SECTION ONE

CHILDHOOD DAYS AND EARLY MANHOOD

CHAPTER ONE

FAMILY BACKGROUND AND ENVIRONMENTAL SETTING

Since I was born about one year and seven weeks after the birth of my brother Clifford, we, of course, were very close companions during our childhood days. This means that our environment and experiences in those years were essentially the same.

My brother Clifford, in the year 1980, has written his memoirs under the title, "Eighty Years of Living." So rather than write a duplicate of those years, events and settings, with his permission I am including here, in toto, that portion of his manuscript which is applicable to both of us.

It is appropriate, as he has done, to document our ancestry first. In order to make his write-up understandable, as a part of my background, it is suggested that the reader substitute, in his mind, the word our wherever the word my appears, if appropriate.

"EIGHTY YEARS OF LIVING"

by

REV. CLIFFORD G. PARK

Robert Browning - "How good is man's life, the mere living!"

What a fascinating eighty years of living have been mine! If my life is half as interesting to read about as it has been to live it, this light-hearted sketch will not have been written in vain.

Historians, to be sure, tell us that of the billions of people who have inhabited our planet, only about five thousand have accomplished enough to merit remembrance. I certainly do not belong in that select company, but I hope my career has been interesting and significant enough to make it worthwhile to pass on these memoirs to friends and members of my family.

Genealogy -

To begin with, the Park lineage can be traced as far back as the 6th Century A.D., and we can take modest pride in the fact that a tiny trickle of royal blood, derived from ancient English monarchs, still courses in our veins. This tincture of royalty, however, was derived by marriage from the female side. The direct male ancestry of the Park line is traceable back to Robert Parke of Gestingthorpe, Essex County, England, whose death is recorded in 1400 A.D. The seventh in line - Robert Parke (1580-1665) of Acton County, Suffolk, came to Boston, America on the good ship Arabella, with the Winthrop Fleet in 1630 (acting as Secretary for Governor Winthrop of Connecticut during the voyage.) Robert finally settled in Old Mystic, Connecticut. Many of the Parks of America trace their origin back to him, and in

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1930 a bronze plaque was erected to his memory in the Old Mystic Cemetery, a cemetery now maintained by the Daughters of the American Revolution. My brother, Dr. Wilford E. Park, and his wife, Dr. Evelyn Hartman Park, visited the cemetery in 1961 and took pictures which he has preserved among his detailed and extensive records of the Park family.

The above Robert Parke married Alice Tompson, a widow with three daughters. One of these daughters, named Dorothy, married Robert Parke's son, Thomas (who was born in Hitchim, England in 1616). Dorothy Tompson had inherited a royal lineage through her mother, and it is from a son Robert, born to Dorothy and Thomas, that our descent is traced and our claim to a royal ancestry is made.

Dorothy's line of regal descent - sometimes through kings and queens, sometimes through blood relatives of reigning monarchs, provides us a background of which we can be justly proud. Her lineage is traceable back through eleven British kings to Cerdic, King of the West Saxons (519-534 A.D.). In her direct line of descent we find Egbert. first king of all England (827-836) and Alfred the Great who reigned 871-901, and of whom an historian has written, "No nobler monarch ever sat upon a throne." Through related lines, it is possible to name 69 kings and queens of England, Scotland and France with whom she possessed some blood relationship. Two examples were Malcolm 1st of Scotland (slayer of Macbeth) and the Emperor Charlemagne. Another was Eleanor of Acquitaine, wife of Louis VII of France and Henry II Plantagenet of England. Eleanor was the mother of two other kings: Richard the Lion-hearted and King John Lochland.

The 1981 - Vol. XVIII, No. 1 News Letter of The Parke Society, Incorporated in Connecticut, documents the ancestry of Diana Princess of Wales, England, back to Dorothy (3) Parke, daughter of Thomas (2) Parke, and his wife, Dorothy Tompson.

Returning to our direct descent from Thomas (2) and Dorothy Tompson, the Park line is as follows:

Weighing in as a "preemie" of 4-1/2 pounds on February 5th, 1900, I doubt if my birth caused much excitement, even in a hamlet as small as Fair Ground. This obscure little village in the center of Houghton township, Norfolk County, incidently, had derived its name from the fact that the township fair grounds were situated on the northwest corner of the intersection, where the annual township Fall Fair was held. Township council meetings were held in its town hall. My actual birthplace (as it was also of my brothers and sister) was the home of my grandfather, Philip Bender Park, who must have early moved to his farm a half-mile south of the main corner- perhaps a cen~ry and a quarter ago--to begin the task of establishing domicile in a wooded wilderness.

It was my good fortune to be born of sturdy stock. With a paternal grandfather of English heritage, a paternal grandmother of Irish parentage, a maternal grandfather of Pennsylvania Dutch extraction, and a maternal grandmother whose parents were Scottish (whose own mother, my maternal great grandmother, could still speak a bit of Gaelic and survived into my early childhood), I was nonetheless a trueblue Canadian of the fourth generation, with my roots firmly planted in the soil of this great land where so many blood-streams have intermingled to produce a citizenry worthy to stand beside the best the world provides.

For the first eight years of my life our family lived in the northern half of my grandfather's frame house, located a half-mile south of Fair Ground. Father's elder brother John and his wife Effie and son and daughter Stanley and Vera lived in a more pretentious house on the corner farm just north of us. Stanley and Vera were to be older school mates and play-mates of mine until their removal to Brantford before I was fully grown. But my grandfather's home was a good place to spend one's early childhood. One of my greatest memories is that of looking out my grand- mother's bedroom window watching my father working on the addition which was to make our own family accommodation more adequate. As I think of it now, I realize that our bedrooms were small, but the combined living-dining room in my grandfather's part of the house was very spacious, and the big box stove in the middle of the room had a woodbox behind it which seemed positively huge to a small boy to whom early befell the duty of keeping that woodbox filled. Above this part of the house was a very low attic, a child's haunt of mystery, atrociously hot in summer and inhabited by big black hornets which were, fortunately, too sleepy and apathetic to attack anyone.

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In his earlier days, my grandfather must have been something of an athlete. He could do a standing broad jump nine feet backwards, and on one notable occasion, he walked the fifty miles from Walpole to Fair Ground in one day, arriving ahead of the stage coach! But he was not only a man of stamina, but a pioneer of vision and resourcefulness. With five strong growing sons to help him, he cleared his land and planned his homestead wisely - building two good barns and a commodious house and planting two acres of orchard with space for a garden. I remember the well-chosen varieties of fruit trees - apple trees, which included astrachans, talman sweets, russets, greenings, kings and northern spies. And there were other fruits as well: sour red cherries, small blue plums and small peaches - all a tasty treat then, but a far cry from the big luscious varieties we know today. In season also, the garden produced black and red currants, strawberries, red and black raspberries and long black thimbleberries. I can see the thimbleberry patch yet - down beside the outdoor privy, beyond the little smoke house where hams and bacon sides were cured, and the old fire-place where my grandmother made soft soap from fats and the lye she leached from ashes. Nearer the house stood the outside cellar, the soft water cistern and the well at the back door, from which water always pure and cold could be enjoyed by anyone energetic enough to operate the pump handle. And never far away was the woodpile and its axe from which wood for the kitchen cook stove or the living room box-stove could be secured as required. Out front on the roadside stood two huge balm-of-gilead trees, redolent with the healthy odour that distinguishes their species. Across the road the little creek wound its way through a neighbour's swamp, down to the old swimming hole which we boys had created by damming up the creek, and in which we learned to swim the dog-paddle without instruction. From that swamp on warm summer evenings, the frogs would lift their voices to rival the birds in a chorus of nature that was always music to our ears.

In spite of the usual childhood diseases, we had a healthy and certainly a happy childhood. I remember how ecstatic I was as a tiny lad on Christmas morning to find that Santa Claus had left a handful of nuts and hard candies in my stocking, an orange, a top, and a whistle, as my share of his Christmas largess. We children were up early before the wood stove was alight, and our bare feet chilled on the linoleum floor - but that in no way detracted from the thrill of our Christmas morning, nor dulled our parent's delight in our happiness. I never had any sense of economic deprivation as a child.

Indeed I shall never feel so economically well-to-do as I did as a little lad of six or seven, when my father brought home to live with us an English girl from the Barnardo (?) Homes. They arrived after the usual evening meal, and mother gave her bread and milk for supper. I remember how my heart swelled with pride as I reflected how wonderful it must be to enjoy our plentiful and delicious bread and milk after the Sparten diet I assumed she had had to endure at the Home. (I still like bread and milk, especially if I am a bit under the weather.)

Actually we were not quite as well-to-do as I assumed. My grandmother found it necessary to dry apples each winter on a big screen over the kitchen stove to earn some extra cash for the store. How else could she have secured the sugar and flour for the delectable cookies which established her as a small boy's favourite grandma? President Roosevelt in one of his fireside chats, declared that "the people of America were one-third ill-housed, ill-clothed, and ill-fed." Some wag commented that "this country was founded by people who were ill-housed, ill-clad and ill-fed, and didn't know it!" To a considerable degree that applied to us, even though we ranked as one of the more affluent families. With our poorly insulated wooden houses,

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our wood stoves and coal oil lamps, lacking both a basement and inside plumbing, we were by today's standards, ill-housed. And we had little to spend on clothes. Even at 19 years of age when I started to Albert College to train for the Christian ministry, I had only one suit and its sleeves had already started to fray and my mother had to turn in the edges of the cuffs to hide the worn spots. But we were never ill-fed, for we were active farmers producing the bulk of our own food in our own fields and gardens. For many years my father grew six or eight acres of potatoes a year - (How skillful I became in hoeing out the weeds and picking off the potato bugs with pail and paddle!) We butchered our own hogs and milked our own cows, sending the milk to the local cheese factory, shepherded our own sheep, had enough chickens and hens to keep us in eggs, and some geese and turkeys to provide a special treat for Christmas and Thanksgiving. In winter we felt no hardship to breakfast regularly on buckwheat pancakes along with fried ham or bacon, and maple syrup to top off the final helping.

Besides, food prices were unbelievably low. In 1908 the Cutlers moved to a new cement block house a stone's throw west, beside the little white Methodist Church, and my father and mother took over from them the rambling old country hotel which stood on the south-west corner of the intersection in order to board the workmen employed at the new sawmill which had been erected a quarter mile east on my uncle John's property. During that period, one butcher offered Dad all the hind-quarter beef he could use at a standard price of eight cents a pound!

But I count it part of my good fortune to have been born and reared on the farm. Not that I do not recall some anxious moments from my early childhood. For instance, there was that time I waded across the neighbouring creek when it was swollen with the melting snows of Springtime, and promptly came down with a bad case of croup. A neighbouring woman (Mrs. Mel Williams) came to sit out the night with me and administer hourly a concoction which didn't taste bad at all - anyway, I was better the next morning. Only years later did I learn the medicine was a mix ture of honey and urine! At least it was harmless, but I won't try to recommend it for anyone suffering from croup today.

And then there was that day Wilford and I undertook to kill a turtle not much bigger than a watch. We found it in the creek and had heard mother say its shell would make a nice ornament, so we decided to cut its head off. After argument, I conceded Wilford the privilege of wielding the axe and he cut off the end of the first finger of my left hand! It didn't hurt much, but it bled profusely, and I pictured myself bleeding to death. I let out a yell that must have been audible a half a mile away. Just then mother was sitting on the throne in the old three-holer beyond the smokehouse. I ran to show her my bleeding hand, but wisely she tried to calm me and emerged to bandage the finger as quickly as she could. I am sure that was one day mother needed no prune juice or epsom salts! Care and Zam-buck ointment healed the wound but that first finger has always been a little shorter than its mate on the other hand.

Of course there were amusing moments too, and Dad seemed to have more than his share of them. But one that tickled us most had to do with his regular Saturday night bath. We were accustomed to heat the bath water in big kettles on the kitchen stove and pour it into the big tin tub Dad had made with a wooden

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frame for our weekly ablutions. However, we were accustomed to tap the maple trees around the house each Spring and boil down the sap into syrup in the big pots on the stove. This particular night Dad mistook the partially boiled sap for his bath- water and used it for his bath - quite the sweetest bath he ever took, I am sure, and probably unrivaled in anyone else's experience. But maybe not an unfitting external accompaniment for the inner good nature that was so conspicuously his!

It was from the home south of Fair Ground that I started to school at six years of age. I didn't like it and came home at the first recess saying I wasn't going to go. Of course I had to go back, but I remember lying awake one night wishing for the time I would be done with school. Little did I realize then how much I would learn to love school; nor did I dream it would be twenty-one years later that I would finally graduate from theological college and be done with the class room forever.

I did not have to be long at school before I learned to enjoy reading. Having devoured the Henry and Horatio Alger books on our own shelves by ten or eleven years of age, I cast about for something of deeper interest and found it in a book in Aunt Effie's library. It was Robinson Crusoe, and the book proved so fascinating that I stole over to read it for hours at a time without telling anyone at home where I was going. This latter indiscretion led to the only real spanking I can remember my father ever giving me, and punishment did nothing to warp my ego or dampen my enthusiasm for reading, but it did teach me to be more considerate of my responsibility to others.

During the four years Dad and Mother operated the boarding house for about twenty millworkers - until the mill characteristically burned down when the available timber was exhausted - they continued their regular farming and nearly worked them selves to death trying to carry two jobs at once. Meanwhile, I continued to attend the local public school a quarter mile north of our house, and did what I could to help on the farm.

I had done rather well at public school and at twelve years of age I had passed my High School entrance exams - rather young, but then I had a father who had done it all at eleven years of age, and had come first of the twenty-six township students who had written their entrance exams.

But now with the mill gone and the boarders gone as well, and Dad able to give full time to his farming (plus some extra time spent barbering on Saturday nights, and his not too exacting responsibilities as Clerk of the Seventh Division Court of Houghton township), I could be more readily spared. So September 1912 saw me a student in the high school at Vienna, a village eight miles west of Fair Ground. Vienna high school had only about thirty pupils, but excellent teachers, and in three years I had finished high school with what was called a Normal School Entrance Certificate (one language short of matriculation). The high school arrangement had been for me to board in Vienna from Monday noon to Friday noon and return home each weekend. Incredible as it seems now, I was able to get the four nights' accomodation and thirteen meals a week for $2.00 per week, and if I remember correctly, I was paying only $2.50 a week when I finished high school In June, 1915. Inflation was not a significant problem then.

Now it was Wilford's turn to go to Vienna to high school, and when he finished, Montie's turn, then Leta's. So, it turned out that from 1915 to 1918 I was at home again, giving now all my time to working with Dad on the farm. At fifteen I was too young to enlist, and anyway, as a farm boy, I was excused from military service

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because engagement in agriculture and food production was deemed an essential part of the war effort. In that rural setting, with radio not yet invented, without a daily newspaper, and as far as I know, none of my schoolmates in the Armed Forces, the War did not seem to touch our lives very closely. But I do vividly remember the joy of that memorable November 11th, 1918 when the whistles began to blow to announce that the Armistice had been signed and the war was over. That afternoon my father and I were shingling a new shed in our shirt sleeves, and I doubt if we have had as warm a November 11th since.

My formal education was soon to begin again, but I have never regretted the three and half year interlude in my academic career. I was at home at a time when I was sorely needed. We lived in the corner house but farmed two farms of our own, one a half-mile south and the other a half-mile west, and worked and rented land as well. Our farming was done the hard way, by hand, or by primitive horse-drawn machinery. I had as yet hardly seen a tractor or a milking machine. Corn binders and hay bailers were still a foreign curiosity belonging only to more affluent farmers, and an automobile was still out of the question. We took the cows and the horses (eight of them) down the road to pasture at night, and it was fun to ride one of the horses bare-back, set the dog on the other seven, and go down the road like a charge of cavalry. No wonder pedestrians leaped out of the way as we passed, and I am afraid the look on their faces often betrayed an emotion other than fear. But after getting tossed off on my head by the horse, I was less prepared to ride without bridle.

By chance, around Christmas, 1917, after I had finished school and Wilford was now attending High School in Vienna, Montie upset a lantern in the straw mow and the whole barn went up in flames. He was lucky to escape from the blazing inferno, and neighbours helped drive the cattle from the shed and lead the horses from their stalls so that only a sow and a colt died in the blaze. I happened to be away and was sorry to have missed the excitement, traumatic though the loss seemed at the moment. But luckily Dad had already contemplated building a new barn and it was now only necessary to hasten the project. Already Dad and I had spent two winters cutting off the seven acres of virgin bush at the rear of the west 50, bringing home the long straight timbers to be shaped into beams for the new barn, and cutting the others into logs to be taken to the mill to be sawn into lumber for sheeting and siding. Chain saws were not yet in use, and it brought my father and me very close together spending those two winters on the opposite ends of a cross-cut saw.

The third winter (1917-1918) 1 spent in Brantford working at Adams Wagon fac tory, and boarding with Aunt Effie, Stanley and Vera (Uncle John having died of cancer in 1916). They moved to Brantford a few years before where Stanley was a motor mechanic and Vera a school teacher.

In the Spring of 1918, 1 returned home to do the farming while Dad and an experienced carpenter worked on preparing the timbers for the barn, shaping them with a broad-axe, and mortising the ends for the raising. The raising was a big event. Neighbours gathered for miles around to lend a hand with ropes and pike-poles and their own strong backs. I was proud to have a part in it. When the frame was in place, I helped with the sheeting and shingling and painting. But never unwilling to engage in a harmless prank, I caught the neighbour's rooster who was too ardently visiting our hens without an invitation, and I painted him a brilliant red from comb to tail. Understandably, the neighbour wasn't too pleased to see his rooster so brilliantly bedecked. He complained, "The hens didn't know him!"

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And lest readers might assume I never engaged in any other mischief, I will confess that one Halloween night, after Wilford and I had gone dutifully upstairs to bed, we climbed out our bedroom window, unbeknown to Dad and cut the chain securing a neighbour's gate - which he boasted was prank-proof, and deposited the gate in his own haymow where he found it not too long after. When someone discussed the disappearance of the gate next day, Dad remarked that his boys were innocently in bed. The other said: "Don't be too sure!", but happily nobody pressed the matter any further.

However, the legacy of my years on the farm were both great and positive. My character, my habits, and my outlook on life were shaped and matured by these years in the great outdoors. I learned to enjoy Nature, and feel at home with Nature's God. The fields, the trees, and growing things, the animals, the sun and the rain, and the open sky, the stars and the glory of the sunset made me look beyond the things that are seen to the wisdom and love of their Mighty Maker. As a farmer, dealing every day with the forces at work in our world, I was an existentialist before I had ever heard that word for Sartre's now popular philosophy. But I was a religious existentialist, convinced that behind the seen and heard, and the known, stands invisibly a wise creator and a loving God. Perhaps that is why I have always loved the hymn:

This is my Father's world, And to my listening ears All nature sings And round me rings The music of the spheres. In the rustling grass I hear him pass: He speaks to me everywhere.

I learned too, from years on the farm, that work comes before play, and I think I would have agreed with F. R. Barry who told the students of St. Andrew's University in his rectorial address - "There may be something that is more fun than hard work, but I do not know what it is." Anyway, I had plenty of it. One summer I got up at a quarter to five each morning to fetch the cows and horses from pasture, get the feeding and the milking done, and after a gargantuan breakfast, be ready for the day's work in the fields. The ability to work hard and consistently and do it happily, has stayed with me all my life, and doubtless has been a major secret of my success in life.

FAMILY BACKGROUND AND ENVIRONMENTAL SETTING (CONTINUED)

Now that you have read Clifford's description of our childhood environment, I want to add a few small details which he left out.

The little creek, which Clifford mentions in the swamp across the road, emerged from Uncle John's farm, where it adjoined grandfather's farm, at the road. The creek there crossed the road and flowed in a south-westerly direction into the adjoining farm on the south side of the swamp. It was under the bridge across this creek, on the road, where we found the small turtles mentioned by Clifford, in about two inches of water.

Clifford's reference to our swimming hole, in the creek across the road, brings to mind our improvised water wings, consisting of a couple of pieces of small logs extracted from our woodpile. Across these we had nailed a leather strap. To swim

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we lay in the water with the strap across and under our chests. The floating wood held us up and we were free to flail with our arms in learning to swim.

The swamp across the road from grandfather's house used to have beautiful blue flowers in it, which we called flags. In later summer evenings, all over this swamp there were glittering flashes of light which we found came from fireflies. We caught some of these flying insects, and even in captivity, they would periodically cause their abdomens to glow momentarily. We experimented by crushing some of them, and we found that their tissues, when crushed and spread out, continued to glow for a time in the dark.

The ditch beside the road next to grandfather's fence grew lots of cattails. When dry, we sometimes cut some of them and dipped them in coal oil (kerosene), then lit them and paraded with the torches at night.

From the road grandfather's home property was entered through a small gate. There was a front door in the house which was seldom used, that opened immediately into the living room (which also served as the dining room). Most traffic was through the door on the south side of the house, which opened into the kitchen. Between the kitchen and the living room was a narrow pantry that took up most of the space.

Clifford has mentioned most of the buildings on the property. Behind the residential area was the barnyard, which was quite large, with a fence around it, enclosing the farm buildings. On the south of the residential property, the barnyard was connected with the road by a wide lane, with a gate at the road. Farm animals had access to this lane. This lane also contained the piles of wood used to heat the house. Some of the fruit trees, mentioned by Clifford, were on the north side behind the house and some were on the south side of the lane. Most of the garden was also on the south side of this lane.

There were a few more fruit trees which Clifford did not mention. There was a crabapple tree which supplied small apples for jelly. There was also a fall apple which was dark red in color which we called wine apples because of the color. I remember too a small, very sweet pear which was russet in color. It may have been an ancestor, or relative, of the Bosc pear. Winternellis pear appears to be identical. Every year some of the apples were taken to the cider mill where they were crushed and the apple juice brought back in barrels. Some of this cider eventually became cider vinegar.

In front of grandfather's residence was a lawn of sorts, bordered on the north by lilac trees. There was no lawn mower so the grass was kept under control with a scythe. At one point over the fence, at the road, was an elevated platform called the milkstand. On it every morning the milk cans were placed, where they were picked up by the driver of a horse-drawn wagon with a flat top, and taken along with other supplies of milk to the local cheese factory. The milk cans were later returned to the milk-stand with some whey in them, which was used for pig feed.

Grandfather's barnyard was connected with the fields on the farm by a lane which was entered through a gate on the south side of the barnyard. This lane for some distance ran along the eastern border of the garden toward the south. Later the lane turned to the east and ran all the way to the eastern limits of the farm, giving access to each field on either side. The gates to each field were kept closed

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except for the fields used for pasturing animals. The cows when admitted into the lane at the barnyard end, found their own way to pasture, and returned by themselves to be milked, every evening. One feature about the farm in those early days was that all of the fences were either stump fences or zigzag rail fences.

I recall one time, when we were in the attic of grandfather's house, we became curious about two smooth pieces of narrow wood which were attached to the rafters with one end of each bent in a curve. Much later these pieces of wood turned up as the runners of a sleigh which Dad built for us.

Clifford in his comments on the burning down of our barn referred to the loss of a sow and a colt. On the next weekend, when I was home from school, Dad told me of seeing the sow run out of the burning barn with the grease bubbling out of her back like bacon in a frying pan. He said she was so desperate with pain that she turned around and ran back into the fire. Later in my diary I found that the date of the fire was December 18, 1917.

Later I learned that Dad had no fire insurance on the barn, but he said his neighboring farmers and friends got together a purse containing $700.00 and gave it to him.

I remember when the new barn was being built that Dad consulted us boys about a name for the barn. We suggested Golden Glow and it bore that name on its western side as long as it was standing thereafter.

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