It's a drizzly gloomy morning so I'll write of some happier times.  Ag's mother owned a little stone house on a two-acre lot on Lisle Road. When working the Sole Leather fell to three nights a week, Ag had suggested, "Why don't we move down to the cottage for the summer to save rent?"  So in April 1931 we moved in. The Mahars used to go and spend a couple weeks in the summer besides now and then a Sunday picnic. 

 We had two daughters when we moved there and our third daughter was born there.  Ag knew the conditions we would face there but she was a brave girl and didn't mind the difficulties, for there was no electricity on the hill until 1946. The water supply was a walled up spring in the back yard where you dipped up your water with a bucket on a rope.  After we had been there for a while we installed a pitcher pump with a copper pipe. This was a lot better, but there was one thing that you didn't want to forget, to always save some water to prime that pitcher pump.  

 That makes me think of the time years later when I felt sorry for our neighbor Billy Welch who lived then where we live now. He always got his water by dipping it up, except he used a chain and he had a weight on one side to help tip the pail over in the water.  There was a pump and a length of copper tubing at our place that wasn't being used and I offered it to Billy.  He didn't want any G-D---metal in his water.  It must have been alright for his animals though for the water to the barn and the spring house ran from a spring and under the road through a lead pipe.

 There were very few people that lived on the hill at that time. Our closest neighbor and friend was Ben Titus. Ben wasn't a big man but he wasn't afraid to tackle big jobs. There used to be some railroad ties that he had set the ties by himself. Ben's wife had been Irene Steenburg, who was Joe McTamney's aunt, Joe is known by most everybody as the owner and operator of  The Parkview Restaurant.  After Ben died Carl who been Ben's partner in the barbershop on Lake Street, Carl married Irene.

 After that there several people moved and left the house next door.  But the ones I remember  the most and best were a couple and their two daughters Les and May Lisk. Les had a job in the E.J. shoe factory and he also was a darn good fiddle player. 

 At that time in the Depression, just because you had a job in E.J. didn't mean you were fully occupied.  Most jobs were piecework and E.J. didn't believe in laying people off when work got scarce they just divided it up. You might have work on your type of work and then they would tell you about when to expect more of your kind of work, meanwhile you were a free agent. 

 Les and I used to get firewood together. He had an old Dodge car that was so low geared that he could load on a steep side hill and take off with no trouble. But I had made a little truck out of a 1928 Ford car and I had to have the length of the car on level ground to make it up the hills. On Les' side of the fence there was very little dead or dry wood. I often wondered how May made out having to burn green pole wood. We all had good time together.

 Last month I shorted my friend and brother-in-law Anthony Kritkausky.  Tony was a good M.D. in Binghamton for years and was a dear friend of mine. He was best man at Ag's and my wedding.