Some Observations from the Hill
by HH ‘Hub' Brown

 Have to tell you about some of my cooking experiences. As a kid, I was always interested in cooking. I didn't start as early as one of my great-grandsons. Gerry Ronan couldn't have been more than four when he would push his high chair over to his mother's electric stove and get a frying pan, put a little butter in it and get an egg, break it and turn on the burner. He must have had previous instructions for he kept the heat low, which makes an egg much nicer. 
 
When we first lived on the outskirts of Tunkhannock, there was a family that lived the next farm up the road. There were two boys a little older than Bob and me. They had a habit of celebrating Easter by going in the haymow shortly before Easter and hunting for hen's nests and collect the eggs hidden there.

 Then Easter morning they would head for the river with maybe about half a tin pail of eggs. Bob and I had been invited so we tagged along. There were some nice flat rocks at the top of the cliffs by the river. They would scoop up some water and hang the pail over a fire and boil the eggs. They would then see who could eat the most eggs. I remember one of the Evans boys eating 17 eggs. 

 When we moved downtown in Tunkhannock, some school kids must have found out that I could cook eggs for I would be invited on a Saturday morning to go down by the river to cook breakfast. They would have a good sized frying pan, some bread and butter, and a lot of eggs. They must have had some bad experiences cooking eggs for they always wanted me to cook the breakfast. We'd dump a bunch of eggs in the pan with butter in it, stir them up and then cook them slowly. When they were done and had cooled down, we'd cut them up like a pie and eat them.

 One time years later, Bob and some of the fellows he worked with had planned a deer hunting trip in the Adirondacks even though I had been out of work since the Fourth of July due to the infection from a bad tooth which had gotten into my jaw bone. I had had one operation in which the doctor had pulled two more teeth and made a big hollow in my jaw bone but hadn't gone quite far enough for my face had started to swell again. 

 I had been seeing the doctor every week and when I told him I was going deer hunting the next week, he said, "Can't you wait till next week for I'm going then?" 

 I told him the fellows had asked for time off a long time ago. So it was two weeks before I saw a doctor again.  Because I hadn't any money, I offered to do the cooking. Because hard wood is so hard to come up with, I always kept on the watch for some. One day, coming back to camp, I spied a little ridge covered with small dead hard maples. I went on to camp and got the camp axe and cut what poles I could carry and took them to camp. The next morning I used some of my hard maples and had burned them down so there was no flame and had a good cooking fire. 

 These fellows wanted a big dish of oatmeal and then pan cakes with either ham or bacon and eggs so I needed a good sized fire. I had to go in the cabin for something and while I was in there the youngest Gumble brother had heaped most of the rest of my maple wood on top of my cooking fire. When I came back out he said, "Well, Hub, I fixed your fire for you." 

 The sticks next the fire had already caught fire and flames were coming out of the top of the pile. I knocked some of the sticks off the pile and then I was so mad I grabbed him and away we went down the bank almost into the creek. Some of the other fellows pulled me off him, but we didn't get a very early start that morning.