My Life, such as it is…………………… Growing up in Bennet Nebraska
As I said in my last posting, I started out as a very young child. I can remember bits and pieces of my early years but can’t remember five minutes ago. What I remember is that life was pretty good then. I played all day with a dog and chased chickens in my grandparents back yard. I remember the outhouse in the back and if it was cold or in the middle of the night the chamber pot under the bed did the trick. We listened to the old radio in the living room at night. Shows like Inner Sanctum, lone ranger, gene autry, the shadow, jack benny, etc. You got to use your imagination to visualize the scenes. The photos below is my house as it stands today in 2013. Looks a little different with a few modifications and minimum modifications.
We used to go downtown a lot. It was only about a four block walk. Downtown was fun back then. there was one big general store, now gone, a bank, now a post office, a meat locker, now gone, and an empty space between two building where they showed movies on the wall outside on some weekends. We sat on wooden benches. The meat locker was where we went when it got really hot. The owner let us stand in the cooler for a couple of minutes.
Just south of town the is a set of railroad tracks. I can remember us going down ther a couple of time to watch a flash flood roar down the tracks. Boy what excitement we had. Below are some more pictures of the town today. The fire station is the original station and a recent grant allowed an artist to paint the mural on it. Kind of cool.
This is the converted bank.
Empty space where the meat locker was.
Bennet gained some fame when Charles Starkweather and Caril Fugate came along. (Caril Ann Fugate (born July 30, 1943) was the adolescent girlfriend and accomplice of spree killer Charles Starkweather. She is the youngest female in United States history to have been tried for first-degree murder.) Charles Starkweather killed the childhood friend I used to play with.
Other memories I can remember is Saturday night baths in the kitchen in a wash tub, Sunday chicken dinners, walking down dirt roads and picking goose berries so my grandma could make pies and jelly. My grandma also taught me how to crochet. She was left handed and I was right handed, but it all some how worked out.
My grandpa ( really my step-grandpa) was a great male influence on me. Don’t know much about my real grandpa on my Mom’s side. Even back then I don’t remember my dad being around much. Don’t know if he was working a farm or already in the Army. No one around to ask anymore. Anyway, my grandpa was a veterinarian. Everyone called him Doc. He used to sit on the front porch in the evening in his rocking chair, smoking his pipe with Prince Albert in a can, and drinking a beer. I would sit on the right arm of the rocker. He was the first one to give me a beer. I had my own shot glass and he would pour me a couple of drops. I would make a terrible face but always came back for more. By the way, the beer was Schlitz but I was too young to pronounce it correctly. I called it Shits. Like I said my grandpa was a veterinarian and he provided the human killing of the Sunday chicken dinner. He would hang the chicken by their feet on the clothes line out back and stab them in the throat. He also introduced me to my first baby rabbits. He was digging up some potatoes in the back yard and discovered them. He also had grape vines in the back yard. Probably for making jelly. Can’t imagine for what any other reason.
A few days ago when I visited Bennet to get the pictures I decided to stop into the cemetery. I vaguely remember the funerals and knew about where they were my grandparents were buried. I found a map on the board there and was able to locate their graves. Picture below.
