This story starts out long before any of us three boys were born. A young fellow who lived in the neighborhood of German Hill wanted to go to Tunkhannock to buy a new shotgun. He’d hitched a ride with a neighbor and as most of the way home he would be going through woods and brushland, he had loaded his new gun thinking he might get a shot at some game. Just opposite to where the shortcut came back on the main road, there was a cowbarn. A young farmhand had seen the team and wagon coming down the hill and was leaning on the windowsill watching. He called out to George Shippey, the young fellow with the gun, “What have you got there, George, a new gun?” To which Shippey answered, “Yeah. Wanna see how it works?” And with that he pulled the gun to his shoulder and fired. Whether he had forgotten that he had loaded the gun, or maybe he just intended to blast the side of the barn, anyway, the charge struck the man and he died from it. Shippey was sentenced to twenty-two years in prison. 
By the time we came into the picture, he had served his time and was a little past middle aged and was living in a cabin by a swampy pond that was called Shippey’s Pond. We were too young to know what kind of a life he lived, who he neighbored with, or how he survived. We knew his pond was full of suckers and in the spring when they were spawning, they would fill all the little feeder streams. Sometimes a group of men with torches and spears would kill a lot of fish, throw them in a wagon box, and then next day drive around and give them to the neighbors.
Our oldest brother, Jady, found he could wade up close to a cutbank and feel in the grass and weeds suckers lined up there. By bringing his hand up under them he could grab them by the tail and throw them up on the bank. 
One day we were walking by the pond and Bob noticed that the door of the cabin was halfway open. No one was in sight and Bob said, “I’m gonna see what it looks like in there.” He had gone about halfway to the cabin when George himself walked out. A big man with a big moustache, dressed in rough clothes and looking very serious. There was so much mystery and speculation among the kids at school that even bold Robert decided we had urgent business right on up the road so we never exchanged any words with the man. That road is gone, the pond is now called Flowing Pond, and there’s a golf course right by it.
Jady was so shy as a child he wouldn’t go to school unless Bob went with him so Bob started first grade when he was four years old. He and my two sisters Sally and Elsie would start right in talking with strangers but Jady and our youngest sister, Lucille, were painfully shy. I felt awkward around strangers. Our youngest brother, John, found out he had Diabetes when he was thirteen and overheard a visiting woman say, “Well he’ll never see twenty-one”. So John lived the rest of his life believing that and lived accordingly, eating too much sweets and then taking too much medicine. Bob and I visited our relatives in Minneapolis where we celebrated Bob’s birthday on the seventeenth - his 97th. He told us of a lady acquaintance who had a cough that she couldn’t seem to get rid of and wanted to know if he knew of a cure. Bob told her to take a dose of Epsom Salts. “Would that help?” she asked. “Well, you wouldn’t dare cough,” Bob told her.