Alice and John married when Alice was only 15 and he was 20. One of the first things they did was to keep a small boarding house near where John worked for the RR while the Hoosic Tunnel was being built. He worked as a lumberjack and she cooked and cleaned for the single men who roomed with them.

Gramma (Amelia St George Fallon) always said that there were 13 children. Unfortunately, I didn’t think to ask her to name them all for me ( I was only 11.) She talked of growing up on the farm and what a happy time they had. She did tell me that she loved going to school and repeated the 8th grade twice because her younger brother was still in school and her parents didn’t want him to walk there alone. She was happy to do it. She couldn’t go to the high school because it was too far away, so she could learn a bit more this way.

John would go into town a couple of times a year and get their supplies. One of the things he would buy was a large container of Gin. It wasn’t that he was a “drinker” but that was the basis for the medicines they made when anyone was sick. Half-way through her child bearing years Alice lost her eyesight as a result of illness. Gramma said she thought her mother had had scarlet fever but Alice’s obituary said it was meningitis. When several of the children would become ill at the same time Grandpa John would set the beds up in the dining room and have his mini-hospital ward right there so he could keep an eye on all of his patients.

Grandpa John was pretty easy going but the one thing that would get you a sure-fire trip to the wood shed was to leave anything out of place that could cause Grandma Alice to hurt herself. Maybe that was the reason but my grandmother (Amelia) was the tidiest woman I’ve ever known. Everything in her house was always spotless and she never sat still for a minute. She was always doing something around the house and everything was always in place.

When the girls, in turn, were learning to make biscuits, Grandma Alice would tell them what to do and then they would do it. As the biscuits would come out of the oven whichever girl had made them would ask their Papa “are they all right?”

John and Alice St George

And he would respond “almost.” And they would know they had mastered biscuit making on the day his response changed to “they were very good.” In this way they learned their basic cooking skills item by item. But always, it was Papa who would pronounce when each skill had been mastered. I had some of my Gramma’s homemade bread and it was wonderful, so I know that Grandpa John was a good judge.

One funny story that Gramma told my mother was that on a day when both Grandpa John & Grandma Alice were gone from the farm one of the children used Grandpa John’s favorite cup. There was an accident and the handle was broken from the cup. The children glued the handle back on and put it away. The next time it was used, the handle came off while Grandma Alice was washing it. She said “oh, John, I’ve broken your cup!” He said “oh, honey, it’s all right, it’s not your fault.” He never knew how right he was as the children never told what had happened!

FROM CANDY
5 MAY 08