Re: What was it like where you grew up?

Posted by Buzzman72 on November 04, 2012 at 06:33:49 from (74.134.25.51):

In Reply to: What was it like where you grew up? posted by RBnSC on November 04, 2012 at 05:49:15:

I grew up in a small town in southern Indiana, back before the Interstate highways came through. There was downtown, nestled into the valley where two creeks met, and there was the "residential area," which was everything in the surrounding hills. I lived on the south hill. When I was born, Dad and Grand-dad were Hudson dealers, had been IH truck dealers until about a year before, and still handled IH and Farmall tractors and implements as a sub-dealer for the franchise holder on the northernmost edge of the county.

The town was about 20 miles from the Louisville, KY metro area as the crow flies, but about 35 miles and 45 minutes away via the two-lane blacktop. So we were close enough to Louisville to get TV reception, but far enough away that the main reason to go there MIGHT be for Christmas shopping. And we were far enough away from Indianapolis to be essentially ignored...as long as we paid our taxes. At that time, long before casino boats and their related tax revenue, southern Indiana ended at Bloomington, as far as Indianapolis was concerned.

Back when I was a kid, the area was primarily agricultural. There were a few Farmall "hundred" series, but the bulk of the tractors were red, and had letters like C, H, and M and their variants. The Allis dealer down the street and across the south bridge sold a few units, and while Dad was a dyed-in-the-wool Farmall guy, he respected the tractors Allis-Chalmers built. He also had a healthy respect for the few Case products in the area...but the nearest dealer was in the next county, and for all practical purposes most farmers simply weren't going to drive that far for parts and service. There was also a healthy and thriving Deere dealership in town, but the competition was friendly. Many, if not most, of my school friends were farm kids. Lots of their parents and grandparents were customers at my family's garage. We had an IH refrigerator in the house, an IH air conditioner in one of the living room windows--apparently I'd been sickly in my first two years--and an IH deep freezer on the back porch.

In 1959, the downtown area flooded. My family's business, in a leased building, had 3 feet of water in it. A lot of time was spent washing away "flood mud" from everything. And then Grand-dad decided that he was going to move the business. So he got out of the car franchise, which by then was American Motors/Rambler, and took on the project of remodeling, and adding to, the barn that was located on the knoll behind his house, across the south bridge from where the business had been located. He ended up with a building that was about 1/3 the size of the one we were leaving, but it had an 18" high steel beam with a hoist on a trolley in the center of the garage area...so we were set up for servicing tractors. We could do 2 at a time, as long as we weren't splitting one.

So I learned parts counter skills the summer I was 8 years old, when Grand-dad was hospitalized TWICE for ulcer surgery. Later, I learned to twist wrenches and to re-face valves in that tiny shop. In the summertime, a lot of the work went on outside in the gravel driveway when the shop itself was full. Dad would paint tractors outside, as long as the weather allowed it. He'd first clean them well with the old steam jenny and some 49-s lye-based compound, and then he's allow us kids to help with putty knives and wire brushes to deal with any flaking paint or anything else the steam had missed. He did the sheet metal prep himself, of course. Since Grand-dad had the garage in the back yard of his home, business hours were just an approximation; when planting or harvesting time came, closing time was whenever the last customer had been dealt with.

The old 60-ton hydraulic press was set up at a corner of the building outside. Gears and bearings by the hundreds were pressed there, along with the straightening of sickle mower cutter bars on occasion. The welder and torch rig were Grand-dad's area, and no matter how much we begged, he always said that "you boys" [even if there was only one of us there, we were still "you boys"] didn't need to learn about that stuff. So I was past 40 when I learned to weld.

In the mid-1970's the interstate came through. By the mid-1980's the atmosphere of the town had changed. By 1990, downtown was pretty much dead, except for the courthouse. In the late 1990's, a new jail and court building was built on the west hill, to deal with jail overcrowding lawsuits and to free up space at the courthouse, which was built in [and for] 1929.

In 1978, I married and moved to the city. In 1980-'83, I moved back to my hometown temporarily. In 1983, I moved back to the city with my wife, and lived there for another 10 years. My first wife passed away in 1992, and I moved back to my home county, but not the old hometown; it just didn't feel like the hometown I'd left. In 1994 I remarried and bought a house in a subdivision in a small rural community, a mile outside an unincorporated small town. For work, I commute to the city; and I'm happy here in the country, surrounded by corn fields and soybean fields and woods and cattle farms and deer, squirrels, rabbits, and wild turkeys.

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