Growing Up With My Mother Flora

As I just noted, I raised chickens from an early age and when I got a part-time job on a nearby dairy farm as a teenager I paid for the chicken feed. We sold the extra eggs and I let my mom keep the money for herself - a small token for all she did for me.

My menagerie of living things during my teenage years included chickens, rabbits, pigeons, hamsters, goldfish, turkeys and ducks. We also raised a pig or two each year.

I still loved gardening, flowers, small fruits (especially strawberries), and vegetables. Because I either did it myself or assisted my dad with our little farm, my mother made whatever I wanted to eat especially deserts. Angel Food Cake (made from twelve egg whites) was always accompanied by a Sponge Cake (made from the twelve egg yolks) and later the two batters were swirled together to make a "Daffodil" cake. I loved her pies especially apple, strawberry rhubarb, custard and raisin! Her homemade fudge of every kind disappeared in a day or two especially with three kids who all liked it.

All of my 4-H Club members loved it when meetings were at my house because of the refreshments my mother served.

My mom did everything for our family; she even polished all our shoes! I loved her dearly and her mother, Gram King, also.

My dad was a meat and potatoes man, tough roast beef and steak, ham roast pork, fried crisp salt pork, chicken turkey (on holidays), organ meats like liver, beef heart and chicken's feet. He also favored smoked beef tongue, pickled lambs tongues and pig's hocks and pickled eggs!

My dad was a great and supportive father who drove me to all my events too far to walk of bike to. I was in Boy Scouts, 4-H Club and events, Church (Altar Boy), and took tap dancing lessons from the Mooney's in Northampton and in my teens I joined Easthampton Grange.

Dad built all the housing for my animals. He would not allow me to learn any practical carpentry skills, (but I did learn some because I watched him), because he and mom, neither of whom had finished High School, had decided that their first born son was going to college. My dad would yank a hammer out of my hand when I attempted to do some building work. "You're going to school, boy!"

I loved my dad, but as a youngster I was also afraid to buck him because if I did. I got a "backhander" in an instant. This was not a frequent occurrence but I always had a long memory and the few times I got a "backhander" made me leery of telling him anything that might earn me another one.

So, I clung mostly to my mother for emotional support. She was always there with a big hug as was my grandmother. Gram saw my dad whack me once when he caught me and a couple of my friends smoking corn silk in the field across the street from our house, and she told him never to hit me again or she'd call the police. My dad told her to mind her own business, but the feud soon blew over and my dad was back to taking my grandparents wherever they needed to be driven and was very kind to them.

Bernard J. Fleury, B.A. History and Classical Languages, Ed.D. Philosophy, Government, and Administration, is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Educational Administration. His administrative/teaching career spans more than five decades and three United States and Caribbean Colleges.

Dr. Fleury's lifelong interest in history from the perspective of the people who lived it, is evident in Chaps. VIII & IX in A Bee in His Bonnet (website: http://www.greatgeneration.net) that is his grandfather Frank King's Great Generation story as he recorded it, and told it to his daughter and grandchildren.