Memories of Growing Up

My father, John (Jack) Vadnais thankfully obliged me when I asked him to write about his memories of growing up.  What follows are some of the stories he wrote for me.  The day he sat down to type the following, he opened with “Cynthia has been after me to write my memoirs!”

”My name is John (Jack) R. Vadnais.  I was born in a home at 1309 Fourth Street, White Bear Lake, Minnesota on February 19, 1925.  I was born in the northwest bedroom in our home. The person that was with my Mother was a first cousin, Mildred Cardinal (LaBore).

I had five sisters and six brothers: George, Charles, Florence, Dick, Mona, Leona, Marguerite, Gordy and Anna Mae.  One brother Lawrence, died at 5 months old and another brother Henry died at about 5 years old.

We lived in a one and a half story home with a kitchen, front room, bedroom and a porch.  The second floor had two bedrooms and a small sun porch.  My five sisters slept in one bedroom.  My older brother had his own separate room.  Charles was away at a school for the deaf in Faribault.  Three of us brothers slept in the sun porch, which was large enough for one bed.

The heating of our home was with a pot-bellied stove located in the front room and a wood burning cooking stove in the kitchen.  Railroad ties were used for fuel in both stoves.  The ties were used and discarded by the railroad.  We had mountains of them stacked in the backyard by the time fall would roll around.  The saw we used to cut them down to size was called a luger.  It had a blade approximately two feet in diameter and was run by gas. [I suspect that it was the Waterloo Boy engine (Waterloo Boy eventually became John Deere) hooked up to a large circular saw blade.  It was one of the pieces of property Adlore got when he became the sole owner of White Bear Oil Company.]  My older brothers and father would cut the ties into stove size pieces.  The stoves would be stoked up before bed, but by many a morning they would be nearly cold.

One morning when I was about five years old, the temperature in the house was extremely cold.  We had no heating on the second story except that which came through the vents in the floor.  This particular morning, I grabbed my underwear in one hand and headed downstairs.  My mother was already getting breakfast and baking bread in the stove.  Bread had to be made every day and on Saturday, cinnamon rolls and baked beans were on the menu.  To warm up quickly I ran into the kitchen and sat down on the warm oven door which mother had just opened!  Boy, oh boy!  I really burned my bottom!

We had an outhouse in the backyard.  Most of the time we used catalogs for toilet tissue.  On Halloween it was a great fun prank to tip over the outhouses.  Some Halloweens the joke would be on us, for the outhouse owners would remove the houses before we got there.

In the late winter, a butchered pig was put on the front porch.  It was always covered up with a sheet.  When meat was needed, my mother would take a meat saw and cut what was required for supper. 

I believe I came by the nickname of Jack from Tony Buchal.  He brought in large amounts of potatoes which were put in the dirt floor basement of our house by the truckload, enough to last the entire winter.

At 5 years old I had a ruptured appendix and they gave me 1 hour to live, I fooled them all.  One day Sam Hane stopped at the house to buy gas (my mother had a gas pump along side of the house).  Sam asked how I was, my mother said I was not good, about that time I came out of the house with a tube hanging from my side. 

Our shoes came from a shoe barrel under the upstairs steps. When we needed a new pair of shoes, we would go the shoe barrel and get a pair.

In the summer time games like Annie, Annie Over would be played.  We would throw a ball over the garage for the other team to catch.  We would play other games like cops and robbers, too.  Our guns were made out of apple box ends, with cut rubber binders fitted over the ends.  We were then able to shoot the binders at one another.  There was always a game of softball going on.  Both boys and girls would participate in these games.  Marble games were played where the kids with the “good” shooter cleaned up in the game of “for keeps.”  The winner of that game got to keep the loser’s marbles.  Even old tires were quite the novelty.  We’d have a great time rolling them up and down the street.”

TO BE CONTINUED…

Thanks for visiting, come back soon,
Cindy

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