Howard Herron Memoir - University of Illinois Springfield

Howard Herron 9
I remember starting to school, I went to school, that was the first time
I went to school. Right by my house was a big ravine and my father used
to set traps out there and I seen my first skunk out there. I went to
school there the first year and then the next year we moved to Auburn.
Q: Well, back there in that home, can you remember what the kitchen
looked like?
A: No, I don' t.
Q: A cook stove?
A: Oh, they had a wood stove, everything was wood.
Q: Did you have to help carry the wood?
A: Oh, yes, my brother was older than I was, and he would chop it, and I
would carry it, and we would cart it up under a big ravine that sat on
the east side and on the west side was where we would put wood in under
the house to keep it out of the snow. We carried this wood up as we
needed it. I remember my father. In those days, they were young people
and they had a dance, and my father, I know, I remember them talking
about it. I guess I had gone to bed or they had put me to bed and it
wound up a big free-for-all fight. The Beeves boys, 1 remember him
telling about it, the Reeves boys came down there and they were going to
break up the dance and it wound up in a fight. My father had on a coat
and a vest and one of them cut him with a razor, he cut right down and it
didn't go through the vest. They played rough in them days, very crude
as I found out later as I got older. Then we moved to Auburn.
Q: Well, how old was your mother and your father when they married?
A: I wouldn't know, I never did know.
Q: They never said? How many children did they have?
A: Well, there was three boys and one girl and my little sister died
with pneumonia. I never did remember her. But I heard them tell about
her. She died of pneumonia.
Q: Were your brothers both older than you?
A: No, my oldest brother, Cecil, run a cafe here in town until he died.
And my youngest brother died in 1960 something.
Q: And what was his name?
A: Paul, his name was Paul. Cecil was my oldest, and Howard is mine.
Q: Did Paul live here in Auburn too and what did he do?
A: Well, he worked in the coal mine and when the coal mine shut down,
why he worked for me in the garage, ran the gas pumps and things like
that.