He was the egg man

While I was out wasting my time at rock concerts and sitting in my room listening to records and baseball games, this is what my grandfather was doing.

Royal Lockard had no time for any frivolities. I don't really remember him much like this, but I do know he was always working. He seemed to hold not much use for the modern world, and he seemed to live a code that was rooted in the 19th century, at least to me.

Men had their roles, women has theirs. Men took care of work outside the house, women took care of work inside the house. My grandmother didn't drive, or example. He didn't have much use for television, and for shows he did watch (Lawrence Welk, for example), it became a problem for him when the show began to feature more and more women. He was the youngest of 11 children, and as I have mentioned before, arthritis left him a virtual cripple in his mid-60s.

Royal and Orpha (along with their children Kline, Florence (known as Dolly) and Rolland (my dad) grew most of their own food on their 40-acre farm, which featured a very large vegetable garden and field upon field of sweet corn. They raised cows, chickens and pigs. Kline and my dad had to drop out of school after the 8th grade to work on the farm. And for as much as women seemed to take a back seat, I was told he encouraged Dolly to finish her education, which she did down the road five miles in Picture Rocks.

Theirs was a simple life for sure. Work seven days a week, with church on Sundays. We often visited on the weekends when I was very young, and I got to help milk cows and collect eggs.

If Royal was alive today, he would not call what I do working. Sitting at a desk was for city folks, and if you weren't using your hands and back, you weren't working.

The only time I saw him relax was on Sunday afternoon drives. The women would sit in the back and the men in the front, me in the middle between Royal and Rolland, who drove.  We would drive around for a couple of hours, look at neighboring farms and end up with ice cream, which was extravagant (or so it seemed to me) in my grandparents world,

On the way home, "Pappy" could see I was getting sleepy and invite me to put my head on his shoulder for a nap.

And between faith and family and the sweat of the working day, you could feel the silence  of these far, far simpler times.

In rural Pennsylvania. In another time. In another place.

There's treasures for the takin'

Lockard's General Store
Huntersville, PA, Circa 1950s

The store pictured in this photo is the very definition of a mom and pop store. In particular, this was my dad's mom and pop's store.

This one-room store, which stocked mostly staples such as bread, eggs and milk, was attached to the side of the grandparent’s farmhouse at the corner of Dutchtown Road and Route 87. There was a Texaco gas pump to the left of the store’s entrance; I can remember gas as cheap as 39 cents a gallon. A cooler that held milk and soda bottles and a freezer for ice cream was to the right after you entered the heavy door with the an oversized black latch.

Behind the counter was a big old gold behemoth of a cash register with giant keys that you had to press down hard on to open the drawer. And on the counter were giant (to my eyes) containers of mints that you paid for by the ounce or pound. Later on, a bookmobile came each week with 45-50 books that you could borrow and bring back as you please.

You had to walk through a storeroom to get to the store from the kitchen. A bell was attached over the entryway to the storeroom that rang when someone entered the store, and Royal or Orpha (mostly) would walk from wherever they were in the house through the storeroom to wait on the customer. After my grandfather’s arthritis debilitated him, the walk was long and laborious. But the customers (almost all locals) knew about this condition and patiently waited in the store.

Perhaps they knew about it too well.

The honor system of sorts came crashing down one day when a pair came in the store, and while one held the door so my grandfather could not enter the store, the other cleaned out the cash register.

That event sent shockwaves through the idea that this little part of the world was immune from troubles that seemed confined to newspapers and television. And it meant the end of the store. Shortly thereafter, my grandfather had a stroke, went to the hospital and died. My grandmother sold the house and farm and moved into a tiny house about 10 miles away where she lived for another 15 years or so.

My strongest memories of the store are the wooden, creaky floor and the wonders of the candy case. For 25 cents, you could get a whole bag of penny candy: root beer barrels, Mary Janes and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, a veritable treasure trove. I especially loved the creamsicles and fudgesicles from the freezer, as well as the 7-Up and Coke bottles from the cooler with the fascinating built-in bottle opener. When we visited, my dad would often wait on customers, so I would tag along into the store, and if I was lucky I would get a piece of candy. It sure seemed like a penny went a long way back then.

The store remained open for about 50 years, serving farmers and others who didn’t want to drive the five miles to Picture Rocks to the next closest store.

In today's era of chain convenience stores, this almost seems like a relic from an unimaginable world many years ago.

Which I guess it was.

Dressed to kill.....

For a Sunday-School teaching, God-fearing, member of the Order of the Eastern Star farm wife, my grandmother was plenty tough. I think she had to be.

My grandparents used to have boarders during hunting season; men from out-of-town (mostly near Philadelphia), would come and stay at the big farmhouse for several days during doe and buck season. This photo was from a hunter named Joe and was taken in December 1956 (the back of the photo was inscribed). This particular hunter went home without his buck and signed off, “Better Luck Next Year.”

My grandfather by this point did not hunt (nor did my grandmother) as he was too busy with this farming chores and slowing down from the crippling effects of arthritis. Not sure why Orpha was holding the gun (there is the chance they were about to head out to the smokehouse to kill something for supper), but more-than-likely she was just holding it for posterity. I never saw her shoot anything, but she did cook up a mess of critters and wild game. And made a mean applesauce from the apple trees in the back yard.

And I never, ever saw her in anything but a dress – her “Sunday go-to-meeting” dresses, as she called them, and her everyday working house dresses, which could also double as her gun-totin’ dress.

Open to pain and crossed by the rain

My grandmother on my dad’s side left me the family photo album after she passed away. It’s been sitting in a box for a few years, and I’ve decided, as this blog is purportedly a testament to what has gone before in my life, to pick some of those that are most representative to showcase for my stated purpose of “Farther On.”

Given how mementos if not memories have disappeared from the combined Lockard/Warburton household, this is priceless stuff to me, and it is well past time to get it documented. So this is the first in a series that I will be sprinkling into my posts.

While we obviously had a camera in our family, there are precious few photos of my immediate family. This is the only known photo of the four Lockards as a unit from Grace Ave. in Shavertown, Pa. There are several others that contain all of us, but other family members have wandered into the frames.

This was taken in front of my paternal grandparents farmhouse in Huntersville, Pa. I imagine my grandmother (Orpha, the one who had the photo album) took the photo, and probably snapped it with a Kodak Instamatic. She must have literally been standing in the road when the photo was taken, as the front door of the house was only about 10-12 feet from the winding road that was Route 87.

By this time, my grandfather (Pappy, we called him), would be retired from farming and walking with two canes, severely crippled from arthritis. That is mostly how I remember him, moving about in such a labored manner from the kitchen through a storage room to wait on customers in a general store that was attached to their home. Pictures of that are forthcoming.

This photo finds us in summer with open upstairs bedroom windows. It could be stifling in the big old place as circulating air was hard to come by. The gutters need attention and the house looks like it needs a paint job as well; funny, in my memories the Lockard homestead at the corner of Dutchtown Road is sparkling, up-to-date and ready for the long haul. Just the way I thought of my family at the time of this photo.

My dad looks distressed about something (which was mostly unlike him then) and my mom is hidden, which is not surprising given her aversion to the camera. I am about four, which makes my brother around 14. And indeed, this is my family’s regular summer attire: No shorts (except me) and my mom in a dress.

In about 10 years or so, this unit would be blown up, and that look on my dad’s face would be very common. My mom would be gone, my brother would live 1200 miles away in Florida, and my dad and I would be muddling through on our own.