Published in Wetmore Spectator,
March 20, 1936
By John T. Bristow
T his, then, is the continuation of the story of my father’s tanyard; with related incidents—hoarded memories of the old days back a half century, and more. They are solemn reminders that “Time flies.”
That tanyard was, I might say, a howling success while it lasted. Besides the tanyard, my father owned a bunch of boys, and those boys, semi-obedient and helpful, really did some commendable things, but when encouraged and abetted by the other town boys of that happy, care-free age, their doings were not always something to be commended.
Taken by the large—including, of course, the English and the Irish and the “Dutch,” and a couple of Swedes — they were, I must admit, a dare-devil bunch. And I might as well confess now that I was, perhaps, the most devilish one of them all. Anyhow, I became a printer’s “devil” at an early age.
My father made good leather—and he knew how to get the most out of it. Being a shoemaker, he made it up into good boots and shoes and gave his boys a good leather dressing whenever they needed it—that is, when their deviltry came within his notice. The Lord knows there were hundreds of times when they escaped only by narrow margins. And had my father been a little more vigilant, this day of which I write promised to be the red-letter day.
There were two outstanding events that day, either of which would have merited knee-strap activity. In case you don’t know, the shoemaker’s knee-strap, besides being useful to hold a shoe in place while the artisan works, is a persuasive instrument of correction when applied with vim and vigor at the right time and place.
As already informed, in a previous article, the creek had been dammed and there was a fully officered Damsite Company, with Michael Norton as life-saver, whose actual services, as Jake Geyer now recalls, never amounted to more than his crossing himself three times before going into the water. A large wooden box, with metal bottom, used for cooking the sumac-tanbark mixture, when not otherwise in use served as a boat on that fine body of water.
Jim Cardwell, a Kentuckian — and brother-in-law of Andy Maxwell, the Indian fighter mentioned in previous writings—who held a responsible position as coal-heaver at the railroad chutes close to the tanyard, when not otherwise engaged, helped the boys occasionally with the work of maintaining the dam—and even helped my father sometimes. All this he did out of the goodness of his heart, glad to be helpful. He was a grand old sport, even with his one weakness. Jim loved his booze and seemed to have a mania for sharing his bottle with others. He even gave Eagle Eye, the Indian featured in a preceding story, a nip of his “firewater” one day, and my father raised Ned about that. It was unlawful to give liquor to an Indian.