Blowing in the Wind: On the farm winter was the most quiet and peaceful season. While it was always cold outside, the barns filled with livestock, hay and straw often were quite warm, even on the coldest days.

In the house it was always a battle to keep it warm and comfortable. The upstairs bedrooms were always drafty and cold because there was no way to force the heat from downstairs to the upstairs. In addition, the windows had no storm windows on the outside. When the wind blew you could always see the curtains blowing. The good news was we always had plenty of warm bodies in each bed plus plenty of heavy blankets. It never took us long to dress in the morning and head downstairs.

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Lights please: One of the out buildings on the farm was the smokehouse to the north of the house. When we moved to the Baby Fold farm the building was still functioning as a smokehouse. In later years it became a storage shed.

We didn't get electricity on the farm until 1947. Without electricity you either had a choice of taking your meat to the locker plants in Colfax, Lexington, Leroy, or one of the other small towns. These small towns had electricity about 2 or 3 years before the farms. The other option was to keep the meat in the smokehouse.

Generally in mid to late winter we'd butcher a pig and take the large hunks of meat into the smokehouse. We would then take handfuls of brown Morton's curing salt and rub it all over the bacon sides and the hams and other large pieces of pork. We would then place the meat on large meat hooks and hang the meat from open ceiling rafters. I don't recall anyone ever getting ill from the smokehouse meat. Nor, do I remember any of the meat ever spoiling or being tainted in any way. The only extra step in preparing the salted meat for the family meals was to run water over the meat to remove the salt.

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 Ante Up: The winter nights provided ample time for card playing. Dad loved playing cards so it's no wonder all the Weber children also learned to love playing almost any kind of cards. We played poker and buck uchere. The stakes were generally for nickels and no one lost much money in our games because we always placed limits as to how much you could lose.

The card playing carried over into the Weber and Arteman family gatherings also. The men always ended up in a big poker game much to the chagrin of the women who were banished to another room to fend for themselves and, of course, to watch over all the kids (prior to Women's Lib).

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Getting Deep: It seems to me almost everyone over age 50 has a tale about having to walk to school in snow drifts higher than their head. Well, I do too, and it's true, except perhaps for the height of the drifts.

We kids walked to school almost without exception every day, rain or shine. When we lived on Uncle Henry Weber's farm north of Cooksville in the early 40's we attended Mt. Guiliud School. To get there we walked east about 1/2 mile through the fields to the gravel road where the Powell's lived. From there we walked about 1/2 mile north to school across the Mackinaw River. Sometimes the snow was higher than my boots. It didn't seem like such a big deal because everyone else also walked. If we followed the gravel roads it was about 2 miles so we generally cut across the fields.

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Lofty Afternoons: Wintertime was not quite as busy and rushed as planting and harvesting season, but there were extra chores required in winter because of the cold weather. For example, winter always required having to spread straw in the pigpens and in the stalls for the cattle. Another battle was making sure all the water heaters were working so the water tanks didn't freeze over. Coal, wood, cobs, etc. prior to electricity fired the water heaters so it wasn't always easy to keep the water from freezing.

Despite the extra chores, we boys always found time to play basketball up in the hayloft of the barn that was located near the corncrib. The hayloft always had either loose hay or baled hay. Each winter we would rearrange the hay so there would be enough space to play. We would eventually end up with an area about 20 feet by 25 feet; not very big for a gym floor, but it worked OK because I couldn't shoot from any further than 10 feet anyway. Basketball was not my favorite sport. The only one of my brothers that I could out jump was Terry. I don't ever remember catching my chin on the rim of the basket.

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 Goose Chase: At school in the winter we played a game out of doors in the snow called fox and goose. It was a version of tag played around a large circle in the snow with paths leading to home base, which was a small circle inside the larger circle. The whole thing resembled the spokes of a wheel. The idea was the fox had to catch the goose before the goose made it to home base. Doesn't sound like much fun now, but then neither does walking for exercise around North Point or the College Hill Mall.

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Mackinaw Falls: When I was 12 or 13 I saved enough to buy a pair of black leather ice skates. Two or three of my grade school friends also had skates. We would meet down at the Mackinaw and try our hand at ice-skating. It's a wonder we didn't break our ankles because the river never froze exactly smooth. There were also sticks and branches frozen on the surface of the ice, so it was very dangerous. In truth, it probably didn't affect the caliber of our skating, because none of us really knew how to skate very well. After a couple of hours of flopping around on the ice, I would always end up with a sore bottom and aching ankles. Generally we would put the skates aside and if there was enough snow on the ground, we'd take our sleds and head for the hills. Sometimes we nearly froze, but the next day we would do it all over again.

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 Slippery Slopes: The hills and the timber provided a great place for sledding. I can remember flying down the hill on my sled and jumping the little creek that ran through the timber. It's a small miracle that I didn't get killed. The creek bed in places was 8 to 10 feet across because of soil erosion. The creek bank on the hillside of the creek was about four feet higher than the other side. That meant you were in the air about 8 feet before you landed on the other side. It wasn't very smart, but it was fun if and when you made it across.

The longer more sloping hill was the one just north of the Mackinaw. It sloped right down to the fence that bordered the river on the north side. We always tried to see who could go the longest distance down this hill. If the snow was crusted on top enough to keep the sled runners from sinking into the snow, one could go to the fence and sometimes further, if you could get the sled to turn and run parallel to the fence.

There were other things I remember about winter, like the pot belly stove that set in the dining room and would glow a bright red at night; the kerosene lamps; the trips to the outhouse when the temperature was below zero; mom hanging clothes to freeze dry on the clothes line behind the house, and my Vitalis hair oil (mostly alcohol) freezing in my upstairs bedroom.

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Let George do it: I spent a lot of my non-school winter days hunting rabbits and pheasants with my 22 rifle. Even on terribly cold days, near zero, I would be outside tramping along the hedgerows and the little creek behind the barn and corncrib.

Mom had a friend, Grace Hallstrom, who lived in Chicago. She would come down and visit a couple of times each year, along with her husband Al and family. In the wintertime, her husband would sometimes bring a friend down with him and they would go hunting on our farm. Since they didn't know much about the hunting locations on the farm (or hunting either for that matter) I was always their 'bird dog' and would point out the rabbits and pheasants hidden along the hedgerows and fences.

Once Gracie's husband brought a friend with him by the name of George Binks. George was a major league baseball player for the Washington Senators. He had heard that my brothers and I were baseball players and fans. So he brought a baseball that he had autographed. It set on a whatnot shelf in our dining room for a couple of years.

We hunted for a couple of hours that day. There was a lot of snow on the ground and the weather was very cold, so the rabbits and pheasants were all settled in along the hedgerows. I must have kicked up about 6 or 8 rabbits and about 5 or 6 pheasants that morning. Each time I pointed one out, I would give them time to get their automatic shotguns ready and then proceed to flush out the rabbit or pheasant. There would be a terrible explosion of gunfire as they emptied their automatics while the rabbits and pheasants would scurry off frightened but always unscathed. I've never seen anything to equal it.

Apparently George Binks couldn't hit baseballs any better than he could hit rabbits or pheasants because he didn't last very long as a major league player.

What happened to the baseball you ask? Well, one summer afternoon about 2 years later Kenny and I were playing baseball in the grove in front of the house as we often did. We ran out of baseballs to play with and, you guessed it, I ran into the house and got George off the whatnot shelf; thus ending the life of the autographed ball at about the same time as George's checkered baseball career.

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Yuton: My first memories as a child were those when we lived at Yuton. I attended grades 1 and 2 in a little one-room school one mile west of the Yuton grain elevator on the Yuton Danvers road. The school is still there but it has now been converted to a small house.

My teacher was Miss Isabell Basting, a wonderful lady who made her 15 to 18 students feel very special. She was a long time friend of Dad and Mom after she became our teacher. Kenny, Marilyn and I attended this little school. Roger was still too young and Terry and Donna not yet born.

I can remember we walked the mile to school on the gravel road carrying our books and a lunch pail. I can also remember playing softball in the small schoolyard between the schoolhouse and the road. Miss Basting had a good friend who was the teacher at Little Brick Grade School at the corner of what is now Raab Road and Linden Street in Normal. I remember our little school going there to play softball. I don't recall the outcome so we must have lost.

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Mount Guiliud: I have lots of good memories of school, both grade and high school. There were about 13 kids in school at Mount Guiliud just north of the Mackinaw River three miles north of Cooksville. One of our teachers drove an old Chevy car. One day the older boys (not me) slid dozens of corncobs up the exhaust pipe of her car and then waited in the cornfield to see what would happen. Teacher started the car and blew corncobs all over the schoolyard, while the guys in the field about died laughing.

Things were sometimes so lacking in our little grade school that I ended up teaching phonics to the younger kids (your mother still can't believe this). I must admit that I probably screwed up several of my schoolmates for life.

Our little one room grade school didn't include a library nor did we have one at home. My favorite book, therefore, was one of my textbooks. It was my history book. I didn't necessarily like all of history, but I was fascinated by the civil war. That's a boy for you.

I was never able to understand, then or now, the strategy involved in the great battles of the civil war. How could anyone in their right mind line up two or three hundred soldiers across an open field and march them straight ahead toward the enemy who were also lined up in the same way, and when both lines got close enough, shoot at each other. It never made sense to me, especially when most of the generals had graduated from military academies. Even we kids, when playing Cowboys and Indians, had enough sense to hide behind rocks or trees or something so we wouldn't get shot. It's still a mystery to me.

After graduation from Mount Guiliud, I left home to attend high school at St. Bede Academy at Peru, Illinois. That was in the fall of 1946. Thank goodness I didn't have to take an entrance exam, or they would have first had to make me retake phonics lessons.

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Watchful eye: I was a hard worker in grade school and in high school primarily because I was just average when it came to learning. The hard work did pay off years later when I earned a State of Illinois College Scholarship by finishing in the upper third of my class. I read and worked hardest in grade school the year Mary Arteman lived with us and taught school at Mount Guiliud while Uncle Joe was in the Navy. It wasn't very easy having your aunt as a teacher and also living in your home. I couldn't get away with anything. I could never offer a single excuse for a missed assignment.

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Now Hear This: Saint Bede Academy was a family tradition for many years. Uncle Basil was the first Weber to attend St. Bede. Dad attended for a short time. Seems they ran out of coal and had to close down the school. I don't know the details, but Dad never returned after they reopened.

I was 14 when I started my high school education at St. Bede. I have a good recollection of my first night there. It was 'rules night'. Father Conrad, a large robust Benedictine priest, was my prefect. He was the one who explained the rules. The meeting lasted two hours and was filled with nothing but 'don'ts' and 'can't dos' and the consequences of each violation. Many of the rules involved being on time. (Now you know why I am 10 minutes early for almost everything.)

Each of the potential violations were emphasized by Fr. Conrad pounding his fist on the old wooden desk. I thought he would shatter it or at least break his hand. It turns out his tirade worked because I ended up on the honor roll and recipient of the good conduct medal of the freshman class. It's amazing what fear can do to and for you.

Dining Hall: All meals were served in a very large dining hall. The tables were about 25 foot long and divided by school class. In addition, there were separate tables for the junior college students.

All students would enter the dining hall at the same time and go directly to their table. All remained standing until after grace before meals was said. No one was permitted to leave until everyone finished eating and grace after meals had been said.

During the Lenten season, and on certain other special occasions during the church calendar year, one of the monks or a priest would read from scripture. During these meals no one was permitted to talk. This was really unusual because typically the hall was very noisy.

Our meals were prepared by a group of Hungarian nuns who arrived in the U.S. in my freshman year. They didn't know much about food preparation. You never were sure just what you were eating. But you knew it was a lot different than Mom's cooking. If I had stayed at St. Bede and ate their cooking, I would probably still weigh 135 pounds

I helped offset some of my school expenses by working as a dish dryer in the kitchen of the dining hall. I worked with about four other students plus about six of the Hungarian nuns. None of the nuns spoke English and as you might guess, none of us guys who worked there could speak Hungarian, but we had a great time laughing and trying to communicate with the nuns. It's amazing how much can be understood by hand motions and facial expressions.

With about 250 eating at each meal, there were lots of dishes to be washed and dried. There was an automatic dishwasher that the nuns ran. It would take us boys about an hour and a half to complete the drying after each meal.

In late spring and early fall, the nuns would often end up in the garden area behind our dorm and you could hear them laughing and singing in their native tongue. I often wonder what happened to them.

The Shack: My second job in high school was working in the school store. The store was a combination soda fountain with ice cream, sodapop, hot dogs and candy; and a bookstore with all of the textbooks used in the high school and junior college, plus school supplies. In addition we sold school jackets, sweaters and hats, etc. The store was called The Shack. We were open for about three to four hours a day after classes until dinner time and again after dinner till about 7:30. On Saturdays and Sundays we were open about five to six hours off and on throughout the day.

The Shack was a great place to work because sooner or later you got to meet everyone, including all the priests, all the high school students, as well as the college students, and visitors. The latter group included having the chance to meet all the Harlem Globetrotters when they played an exhibition basketball game at St. Bede against another traveling team called the Washington Kernels. The main attraction for the Globetrotters in those days was a fellow named Goose Tatum, a world-renowned player who was called the crown prince of basketball.

The Shack was a good place to hang out on Saturday afternoons because I could listen to the Notre Dame football games on the radio. The other major benefit at the Shack was that I got everything I wanted free, including school clothing and everything else we offered for sale. I ended up working all my four years of school in the Shack.

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