OUR SMITH FAMILY STORY PART SEVEN by Lorena May Smith Stahlbaum, my Aunt. 3/17/2010

We went to school in Port Austin until the end of September, then moved back to Bad Axe. I was in the third grade, not too happy about it because the arithmetic book was different from what I had started with in the other school, and the teacher thought the best way to make me learn was to slap my hands with a ruler after school. My sister put a stop to that when she caught her at it. Of course for that time on I disliked all mathematics. Oddly enough every job I had was to do with that in after years. Whoever made arrangements for our rented house we moved into didn't care much that it was unfurnished, uninsulated and hard to heat. Still, I suppose there were few places

for rent, especially to a single mother of five children and for low rent. Mama took care of that shortly. She had a job as custodian in the Episcopal church, where we all went to Sunday school. One of the elders was a vice president in a bank, found a house for us at the east end of town, a comfortable bungalow with weathered siding. Now we had lived midtown, north, south and west of town. I guess we didn't know whether we were uptown or downtown people, or care. We were still young enough that the boys would build racers and scooters to coast sown the slight grade that ran down the street for three blocks and ended in fields. We also had fun with a wagon made up like a covered wagon of the old west. Arthur was always giving magic lantern shows to a bunch of his cronies. Neil had a paper route, when his Boy Scout meetings interfered with his deliveries, it was I who took over for him. Don eventually grew into just our street for a route of his own. There were tent shows with plays, the chataugua, and so called medicine shows to go to, with their spiels and vaudeville acts. We watched the circus unload at the depot and parade the elephants and animal cages up Main Street; band concerts some summer evenings on the court house lawn. Summer was a care free time. Before school started in the Fall there was a County Fair for a week in late August. Even if we didn't get to go to it we had fun after all the booths were gone looking for findings left behind, especially coins dropped here and there and in the the Grandstand, where people sat to watch the horse races and entertainment. All the youngsters in town would congregate at the fairgrounds, then. HAPPY CHRISTMAS 2010 TO ALL SMITHS AROUND THE WORLD!