CHAPTER I “OLD DOC”
We called him, “Old Doc.” he had delivered each of my parents’ babies and I was number twelve. His son “Young Doc” had delivered each of my baby girls.
“Old Doc” and my father had been best friends for many years. It was after I was five years old and moved from the big home on the corner of Byhalia, Ohio, along with my older brothers and sisters, to the house beside my father’s fourth and largest stone quarry in York Center that this all changed.
Both morning and evening it was always, “Who is gonna help Mom milk? Between 60 and 70 cows?” Sometimes my husband. Sometimes the hired man. Usually one of my daughters. But……always me!!
On an early Sunday morning, I hurried through the milking, put the glass lines and milkers to automatic wash. I prepared a roast with potatoes and carrots to bake in the oven while we are at church.
Once each year Venice Florida held a “Bachelor Auction”. This was single men in the area who were usually sponsord by their work place. A prize date with a bachelor was offered. All the proceeds went to “Lung Cancer” research.
So the big night arrives and I join the ladies at the Venice community center to bid on the bachelor I have chosen. Their pictures and all the information about each man is in the advertisement, also the date being offered.
Have you ever known anyone who had a complete facelift by a plastic surgeon? While I was selling Real Estate in Venice, Florida, which is something I did for eighteen years, a young lady from Missouri or Kansas, I’m not sure, asked me to show her some condos that were on the market.
As I was driving us to one of the condos I had selected, I noticed she had a scab above her lips. Although I hadn’t asked her about it, she told me that she had just had a facelift by a Venice plastic surgeon who had scraped the skin above her mouth and it had not yet healed.
It was the summer of 1936, between my eighth and ninth grades of school. I was meandering through the yard of our home in York Center where I lived with my brothers and sisters beside my dad’s stone quarry. He and my mother lived in a farm house seven miles away.
Since I was not expecting him to be around I was wearing the “forbidden” shorts.