For the last month or so, I have been collecting stories about Comstock: anecdotes, profiles and informative pieces, for a project I'm doing for the Comstock Township Library. The pieces can be historical or contemporary. They can be as short as a few lines or as long as a few pages, and can be written by locals or by outsiders looking in. I'm not looking for profound insight or literary merit; I'm just hoping to create, through the different visions and voices, a kind of patchwork of Comstock and its people, past and present. I’m reprinting a few pieces of my own here, plus some other family contributions that might give a sense of at least one neighborhood. Seventy-five pages of these stories are now collected in a spiral bound book in the Comstock Library's history room.

Tom in the Trees by Bonnie

My brother Tom lived in trees much of his early life. For a while he lived in what we called "the playhouse," an old one-room wash-house built for my granny's wringer washer, where we used to all hang out, but after that was partially burned down--probably by us smoking--Tom took to the trees. He was always a good climber, Tom, but that wasn't the whole story; I think he just liked to be above it all, able to watch life from a superior position. He was untouchable up there. His forts started out simple, but his later tree houses were elaborate multi-level affairs that contained mattresses, stereos, a television, space heaters. He ran extension cords from the barns and workshop to keep himself powered. His biggest fort had a screened-in porch. In 1979 a tornado passed through Comstock and tore apart that last tree house; my brother George remembers going up to the barnyard afterward and seeing Tom's stereo dangling from a tree by its electric cord, while much of the structural wood was scattered on the ground. Tom is the middle of us five kids, and back then he had pale skin, through which you could see blue veins, and also the most marvelous thick hair, nearly white and long enough that it formed pipe curls. He never would ride the bus to school, and until he got a driver's license he rode his bike in all weather. My sister Sheila reminds me that Tom used to wear sweaters to school in the cold mornings but that he wouldn’t want to wear them home when it was warmer, so he stored them in his locker, until his locker was full. Then he'd stuff all his sweaters inside one sweater and make Sheila carry it home on the bus for him. She called it Tom's sweater ball. Tom slept in his tree houses summer and winter--one winter he installed a wood stove. And I think one of his cats used to stay up there with him. Tom says this last tree fort was a twelve-by-twelve shed that he disassembled on the ground and reassembled in the trees. The amazing thing is that none of these tree houses collapsed while he was in it.

Tom says, "The fact that we were not maimed by one of these works of architecture was due to my constant following of Frank Lloyd Wright's principles. You had to take into account the fluid dynamics of the wind blowing through the trees." Tom remembers lying on his back, staring at the trees, toking a joint, and getting one of those energy spurts that only a sixteen year old could understand, one for whom "even drugs could not quell his emotions."

Tom is forty-two now and still a great builder. Recently he constructed an elaborate deck on his house, which is set high above Long Lake.

Comstock Kid Stories from Terry Herlihy (Terry was born in 1944)

1. Our Comstock house was downstream from a rendering works, run by my friend Doug Hahn's dad. They had ice-cold bottles of kool-aid pop for two cents in the break room, but the smell was so horrendously awful you couldn't tell cherry from grape. My beagle Pepper loved the place. All over the field around the plant there were piles of hair ten feet high and full of worms. The plant rendered dead meat into tallow and dumped the rest into the creek where it would drift past the house and pollute the ponds downstream.

Doug had a fat hound dog that was always pregnant or nursing a dozen pups. The older pups would stay around long enough to knock up Mom so after 10 generations they were almost as good as clones.

Doug was really afraid of his dad. One time we were fishing in Morrow lake and he pulled his lure out of the water to avoid hooking a big bass 'cause he thought it might break the line and get him beaten up for losing the lure. He really got his ass kicked when he threw a huge cherry bomb with the wick burned down to nothing into his dad's furnace. He should have stuck to losing lures. Another time we were launching corks out of bottles using dry ice and water as a propellant. Then we got bored with chasing corks decided to launch the bottles. After Doug walked in the launch path for a better view, my mom took him to the hospital to get his head sewed up.

2. From the time I was two until I was nine, my mom was a Girl Scout leader, and I got dragged all over. On one hike, I was near the rear when the whole troop walked upstream along the creek, above where the third dam used to be, in the muck or morrow or whatever that gook is. It was practically like quicksand. In minutes, Mom and about 15 scouts were up to their arm pits, some of them way out from solid ground. Because I weighed only about 45 pounds, I could crawl out with branches for the girls to crawl up on. It took an hour to get them all out.

Before Girl Scout cookies, the Comstock troop had everyone saving newspaper and magazines, which they picked up and sold to the paper mills in Kalamazoo. When the cookie deal hit, the troop blew off all the paper savers, but I had a little wagon (the one that is still at the family cottage), and I picked up all the paper and magazines until I had a truckload, and then dad would bring a truck home from work to take the stuff to the paper mill. Sometimes Dad would charge me a dime a mile for the truck so I would give him a dollar out of the 35 dollars I would get.

The girl scouts never picked up returnable bottles to raise money so they were pretty much mine. I would walk from school every day and turn them in at each store along the way, and that kept me funded, so I could buy with candy, pop and gum to rot out my teeth as fast as they could grow in. Also money was good for buying every comic book I wanted, including Uncle Scrooge McDuck, Little Lulu, and Bugs Bunny.

I was also in the 4-H club, and my dad taught me photography with an old box camera. Either the 4-H or scouts taught me to identify birds and trees, but I moved to Chicago before I could win a stuffed turtle like my sister Susy got.

The Korean War ran up scrap steel prices way up to current prices for a while. It's amazing how much stuff I found laying around in the woods, like plows, racks, pieces of cars and bikes, and they would add up to a truck load in a jiffy, like $75 less $1 for dad the trucker.

I buried a box in the ground to see what critters would fall in at night. I caught lots of toads, frogs, and turtles, and a shrew that bit my finger badly. I worried for months about whether it had had rabies. I left the box there for years, but I built ramps for the shrews to get out. I also filled the trees with ladders and platforms and dug tunnels in the ground, trenches covered with boards and dirt.

The science teacher came to 2nd grade to ask where the frogs on top of each other might be found (they do that when they lay eggs). I didn't want to embarrass her in front of the class, but we all knew that every last frog egg had been laid weeks before.

3. Dick Ackerman lived just north of us on on 26th Street. When we were in second grade, in 1956, Dick Ackerman and I had a contest for how many pairs of pants we could wear to school one minus-20 F day. He had seven. I had six. He got busted when he mooned the principal when he only meant to pull down pair number six.

Dick and I used to swim in the pond, and that was always followed by leach removal with a saltshaker. Dick held the record for the most leaches, about 27 or so at one time. I used to show Dick all the critters along the path I took to school (along the pond), the biggest turtles, the loudest frog, etc. Once in the winter I went through the ice and was black with muck to the neck. I continued on to school, but they sent me home to change. In the summer we would spend hours foraging for dewberries, wild strawberries, blackberries, and random raspberries. Mushrooms too, though puff balls and moral mushrooms were the only ones I knew. I would pick puffballs as big as softballs and my mom would fry them for me. Usually, though, they were already gone to spores, and we would stomp them into dust. That dust wasn't anywhere near as dense as the dust we would make in Dick's dad's garage throwing dirt in the air for hours until our lungs were so full of dust we couldn't breathe. I don't know why we did that.

Dick Ackerman tried to invent the waterproof cherry bomb by lighting and putting one in a jar, but it went off while he was screwing on the lid. He and I did lots of kid stuff like making a blast furnace behind the house with a piece of stove exhaust duct and some granite blocks. It could melt glass pretty well. We caught northern pike in the creek with an orange sack and coat hanger fishnets. Dick found a rifle that we kept hidden. We would have killed ourselves if we knew how to buy ammo. I liked the fact that Dick didn't kill frogs and turtles like everyone else did. There was a myth about the mulberry tree in Dick's yard: he said it had been planted in 5 lbs of sugar and that was why its fruit was white and sweet.

Dick's mom and dad on a hot day would take us to Pickerel lake which was about 100 F and filled with floating cotexes and other trash. On the drive there and back, Dick's dad and mom drank a case or so of Pfeiffer's beer and threw the bottles out of the car. (This was also the height of polio season). One summer Dick grew a watermelon, watching it for months, and his brother ate it just when Dick was going to pick it. Dick claimed that he fell out of the tree house above our stable and landed right on my sister's horse. We used to play cards with Dick's brother's deck of cards, which featured photos of naked people doing weird stuff on them. Dick claimed to have introduced the girls of 26th Street to sex and claimed to have some resultant descendants. The last time I saw him we were driving around at 100 mph on back roads with Listerine for brake fluid (so it wouldn't freeze).

The fact that I was forbidden to see Dick sort of cut down on our contact, but I'm sure I would have tried out his homemade scuba tanks with him if I had been there. Instead, he tried them out alone in the upper pond, and he drowned. He was seventeen or eighteen, I think.

4. Don't forget Herman the Railroad crossing guy. When a train came, he would get out of his shack with a paddle to stop cars. When we kids finished spending all our money on candy or pop at Reed's or the Beer Store, we would hang out with Herman in his shack. He would bore us with stories of doing the same railroad job up the line somewhere. His paddle was a smaller version of the stop/slow paddles of held up by the highway flag-people.

In the summer the best swimming was at Lambeck's creek, which was what they called the creek upstream of the rendering works. Upstream of the place it wasn't full of floating hunks of dead stuff. Mr. Lambeck had neat stuffed animals all over his cabin, not beanie-baby-type animals but dead deer heads and creatures all over his walls.

I would go all these places with my dog Pepper. He actually accomplished the romantic feats Dick bragged about. There were farmers who actually shot at us from their farms, surrounded by half-beagle half-pedigreed pups.

The Hill House by Bonnie

In the summer, my mother expected all of us kids to be outside doing something, and often we spent the entire day on the run, riding horses, taking walks, staging neighborhood battles between good and evil. As I recall, the only kids we thought were evil were Gerry Mattimore and Tom Bloom, and sometimes if we weren't battling them, we hung out with them, though they had once killed one of our laying hens. My brother Mike's best friend was Roy Hill and he was always with us Campbell kids, whether we were building tree forts or stealing road signs, or slogging upstream in the Comstock Creek. Roy developed a method of getting rid of bloodsuckers without salt; he stuck the end of a certain kind of stick into the leech's head and twisted in a certain way, and the leech came off. My brother Mike recently reminded me that all the girls liked Roy, but that Roy didn't really like girls though nobody (including Roy) really knew what that meant back then. Roy lived on Worden Street in a house where the upstairs bedroom plaster walls revealed a lot of plaster lathe; he lived with his sister Diane, his mother Una, a woman they called Aunt Gloria, and Gloria’s daughter Rose. Una was a small thin chain smoker who liked to laugh. Aunt Gloria was gigantic and rather grumpy, and she kept a secret food stash of decadent sweet things in a locked metal cupboard. In retrospect, it seems clear Gloria and Una were domestic partners. One day Gloria fell through the rotting porch boards outside the house's back door, and she was so big they had to lift her out with a tow truck winch. Roy moved to Florida when he was about nineteen. He came back once or twice after that to visit, and then ten or twelve years ago he died in an automobile accident.

When the road commission put in the new K Avenue and closed off the Worden Street railroad crossing, only one house was taken down, the mustard colored Hill House. Before they put tore it down, I went there and tried to look in the boarded up windows, to see where Aunt Gloria's metal cupboard. As far as I could tell, Roy and Diane had mostly survived on white bread and margarine and whatever junk food they bought at the beer store. I talked to the neighbors, the June and George Boney, and they expressed sadness about the Hill House coming down and about the Worden Street rail crossing being closed down. They told me a story about their realtor getting her car stuck on the tracks--she got out and let the train take her car down the line, even though it contained a briefcase with a thousand dollars in it. June described another event, seeing her neighbors, a mother and a grandmother, hit by the train and killed before her eyes, while she was watching their children. The Boneys said that Una had died and that Roy's sister Diane still lived somewhere around town. The Boney house was a mirror image of the Hill House, though the Boney's had always looked more kept-up. June Boney told me that they'd gotten a call a few years ago, and they'd heard an almost undecipherable female voice, like a little girl's voice, asking them, "please come get me. I'm ready to come home." The voice deteriorated into weeping. Then a nurse came on the line and apologized, said it was Gloria, mostly out of her mind, just talking crazy.

The Power Plant, by Michael Campbell

The Kalamazoo River passes through Galesburg, Comstock, Kalamazoo. Many years ago my Grandfather as a general contractor (Herlihy Mid-Continent Company) had the winning bid to build a power plant in Comstock. As part of the construction, a dam had to be built providing a reserve of water. This would later be called Morrow or Kilowatt Lake.

It would be about forty years ago when I started riding a bus to Comstock East Elementary School. One thing that was very noticeable along the route was the power plant near M-96 and North 28th Street. It was an area called East Comstock, near the school. Dozens of coal cars would be lined up to heat water for the steam turbines. Heavy black smoke poured from the stacks, leaving a light layer of soot on the playground. During the winter we would still pick up and eat a handful of snow in spite of the color.

I got used to seeing the plant, but there were still times that stood out, such as waiting for coal cars to reach the side rails and release steam. The violent steam discharge would happen abruptly and end the same way. Imagine the sound of nearby jet or thunder.

The power plant still exist today, with its landmark twin stacks but only generates a few megawatts with its hydroelectric generators.

What We Did For Fun in the 40's, by Joanna Herlihy

I most vividly remember the years 1942-45 when I was 8 to 11 years old. World War 2 dominated Comstock then--war news, ration books, big brothers and fathers going into the service. War dominated our play too. My next door neighbor on Prospect Ave, Keith Bunting, led a commando unit with headquarters in a homemade shack. We regularly participated in maneuvers, wearing army helmets and carrying improvised weapons. Keith recounted army stories from his brother Allen who was stationed in India. I led exercises with the younger children, parading with flag, baton and drums.

Field exercises flowed over into outdoor endurance activities such as hikes and cook-outs. The most rigorous hike was east along the river, past St. Anthony's toward the power plant--rigorous because of the underbrush and the fear of rattlesnakes. We had all heard of the man who was bitten by a rattlesnake near the dam. He ran a mile back to town for help and then died.

We hiked north of the tracks too, into the woods behind the castle on the hill, taking care not to step on the cow pies in Farmer Snow's pasture. We hiked along the path past the 2nd pond to the 3rd pond--which disappeared when the dam broke at the end of the 40's. There was a spooky abandoned mill by the 3rd dam (someone said it was a rug cleaning factory). We crawled under it then. Around 1950 the Lawrences tore it down and built a handsome house. We didn't hike further north by the 3rd pond. That was rendering works territory.

Swimming was never simple. The river was full of grass with bloodsuckers. Sometimes we waded across the river; nobody had a boat and we never really swam there. The ponds weren't so attractive for swimming either with all the muck on the bottom and strange creatures. The best swimming was a mile north of the tracks at Lyons Lake, upstream from the rendering works. The water was so clear you could see the deep drop-offs in the old marl pit.

Winter sports were great. The 1st pond was the best for skating. It seemed like the whole town was there, skating for hours in the cold weather, day and night. Kids my age sometimes ventured to join in crack-the-whip with the big kids. My feet would be so cold when I got home. My mother made me soak them in cold water to avoid frostbite.

The best sledding was down the hill behind the old high school with a bend at the bottom by the Allen's house, coming out by the I.O.O.F. hall. Other hills were blacklisted by memories of past accidents. Having the railroad tracks at the bottom of the steepest hill was a bummer.

The most fun of all for me was when I could go with my friend Nancy Parkhurst to the Saturday night dances at the I.O.O.F. hall. The evening program was interspersed with dances like the schottische which children like me could join in.

Other nighttime fun may have happened only in my neighborhood. There was a season when Keith Bunting would periodically announce that we should be on the look out for the Green Hornet that night. The word would spread to all the neighborhood children. We might be out in the dusk playing hide and seek when the strike would come. And we would all chase the hooded Hornet without success. The rumor was that Mickey Ott played the role of the popular radio show character, but nobody ever proved his identity.

Night was the best time by the river, too. I'll never forget the moonlight reflecting from the ripples by the sycamore tree.

Farewell to the Coles: Elmer, Dorothy, Kathie, Karen, Ed by Bonnie

When I grew up, I hung out with Kathie, Karen, and Ed Cole who lived on Henning Street. Their dad was a long-bearded biker guy named Elmer, who hung out with the Outriders motorcycle gang, and his black hair and dark skin were attributed to his being part Indian. He took his coffee with honey, which he squirted into a spoon from a bear shaped plastic bottle. Their mother was Dorothy, a plump pale-faced woman with acne scars, whose pursed lips suggested she was always ready to receive the information that her husband was fooling around on her. She kept a bottle of saccharine tablets, smaller than baby aspirins, for her coffee. None of these people are alive now. Kathie, the eldest kid, was a long-legged beauty with a small head who used to lie out in the sun all the time, greased up with baby oil for absorption of maximum rays, and it was from her I learned about Sloe Gin and Southern Comfort, the kind of alcohol you drink only until you throw it up and then never again. Once Kathie was hiding from Elmer at our house--she'd come up there because he was going to "beat her ass"--and my mother faced him off in the middle of the night, though he threatened to burn down our house. Karen, one year older than me but in the same grade, was a bossy friend, and was an authority on many things including fashion; she was the first to wear "elephant bells" in elementary school. I recall the polyester pants were powder blue and the belled bottoms probably had a diameter of twenty-four inches. Later she sometimes used to sniff gold spray paint out of a cloth to get high. Ed, who was my age, was humbled by the force of his sisters. He mumbled and muttered and idolized his father, whom he would later come to be the spitting image; I taught Ed to French kiss when we were about eleven, both of us standing barefoot on the big iron register in the dining room, over the basement furnace. I think that was the only register in the house, and once you stood on it for a while, with the warm air blowing up your pant legs or skirt or nightgown, you didn't want to move.

All the Coles scared me a little, because they were fearless: they rode motorcycles, and they had big mean dogs that barked from the ends of taut chains, listened to heavy metal music, and talked about beating people’s asses. And yet all the Coles, from Elmer to Ed treated me warmly, always, and accepted me as one of their own, though they made fun of me for being scared of things. Elmer died in a car wreck with a disreputable woman on the day I got my driver's license. The woman stole Elmer's wallet and left him dead at the scene. Dorothy died of cancer some years later.

The Coles were always doing something, and they hardly ever sat around watching television. Once when I was sixteen Karen took me to a biker party in Kalamazoo and we were invited in and the door was locked behind us. All the windows were painted black. Skinny girls with tattoos glared at me, or so I thought. Those were two or three of the most terrifying hours or my life. One day I stopped at their house on Henning Street and found Karen had a bale of marijuana in her garage. A bale, like a bale of hay, only it was marijuana. It was hilarious and surreal, like something out of a Cheech and Chong movie. The last time I saw Karen was in 2001, at the Comstock Discount store, when she invited me to stop by her house next to East Elementary school; her son Damien was maybe nine years old, and she talked about racing moto-cross with him. Karen died of a heart malfunction a few weeks later, at one of Damien’s baseball games. The last time I really talked to Ed was at Karen's funeral, and he was telling me that he'd like to move his parents' remains from Mount Ever-Rest in Portage to the cemetery behind the Comstock Adult Education building, where Karen's lavender coffin was interred. Just a few years later, in 2004, Ed died of complications of alcoholism. The last time I saw Kathie was in Spring 2004 when I interviewed her for an Allegan magazine fluff story, to ask her about her and her daughter Celina's relationship with their dogs. I’m glad I took photos. Celina, who is confident and beautiful, even more beautiful than Kathie was at twelve, told me later that her mother went to sleep one night and didn't wake up--it was apparently a reaction to some prescription drugs she was taking. Ed is survived by two beautiful dark-eyed daughters. Farewell Coles. Your short lives were intoxicating with their energy.

Mike Pierce, by Christopher Magson

Mike Pierce and his girlfriend rented a house on the north side of Kilowatt Lake, near the power plant. He worked at the paper mill with me in Parchment.

At the mill, management decided to crack down on drug use and Mike ended up selling some pot to a plant--a blond chubby woman with bad skin and caked make-up, a woman who was apparently working for the Michigan state police. He was fired of course and jail time seemed inevitable. He had done some time in prison at one point and decided he would not be able to do time again. He made a pipe bomb and lit it off in his back yard while his head was resting on it. The police wanted his girlfriend to identify him, but she kept repeating "there's nothing left, there's just nothing left." He had a few bad habits, such as the pornography he kept in his locker at work, and using overpowering cologne. Really, though, he was just an aging hippie in a paper mill and there was no harm in him.

The Furnace of the "H" House, by Bonnie

While my mother was away this March (2005) at a folk festival with her gentleman friend Loring, the boiler pipes in her attic burst and hundreds of gallons of water poured into what was my old bedroom. It poured from the attic pipes through the ceiling, through the light socket and through the newly revealed divisions between the sections of ceiling plaster. My mother had inadvertently turned off the heat, and the water stopped circulating, froze in the pipes and burst. It was only by sheer chance that I happened to stop by the house shortly after the pipes burst. Had a few more hours passed, the damage might have been irreparable. When I got there, it sounded as though someone was running the bathtub faucet full blast. My brother George zoomed over, and while I moved books out of the room, and placed and emptied tubs and buckets strategically, George figured out how to shut off the water at the furnace. Two days later my brother Tom sweated new copper pipe and repaired the damage. Almost everything important dried out.

My mother has lived most of her life in the house she now occupies on 26th Street. She was a little girl when my grandfather, Frank Herlihy, built it in the shape of an H, for Herlihy. There is one hilltop position from which a person might get the view that shows to advantage that letter of the alphabet. Otherwise it is simply a rambling house that is expensive to heat, because of the surface area and the many windows. There are two four by ten foot picture windows and eight-eight windows that are 2'x5', each with four panes.

This was not the first time the furnace has given us trouble. I should mention that the original oil burner furnace, in place for forty years, was a massive gray thing (insulated by what was probably asbestos) occupying an entire small room (called the "furnace pit") and resembling an elephant. When I was in high school, my mother got the idea of saving money by converting this old boiler from oil back to coal, so that she could burn wood in the coal box, and during this time us kids often awoke in winter with skims of ice upon our bedside water glasses. Because wood is not so intensely energy packed as coal, the wood burner scenario required constant attention, constant feeding of wood into the fire box, even to keep the house moderately warm. One year my mother took a trip to California with Uncle Terry, in March, and the kids she'd left in charge didn't keep the fire going. The pipes burst in the concrete floor. Luckily at that time I was away at College.

There was one time before that when I was about seven, when we were away visiting my grandparents in St. Joe, and we got home after supper, and found the entire interior of the house and everything in it coated with black soot. My mother said the furnace had exploded. At the time I was grateful we had not been there, but now I think, Wow! That must have been something. Years later we were still finding patches of soot on the tops of doorframes.

My mother says she was about eleven when her father was showing her how to kick start the furnace using the re-set button. She had to know this because they were leaving her alone for a weekend. He pressed the re-set button right after the furnace had quit cycling, so he and my Mom were next to it when it exploded. Apparently the box had been really hot since it had just turned off, and starting it again blew the door open and sent soot everywhere, onto my mother and grandfather especially.

The Dam Story by Susanna

Comstock in the early days had a series of three ponds and dams. The first pond next to the RR tracks ran a machine shop. The second pond was ornamental. Above the stone decorative waterfall was a wooden timber dam on which a sawmill was located. A 100 year old lady was my source of information: Maude Lockwood.

Now we come to the third pond. Research is sketchy, but on-going. My father built this house on the Comstock Creek between the second and third ponds in 1946 and 47. Mr. Lawrence who we bought the property from showed us the old mill wheel of the grain mill under his house built over the old building. It could be still in place. The third pond dam was earth with a skin of concrete.

We youths were told to keep away from this dam, which was heavily sandbagged and seriously leaking. Of course we went there every day and also to the nearby grape vine swing that would take you 25 feet up in the air. Then we'd hang out and guess when the dam would bust. We knew it was going to happen (I was 8 or 9). Of course our parents didn't know we were hanging out on the perforated dam, leaking gallons of pond water.

And then one night at 3:00 a.m. while we were asleep, it busted. Wow! Wading gleefully in mud up to our necks the next day with handfuls of fish, turtles, frogs and muck. It took out the old sawmill dam and so lowered our pond level for all time. There was massive outflow. It went 12 feet on the banks but it didn't break the other dams.

Only a few pieces of concrete remain of that third dam. It was a huge mess of muck and slime for a few years until it stabilized, and now is just marshy.

Back then the rumor was that someone dynamited the dam because it was so dangerous to us kids. More recently, a local source told me that a Mr. Hunt had dynamited the dam because he was so annoyed at the Kalamazoo Rendering Works for dumping animal waste into the third pond. The DNR has no record of the third pond, though they were able to date the first and second pond dams at about 1890.

My property on the creek still has the mill races that diverted water from the overflow from the third pond during this active period as a grain mill.

Oats and Old Red, by Susanna

One summer day in 1969 I wandered in to visit my farmer friends in the old home place. The parents were absent due to a crisis down in Missouri. My friends had pretty much maxed out their credit cards on seed and farm stuff, parts, etc.

They offered me a great deal on oats, which as a horse and donkey trader, I had use for all the time. What I didn't have was an oat bin. I paid in advance for the grain and went home and constructed an amazing bin (it lasted 1969-2003). Old Red, my Hereford-Ayrshire milk cow watched with interest.

The first load I shoveled into my new bin, with Red watching curiously. The second load followed, but some children crisis happened and I went to the house to settle it and took way too much time. When I came back to unload, the cow had a guilty look on her bovine mug.

I emptied the truck and considered it a good deal and a job done.

However, as happens on the farm, it was not done. About 4 hours later and of course after-hours for the vet (as with kids after-clinic hours), Red began huge moos of a desperate nature. In my absence she had stuffed herself on oats.

There was only one vet on call, in Augusta, and when I reached him he said he'd promised for 3 weeks to take his wife out for her birthday, and he'd stood her up, and she was near divorcing him.

He told me to cut the fittings off a piece of garden hose and shove it down the cow to let out the oat gas and call him back.

I snuck up on the cow with the hose and a huge amount of disgusting gas came seething out, so I called the vet to report the results. He replied, "You didn't leave it in long enough, do it again." This time the cow was wise to me. A Battle Royal. If any more oat gas came out, I was not aware of it while I was being trampled. Red and I survived in our relationship for years to come.

Charlene, by Susanna

One Christmas vacation--in those boring days for the kids after the day, before the New Year's Eve stuff--the phone rings.

It's Mister Tom Taylor, extremely excited. "Dahlin, Charlene drowned in the pond. Do you want her?"

Now, I realized that the victim was indeed a cow, and with a houseful of serious carnivores it would be a plus to harvest one, but I had to ask. "How long ago did she drown?"

"Forty-five minutes ago," replied Tom. "She was fine this morning. She walked out onto the ice to get a drink of water and went through." Tom's care of his livestock was always a bit sketchy. I would have broken the ice for my cows.

As I mentioned, a bunch of kids on a vacation plus idle adults made up quite a crew. We arrived in several trucks to (indeed) see a cow floating upside down in a pond a hundred feet from shore. Now what?

Tom was accompanied by Jack Polk (a bane of my existence from years ago when working at Herlihy's, the guy who disappeared at noon after my payroll was finished.)

The first bright idea was to launch a boat. Unfortunately a family of woodchucks had filled it two-thirds full with dirt. We dug it out and launched it on the pond. Meantime, son Tom had found a hundred feet of cable and clamps and hitched it to the 1970 Ford four-by-four.

The boat crew fell through the ice but they did manage to hook onto the cow.

An unforgettable sight. An upside down cow bouncing across the ice at 20 miles per hour.

Then it was time for the serious stuff. I had to gut her--thank God no calf--perhaps she suicided--and our saw dealer put vegetable oil in a new saw to do the honors of cutting and we took her to a no-questions-asked shady meat cutting place.

In retrospect, Charlene was one great cow, providing entertainment as well as eating.

Comstock Beer Service by Bonnie

When we were kids, the Beer Store, as we called it, was owned by Don Phillips, who lived across the creek from us. Back then, the Beer Store had the coldest freezer in town and we bought our ice cream there. Often on Sunday nights my mother would buy us kids a half gallon of Neopolitan ice cream, the pink, white and brown stuff. It was frozen too solid to scoop, and we couldn’t stand to wait for it to thaw, and so Mom would cut it for us with a big butcher knife into slices resembling the flags of some European nation. We'd also buy ice cream treats during the day sometimes, to take down and eat under the bridge, in the "tunnel." The "tunnel" was an old underpass beneath the railroad tracks and E. Michigan that had been half-heartedly gated shut, but we just walked around the gate. The concrete was crumbling and it sometimes smelled like urine or worse, but the creek was fast and shallow there. We’d get orange push-ups or vanilla ice cream sandwiches or vanilla ice cream bars, nutty buddies, or something that had some crushed cakey stuff on it in strawberry or chocolate, and we'd wade in the water, avoiding the broken glass littering the pebbled creek bed. I was somewhat interested in adventure as a youth, but mostly I was interested in sweets.

Once when my brother Tom and sister Sheila were at the Beer Store, we told our dog Brownie to stay put outside the door. She was a black and white dog, so there was no explaining why we called her "Brownie." In any case, when a westbound train came, she did not stay put. She ran out in front of the train in order to keep it from getting away and ended up slipping under the cowcatcher. As soon as the train had passed, we ran to the tracks and found Brownie there in the center, lying perfect still, dazed, with a bit of hair shorn off the top of her head but panting and very much alive. We called my mom, who came and picked us all up. Mom brought a gunnysack, assuming that "Brownie got ran over by the train" meant a bloody mess. It took Brownie three days to recover enough to walk, and though her hearing was never very good after that, she lived on fine for several years.

Hillbilly Heaven by Bonnie

Between the years I was eleven and fifteen, everybody hung out at Hillbilly Heaven, drinking contraband alcohol, smoking pot and cigarettes, making out and listening to music. Hillbilly Heaven was what we called the top flat part of the Balkema's gravel pit before Balkema gouged so much of it away to sell as bank run gravel. Apparently Balkema didn't mind kids parking there, and it was nice to have somewhere to go. I could walk there from our house in about fifteen minutes, so long as the concrete block and plank bridge across the creek wasn't out. During the daytime I often rode my horse Sparky there, up and down the hills, and I studied the trash that people had left, liquor bottles and empty cigarette packs. But really, all things considered, the kids were pretty well behaved at Hillbilly Heaven and didn't litter very much. I remember the time that Mark Mort, who was handsome and had his driver's license, kicked my neighbor Margaret Boer out of his car because she wouldn't make out with him. Margaret Boer was tall and willowy with long, thick dark hair, but her Dutch Reform parents were very strict, and I wonder what she was even doing up there. Years later she and Mark Mort got together again; they married and had three kids. Now they're divorced.

Also: Other stories of interest include Denise Martin's observation of a train wreck, Jaci Dillon's memories of Kite Fest, Jamie Blake's visit to the Tap Room, Peter Green's memories about going to the cottage and his story of the great cherry theft, Linda Green Metzler's appreciation of Susanna's chickens' eggs, Margaret von Steinen's appreciation for Comstock's small town life, and lots of stories that refer to the rendering works and to the dead elephant that ended up there. Let me know if you want to see any of these and I'll ask the authors' permission to share them online. In any case, they are all in a spiral bound volume at the Comstock Library.

Please send news and notes (or even Comstock Stories) for the next issue of the Letter Parade to bonniejo@iserv.net or to PO Box 52, Comstock Michigan, 49041.