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Hulda Driver’s Screen Door

 
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roger.pape
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Joined: 17 Mar 2009
Posts: 414
Location: Liverpool, NY

PostPosted: Thu Nov 18, 2010 10:47 am    Post subject: Hulda Driver’s Screen Door Reply with quote

There were some interesting houses in the 400 block of Magdalena St. of Concordia when I was a youngster. I thought about them when I was contacted by a relative of the Ziegelbein’s. John Ziegelbein, a long-time mechanic at Walkenhorst Motors and father of one of my classmates, started building a home there in the late 1940’s or early 50’s. After finishing the basement, he covered it and the family lived there for a number of years before he completed the house.

Just north of it was Hulda Driver’s old house. (At least it seemed old because it always needed painting and other repairs.) She had an icebox rather than a refrigerator and needed ice delivery regularly. The icebox was slightly smaller than a standard box and a normal block of ice would not quite fit in it. Rather than spend the time chipping away one side, my brother Don had the clever idea to put the block of ice edgewise on a hot sidewalk and melt it down until it fit. One day when cousin Bill Klingenberg was delivering ice there, he noticed tufts of cotton on the screen door. When he asked Hulda about that, she said “That’s to keep the mosquitoes out of the house.” To which Billy replied “Oh” but had a puzzled look on his face. Later, Billy said to me “I didn’t know that cotton repelled mosquitoes.” Apparently, he thought that she was saying that cotton had some repellant property, like bug spray, rather than simply plugging up the holes in the screen.

On the other side of the street was the house where Mrs. Emilie Luecht lived. She was the daughter of Henry Schlesselmann and widow of Rev. Eilert Luecht. Apparently, Henry built that house because the 1930 census shows him living in it with Mrs. Luecht and her son Norman. The house had no running water or indoor plumbing as long as she lived there. The well was in the back yard just across the fence from one of our chicken pens. If I remember correctly, it had a crank-type pump. (That’s the kind that has buckets strung along a looped chain to haul up the water.) The outhouse was built into the barn that backed up to the alley between her house and our house. I was always intrigued by the “honey-dippers” that would come periodically to clean it out. You didn’t need a keen sense of smell to know when they arrived. I would watch as they opened the trap door in the back and ladled out the contents into the barrels on their wagon.
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