In the beginning, the summer of 66

Memories over a span of forty-five years become foggy and eventually they pass for fact. So please excuse me for all the facts that I have imagined and please feel free to dispute them and add your own version.

   To me the story of the farm upstate begins at the turn of the twentieth century when Joseph August Muller builds a home on a dirt road that was eventually to be called

Klein Avenue

. During the depression he loses the house. The House is repurchased by his son, William in the early fifties, where he and his wife will raise four kids.

   On the north side of the house there are two building lots owned by Grant Pulley, located at the time at the corner of the Hackensack River and Route fifty-nine.

   A builder from Nyack with a shady background wanted to sell the top soil and put two houses on the lots. Anyone with knowledge of the area even now knows it was and is a swampy area.

   There is even a story about a train engine on a siding somewhere over near Phillips lane that sunk into the swamp. I wasn’t around so all I know is that sometime during the sixties sounding were taken of the area in preparation for building Phelps lane and supposedly a large mass was spotted on the sonar. History or fable who knows?

   The Town folk were in an uproar over the addition of two houses and the accompanying septic systems, they felt the land could not handle any more.

   One afternoon the builder knocked on Cornelia and Bill Muller’s back door. He wanted to sell one of the lots to them for the sum of twenty-five hundred dollars, they accepted. On the far lot a house that was on the Grant Pulley property was moved.

   My Mom remembers kids in the winter sleigh riding from the top soil hill and sliding under the house and out the front while the foundation was being finished.

   What does all this have to do with Upstate you might wonder? The first people to live in that house were Art and Holly Cockcroft. There son Brian became friends with Karl and Holly became good friends with my mom.

   The one think that stands out about Holly Cockcroft was she seemed to have her hair forever in curlers.

   Sometime in 1966, I think Karl was invited upstate to spend sometime with the Cockcrofts. Next we were all invited up. And like always, or almost always my dad didn’t go.

    We spent maybe a week or two up there. We picked blueberries, hunted for fossils and I think we even went to the County fair. We swam in the small home made ponds full of    frogs and rocks. You were told to wear sneakers in the pond, but never told why.

   Mrs. Cockcroft had an old blue car something out of the fifties and she called it Betsey. When she had to transverse the mile long dirt road, to and from their farm house, going up and down hills, trying to stay out of ruts and places where the water had pooled after a shower, she’d say, “come on Betsey, you can do it, don’t let me down.” And for my memories it never did.

   They had a large expanse of grass land that they would cut to keep the trees from filling in. They had a large mowing machine and I asked if I could mow some of the grass. For a parent or an adult this is why they have kids. What they find as drudgery, a child finds fun and exciting, so they let me. After a while Art Cockcroft waves me down and fills the mower with gas and clears some cut grass from the blades. I don’t know what happened next put he steps in front of the mower just as I put it in gear to go forward and I remember him jumping out of the way and me being very afraid that he would be angry at me. My mom kept telling me “No, he’s not angry; he knew you didn’t try to run him over.” They must have bought the farm when it was a working farm all the out buildings and a large portion of the fields were still in good condition.
  The Cockcroft's lived, summered in an old farm house. While we were there we slept in what was a living room or a palor.

I remember two over stuffed arm chairs, one blue, out of the forties or fifties that had been wedged between the beds.

  The out buildings that I remember was a horse barn, a chicken coop and furthest from the house a deluxe two seater outhouse. I don’t remember if the door had a half moon in it, but I do remember it smelled a little and  it was painted red, a barn red every building was painted the same color with the house having a silver tin roof.

  My sister, brother and I were asked if we wanted to paint the out-house, yes red. It was nineteen-sixty-six, my sister was six, Eric was four and I was the old man at eight. We were eager to paint and grabbed the brushes and paint. I don’t remember much about the next hour or so, but I got the brilliant to tell my sister and brother they should paint their arms. They thought it was a great idea. Heck back then I could tell them to stand on their heads in the middle of the road and cluck like a chicken or to paint their arms and they would ask how high we should go, which I answered all the way up. We were out of sight of adults so there was no one to stop the two of them from painting their arms. The paint was not a modern water based paint that would wash off. No this was an oil base paint that needed turpentine and elbow grease to remove. I went ahead of my younger siblings and watched as they came down the road so proud of themselves holding their barn red, almost blood red arms up above their head, laughing and smiling until either our mother or Mrs. Cockcroft asked what the heck have you two done? Their laughing and smiling changed quickly and I remember one of them saying “Joseph made us do it.” I must have gotten yelled at, but it was not something that I remember.

  Eric remembers Art Cockcroft taking turpentine and a wire brush to his arms and how much it hurt. I remember both of them being washed and I guess scrubbed on the front lawn.

  Life moves on and being a little kid on a farm there was always something to do. Someone had dug two small ponds down the bottom of the hill. The one on the left we didn’t go in and the one on the right we did, but only with our sneakers on. I never asked why, I guess I just thought that was the way it was done. We spent time down at the pond swimming and catching frogs and salamanders.

 We went for walks and picked blueberries, which back then I didn’t like. We hunted for fossils in the many stone walls that lined all fields.

  The first time I remember seeing the house we would by was when I walked down the trail between the Cockcroft’s and the Vines houses to play with their oldest son Billy. He was in my Sunday school class, but went to a different school then I did. I remember walking down the hill to the left of where the cow barn stood seeing Mr. Vines taking a board from the old garage and replacing a split piece off the south side of the house where the fireplace was. We played in the barn and I remember Billy swinging on a rope across the area that all the hay would be stored during the winter.

  The cow barn was huge. On the north wall were one or two doors that would slide open on the left was a small enclosure that was for young calves. There was a metal triangle thing with holes in it in the corner which I think was for feed. Across to the right of the doors was where hay was kept. I can still imagine it filled up with hay back when it was a working farm and on cold winter mornings the farmer  coming in the smell of hay heavy in the air, the smell of cows in the attached section waiting to be fed and let out .

  In the area where the cows were kept the manure bucket, a large metal half drum set up on a rail above it that the farmer would fill up and push down to the other end of the barn and out to be dumped in the manure spreader. When we owned the farm we use to ride it in, push it as fast as we could until it hit the end of the line with a loud solid thud.

 I spent time playing with Billy and I think he begun ignoring me and I got mad and decided to go back to the Cockcroft’s farm. I started up the hill following the road until about half way back when the road, more like indentations in the ground disappeared. I turned around to find the trail and I walked back and then I walked this way and I then walked that way and I crossed a dirt road and went up a steep hill and then I went down a steep hill and I crossed a dirt road and I was in open fields and then I was in a forest of old trees and somehow after all that walking I managed to return to the Cockcroft’s. I never told anyone how lost I ha d gotten. It would not be the last time over the years. I even got lost coming up from Rockland with my cousin Joe when we took route 88 instead of route 132 I think. One think to be sure of is if you take directions from me make sure I have already been lose there.

  One of the high lights of that summer was when we went to the Cobleskill fair. All the fairs for the first dozen years were all basically the same and are so different from the way it is now that it’s really from a different era.

  There were two different ways to go to the fair from the mountain. The first way was the quickest going down Richmondville hill, making a right and in through the main section of town, past the Dairy Queen, then another right and to the fair.

  The other way was Sawyer Hollow road, it was a slower decline and it gave you a chance to adjust to the change in altitude and to see some of the farms in the area. By coming down Sawyer Hollow you also avoided the traffic and you entered the fair grounds and were able to park inside the race track.

  One of the first smells and the smell that I associate with fairs and with summer would be the Cobleskill fire department’s tent where they would be cooking chicken over a large charcoal grill. Smoke would billow up and if it wasn’t the fire department doing the cooking I think someone would of called them to put out the fire at the fair. I never did eat any of the chicken, back then I didn’t eat much of anything different. I would eat there, but it would usually be burgers and fries.

  In those days all the barns would be full and you would go pass rows and rows of cow’s butts. Occasionally you would get treated to a freshly made cow pie. Sometimes you could watch it being made. I think there were four barns full of cows back then. You could also see the many different types of chickens and all the pigs and sheep and horses and there were even Clydesdales, these huge mountains of horses. They even had horse races, trotters with the sulkies, I think they are called. Back then I would get tired quickly of seeing all the animals and want to hit the midway as quickly as possible.

  In the sixties you had to pay to see the shows. There were always a sing group and Joey Chichwood’s thrill show. And the show of shows for me, the demolition derby. The announcer, whose name has been lost to time, it was always his production would stand up and announces the show telling the crowd the rules and announcing where each driver was from and what his number was. Sometime during the show he would start to pick on a certain car. He would tell a drive that if his car didn’t stop causing so much smoke he would be disqualified. He would keep on this driver until it got the crowd angry at the injustice. It wasn’t until years l figured out he did this to get the crowd riled up so they would be more into the show.  

   Joey Chichwood’s thrill show was filled with car stunts. Cars driving on two wheels, motorcycles driving through flaming boards and the infamous slide for life, which I think was a guy being pulled around the track at a high speed then letting go of the motorcycle and sliding through light gasoline, with the announcer saying very solemnly that if he stops short he could be seriously hurt. No one was ever hurt.