"Our family moved to my grandfather's homestead on the south side of what is now known as Downing Highway in about 1904. I was born there in 1905. The land was situated on both sides of the road, with a small creek at the end of our property. I was allowed to go to that creek, but not to the Macon. Flossie always told me there was a griffin under the bridge.

The house, garden and orchard were on the south side of the road, and after Addie was married, an ice house was torn down and a house built for her east of our house. On the west was a shed where father butchered his cattle for our winter's meat. He and Mother would put meat through the grinder to make sausage and they would fry down the fat for lard. There was headcheese to be made and hams to be smoked; apples and potatoes brought into the cellar and cider put in barrels for vinegar.

Downing's farm joined ours, and I recall Marion and Emery Downing, and the names of young Charley, Nellie and Nora. It seems to me that Titsworth land joined our apple orchard on the south.

The McCarberys lived near. There were children, but the only one I recall is Rhea, a tall pretty dark eyed, dark haired girl. There were Rose and Nancy, married to Underwoods. There was Nellie Curry, too, with red hair, I believe.

"On the north side of the road were the barn and farm buildings and back of that a woods. The field east of the barn was planted to corn. One year my father ploughed it round instead of square and in the center of the corn field he planted a watermelon patch, even yellow ones, and the first we had ever seen. At the end of the field to the east was the schoolhouse on land donated by George K. Getty. It was called the Getty School.

"There was an Irish Church somewhere along there to the north of us. As I recall, it was brick. On that road just across from the school was an old house with huge willow trees in front and Edmond Lloyd's family lived there. He fell into the basement, I believe, and broke his neck. Francis, Marjorie, and LaVern were the children, and Cindy, the wife. Once I had a birthday party and Vern gave me a beautiful little cup which I have had all these years.

"Peter Getty, my father's uncle, wanted my father to go 'out west' with him and thank goodness he didn't, for now I find that 'out west' was Minnesota, and that is colder than Michigan.

"I remember when Pa had his sale; the auctioneer and his cry. We took our three horses with us, Nell, Topsy and Prince, for Pa needed them to haul his tank wagon as he kept on threshing grain.

I was five or six years old when we moved to the old fairgrounds at Dundee. It was a miniature farm 25 acres. Uncle Charley helped put in the com and alfalfa. He used to plough up lost jewelry and money, I suppose lost at the Fair.

Here we lived in a big house, three bedrooms all with big clothes closets, and a large hall upstairs, and a big attic. Downstairs there was a parlor, parlor bedroom, sitting room, bedroom with clothes room, dining room, kitchen with coal room and washroom, a back porch, side porch, hall, bathroom and cellar, all leading off the kitchen. On the enclosed back porch a cream separator, a well where mother hung her cream and butter to keep cool, a washing machine run by a gas engine which was attached to the machine by a belt, and which was also used to pump water to the barn for the stock.

"We had a playhouse which had once been the ticket booth for the Fair Grounds on which the place was built. One of the display buildings my father used to store his threshing equipment. He had blacksmith tools there and an anvil where he repaired what he could. He built a new barn and corncrib and the chicken house was a remodeled Fair building; the 'judge's stand' was a place for the pigs.

A long lane led to a small wood lot where the cows pastured in summer and where I picked wild flowers and blackberries, wild strawberries and black eyed Susans, if I climbed through a convenient hole cut in the fence to the neighbor's lane and a few paces across another gate to the railroad tracks, the ones that led to Britton and beyond. There were thorn apple trees and a choke cherry along the fence that hemmed our lane and three huge stones about halfway to the wood lot and another one at the end of the fence that enclosed the corn field.

"What a wonderful place for a kid like me to grow up. I have always thanked my parents for a beautiful childhood.

"Blanche was the gardener. She had 'four o'clocks' planted all around the fence and sweet peas growing and blooming on the north side of the house, and a lovely garden. I brought a horse chestnut home from school and planted it by the kitchen walk. The south porch was screened by wild cucumber vines which provided nice shade on a hot day.

Blanche hatched three duck eggs by a hen one spring, and they found the little ditch that separated our place from the neighbors and one night when we came home here were the little ducks having a moonlight swim and talking away in their delight while mother hen walked the bank imploring them to come and go to bed.

"One other night we came home from the show and here was a big white grunting ghost on our lawn. Mom said, "Oh, that old hog is out again', so we had a job getting her back in her pen.

Blanche was a born teacher and held school daily when we were children. If Veyirl and I wouldn't play, we weren't all that crazy about school, she would teach the dolls propped up on stools and a chair for a desk.

She had two little white pigs when we were kids. They were runts, so Father gave them to her. She called them Fanny and Floyd. Eventually they died and we buried them, with many tears, in the corner of the apple orchard. This corner became burial place for chickens, birds, and whatever else, with stones at each grave head.

Addie's oldest was born when I was five years old and Flossie was married, and so Blanche was my big sister, my teacher, my love and comfort. She came out here two times before her death to see me.

"Pa bought a Ford and it was the kind you had to crank, a Model T, with an 'ooga, ooga' horn. One day, while cranking the car, the crank flew back and hit his arm and broke it.

"He would take us for a ride along the river road and the fireflies would come out and amuse us with their flashing lights. When he needed parts for his machinery we would all pile in and go to Toledo. He would take us to a restaurant to eat. Pa always ordered white fish. Then we would take in a Hoot Gibson or Tom Mix 'shootem up western'. We would pick up his parts and head for home. The side curtains were flopping and we kept warm under horsehide blankets.

"In the summer we would load Addie's family and us in the Ford and go to Wamplers Lake on a picnic with eight or nine people, lunch baskets, bathing suits, babies' necessities, and happy hearts in anticipation of a super holiday; not to mention fish poles, bait and straw hats.

"My father was a farmer and a sawyer. I remember him pointing out barns which he had sawed the lumber for. He was also a thresher of grain. He had a steam engine and a grain separator, a tank wagon which carried the water for the engine, a pair of bay horses that pulled it and he went from farm to farm threshing, starting with barley and on through the season. He even had an ensilage cutter for filling silos.

Then the farmers bought their own rigs and he went into the garage business. He bought out the Wadsworth Brothers in Dundee and opened his Square Deal Garage. Everyone knew him as Nub Getty. His sister named him that because he was so small. She called him 'Nubbin'.

Pa loved baseball, boxing matches and was good natured and full of fun. He loved cats and dogs, but had to shoot Old Ring, so he would never have another dog. He worked beyond his physical strength, and was miserable with arthritis for years.

"My parents belonged to the Grange. They went to dances and card parties when young and later, in Dundee, I believe Pa was an Odd Fellow and Ma, a Rebekah.

Sometimes a peddler with one of those huge suitcases stopped, selling Watkins, Rawleigh, Porter's Pain King, and products of that nature. There was one that Pa called Jake the Peddler. A grocery wagon stopped by the farm regularly and Ma bought such things as Quaker Oats, sugar, flour, salt and soap. Sometimes the Quaker Oats contained a teddy bear as a prize, cut from some sort of paper, would curl up and do tricks in your hand if you blew on it first. Also stick candy with a finger ring around it, which was very popular with me at the time. Fairy soap and The Gold Dust Twins Cleanser, also ball bluing and Fels Naptha soap, were found in our home. How times have changed in fifty years.

"When we were still living on the farm, George (Roggeman) came with a horse and cutter and took Flossie for a ride and took me along, too. We were all packed in under the white fur robe.

"It may have been the same winter on Christmas morning that Pa was so excited and told us to come out and see Santa's reindeer's tracks in the snow. Sure enough there they were and on the roof top, too, however I could not see them up there. Well, the tracks on the ground were real enough. The cows had gotten out in the night, but that was the story Pa was telling to please his family. Christmas was always beautiful.

"After awhile the place got too big for my parents. My mother had kept the whole lawn mowed, the garden planted, the butter churned, the chickens hatched and off to market along with all the other chores, so they sold it around 1918.

It nearly broke my heart, but I realized that my parents were getting on and it was too much work for them. We rented a place on Pearl St. for a year or so and then bought the 'treasure house' (the house where the old Getty portraits were found, mentioned in the Introduction), and lived there until my father passed away of a stroke in 1929.

The 'treasure house' which was on the same street where we lived, was the home of a dear old friend, Lyda Kent. One morning it caught on fire in the kitchen and she was so badly burned that she did not survive. Pa bought her house and had to remodel it some. He closed off the only storage place there was at the top of the stairs. He left a crawl space to it but it was difficult to get into that space. The big pictures which had graced our parlor and sitting room in the big house just overwhelmed the smaller one and so were stacked in the hallway upstairs. I have never been able to stand clutter, and so laboriously I hauled each picture through that tiny crawl space and into the storage room along with the postcard albums and the rest of the clutter, one at a time.

When remodeling, my father added a two car garage and coal bins hard and soft we had one of those wonderful old hard coal burners, and a room for Ma's washer, a sink for drainage and a place for our oil stove on which we cooked in hot weather. My son was born there and my father died there. What a blow to the family when he passed away and my sister Addie was killed in an automobile accident six months later.

"Ma tried to live in the house after my father's death. I was married by this time, and my son was two years old. We lived two houses down from my mother, and Veyirl lived two houses down from us, so we were near her. She decided to have her brother, Uncle Charley, come and live with her, but that didn't work either. He dug up her flowers, or hoed them out, and when fall came she decided to rent the house to a teacher, and live with Veyirl and Dewey for the winter.

I went back to work when Don was a year old and my baby sitter graduated from school so Veyirl cared for Don along with her 1 year old Robert, who died of pneumonia and measles at age seven. Mom lived with Veyirl during the winter and when the teacher moved out, after the school term ended, I rented her house and paid her for looking after Don, so we lived there until she decided to sell the place to her sister and brother in law, Bertha and Frank Monk. We then moved into an upper apartment.

We were so forlorn after Pa's death. Veyirl was the only one really settled. Addie was killed in a car accident (the car hit a horse) six months after my father's death, and Flossie was living on a rented farm in a small house. Blanche was on a farm in Northern Michigan and practically starving because of her husband's illness. The Great Depression had us all in its choking grasp.

• "Addie was born to Ervin and Lena Belle Getty on March 16, 1891. She married Ralph Raymond Roggerman. She was killed in an accident on November 26, 1929.
   

• "Flossie Mae was born. January 30, 1893, and married George Roggeman September 27, 1911, in Dundee. Flossie died in a nursing home in December 1978, George died in Lansing November 15, 1977.
   

• "Blanche Irene (1898  1974) married Elmer Durward Rolph (1898  1960).
   

• "Veyirl (1902) married Dewey John Wittkop (1899  1972).
   

• "Alice Naomi (1905) married (1) Elmer Koster (2) Gordon Gretsinger (1904  1980). "
   

• Doras Helen was born March 12, 1908. She died July 24, 1909, at the age of 1 yr. 4 mo. 12 days. Cause  hydrocephalus."