitt married Loda Schitt, and they produced a son with a rather nervous disposition named Chicken Schitt. Two of the other six children, Fulla Schitt and Giva Schitt, were inseparable throughout childhood and subsequently married the Happens brothers in a dual ceremony. The wedding announcement in the newspaper announced the Schitt-Happens nuptials. The Schitt-Happens children were Dawg, Byrd, and Horse.

Bull Schitt, the prodigal son, left Sugar Creek to tour the world.
He recently returned from Italy with his new Italian bride, Pisa Schitt.

Now when someone says, 'You don't know Jack Schitt', you can correct them.

Sincerely,
Crock O. Schitt

Wild Things

The greatest part of my childhood was spent living next to a four acre lake in an unincorporated area near Independence, Missouri. There I was first exposed to wild things that became just as natural to me as the other twenty or so kids that shared my idyllic up bringing. Nothing was unusual about how or where we lived according to us.

Even when I was much older and the army allowed me to go on camping trips to Germany, Italy, and Panama, living and communing with the great out doors, nothing seemed that special, I had done it all before.

When I moved to the Alaskan tundra and lived in Eskimo villages next to the Bering Sea, along the banks of the Yukon, and seventy mile north of the Arctic Circle, all seemed normal enough.

I have seen almost all the wild animals in their natural habitat Alaska has to offer, minus a Polar Bear, encountered enough wild things in the jungles of Panama to realize that is where they need to stay, and knew almost on a first name basis all the animals that called my four acre lake theirs.

The odd, some might say sad, thing is that I never really was impressed by any of it. Hiking and camping was just a hazard of the military trade and un-caged animals were just things to be avoided.

However now on the front side of retirement I am beginning to develop an appreciation of our four legged and legless friends, albeit some what grudgingly perhaps.

I live in a gated community that butts up to the desert. I am not sure if the fence and gate are to keep the wild things from wondering in or keep the old people from wondering out. I don’t know if I have just never noticed before or if there is something going on in the far horizon, but animals seem to be popping up all over the place and they don’t seem to want to leave me alone with my nightly Rey Del Mundo and Grand Marnier.

There is a rattle snake that insists on sharing my cactus garden, a desert frog that leaps across my patio each night followed by another sort of long black looking snake that I have yet been able to identify. Seldom seen, except by me it appears, is a desert lynx that sits very close to the fence with a frequency that makes me some what uneasy. He just sort of glares at me. When he isn’t around a road runner comes scampering down my side of the fence followed by a coyote on the other. Of course there is the extended family of creeping looking lizards that have taken up domicile under my shed and meander all over the place day or night. I have begun to find them all amusing, entertaining, and interesting.

As the early evening fades I know longer see my little wild things but I know they are there. The fence vibrates now and then, I hear the pounding paws along the trail on the desert side of the wash, something going through the brush, and all sorts of bumps in the night. I enjoy them immensely and it becomes a soothing event each night.

However every few nights I hear a faint rattle, a thump - like flesh hitting flesh, and a quickly muted squeal coming from the direction of my cactus garden. I then down my Grand Marnier extinguish my Rey Del Mundo and retreat to the inner sanctum of my permanently attached mobile home. The wild things are lurking about.

Seann's Blog

http://seann-mcanally.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2014-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&updated-max=2015-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&max-results=17

He does a real good job on this blog.  Worth the read.

Basketball, Village Style

Eskimos love basketball.  They have their own NBA, the Native Basketball Association.  The village of Hooper Bay had I think six teams of men and four of women they called the City League.  Why they did not call it the Village League I don’t know.  It was and I am sure still is the ambition of many a young Eskimo lad and lassie to be on the school basketball team thus getting their training for the City League.  The teams are usually made up of family members and best friends.

I am not a sports writer so I can only try to make a few comments and a couple of observations about what I observed that night. 

After the team introductions the crowd grew quiet.  Everyone stood for what I assumed was going to be the national anthem.  Instead the packed house turned in the direction of the flag near the main entrance and in walked the eldest of the Elders.  He took a seat on a folding chair that appeared with great fan fair next to the entrance.  He looked over the crowd, smiled, waved and sat down. Play soon began. 

Referees call the games in the bush a little looser than they do in the rest of the world I think.  Not being a basketball fan I am not real sure, but few high school or college games I have attended did not have a representative from the health clinic strategically placed.  I heard later that the particular game I was watching was a lot less physical than most.  Only four players were treated for minor cuts and abrasions.

The game seesawed back and forth.  It was one fast break after another.  This continued until about the last thirty seconds of the game.

The score was tied 87 to 87.  Hooper Bay had the ball.  Barney passed to Obadiah, Obadiah to Masontoo, back to Barney, up he went with a jump short  when from out of no where a Chivak player bounded off the knee of one of his own teammates  and grabbed the ball out of mid air before it started its downward decent, thus eliminating a goal tending call.  Now the Comet’s had possession, fast break back to the Comet goal, up for a lay up but missed because number 32, Barney, got in the way.  The ref determined that Barney had fouled.  Two shots.

Chivak missed the first shot but made the second.  88 to 87.  Back toward the Hooper Bay goal.  Passage down the court went like clock work until Barney had the ball within five feet of the net.  Up he went for a sure two pointer when again a Chivak player grabbed the ball out of mid air just as it was leaving Barney’s hand.  But then Obadiah grabbed Masontoo lifted him up in the air.  Mansontoo made a gesture toward the Chivak player that loosely interpreted meant, “May you mother be mistaken for a walrus.”  The Comet got mad and through the ball at Mansontoo, who caught the ball in mid air and just as his feet were ready to hit the court he tossed the ball up toward the goal….nothing but net.  The Warriors won 89 to 88. 

All slept well in the village that night.