Grandma’s House
By Delbert Blickenstaff, M.D. 

When all of us cousins gathered at Grandma Butterbaugh’s house in 1930 it was a mad house.  My twin brother Robert and I and our cousin Evelyn were the oldest.  Two or three more cousins were added each year, so we had a mob.  Our Aunt Lucille was only four years older than we were, and she functioned as our leader.  One day we decided that we wanted to take a ride in a Model T touring car which was parked in the barn.  Lucille was about sixteen years old and she agreed to steer the car.  So we boys pushed the car out of the barn, loaded all the little kids inside, and pushed it to the edge of a pasture which went downhill.  When the car started coasting down the hill we boys jumped on the running boards for a free ride.  Lucille did a good job steering and didn’t hit anything.  I don’t know how the car got back in the barn. 

Another way that Aunt Lucille showed her leadership was to take us cousins across a field to a one room schoolhouse and “teach” us.  The building wasn’t used anymore for a school, except when we were there.  Lucille had lots of puzzles for us to work on, and her classes were more fun than our real school.  Sometimes she would take us out to a nearby cemetery and “preach” to us from a stone pulpit.  Her father, Grandpa Butterbaugh, was the free minister in the West Manchester Church of the Brethren in Indiana.  So she had a good tutor.  At other times she would make up plays and cast us kids as vagabonds, or prospectors, or other exciting characters. 

Grandma’s first name was Etta, and I remember her as a jovial person who always had a supply of cookies for us kids.  She had a strange appetite for raw oysters.  It almost made me sick to see her place raw oyster on a saltine cracker and chomp it down.  Strange taste must have run in the family because uncles James and Paul always put gravy on their pie. 

Since Grandpa was a preacher, he didn’t seem to be much fun for us boys until he took us to the community ice house.  During the winter the farmers would take their big saws out on the frozen lake, saw blocks of ice, and store them in the ice house.  Then in the summer when it was home made ice cream time, Grandpa would take us to the ice house and let us help him bring the ice home.  I don’t remember who turned the crank. 

At night time there weren’t enough beds for all the visiting grandchildren, so we slept on blankets on the floor.  I don’t know how much sleep we got, but we had fun.  Going to Grandma’s house was always a treat.

Delbert Blickenstaff, M.D.