Fathers Day Fishing Story

FATHERS DAY FISH STORY 
CLYDE SCHUMANN 
  
    It was Fathers Day. My family had bought me a beautiful set of waders to use with my new 
hobby of fishing. To celebrate the day and to give me a chance to try out my new present we 
climbed in the car and drove to the Deschutes River in Yelm where we were considering buying a 
river lot. The setting was inviting. We were in a wooded area on the banks of the river. We could
hear the birds singing and the continuous running water of the stream.
    I climbed into my new wa ders and grabbed my spinning rod. The water was running high so I 
was nervous about slipping on the rocky bottom. I looked at my family standing on the bank 
watching me. I was on the spot. I couldn't back down now. Ahead of me was the swirling water. 
Once in I felt the current pulling at my legs. The footing was treacherous. I started wondering 
when I was going to have fun fishing. So far the work of keeping my feet and hoping I didn't 
drown was taking all my attention.  
     Somewhere I had read that fish liked to hide behind rocks. In the middle of the river was a  
protruding boulder with the swirling water bubbling around it.  A fish had to be lurking in the  
slack water below the rock. I cast my lure on the boulder and pulled it into the slack water. I felt 
the pull of the line. The rod tip dipped. A fish!! All excited I reeled in line. My feet were  
slipping. With a super effort, I kept from taking a bath. For the next five minutes I fought to 
keep from losing the fish and at the same time keeping my balance. My family on the bank, as 
excited as myself, shouted instructions and encouragement.
     Finally the fish tired. I carefully took the hook out of his mouth and held him up for all to see.
He was a beautiful fourteen inch rainbow trout. This fishing is great. But what's this? My wife, 
Ronnie, says "That fish is cute, Please let him go." 
     I say "Your crazy! This is my first fish."
     She says "But it's so cute. Look at its eyes."
I look and am surprised at how expressive and brown they are- Like limped pools of sensitivety. 
The fish looks at me with his bulging soulful eyes. Then I hear, or think I hear the fish say "Yeh!  
I'm cute."
    I say "Christ! I can't throw you back. Your my first fish." I must be off my rocker. I'm
talking to a fish.
   Then he says "I'm too cute to eat. Besides, it's Fathers Day and I'm a father."
   He really got to me talking like that. I say "What the Hell!" and throw him back in the water. 
My kids must think I'm nuts. Before the talking fish with the expressive eyes flips his tail and 
swims away he looks at me with a twinkle in his eyes. He has a smile on his lips. Or is he 
laughing at me? Maybe he figures he has outsmarted me. Perhaps he's right but somehow I feel 
good about letting him go. I quess the kids are right. I must be some kind of nut. From now on I'll 
refrain from looking in a fish's eyes or talking to one.

Elmer

ELMER

My brother Elmer has never married. We think that when he was in England he fell in love with an English girl and when it didn't work out he never got over it. In the army he was a specialist working on bomb sights. He had a very good brain in things like that. After the war he went to work as a carpenter for the contractor Pa was superintendent for. He never liked carpenter work. He tried it on his own as a contractor building garages with Frank Dournour. They also did some remodeling. I worked for him and Frank for a time. Frank grew up in our neighborhood on West 116th Street. He was an alcoholic. One day I brought him a bottle of beer which he drank. We didn't see him for a week because that one beer started him on a binge.  After Frank and Elmer split up, Elmer went in business with our brother, Norbert.  They started building houses and were doing pretty well at it. I worked for them as a cabinet maker and finisher for a time. They were trying to dry out one newly plastered house with an oil fired salamander. They left it on all night but something went wrong and it started to smoke. It smoked all night and left a thick layer of black film on the walls and ceiling. We washed the walls down with water but all that moisture and soot made it very tough to put the finish woodwork on. They built one house in an area with a very high water table. When they dug the basement it filled with water so fast that they had to put the dirt back in and make a basement-less house.

Elmer and Norb bought a large piece of property with a farm house on it on a busy highway in Montrose, Ohio. Norb and Rose had adopted several children, because they couldn't have any of their own, and with Elmer moved into the farm house. This gave Elmer a taste of family life. They bought an old horse for the kids to ride and I think a few chickens. One of the boys, Donny, was about five or six and was Elmer's favorite. They built a Dairy Queen on the road frontage and had some one else run it because they were too busy with their contracting business. They sold the property later at a good profit and it has been resold recently for a million dollars.

After they sold the property Norb went to work for a construction company as a superintendent and Elmer bought a fishing resort on an island in the middle of a lake in northern Canada in the province of Manitoba. It was a fly in resort because as far north as it was there were very few roads. He went to work improving the resort by adding a restaurant and many amenities. After a time he took in a partner and it looked like they were going to start making some money. The lake was full of lunker northern pike and things looked fine for their resort business. As it turned out however there was an Indian women on the island who had a daughter she wanted to marry off to Elmer. Having her daughter marry a white man would be very good for her family because it would make them important in the Indian community. Elmer would have no part of this and when the Indian women saw it wasn't going to work she turned against Elmer and used her influence against him with the ones in a position to renew the island resort lease. The land couldn't be bought because it was in a provincial park. Elmer couldn't get his lease renewed so, at a great lose, he was forced to sell to his partner. His partner was able to get a lease renewal because the Indian woman wasn't mad at him. Ralph said that because they hadn't heard from Elmer for a long time every one of the family in Cleveland was afraid the Indians had killed him and dumped his body in the lake but during this time he was trying to salvage what he could from the deal. Of course, he lost a great deal of money before he was out of it.

He returned to Cleveland and worked at the carpenter trade. A few years later he bought an apartment building in the run down part of the west side of Cleveland where the colored and Porto Ricans were moving in. I looked at the place on one of our visits home and wasn't impressed with the apartment. Later the place burned down with no insurance coverage. He was able to sell the land at a good profit to a McDonald franchise holder. We saw Elmer at Bob's house when we were in Cleveland For John and Rose's 50th wedding anniversary. He was not well at all. He had a hard time breathing and had to carry an atomizer to help clear his lungs. He appeared to be suffering from emphysema and from the look of his face and his general appearance he is in need of proper care and medical attention.                                

Ralph said that when they were kids if there was anything new to try out they would say, "Lets try it out on Elmer." Elmer could take electrical shocks and I've seen him stick his wet finger into a light socket to see if it was live. One time Ralph and Howard were trying an experiment and grabbing Elmer from behind squeezed all the air out the air out of his lungs. Elmer was knocked unconscious. They thought they'd killed him and of course were pretty scared until they managed to bring him out of it none the worse for it. Pa thought a lot of Elmer and made him and Ralph joint executors of his will. A few days before Christmas l986 Ronnie got a call from her brother, John, to tell her Larry's sister died at the age of 92 years. I called Vi the next day to see if we could send flowers but it was too late because the funeral was that day. She told me the latest that was happening to Elmer. He was in the hospital for a hernia operation. He had a double hernia but they were only able to operate on one of the hernias. When he was ready to leave the hospital Elmer called Larry to get a ride home. Vi told me she got mad and called Ralph and ask him how come with all Elmer's brothers he had to call Larry to get a ride home from the hospital.

It wasn't long after Elmer got out of the hospital that he moved to the rest home. It's the kind of home were the patients have to be able to do for themselves. Elmer is in real bad shape when it comes to breathing because of his emphysema but he doesn't need complete nursing care.  He's better off were he is because at least he'll eat right.

June 28 1987 Elmer was found dead on the floor of his room by his landlady. He was 75. He seems to have lost the will to live. Ronnie and I flew back for the funeral.  The funeral arrangements were handled by Corrigan Funeral Homes and he was buried at St. Mary’s cemetery.  It is a sad fact of life but at a family funeral is one of the few times we see many of our relatives.  Our aunts Angela and Frances, who took care of us for two years after Ma died until Vi finished high school, were there and  Aunt Alma who was 95 at the time and still on her feet.  At the cemetery there was a problem because human bones were found when they dug the grave. There was no record of anyone being buried in that location. Elmer was left above ground until a decision was made as what to do about the bones.

Telegraph Company

I made a friend named Al Poopidada. My sister Viola did not think much of my friend. She said, “What kind of a name is that????.”  Al had rabbits and needed food to feed them. It was his habit to go behind the stores in the dumpsters and get out the lettuce whatever the rabbits would eat. I decided that when he went to get this food I would go along with him. So this would be about 5 a.m. and I would still be sleeping. So our bedrooms were on the 2^nd floor in the house on W 116^th Street. I tied a light cord around my ankle and left the cord hanging outside window. When he came along he would pull on the cord and wake me up. I would quickly get dressed and while everybody was still sleeping I would go out with him.

Then, we decided to run a wire between his house and mine to use as a telegraph wire. He lived on the next street just about across from the house where we lived. There were telegraph poles and we ran the wire across the main street and across the big field and into my house. We managed it with some difficulty. Then we had a telegraph key that gave us the dots and dashes and we had to learn the letters so we could send messages back and forth. For the power we used a Ford coil and a car battery. Finally after a lot of work we got it operational.

At a pre-arranged time he would home and I would be at my home. We sent messages like, “How’s the weather over there?” It worked very well. But, pretty soon my father started getting complaints about static in the air and it was being picked up on the radios. We didn’t have television at that time. Everybody listened to the radio – programs like Fibber McGee and Molly. The static was our dot and dash. We didn’t realize the radios were picking this up.

The neighbors started with my Dad because they knew if there was anything going on in the neighborhood it was probably started by us. We operated our telegraph system for two full days before we were put out of business.

We were going to call our telegraph company Clyde Schumann and Al Poopidada Telegraph Company. This must have been the shortest lived telegraph company in the history of that sort of thing.

As far as I know the wires may still be up there on the telegraph poles because we never took them down.

Threshing

Threshing

My mother and father were both raised in a farming community about five miles outside of Cleveland, Ohio. Most of the farmers in that area were descendants from immigrants from Germany. The farms were small. Where my father was raised the farm was about 40 acres, which was about the same size as most farms in the area. In order to feed the family and get a little money coming in they had to use up the entire 40 acres. A lot of it in vegetable gardens. But, because they had the horses to feed and grain to be taken to market for extra income a lot of it was planted in hay, oats, and wheat. The farm my mother was raised on about a mile away from my Dad's farm.

Before the harvest there was a lot of planting and the grain had to be cut in the field and bundled and by hand it had to be stacked in shocks. In the shocks it would not rot on the ground and it would dry properly. In the autumn the shocks in the field would be dried and cured enough to be collected and put in the threshing machine. Everybody, including the boys that were old enough, worked in the field to stack the shocks on the trucks and bring them to the threshing machine.

One person in the neighborhood of all these small farms owned the equipment to thresh the grain. It consisted of a steam engine and threshing machine. To move from farm to farm the man with the equipment would drive the steam engine with metal wheels down the roads between farms at about five miles an hour. Behind the steam engine he would tow the threshing machine. When he got on the site he would line up the threshing machine and the steam engine and he had a big belt that was about a foot wide and maybe 15 – 20 feet long. He would attach the belt to the pulleys on both pieces of equipment. In the meantime his schedule was laid out. All the farmers in the neighborhood would gather on the farm that was going to be harvested and do all the work necessary to bring the grain in. They would start early in the morning to take advantage of as much daylight as there was. Hopefully in the one day that farm’s harvesting would be complete.

The women’s job was to prepare the meal and feed the men lunch and supper. The girls either helped with the meals or watched the younger kids. The evening meal included beer and hard cider. After the evening meal was done everyone would sit around and talk and joke and tell about old times. They would catch up on the neighborhood gossip as well. The kids were going to school in the one room schoolhouse. My father went to that school through sixth grade. That was the end of his schooling. What he learned afterwards was out of books from the library and by experience.

After the sun went down the fun would start on the farm at harvest time. There was card playing and singing and lots of drinking. After enough hard cider and beer and passing around the whiskey bottle most of the grown men were feeling pretty good and happy. There were always lots of kids and we would have our own games and fun. When it got dark enough we would play hide and seek. Once it got dark the kids were not allowed in the barn because fire was a danger.

I had so many cousins it was pretty hard to count. In my father’s family there were seven girls and four boys. At that time most of them had children. And farmers believed in lots of children because they needed help in the fields. The family was so large they had an outhouse that was a three-holer. In later years they did put a bathroom in the house. Even after the bathroom was put in we would still use the outhouse when we had company on Sundays.

My Street

I grew up in a fairly new neighborhood where there lots of kids. There were cars on the road – many were made by small companies that have long since gone out of business. Also, there were still a lot of horses on the road. Most of them pulled delivery wagons. There was the baker, the milkman, and one that you don’t hear ever see anymore and most people don’t even know about was the paper-rags man.

The paper-rags man would come down the street with their wagons with a single horse and the horse would walk very slowly and the man would call out “paper-rags, paper-rags” – but it sounded like “paper-rex”. People would come out with paper and rags and anything else that might have a re-sale value and he would pay a few cents to them and take them home to re-sell.

The milk man came every day. They had a route where he would deliver his milk at the same addresses every morning. Now they go to Safeway and buy it in gallon jugs, but he had full bottles to deliver and would pick up the empty bottles. Milk was delivered every day or every other day. He had his wagon full of milk with a single horse pulling the wagon. He would stop the horse and get out with a wire basket full of milk bottles and he might walk for 3 or 4 houses. When he got to the last house he would whistle and his horse would catch up to him and he would get back on.

The baker also delivered fresh rolls and all kinds of pastry. The bakery wagon always smelled so nice because of the fresh baked goods. Usually the baked goods were ordered ahead of time.

There was a little bit of rivalry between the milk man and the baker in our neighborhood. Every so often when they came to a stretch of road where there weren’t too many customers the baker and milk man would race their horses down the street. I don’t remember who would win but they were just having fun anyway.

The ice man was the other delivery man that made regular rounds. He had 100 pound blocks of ice. The blocks were scored in ½ or ¼’s. So if he was delivering 50 pounds he would break the big block in ½. He would grab the ice with his tongs and put the ice on his shoulder. He wore a leather pad on his shoulder so he wouldn’t get too wet and cold. He would take it into the house. In those days there were ice boxes instead of refrigerators. The ice would go in an upper container. The ice boxes had a pan underneath to catch the water from the ice melting. The pan had to be emptied or you had a flooded floor. While the ice man was in the houses the kids would go to his wagon and pick up the ice chips from breaking the blocks. That was a great thing for the kids to suck on the ice.

There was one wagon that the kids were all happy to see…the waffle wagon. The waffle wagon had glass sides to the upper part of it. You could see the propane flame and they made the waffles right there in front of you. When done they would sprinkle with powdered sugar. They cost 5 cents. The waffles had a sweet taste that after all these many years I have never tasted the equal of. I have had lots of waffles since the early days. Nothing has equaled those waffles.

Once when I was very young a team of horses pulling a wagon were spooked by something and they were running on the road and someone finally grabbed them and were able to calm them down. I was in an empty lot nearby when that happened. The horses were prancing around with the noise of their harnesses and hoofs stomping the ground. I was very frightened. Believe me, I was glad they got them under control. Maybe it was just my imagination, especially because I was so young, I felt that I was in great danger. And, I might have been. This experience stays in my mind even to this day.

The house I lived in with all my brothers and one sister was at the top of a hill. In the winter time when there was enough snow that hill would be covered with a layer of snow and ice. It was a great place for sledding. After supper – in those times dinner was in the middle of the day and supper was the evening meal – we used to get our sleds out and head for the street on the hill. There were so many kids in our neighborhood. We would collect at the top of the hill and each of us would take our sled and get a running start and jump on the sled and slide down to the bottom. When we got to the bottom we would start walking back up the hill for another ride. Our sleds had a piece of rope on them to drag them up with. Sometimes there would be kids that knew each other well enough that they would ride down two on a sled. Or if a boy knew a girl in the neighborhood he would get on the sled and lay face down on the sled and his girl would get on top of him and they would ride down together. There was a girl that lived about two blocks away that would sometimes sled down with me. When I got a little bit older there would be cars going down the hill and some of my buddies would hang on to the bumpers and let the cars pull us down the hill. Sometimes the cars owners would get angry and stop the car, jump out, and chase us. We were young and pretty fast so luckily we never did get caught.

The street in front of our house was made of red bricks. One amazing thing is going back to the old neighborhood after living out here in Washington we discovered that those old brick streets were still intact. Hadn’t been black topped over or even patched up too much. My daughters were really amazed. These memories of the times when I grew up are still fairly vivid in my mind. I am amazed some times at how interesting people are and how ignorant of how things were in those days. People don’t realize the kind of life that they lived through.

My First Love

My family belonged to a Catholic Church and we lived in the diocese of St. Ignatius about a mile from the school and church. My schooling from the 1^st through the 8^th grade was at the Catholic school. We had nuns for teachers. Every morning we were marched from the school to the church for services. We marched from the tune of a piano. In the sixth or seventh grade the piano player was a student about my age. She was a girl with curly blond hair. As she played the piano her head would bob back and forth and her curls would bounce up and down. I was fascinated with her looks.

One day I got up the nerve to talk to her (I was about fifteen) and ask her if I could walk her home from school. She said yes and I took her books and we started to walk. I was in seventh heaven. We talked about this and that. Finally we go to her house. She lived about a mile from the school but in the opposite direction from where we lived. As we walked she asked me, “I’m not taking you out of your way, am I?” I said, “Oh, no. You aren’t taking me out of my way.” When we got to her house I handed her back her books and said goodbye.

As I started to walk home I realized I had to go quite a long way home. It was a mile back to school and another mile back to my house. When I got back to my house, my sister, who was the cook was VERY upset. “Where WERE you?” I have to have potatoes for the meal. It was my job to peel potatoes for our large family – so a LOT of potatoes. I had to hurry up so I took my potato peeler and went as fast as I could. The peeler had an end to dig out the eyes, but this night a lot of the eyes were left.

The next day when school was out the girl with the blonde hair was waiting for me to walk her home. I told her I couldn’t because I have to go home to peel potatoes. It just wasn’t working out and that was the last and only time I walked her home. It turned out that was the end of our relationship – all because of potatoes.

In later years I told my kids that if it wasn’t for those potatoes they might all have blonde curly hair.

Hobo Final Chapter

After 3 years away I had been wondering how things were going at home. I was a little homesick. I gradually drifted back towards Cleveland. I didn’t go directly. First I went to Wakeman, Ohio. They had a river there and the farmer let us use the low lands next to the river to camp. There was one guy named Hank that we know. After I visited with him I went down by the campers and I went back to Cleveland with them.

Since I had been working with a sign painter Mmy Dad put me to work painting the house. I learned how to use linseed oil to treat the windows. I had a few ladders there and they were hard to handle but I did manage to get the house painted including up in the peaks. After the house was done, my Dad got me a job. One of the first jobs I had was doing finish work in a new house. My job was to put down the baseboard in all the rooms. I had to be careful when I used a hammer not to make hammer marks. Every time I would make a hammer mark my Dad would spot it.

When it came time for payday the contractor gave my
Dad the money that I had earned. Instead of turning over the money to me my Dad was going to give me an allowance and keep my money. At an earlier time when there were 9 kids to raise there was some reason for the older kids to kick in their money to help keep the household going. But by that time there weren’t nearly as many kids living at home. The necessity of this kind of arrangement no longer existed.

I was willing to pay room and board. Since I had been living on my own for around three years, I was used to making my own way. We locked horns and I packed my bags and left again.

For the next few years I drifted east and south. In order to support myself I was doing odd jobs. Some yard work, washing dishes, and doing a little carpenter work even though I didn’t have my own tools to do that. I went to New York City and then through some of the southern states. Usually I traveled on the trains and sometimes hitchhiking.