On the Moraine, Part XII

By Jim Thompson
HCP columnist

If you live in two places, you live as a vagabond. Living in two places means living in no place. We learned that in these years. I couldn’t participate in sports in Troy, because there were activities on the weekend, and we were on the farm on the weekends. Same with things like paper routes and so forth, which young people had in those days. Vice versa on the farm. Local kids there thought we were from Mars. Only a few of them had ever been as far as Dayton, let alone Troy. 

Our family was fairly well isolated from others, both in Troy and at the McNary farm. This was during the time that television was coming into vogue. Along about 1955 or so, my parents had bought a used one – full of tubes. Every few months, a service person had to come by and replace some tubes. Finally, we got a new one in a sleeker package. This was all in Troy.

However, television left our house for good when a new show came on called “Mr. Ed.” For you younger folks, this was a comedy about a talking horse. That was the end of television in our home. Dad said his boys were not going to grow up watching a talking horse in a plywood box.

We kept up with the Kennedy assassination on the radio.

I didn’t have a television again until late 1973, after I got married, a gap of about 14 or 15 years. Isolation. Not sure how it affected my brother and me, but I am sure it did.  

On the farm, we usually spent Dad’s vacations on the farm mowing, gardening and so forth. It was great to not be going back and forth and to be settled in one place for a while.  

One summer, when I was about 10 or so, we discovered a fox den in one of the fields. Harold Wagoner had come by and casually said that if you took four fox feet to the sheriff, they would give you $3 as a bounty. That was all I needed.

I rounded up a couple of shovels, a grubbing hoe, and my brother for extra labor. We went to the fox den and dug for three days. Kept following the hole wherever it would go. Never saw a fox or a remanent of a fox.  

After that episode was over, Dad took the tractor, a plow and a drag to the field to restore the place we had been digging. 

I was always trying something like this. Once I found a mass of frog eggs in the pond. I took them to Troy in a jar, and figured I would raise our own frogs for frog legs. That didn’t turn out so well. I forgot that when they hatched they would be needing food. I didn’t know what to feed them, so they died.

Perhaps growing up with these experiences was far superior to passively watching a talking horse in a plywood box.

Jim Thompson, formerly of Marshall, is a graduate of Hillsboro High School and the University of Cincinnati. He resides in Duluth, Ga. and is a columnist for The Highland County Press.