Remembering All Parents on Parents' Day

When I think of Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, I think of more than one or two people, so I’m writing a tribute to five people for Parents’ Day, July 24.

I’m one of four children born to Harry and Laura Snyder 80-plus years ago in Loysburg. The home I and my siblings were born into was, at first, a two-story log house, built about 200 years ago. It received several additions, weather-boarding to cover the logs, a dug-out basement (which flooded now and then), porches and many interior improvements over the four generations of Snyders who lived there.

My grandparents on the Snyder side of the family were the second generation to live there, and my dad and his siblings were the third. My siblings and I were the fourth generation to grow up there, but not the last. My own two children grew up in this ancient homestead, but are the last.

Dad and his twin brother Bill and younger brother Frank followed an older sister to the early public school in Loysburg, finishing the eight grades required, and then going to work with their father as stone and brick masons. Dad served as an Army medic in France during World War I, and became the only one who traveled beyond Pennsylvania until he and his brothers traveled to Yellowstone National Park in the 1920s. Their older sister had married and moved away. The three men remained at home, working at their trade with their father as long as he was able to work. They took care of their aging parents and a couple of other close relatives who lived nearby.

At the age of 35, my dad finally got tired of being a bachelor. He found a wife who was willing to move into a house with three men and their parents. The wife, my mother, was Laura Henry, a school teacher. She was about a decade younger than my father, but old enough to know what she was getting into. Their first child, my sister, Jean Wakefield, was born in 1934, after the death of the men’s father, but before the death of their mother. That left my mom to take care of all the usual household duties of a family of three men, an aging grandmother, my sister and soon me. I was born in January of 1936 and my grandmother passed away later the same year. Also that same year, we experienced what is remembered as the St. Patrick’s Day Flood, when the family had to be evacuated from our home on a flat-bed wagon pulled with a rope by men who came to the rescue of the Snyders and two families who lived even closer to the flooding Yellow Creek.

The Snyder brothers gave up masonry in the early 1940s and went into dairy farming on a farm they bought right here in Loysburg, using what money they had saved after the Great Depression and borrowing the rest from the owners of a construction firm in Everett for whom they had done masonry work for over the years. The brothers excelled in farming just as they had in masonry, eventually developing a herd of 60-plus dairy cows and renovating the barn to accommodate them. We continued to live in the same house, and the men walked to work (at the barn), getting up about 3 a.m. for the first milking, and making trips later in the day for field work and the afternoon milking.

Jean and I were born at home with the help of midwives, but my brother George came along two years later in Nason Hospital. Sadly, we three are the only children old enough to remember much about our mother. She had one more daughter, Mary Hall, who was only four years old when our Mama passed away with kidney failure in Conemaugh Valley Memorial Hospital, Johnstown, in August 1946. This was when our parents became a father and two uncles, all three of whom shared the duties of parenthood. They took care of all our needs — made sure we bathed, dressed, ate well, did our school homework, got to bed on time, got up on time and went to Sunday School. Uncle Bill was our waker-upper and the breakfast cook for our school years, while Dad and Uncle Frank stayed to clean up the stable and milking equipment before coming home for breakfast.

After mother’s death Daddy hired housekeepers to do the cleaning and cooking and laundry for about two years, but those folks never lasted too long on the job. One was an older lady, mother of one of dad’s friends, and others were girls or young women that couldn’t cope with the task. But then dad hired a widow who lived up the street. Ella (Wyles) Gartland Snyder became not only our housekeeper but our “Other Mother” over the next decade.

She was not a relative of our Snyder family, but was a blessing to a household lacking a mother. She worked for $20 a week for about 20 years, long after the older two kids were grown up and gone. Ella cooked a noon meal and supper five days a week, walking the length of a football field to and from our house regardless of the weather.

She was provided with a change purse in a kitchen cupboard and would send one of us kids across the street to buy groceries as needed. But we had a garden, which we kids helped tend, and Ella canned some vegetables. We had chickens and we learned at an early age not only how to gather and clean eggs, but how to kill and pluck a chicken. Ella would clean them and prepare the meat for meals. The men butchered a hog or two each year and a beef occasionally, and Ella would can some pork tenderloin, while hams and shoulders would be salt-cured and smoked. Later some cuts were prepared for freezing at the Waterside freezer plant. Eventually we had our own freezer.

Over the years our kitchen was upgraded with a newer electric stove, a refrigerator with a freezer on top and even a dishwasher. Our laundry equipment also was upgraded, making it easier for Ella and the girls in the family to help her.

Daddy and the uncles sent three of us off the college, and my younger brother stayed home to help with the farming. He not only helped with milking and operating farm equipment, he learned to weld, make necessary equipment repairs, even lay blocks and pour concrete on barn improvements.

Who do I remember on Parents’ Day? Daddy, Mama, Ella, Bill and Frank.