Some Observations from the Hill
by H. H. Hub Brown 

This winter reminds me of the one in 1934 only that year we had no snow. Our old neighbor Billy Welch said there was 19 straight days when it didn't get up to zero. 

 Ag was hauling the District 21 kids to town school that winter. We'd had an old ‘28 Model A but you had to have a four-door car to carry pupils. The Ford dealer, Mr. Tiffany, allowed me $63 on my old car. I asked him if he would hang on to it as we had to have two cars. He said he would so then I said maybe he'd let me use the ‘28 til I got hold of $63 to buy it back. So then he told me a story  why he couldn't do that. Seems he'd had a good friend come to him, said he had to have $50. So Fred said, "I took out $50 and he put it in his wallet." That night this friend had a heart attack and died. He said, "As I was the closest acquaintance he had they asked me to take care of his affairs." Mr. Tiffany said "When I emptied his pockets there was my $50 bill but I had nothing to prove it was mine." 

 So as soon as I got hold of that much or maybe I paid him on time, I don't remember, I bought the old car.

 The underlying soil in Endicott was all gravel and the water mains would freeze and then the men would dig down and build fires to thaw them out and sometimes before they got them covered back up they would freeze again.

 I didn't use antifreeze in my radiator that winter. I would fill it with hot after at home and when I got to work I'd open the petcock and let it drain. Then I'd fill it up with hot water again before starting for home. One night that didn't work though. By the time I got to the creek bridge in West Corners the radiator had frozen. I covered it up and let it steam awhile. By the time it was thawed out, I was low on water. I had a three-quart can with me, and I noticed in the lee of a rock there was a big bubble of ice. I broke the bubble and caught what water I needed. But by the time I had reached the top of the hill where IBM was built later it froze again. I'd had it partially covered so I covered it more and it soon thawed out. Then I drove down to Ernie's Diner. Thought I'd have a cup of coffee. 

 A cup of Ernie's coffee at that time of night was all coffee. It made me think of what a comical guy in Endicott said. He said, "you could skip a horse shoe off a dishpan of that coffee and never make a ripple." He was the same one that told them where he kept his thermometer. At 8:30 when we would eat our supper at night it was so cold, all the men would be gathered by some big tin heat duct to stay warm while eating lunch. Everyone would be bragging how cold it was at their place. Someone asked Guy how cold it had been at his house. He said it had been just zero. Then someone asked him where did he keep his thermometer and he said, "We always keep it right behind the kitchen stove."

 Some of the jobs were called gang work. Everyone got equal pay but you didn't always have the same partner. One night I was teamed up with a little Russian man and he was telling me he'd just bought a farm and the fixing they'd done. His daughter used to bring his supper in to him. He'd been talking about the farm and all at once he "I'll tell you what, Brown, you marry my daughter and I give you that farm." I said, "That skinny little kid?" And he was mad already. He said, "What the hell you want elephants?"