Tood's Town XVI

Corncob Harry had a farm about a half mile west of Tood's Town. Corncob was unique in a couple of respects. First, as far as I know Corncob Harry never drove an automobile into town. His mode of transportation was a vintage Ford tractor with a small trailer in tow.

Whenever Corncob Harry came to town he was more likely than not to be the subject of a prank. Often, the young guys in town would put a smoke bomb on his tractor. Corncob would fire up his tractor and there would be small explosion followed by lot's of smoke. Sometimes, the explosion would break a spark plug. Calmly, Corncob would dismount his tractor, remove the offending bomb, and drive away. As far as I know, Corncob never retaliated for the vandalism practiced on his tractor.

The second unusual aspect of Corncob Harry's life was his interest in, what else, corncobs. At least several times a week, and maybe everyday, Corncob Harry would take his tractor and trailer to the Cairo Elevator and fill the trailer with corncobs. The trailer was relatively small about 4' by 6' and had 4 or 5 foot side boards to increase the quantity of corncobs he could haul on each trip.

He used the corncobs as fill for a low wet lot behind his barn. I don't know if he ever gained any ground on the wetness, but he certainly hauled an incredible quantity of cobs from Tood's Town.

Dillard Farnsworth

Tood's Town XV

It was 1947 and I was in the third grade when I first encountered the unexpected death of a friend.

His name was Paul Keller. Paul lived in a small house located on the west side of Route 65 about a mile and a quarter north of Tood's Town. The house was covered with a type of tar paper siding which had coarse grains of sand embedded in it. It was a common type of siding for houses at that time.

I also remember that there was an old pine tree in the front yard of Paul's house.

Paul was an all-American boy. Physically fit and very active.

If I remember correctly, I got to know Paul sometime in the middle of my third grade year and we became good friends over the remainder of the school year. I remember looking forward to going to school to be able to see Paul.

Late in the school year, Paul stopped coming to school. We were told that Paul had leukemia. We didn't understand much about leukemia until Paul died. In 1947, leukemia was a frightening, unpreventable, and incurable disease. Paul's death created an empty space in the pit of my stomach that didn't leave for several weeks.

Years later, when I rode the school bus or drove my car along Route 65 from Tood's Town to Columbus Grove on my way to high school or otherwise, the sight of that pine tree would bring back the empty feeling in my stomach. Even today, some 60 years later, when Paul comes to my mind, I feel the lump of emptiness.

It was near the time of Paul's death that polio was epidemic in the United States. In Cairo several people were struck down with paralysis caused by polio. Our family escaped infection (or at least the paralysis) but a couple of my school friends contracted polio and suffered permant crippling damage to their arms and legs. Sometimes whole bodies were affected by nerve damage caused by the virus, but more commonly nerve damage resulted in arms and legs that were partially or completely paralyzed. For those who had paralysis of the diaphram, the hospitals used "iron lungs" to assist in breathing.

At that time, the origins and method of transmission of the polio virus were unknown to the people of Tood's Town. I remember that there was much speculation among the adults that the water in swimming pools was a source of the polio virus.

It was sometime in the mid-1950s that Dr. Jonas Salk developed a "killed virus" vaccine that prevented infection by the polio virus and several years later when Dr. Albert Sabin developed the oral polio vaccine made from live polio virus. The Salk vaccine was delivered by hypodermic needles and Sabin was a dot of liquid on a sugar cube that was eaten. If I remember correctly, I got an injection of the Salk vaccine from Dr. Miller and later got 3 doses of the Sabin vaccine distributed on Sunday afternoons in local school buildings.

Dillard Farnsworth

Tood's Town XIV

The image is a Lincoln Highway Memorial that was apparently built in Cairo in 1929. Additional information about the Memorial is being sought. Apparently, it was torn down within a few years of being built as no one currently living in Cairo has been able to provide any information about it.

The Lincoln Highway was from about 1937 until a U.S. Route 30 by-pass was constructed about a mile and a quarter south Main Street in Tood's Town. I remember a small red white and blue Lincoln Highway sign located near the intersection of Route 30 and Ohio Route 65.

Now to Tood's Town XIV. In my case, I have always believed and attempted to practice the old saying that “it is better to be quiet and let others think you are a fool than to speak and remove all doubt”. Additionally, my mind often requires input from others to start the process of thought that produces a verbal response. It is only occasionally that I have an unprovoked thought that requires me to start a conversation.

“Filling the air with words.” That’s how my father characterized conversation among family members. He was, when among his male friends, an outgoing and very talkative person, but at home with his family, he was generally reticent and saw no reason to merely fill the air with words.

I believe that this characteristic is not unusual among men although I have encountered families where the males are much more verbal than ours.

The non-verbal characteristic has carried over to most of my siblings and me. Also, I see this same practice of silence in my children, and male relatives on my father’s side and remember it was also present to an extreme in my paternal grandfather. An example, I believe, of the adage that a seed doesn’t fall far from the tree. In all probability it is a characteristic that is a small part genetic pre-disposition and in large part environmental experience.

On the other hand, when he chose to speak my father’s words often contained important life messages. History has confirmed many of those messages and proved others wrong. Sometimes, the messages were also humorous.

As stated in a previous posting, my dad was a horse trader and he also bought and sold used stuff of all kinds. A saying that I remember from my childhood coming from my father was "Nobody knows what they own is worth". I didn't really understand what he was saying until I started buying and selling stuff myself. I found it is almost universally true that people who are selling something do not know what it is worth. Many people believe their stuff is worth far more than it actually is while some place a very low value on their stuff. Nobody knows what they own is worth. I believe purchasing and sales agents exist because of this ignorance which exists in sellers and buyers.

One time, in the fall of the year in the late 1960s, a sportsman friend from Cleveland, Ohio asked me to take him to Tood’s Town to hunt for rabbits and Chinese ring neck pheasants. At that time, the pheasant population was low due to the widespread use of DDT as a pesticide by the farmers. However, my friend was convinced there were more pheasants around Tood’s Town than around Cleveland so off to Cairo we went. We hunted for a couple of days around Tood’s Town and stayed at our family home. Now my friend was prone to fill the air with words. Just how much he talked was brought home to me when my father commented to me as we were getting into the car to return to Cleveland “I’ll bet you don’t have to talk to yourself on the way home”.

Dillard Farnsworth

Tood's Town XIII

When I was a youngster, we lived on Yount Street (which was also known as Pigturd Alley) in what was then the first house south of Main Street on the West side of the Alley. It is now the second house after George T. bought the Restaurant and built a house and garage on the Restaurant lot.

From my earliest memory, we always had animals. The first I remember were goats and dogs.

Brown and white goats. Both the nannies and billies had waddles and horns. Baby goats were frequent. The nannies were milked when fresh.

I noticed that goats thought they were people. They would seek out humans and stand around listening to conversations as if they understood and would often contribute to the conversation by bleating. The goats were constant and good companions for youngsters.

My dad had a small lot just 4 lots further south of our house on the alley. The lot was between Kenny McNamara's and Lemuel Jennings houses. There was an old small wooden shed on the east end of the lot. Dad put up a fence, got some rabbit pens, rabbits, chickens and ponies. There was a well at the west end of the lot where we put a horse trough. From memory, the lot was about 50' x 200' or smaller.

My brother Harry and I each had our own pony. Harry had a very spirited, fast black and white pony named June and I had a poorly coordinated, slow, brown, long haired pony named Topsy. We spent countless hours of the spring, summer, fall and winter riding those ponies around the periphery of the lot. We always rode bare back and usually without bridles. There were a couple of scrubby trees and a brush & trash pile in the center. But there was plenty of room for racing. Topsy & I never won a single race.

We were charged with feeding and watering the chickens, rabbits and ponies. These chores were usually, but not always performed. Sometimes baseball games or hiking trips would interfere and prevent us from accomplishing our assigned tasks. It seems like we were always caught when we didn't feed the animals or clean their cages and paid the price by getting a whipping.

My dad was a horse trader and would frequently bring home horses and ponies. Usually the horses were mean from mistreatment or neglect or were otherwise unmanageable. He would get them back to relatively good behavior one way or the other and try to sell them for a small profit. I remember that in about 1947 or 1948 that horses were readily available for $20 - $30 and ponies for $40 - $60. I never understood why people would pay more for a pony than for a full sized horse.

Animals tend to escape from capitivity. One horse got out during the height of the sweet corn season and overate the green corn. I don't understand the reasons, but overeating green corn often results in a painful joint disease in horses which is called "foundering". Well, this unlucky horse was badly foundered. I think that there was no cure for foundering at that time, but Dad had heard that it could be cured by having the horse stand in mud. So we built a mud pit in the shed and for several months we carried water from the pump by the bucketfull and the horse stood in mud well above its hocks. In retrospect, mud doesn't cure foundering. The horse was gimpy for the rest of its life, but hopefully the mud reduced some of its pain.

Over the years, we had a variety of monkeys. Spider monkeys, proboscis monkeys, little monkeys, and big square monkeys. All of them had a propensity to bite and we were never able to get them out of this painful habit. As a result, we weren't able to play with the monkeys.

Our chickens were usually very colorful bantam chickens that laid eggs of various colors. Occasionally, we would have some heavy chickens, Rhode Island Reds and Whites. The chickens provided eggs and meat and the rabbits were also raised for food.

We also raised some pigeons, ducks, peacocks, Guinea fowl, geese and turkeys.

Among my Dad's favorite animals were small ponies. We had a 36" pony stallion named Champ for many years. He was a smart looking (and acting) pony. We had a two wheeled racing cart and harness for Champ. On Sundays, Dad would hitch the pony to the cart and drive around for an hour or so. From time to time, we also had pony teams and a minature wagon, it looked very much like a small Budweiser beer wagon, that he would drive around Tood's Town. It was clear to me that he enjoyed his childhood on a farm where horses and ponies were a necessity.

My older brothers had horses which they rode in the various horse shows that were held in the area. One of the horses was a black midsized mare. She was apparently a ranch horse. She had a Lazy K brand (the K was laying on its back). We had Lazy K for a long period of time.

Over the years, we had more dogs than I can remember. Most of them came to us for the same reason we got some of the horses. They were mean and their owners couldn't manage them. Usually, the dogs would calm down after we had them for a while and become good pets but not always. Some just enjoyed being mean.

Dillard Farnsworth

Tood's Town XII

One day in May 1957, I decided that I had spent enough winters in Northern Ohio. I decided the solution was to move to Florida.

Someone suggested that Tampa - St. Petersburg was a nice area. I bought a round trip ticket on Greyhound bus to Tampa Florida for $60 and left home the morning after my high school graduation ceremony. My plan was to live permanently in Florida or some other location with a less severe winter climate than Northern Ohio.

I lived with a sister (can’t remember her name) of Tood's Town residents Harold (Wansfelt Wonder of the Wasteland), Lowell (Hoppy) and Charles Jennings (former Marine, too big, serious and intimidating to have a nickname) in Bradenton, Florida.

I looked for work every day for 6 weeks. I also spent a lot of time in the Bradenton city park on the Manitee River talking to retirees from the North and watching Manitees which were fairly common in those days. Most of the retirees recommended that I return to Ohio because of the absence of industry and jobs in the Tampa area.

I finally found a job. However, the job was working in the freezer of a frozen orange juice plant.

I did not report to work. In another quickly reached decision, I decided that it was better to live in Northern Ohio and suffer 6 months of winter than to work 300 days, 8 hours a day in – 40 degree Fahrenheit freezer forever. I used the return portion of my ticket, got on a Greyhound bus the next morning and came back to Tood's Town. I didn’t leave again until I got married, graduated from engineering and law school and moved to Southfield, Michigan for a job as a patent liaison/attorney with the Eaton Research Center located on the Northwestern Highway between 10 1/2 Mile and Lahser Roads.

Dillard Farnsworth

Tood's Town XI

This is a postcard picture of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Depot in Tood's Town, Cairo, Ohio. This photo was taken before my time in Cairo and I can't really estimate the date of the photograph. Obviously it was before the street was paved. The street just to the north of the Depot is Main Street in Cairo and is a part of U.S. Route 30 which is the Lincoln Highway. It is my understanding that Route 30 was paved through Cairo in about 1937. The photograph could have been taken years before that.

Regardless of when the photo was taken, the Depot (and other buildings shown in the photograph) changed very little, if at all, between the time of the photo and my time in Cairo. The color of the Depot was changed from the photo. I remember it as being a beige color not the dark color shown in the photo.

The depot was located south of Main Street and west of the B&O right of way. In the background the taller dark building is the Cairo Elevator, which was a stock company when I was living in Cairo in the 1940s through the 1950s. The elevator is still there and still buys and sells grain and performs other services on behalf of the area farmers. I believe that it is owned by a farmer's cooperative that also owns the Columbus Grove Ohio elevator about 6 miles to the north.

At the end of the siding, there was a loading dock built from railroad ties for loading cattle onto train cars. I do not remember the dock being used while I was living in Cairo, but my mother told me that some of her relatives raised cattle and used the dock and the railroad to ship cattle to market.

The white building in the background to the immediate right of the depot was the home of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows lodge on the upper floor and and a burial vault factory on the lower floor. There Shelton Brenneman built burial vaults from concrete one at a time. Sheldy's shop was another place, where as boys, we visited almost every day.

The main elevator building shown in the photo had been expanded somewhat from the photograph at the time I was living in Cairo. Also, immediately behind the Elevator building, the Elevator had built a 150 foot tall concrete silo structure for drying and storing grain which was referred to as a "bean dryer". The bean dryer is by far the tallest structure in Cairo and is the landmark for locating Cairo for miles in the flat farmland surrounding Cairo.

From the early 1940s until about 1955, our family home was located just to the south of the Depot on the east (left) side of the railroad tracks. Our house is not visible in the photograph, but it is located about 20 feet to the east of the main line of the railroad.

The photograph appears to show a mail bag transfer structure on the east side of the tracks across from the Depot. When we lived on the railroad tracks, the mail bag transfer structure was located just to the south of our house in front of Marion "Corn" Rasors' house. The mail bag was held in position between upper and lower horizontally extending arms. The mail car was equipped with a hook that was extended and caught the center of the mail bag. The person extending the arm to catch the outgoing mail would also kick an incoming mail bag from the car almost simultaneously. In years of watching the transfer, I never saw an outgoing mail bag that was missed.

I spent part of almost everyday, sometimes a major part of the day, in the Depot watching the stationmaster, Vernon Sloan, play with the telegraph key and coordinate the small flow of freight and passengers in and out of Tood's Town. The telegraph was almost always clicking away transmitting messages about railroad traffic in Morse code. In my recollection, the messages were virtually never for the Cairo stationmaster. Most of the messages involved events in Lima, Leipsic, or Toledo.

Most of the railroad activity in Cairo was to pick up mail and box cars of grain that had been stored in the Elevator and sold to a grain dealer, Anderson's, on the Maumee River in Toledo. Anderson's are still there on the North bank of the Maumee River at Interstate 75 in Toledo. At that time, Anderson's was a relatively small family business. Today, judging from the size of the Toledo location, Anderson's appears to be a huge, international business.

In the mid to late 1950s, the American Agricultural Chemical Company ("Agrico") built and operated a large agricultural chemical plant (fertilizer) one mile north of Cairo on Route 65. This plant provided employment for several local residents. Given the weight of the fertilizer bags and the oppressive fertilizer dust, the work was brutal. I worked for a month or so at the Agrico plant stacking 50 pound bags of fertilizer.

Like me, most people worked at Agrico for only a short period of time because the work was so physical and filthy. The fertilizer dust was everywhere and could not have been beneficial for the lungs. Dust masks were required but only partially effective. In addition, the plant manufactured sulphuric acid for use in the fertilizer. The vapors of sulphuric acid were very caustic and permeated everywhere throughout the plant and well beyond.

In the summer of 1957, I worked at the Agrico plant building a railroad spur from the B&O railroad which bordered the plant on the east. The spur we built was only about a half mile long, but involved tremendous physical effort. Moving sections of rail and railroad ties, placing the ties and laying the rails using spikes and hammers put me in the best physical condition of my life. In the first days of building the spur, I would go to work at 7:00 a.m., work until 6:00 p.m. and go home and go to bed in my clothes and sleep until it was time to go back to work the next day. I thought I was in good condition when I started, but it took more than one week to get into the physical condition required to do a full day's work without reaching the point of exhaustion.

In an earlier blog, I told part of the story of Paul Cahill. Paul spent the last 2 or 3 years of his life setting on the step of the doorway to the Depot that is nearest the photographer. During that period, Paul seldom spoke, he just set in the doorway with his cane between his legs and stared. Stared at nothing in Tood's Town but stared at things he had experienced during his service in the islands of the South Pacific and especially in Bataan.

The north end of the Depot was the passenger area. Not many passengers used the railroad for transportation in the 1940s and even less in the 1950s, but the passenger area was well maintained. I estimated that the passenger area was about 20' x 20'. It was nicely paneled in a dark wood and included a low wooden bench along almost the entire periphery of the north, west and south walls. The floor of the passenger area was also wood. The floors of station master and freight areas were wooden planks. There was a cast iron wood stove in the south central part of the passenger area.

The south end of the Depot was for freight and housed tools used by the section crew. The section foreman was Lester "Peanut" Wood and his crew included Felix Thomas and Tiny Martz. They were responsible for maintaining the ties and tracks for several miles north and south of Tood's Town. They traveled to and from their work sites on a small motorized "hand car". The hand car was kept in a small yellow building across the tracks from and just south of the Elevator on the east side of the tracks. The "handcar" had steel wheels that matched the width of the track and a small gasoline engine that propelled the car at about 10 miles per hour. One of the things I remember about the handcar was a small wooden barrel (about 2 gallons) that hung from the back of the car and was the day's water supply for the section crew.

The stationmaster was located in the center portion of the Depot which can be identified in the photograph by the bay window which allowed the stationmaster to observe the tracks both north and south.

The Depot and the hand car shed no longer exist. I don't know when it was removed.

As a matter of interest and for reference, Tood's mother's house, with whom Tood lived was located on the east side of the tracks and just north of Main Street. The camera taking the photograph of the depot was apparently located near the Southwest corner of Tood's property when the photograph was taken.

Until later.

Dillard Farnsworth

Tood's Town X

This a Dillard Farnsworth "Believe it or not" blog.

I am immune to mosquito bites. It wasn't always so. When I was a youngster I was very much allegic to mosquito bites. A bite would itch so badly I couldn't sleep and I couldn't keep from scratching it until it bled. The bites on the webs between the fingers and around the ankles created especially severe reactions.

This unpleasant allergy continued until I was about 14 or 15 years old.

The Cairo baseball diamond was at the Memorial Park. I have described some aspects of the Park in earlier blogs. One feature of the Park not previously discussed was a drainage ditch that ran East and West along the Southern border of the Park about 100' to the South of the right field line of the ball field. This ditch was very nasty. It had a one foot thick mucky bottom that was full of leaches. If you stepped in the ditch, intentionally or unintentionally, and it took more than 10 seconds to extricate your foot, forget any shoe you were wearing. After leaving the ditch, you could count on having a minimum of two and perhaps as many as 10 of the 1 1/2 to 2 inch blood suckers attached to any bare skin.

The ditch also had a good population of snapping turtles.

My friend Bob Paulin and I used to set one line tied to a fence post with turtle hooks and beef brisket and suet and almost always we would catch a medium or large size snapping turtle after a day or two.

In any event, the ditch was a prolific producer of mosquitos.

The baseball diamond was laid out with home plate near the West end of the Park. Right field was to the East and left field to the North. The ditch ran parallel to the right field line and was, as I mentioned about 100' South of the right field foul line.

Most of the baseball games we played in the early 1950s would start at about 6:00 p.m. This was prime time for mosquitos.

As a poor fielder, I frequently got to play right field. The grass of the outfield was a perfect place for the young, hungry mosquitos emerging from the ditch to congregate and ambush the right fielder. And congregate they did. In huge numbers.

Being in right field, I became a primary target for the pests. Literally hundreds of mosquitos would attack at one time. They would cover my bare skin and were especially fond of the ankles where they would bite fiercely through the baseball socks we wore.

I would go home from the games in abject agony. Scratching the bites on my arms with my finger nails and those on my ankles by rubbing my lower legs together. Northern Ohio summer is a high temperature, high humidity area and this was in the days before air conditioning was common. Itching of mosquito bites is particularly severe during 80 plus degree and 80 plus % humidity nights. In fact, it is almost all consuming.

After several years of suffering through the several times per week experience of excruciating itching, I became immune to mosquito bites and have not had a mosquito bite that caused a reaction in 50 plus years.

Dillard Farnsworth