I don't
remember much before school but was told we lived several
places because of the Great Depression Dad worked for different
farmers and didn't have steady work. When I was six we lived
on the west side of Grandma and
Grandpa's house on Dixon Road and lived there until
William got married and needed the house because he worked
the farm so we moved to S.
Custer Road behind the grocery store.
The rooms were connected to
the store with a door which was kept locked of course. I
walked to Bridge School
from there with Elizabeth Reber and Clyde Opfermann.
From there we moved to the
Reber homestead on Dixon
Road. We lived there until 1946 when my parents bought the
house on 7758 S. Custer.
Mother lived there until she died. I lived there until I
married in 1949. After the Great Depression Dad got a job at
Consolidated Paper Company in Monroe and retired from there.
It was a good place to work.
One
of my memories of this house comes from the fact that I used
to trap muskrats on the banks of the River Raisin. Roger Heiden was one of the people who would buy the pelts. My
dad, 
Speaking
of hockey pucks. I remember saving broken baseball bats and
cutting a cross section slice about the size of a hockey
puck. We would then wrap it in athletic tap and use it for
games on the river ice. We would tape pieces of cardboard
onto our legs to act as shin guards.
The
river was named "Riviere aux Raisin" by the French-Canadian people
that first settled in Monroe County. They called it the River Raisin
because of the wild grapes growing along its banks. This led to the
naming of
