Aunt Elsie and Uncle Gurd

Aunt Elsie was one of my Dad's sisters. She and Uncle Gurd lived on a dairy farm on a mountain in Pennsylvania. My brother and I would stay with them once in awhile when we were young. They had 3 daughters and like the other cousins they were all older than us. Our parents were married 7 years before they had my brother and my Dad was the baby of the family.
This picture is of John and I with 6 of our cousins.

We loved to go to the farm. They had a big old farm house with lots of rooms and there was always something to do. One thing that really fascinated us was their telephone. As I said the farm was on a mountain. There were 2 other families with farms up there. Because all three families would not agree to get a phone, the phone company would not put phone lines up the mountain. The families didn't think they all needed a phone as long as someone had one! These 3 families communicated with each other with the old crank phone system. This was in the late 1950's and early 1960's when everyone had a telephone. They had no way to call anyone off the mountain.

Another thing we loved was riding in the milk truck. The milk was put into milk cans and loaded unto an old pick up type truck and driven down the mountain. Everything had to be done on time because the school bus wouldn't pick up the kids. Every morning during school, the girls would meet the bus at the bottom of the mountain in the milk truck.

As we got older we didn't see much of Uncle Gurd and Aunt Elsie and eventually they could no longer farm. We went to a party at there house for their 50th wedding anniversary several years ago. My uncle had become quite a collector. He had actually built an extra room around 3 sides of the old farm house to hold his collections. He had little collections of all kinds of things from farm tools to, well, bowling alleys! My other uncle, Uncle Elmer, told me that one time when they were visiting he was telling Uncle Gurd that my Aunt Sig wanted a butcher block island for the kitchen. Uncle Elmer said he wasn't sure what to make it out of and Uncle Gurd said he might have an idea. He took Uncle Elmer out to the barn and showed him an entire bowling lane! Aunt Sig ended up with a beautiful butcher block island made from a section of a bowling lane.

The picture on the top is Aunt Elsie and Uncle Gurd on their 50th. They are in the last addition that was built. Aunt Elsie died shortly after that but Uncle Gurd is still living. Although I haven's seen him in 10 years I will certainly never forget the time I spent with them as a child.