The House
Dad bought two 100-foot frontage lots on The Lake for $50 each. I remember the first day of the construction when Grandad Shively brought his Oliver tractor and an old hand-operated scoop to dig the basement. Dad walked behind and guided the scoop while Grandad drove the tractor.
I have only brief glimpses of the activity during the construction, but I remember watching Dad laying concrete blocks. The cement or “mud,” as he called it, and the mixing of it was fascinating. If it were too wet or too dry, it would not stick properly, so there was always a bit of raw powdered cement in the corner of the mortar board and a tin can of water nearby to adjust the consistency to the right sloppiness. Srapingup some “mud” and slapping it down on the mortar board with that “slerping” sound would make any 6-year-old boy die to get his hands into the scraping and slerping. The next step was to grab an 8 by 8 by 16-inch concrete block by the center rib with his left hand and, using the trowel in his right hand, “butter” two short edges with “mud”. He had already prepared the place in the wall where the block would rest by “buttering” it too in a similar way with this wonderful grey slop. Then, with trowel still in hand, he would carefully place the block into the wall, and the mud would ooze out all around. Occasionally, some would drip to the ground before he had a chance to scrape off the excess. This looked like as much fun as the scraping and slerping if I could only get my hands into it. The final touch, before going for the next block, was to tap the freshly placed block a couple of times with the handle of the trowel. This was to make the thing “square with the world,” as Dad would say, and to make it line up with the string which he had stretched between the corners of the foundation. The string part looked to me like a waste of time and not nearly as much fun as the mud part.
It didn’t take long for me to learn that laying blocks was not designed to be entertainment. Each time Dad laid a block, someone had to carry another one to him. Helping him looked like fun also, and maybe the first two or three blocks were, but it quickly became clear that each block, weighing about half of my gross weight, was more like work than fun. No matter how fast I could carry them, Dad could lay them faster. It occurred to me years later that he was not really depending on me to carry blocks. While it kept me occupied and entertained, it was the beginning of my understanding of the importance of work.
One day, Dad was laying this endless supply of blocks when Mom went to “the Little Store” at the north end of the lake. When she returned, she reached into the bag to pull out candy bars for each of us. A candy bar was a pretty significant event in those days, and I didn’t waste any time getting mine. Then she tossed the last one to Dad, who was standing on the scaffolding, six feet above the ground. When he reached for it, his big, calloused hands, having been dried out by the “mud”, fumbled it and it dropped precisely into an opening in the blocks. In those days, it was not common to add rebar and backfill the blocks with concrete, so the candy bar went straight to the bottom of the wall, where it remains to this day. As a six-year-old, I spent a lot of time trying to think of a way to get it out, and Mom and Dad joked about it for years after.
There were at least two other really big events during the house construction. One was moving out of the shanty and into the basement of the new house, and the other was moving from the basement to the upstairs. I don’t remember either of these, but I remember how Mom and Dad reminisced about the celebrations when they passed these major milestones in their lives.