A Prairie Home Companion from American Public Media: First Person

Earliest Recollection
by James Buswell
March 7, 2007

I enjoy sharing stories about how it was growing up in the small town of Plymouth, Vermont. Passing my life experiences on to younger people and comparing notes with older people about days gone by is fun and interesting to me. Over the years, many of these people have asked me what were my earliest memories. My earliest recollections, strangely enough, were associated with pain.

Just as parents of today both work, my parents both worked. Before my parents were married in 1919. Mother had been a school teacher and Father was a jitney driver for the Governor of Vermont. After Mother was married she could no longer teach because the town had a ruling that a woman teacher could not be married. So my parents bought the Tyson General Store with a two story tenement house attached to the rear of the store to give Mother something to do. They sold general merchandise like food, clothing, gasoline, kerosene, wood and just about anything else that folks needed. They even cut ice at nearby Echo Lake and had an ice house where people could buy ice to cool their perishable foods. Mother was the postmaster as well as the store manager. Father eventually started a small farm and converted the tenement house into a barn to house a few cows, a couple of horses, some pigs and chickens. He also bought sugaring equipment and built a sugar house. This produced maple syrup to be sold in the store. Later on, Father began a small construction business and part of their work force was the four sons who came along in due time. Our house was across the road from the store which was handy for Mother.

Back then and through the years I was growing up, both my parents were working and my older brothers had their duties and chores to do so Mother took the younger ones to the store with her. When I was the baby and it was nap time, I was placed in an old spool crib in the rear corner of the store. When I was awake, she placed me and my brother Bill, who was two years older than me, in a fenced in porch on the side of the store. Now that the setting has been established, let me get to the pain part.

A special event that my folks liked to attend each year was the Rutland State Fair. Rutland was thirty miles away and in those days that was quite a far distance. In the 1930's, it was a long trip of at least an hour. The year that sticks in my mind, I was three years old and brother Bill was five. One of the performances at the fair that we were especially taken with was the trapeze performers with their daredevil high wire acts. I probably would not remember it today except for the pain I associated with it that befell me a short time later.

A few days after the Fair, Mother put Bill and me on the side porch as usual. We were playing and chattering about becoming trapeze performers. We decided to set up our own trapeze. All we needed was some rope and something to use as a platform that the performer could stand on. The porch had been closed in using woven wire like the wire used on a farm to contain animals in a pasture. This provided the ladder we needed to climb up and place the clothes line over the two by four rafter that unbeknownst to us had been deteriorating over the years from a leak in the porch roof. Now all we needed was the platform to begin our performance from. Naturally we were not discussing our project with anyone at this point. I'm not sure which one of us suggested that the ideal platform would be our sled that was stored on the porch. It's any ones guess how we were able to climb up that wire fence and get the clothes line over the two by four and hoist the sled up and fasten the rope to it to prepare for our exciting act high in the air. Well, six or seven feet up was pretty high to us.

There was no audience or the performance would have been called off, especially if Mother had been the audience. Decision time, who was to be the performer? Whoever was to be first was going to have to have some assistance in climbing up that wire fence and getting positioned on that wobbly sled. Bill, being the older and bigger of the two of us, could do a better job assisting me up the fence and onto the moving apparatus. With Bill's help I made it onto the sled. Was I scared? That's anyones' guess but the ensuing movement of the sled and me produced what could have turned out to be a fatal mistake.

What did happen next? The rotted two by four broke loose from the under side of the roof and sled, Jim and part of the rotten two by four came crashing down in a heap with the rusty nail sticking out of the side of the two by four imbedded in the back of my neck. That was the first real pain that I remember.

I'm sure it was the quick thinking of my Mother, upon hearing the commotion and my screaming and Bill yelling that save me. She knew that Dr. Pappas was visiting a nearby neighbor and she summoned him to come immediately. The nail had missed a major artery in my neck. He cleansed the wound and eventually after much pain inserted a gauze wick soaked in iodine into the wound. To protect against infection, I was taken to Dr. Pappas every day for several days to have the wick removed and a new wick saturated with iodine inserted, until it was healed. That pain was bad. I don't believe they had Novocaine back then. And iodine really burns. You don't hear of it being used much anymore. If not used properly it can seal over a wound with the infection inside and thereby create worse problems.

I did manage to grow up and experience many more bumps and bruises that were sometimes very painful but none that made the impresssion on me like the first one did.

About the author:
I have many stories I like to relate regarding one room country schools, life on the farm, acquiring a college Agricultural Engineering degree, farm visits in the thirteen Northeast States during the course of my working life and much, much more. Telling children what life was like sixty plus years ago is fun for me and I hope helpful to them in learning how to deal with life in a positive way while enjoying the world around us.