The Biography of a Rabbit

My father, Roy Benson, was born in 1879 in Centerfield, New York, and my mother, Frances Lorraine Gulvin, was born in 1880 in Sittingbourne, England which is about fifty miles southeast of London. Sittingbourne is approximately thirty miles from Rochester, England. She came to the United States with her parents when she was three years old and settled on a farm in Seneca Castle (which is thirty miles from Rochester, New York).

When my father was courting my mother he would walk to Canandaigua from Centerfield and rent a horse and buggy from a livery stable on the corner of Chapin and Main Streets. He would then drive to Seneca Castle, a distance of some ten miles, to see her. on the way home, late at night, he would sleep in the buggy and the horse would find its own way back to the livery. He would awaken when the buggy rolled to a stop, then walk back to Centerfield.

They were married in 1901 and went to one of the beaches in Rochester for a honeymoon (perhaps Charlotte). At that time such a trip was an all day affair. They traveled from Canandaigua on the trolley that ran all the way to the beach and carried their picnic lunch, I was told. After their marriage, my parents made their first home in a house on the corner of Bristol and Mason Streets. In 1903 their first child, Clarence was born. A few years later they moved to a farm on Route 5 and 20 about one and a half miles from Canandaigua. My father worked for a painting contractor in Canandaigua at the time and Clarence has told me that Dad used to ride a bicycle to work, wearing a derby hat and carrying his paint buckets on the handle bars. there was a big oak tree on the road, about half way from home to town and the children would walk as far as the tree and wait there each day for my father to come home from work. They would all then walk on home together.

My brothers and sisters were: Clarence, Gordon (born 1904), Leon (born 1905), Adelaide (1908), Mildred (1910), Dorothy (1914), and Helen (1916).

The family moved to the first big house on the West Lake Road and I was born there July 23, 1917. I remember only a few incidents during the time we lived there. One time I rolled a Croquet ball off a high front porch and across a lawn to where it went over a bank and hit my sister Dorothy on the head. I recall sleeping in a downstairs bedroom with the window open (there were no screens at this time). We kept a cow for milk and early in the morning it stuck its' head in the window and gave a loud moo next to my head while I was still sleeping. We also had large barns and did some farming. We grew potatoes for home use and my brothers raised cucumbers to sell. My older brothers used to catch rides to school on passing farmers wagons whenever they could. They went to the Palace Theater on the corner of Saltenstall and Main Streets for five cents. We had a horse that would refuse to pull the hay wagon up the hill to the barn and I remember standing on the wheel spokes to push the horse and wagon towards the barn.

In 1922, when I was five years old, we moved to the house on Chapin Street where my father lived until his death. I attended the Adelaide Avenue School for grades 1 to 3 then went to the Union School, which stood where the YMCA is now. My father bought the house, almost new at the time, for $1400. During these years there were nine of us children (my brother Robert having been born in 1919) and our house was always the center of activity for the neighborhood. All of our friends would come to our house to play and we had childhoods filled with love and good times. My father had horseshoe beds in the backyard with lights above them so the men could play at night. All my uncles and the neighbors would come often to play.

It was about this time that my father opened a wallpaper and paint store on South Main Street. He intended to run the store with Clarence, Gordon, and Leon and also do the painting and wallpapering for his customers. I don't know how many years he had the store, but it was not a success. He then built a large addition to the two car garage at home and moved the paint and wallpaper there for storage. There was plenty of wallpaper he was unable to sell and we kids used to have pieces to cut flowers and patterns with. We would glue the small pieces to bottles and shellac them to make vases. Raymond Smith was my buddy then and was at our house most of the time. They lived a couple of houses down the street and our mothers attended church on Sundays and Wednesday night prayer meetings together. I recall that our Sunday night suppers were always cornmeal with milk and brown sugar. We had a large dining room table, a cherry drop leaf, that would seat ten. I always sat next to my mother at the table. She would make large sugar cookies with a seeded raisin on top and put them on newspapers on the dining room table. We would eat them there while they were still warm. You can imagine what it must have been like cooking three meals a day for ten or more people on the old coal stove. I believe we had gas on one side and coal on the other. We kept the coal fire going to heat the back part of the house. My mother would wash my hair by having me lay on the ironing board with my head hanging over the sink. We took our Saturday night bath in a large washtub by the kitchen stove. We had no bathtub until I was about eight years old.

We always had baseball equipment to play with due to my brother's interest. We would play ball in the street and in a lot at the corner of Chapin and Thad Chapin Streets. The trees, High banks and uneven ground helped me to become a good center-fielder when I played on a flat baseball field. That was easy after running up and down those hills and I could catch anything. The only toys that Ray and I had were very simple. We took the wheels off an old baby buggy and nailed them on the end of a stick. We would run around the house pushing it by the hour.

At Christmas time we were allowed to open one toy when we got up in the morning. My favorite, which I asked for every year, was a wind up tractor with rubber treads which we would try to make climb over stacks of books on the floor. We would also roll marbles down the groove in the bottom of skis to knock down houses made of cards. My older brothers and sisters who were married would arrive around noon for Christmas dinner and there were usually about twenty there. After dinner we would open the presents in the parlor. There were so many of us that we would draw names for the person to whom we gave gifts.

My brothers and I slept in an upstairs bedroom with the window open a couple of inches in the winter time. When we woke up in the morning there would be snow in a pile on the floor under the window. We had one floor register about four feet square in the living room and we would sit around it for warmth. I remember the babies would sometimes crawl on the register and wet their diapers. My mother would sprinkle sugar down the flue to the hot furnace dome to get rid of the smell. Above the register, on the wall, was a shelf which held my mother's chime clock.

There was a small room upstairs where we had a library. My brothers had about three hundred books there and there was an army cot there on which I slept for several years. The library contained the Zane Grey westerns. These were all lost later when my father moved out and rented the house for several years during the war. All my possessions, except for clothes, were lost at that time. After my father remarried, he and my stepmother moved back into the house.

My brothers built a wooden platform in the backyard and we had a tent on it for several summers. We would sleep out there when the house was too hot in the summer time. There were three army cots in it. Dr. Behan lived on Thad Chapin Street just around the corner. He had several large farm horses which would get loose and come running down the street in front of our house. If we were playing out in front and heard the horses coming we would run for the front porch. Sometimes the horses would run across the front yard and barely miss us. We were so small that the horses seemed twenty feet tall. That is probably the reason I never cared much for horses. During this time my father got his first car, a second hand 1917 Ford. I can just remember that the tail lights were small kerosene lamps that you fill up and light for night driving. On one car that Clarence had, the windshield would tip out from the bottom for ventilation and the windshield wipers were worked by hand. I can remember pushing it back and forth while Clarence drove.

In 1926 my grandfather, Peter Orson Benson, would come up to pitch horseshoes with me. He lived with my uncle Jim across the street and down the hill a little. I would see grandfather coming and would have plenty of time to get ready for him because he was 96 years old and it would take him about twenty minutes to walk up. He would toss the horseshoes and I would bring them back to him. He was an active man and had a good size garden until he was about 95 years old. I remember that he had a long white beard that came down to his belt.

My mother did not get to take very many vacations in her lifetime. One time we went up along the St. Lawrence River and another time we went to Buffalo and took the boat trip across Lake Erie to Long Point Park. Another time we went, in two cars, to Pennsylvania. She spent all of life cooking, washing, sewing and caning. Saturday night was the big night of the week for everyone. to make certain we got a parking place downtown, my father would take the car down in the late afternoon and after supper we would walk down to shop and watch the people in town. I can remember sitting on the front fenders of the car and watching the shoppers. There was a popcorn wagon by a building on South Main Street and I suppose, if we had the money, we would get some popcorn or candy. I can remember walking down Chapin Street with my mother to see a movie in the evening.

The Playhouse Theater on Chapin Street had what they called Bank Night on Wednesdays. They would announce a person's name in the theater and by loudspeaker, outside. You did not need a ticket to be eligible and I guess they picked names at random from the phone book or a list of city residents. There would be crowds outside and you had several minutes to answer, so if you were not there someone could come to find you if they hurried. The prize would build up if there was no one to claim it. I remember the time Ray Smith and I were inside and they called our number. We won two bags of groceries. There was also a dish night when they gave away dishes.

One Fourth of July we had a bushel basket of fireworks and were to set them off after dark. I was sitting on the steps with the other kids when someone threw a lighted punk (used to light firecrackers, etc.) into the basket. The whole bushel went off at once! You never saw such a sight; kids running in all directions with Roman candles and pinwheels swirling around them. The house did not catch fire, but the event charred the siding and the porch floor. Nobody was blamed for it because no one was quite certain how it happened. It was probably the fastest celebration of the Fourth that I ever had.....and the most exciting!

Ray and I went to the movies every Saturday afternoon to see the old western movies. We would run all the way to the theater and the first one there got the corner seat in the first row of the balcony. After the movies we would go up to my house and my mother would make each of us a slice of bread and butter with sugar on it. Next we would run up to Arsenal hill and play cowboys. We had a cave dug out of a mound of dirt and we would defend it with spears made from long goldenrod stalks sharpened on the thick end. In the winter we nailed a wooden box on two barrel staves and would sit on the box sliding down hill trying to dodge the trees. In those days they did not plow or sand the streets and when we finally got sleds we slid down Chapin Street. One friend had a bobsled which held about ten kids and we rode that from Brigham Hall, down Thad Chapin, down Chapin Street to the Sucker Brook bridge. The only dangerous intersection was at Chapin and Pearl Streets and we would take turns watching for cars. There were very few cars in those days so it didn't bother us very much.

My brother Robert was two years younger than I and he was sick for a long time before he died at age eight. He was in a wheelchair for quite a while. He had what was called rheumatic fever and the doctor had to drain fluid from his back. The wheelchair was one of those old large ones with a wicker seat and back. I would go to the corner store where VanBrookers is now (Pearl and West Avenue) for groceries for my mother. Robert would sit in his wheelchair by the window and time my running to the store and back. I ran as fast as I could and it must have been good practice because, by the time I reached high school, I was the fastest runner there. The only boy who could keep up with me was "Horse Face" Johnson from Cheshire.

One of our favorite times of the year was when we had the family reunion. In those years we would have from 50 to 100 people. Some of the games we played then were fun and would be even now. There was a pile of sand and they would bury hundreds of pennies in it then let the kids loose to find as many as they could. There would be a ten (or more) gallon container of ice cream from Johncox Ice Cream Plant. After dinner we were allowed as many ice cream cones as we wanted. I remember we could only eat two or three before we were full, then we'd feel bad that we couldn't eat more. Our favorite reunion was the one held at my Aunt Alice's down on Seneca Lake. She was such a nice person, everyone loved to go there. Her husband John was a huge man and just as nice. They lived on a farm and raised food for Lakemont Academy, a school for boys. Their farm was next door and owned by the Academy.

Sometimes we would go to the farm the night before and stay over, sleeping in the house, on the porches, even in the hay in the big barns. The older boys used to drink beer and play cards all night out in the barn. The house was on a hill about one quarter mile from the lake with a lane running down to a boathouse on the shore. In later years I can remember going down with Clarence and Gordon to sleep in the boathouse which was out over the water. It was a wild spot in those days with no cottages nearby. The hill from the house to the lake was all grape vineyards and there was a railroad track right through the vineyard. When we heard a train coming, we would run down and toss big bunches of grapes to the train crew as the train went very slowly due to the up hill grade.

In 1925 Clarence and Gordon went to Florida for a couple of months in the winter. In those days the roads were not very good and the cars undependable. While in Florida, living in a tent, they worked on the road repair gang and also picked fruit. I remember they picked apples all that fall on a farm near Geneva in order to earn enough money for their trip. I recall their return from Florida late one night during a bitterly cold snowstorm. They came in the back door with bags of oranges.

In 1926 there was an older couple, Mr. and Mrs. Rundel, from Omaha, Nebraska, who were traveling through Canandaigua when they had a serious accident. They were hospitalized and their car was in a garage being fixed. Due to their injuries they did not feel up to driving to Nebraska so they advertised in the paper for someone to drive them home. Gordon answered the ad and drove them back. They all got along so well, they asked him to stay with them and he did ... for three years. He bought himself a pickup truck and started a painting business there. He sent us pictures taken of the tornado damage in that area. I remember one picture he took of a wheat straw that was driven into a telephone pole.

In 1927 Clarence and John Timms started for California on motorcycles and they got as far as Kansas when they could no longer ride the motorcycles due to the bad roads. The roads were all red clay and when wet they were worse than ice. After falling off them too many times, they pushed the motorcycles into Kansas City and sold them. They took the money and went by train, to Omaha where Gordon was living. They talked Gordon into going on to California with them in his truck. The roads were very poor, dirt mostly, and it took them a long time. In California they picked grapes, then they came back to Omaha, where they left Gordon, and returned home by train. When Gordon finally came home in 1929 he drove all the way without stopping and it was several years before he got over it. He developed car sickness and could not ride in a car for some time.

I was in the Boy Scouts for several years and really enjoyed it. I got all the merit badges up to the one for swimming and that was when I quit the Scouts. I found that the friends you make in Scouting are sometimes your friends all your life . . . ones like Ray Smith and Skip Dewey. We had a lot of good times at Camp Woodcraft near Cheshire, New York. One of our favorite games there was "Capture the Flag". The lane through Camp Woodcraft was the line between sides and the flag was on a pole way back in the woods. Some would guard the flag while others would circle around, try to get the other side's flag, and return across the center line with it. If you were touched by anyone on the other side, you were out of the game. It is similar to the game they play now with those dye guns. I was in the Beaver Patrol and can remember the meals that we used to cook. Some patrols did fancy things, but we always ended up with Campbells soup. We were known as the "Soup Patrol".

Every year we used to plant pine trees at Camp Woodcraft. It would take all day and we carried the seedlings around in a pail. When noon came, we would wash the pail out in the creek and heat our soup in it. There was a small cabin with a dirt floor, loft and an old cook stove. One time Ray Smith and I went up to stay overnight and it was cold. We were quite young at the time and got scared as it grew dark so we tried to sleep in the loft. We had a wood fire going in the old stove to keep warm and it made so much smoke that we coughed all night and didn't sleep much. We were still too scared to come down from the loft. L. Ray Stokie was our Scoutmaster and he ran a chocolate shop on Main Street. We would go down to the store and he would let us go down in the basement to watch him make chocolates and pull taffy.

Most of my possessions during these years were bought for me by my brother Clarence. My most prized possession was a pair of leather high top boots with a pouch on the side for a jack knife. He also bought me a hatchet, which I still have today. It is the only one I've ever owned and it must be sixty years old. It is getting dull, but it's never been sharpened. He also bought me my first bicycle and it took me forever to learn to ride it. I don't know how many years I had it, but it was my only bike. My mother and father had little money in those days, especially during the Depression in 1929 and 1930, so if I had anything at all it was bought for me by my older brothers.

It was some time during these years when I was in the little corner store on West Avenue and I stole a five cent candy bar. I was scared for months that I would be found out. It affected me so much that the feelings have remained with me throughout my life. It was a great lesson because I never did anything like that again. Jack VanBrooker ran the store and when he had bananas that were too ripe to sell, he would tell Ray and I that if we could eat them all we could have them for free. We would sit on the lawn by the store and watch the cars go by while eating bananas until they came out of our ears. We never did have to pay for any.

We had many other enjoyable pastimes outdoors. We would cut the cover off a golf ball and unwind some of the miles of rubber bands inside. By putting half on each side of the street we could stretch it across and when a car came down it would stretch the rubber about a quarter mile. We would also go to the top of Arsenal Hill and hit golf balls with baseball bats. They really go a long ways. We found our golf balls in the bottom of the creek down by the golf course.

On the west bank of thad Chapin Street there was a row of black oxhart cherry trees belonging to Doctor Behan's widow. When they were ripe we could not resist trying to get some. As soon as we got in the trees, "Old Lady Behan" as we called her, would come running down the street yelling and waving her arms. Guess she watched those trees all day long. One night Ray and I went over and filled our pockets with cherries and ran through the tall weeds back to the tent in our backyard. To our utter dismay, we had run through the weeds where a skunk had just sprayed and we had to throw away all the cherries and change our clothes.

During the harvest season the wagon loads of pea vines passed up Thad Chapin and, when we saw them coming, we hid along the road until we could run up behind the wagon and pull off a big armful of pea vines. Sometimes we would get enough to take home to our mothers. You understand this was not like stealing candy from a store to our way of thinking, so we were certainly not doing anything wrong. There is a big difference between stealing and mere survival. Besides, we had to have something to do to keep us out of trouble.

There were many sheep pastured in the open fields around Camp Woodcraft in the summer time. They were taken to the farm barns north and east of town during the winter. The herders drove the flocks down the road by our house every spring and fall. They were driven down West Avenue and up Main Street. There were so few cars at that time that traffic was not a problem.

The ice truck came around in the summer with ice for everyone's ice box. Mother would put a sign in the window for 25, 50 or 100 pounds and they would chip off a piece and weigh it. While the driver took the ice into the house, all the kids would run up to the back of the truck and get loose pieces of ice. The ice man would yell and chase us away when he came out.

During the Civil War there was an arsenal built at the top of what was thereafter called Arsenal Hill. Weapons were stored there in the event that the city had to be defended. Of course the buildings were gone by the time we played there as kids, but we found the old foundations by digging down a ways. There were a lot of old red bricks. The gully down the other side of the hill had a creek running down it. Ray and I would dig in the mud looking for cannon balls and one time we found one, four to five inches in diameter. It was very heavy. We eventually took it to the Historical Museum as a donation and I believe it is still on display there.

Arsenal Hill (West Avenue) was a steep and dangerous hill. There were many accidents at the bottom and near the corner of Pearl Street. We could hear the crash of accidents from our house on Chapin Street and the kids would all run down to see them. One time a truck load of prunes tipped over and there were prunes everywhere. Another time a load of butter in wooden crocks tipped over and the crocks rolled down people's lawns. People were coming out and carrying them into their houses, but we didn't know enough to get any. Once a car hit a tree and the driver was thrown through the roof and landed on the sidewalk. When we got there, he was sitting up and asked us for a cigarette. Probably he wasn't hurt because (he looked like) he was drunk.

My grandfather, Peter O. Benson, was born September 12, 1831 and died in 1931. Sometime in the 1920's there was a full page article and his picture in the daily paper. It told of his attending the Ontario County Fair for 90 consecutive years. The Fair was held in September then so all the farm products were on display. The fairgrounds were off Fort Hill Avenue where the present High School stands. There was a grandstand, barns and a race track for harness racing. It was a big day for us, as kids, as a picnic lunch was packed and we would park the car in the center of the race track and stay at the Fair all day.

I remember one day when we were playing in the front yard a big black car, with a Philippine chauffeur, stopped. Inside was Ada Kent, from California, a cousin of my father. Her husband had helped finance George Eastman when he founded Eastman Kodak. She came to set up an annuity for my father and all my uncles. They cost $45,000 each and my father received $100 a month for the rest of his life. I remember that he was able to get a better car and buy my mother a new coat (which I recall was blue). When I was in the service, Ada Kent died in Carmel by the Sea, California and left two million dollars to the old woman who cared for her.

We had a big garden and in the fall I would build a little house of sod, sticks, boards and anything else I could find. It was just large enough for me to squeeze into. In one side of it I made a little fireplace out of clumps of dirt and I would break up the sticks to have a little fire for heat. We had a large prune tree next to the garage and my mother would can a lot of them every year. My father loved them. We would take the pits out of some and put them on the flat garage roof to dry in the sun. We covered them with wire screen to keep the birds away. When dried, they were stored in large bags in the bottom of a big kitchen cupboard. In the winter I would get into the cupboard and sit there eating prunes. We had a large sweet cherry tree in the side yard and mother canned nearly 100 quarts every year. I helped her with all the canning--cherries, prunes, peaches, and pears. when she did the cherries she always left one cherry with the pit in it per quart. The person who got the pit when the cherries were served was given a dime. This was a big treat for us.

Our house was always the gathering place for kids and we were likely to play games like "Red Light", "Hide and Seek", and Holly Golly". We used to make guns out of old tire tubes, sticks and a half clothes pin. We would cut loops of inner tube to shoot as bullets then play cowboys and Indians.