William Blum

The Most Important Events in My Life as I Remembered Them and Had Them Recorded by My Son Herbert

Recorded by Herbert E. Blum.
Transcribed by Ellen M. Rohr from The Blum Family History written by Herbert E. Blum.

Continued from Page 1

I sold the farm to a man from Sheboygan, Wisconsin and took three houses as payment. I thought the rent money would be a good income. This didn't work out too good either. It seemed the repair work and the resulting loss of time from my job made it a losing proposition. Poor renters and a lack of supervision because I was too far away made me sell the houses for whatever I could get for them.

In the meantime we had moved to an empty house on the cheese factory property at the top of the Saxonburg hill. I took a job with Hugo Benzinger my neighboring farmer and I helped him with the farm work. I figured that the rent money from the houses and my pay as a farm worker would support myself and my family which now numbered four. My wife and I and daughter, Dorothy and a son Herbert. I soon looked for another job and traveled to Two Rivers to find one.

In the spring, On May 16, 1916, I started working for the Aluminum Good Manufacturing company at Two Rivers, plant number two. They made many things out of Aluminum. This industry was started in Two Rivers by Joseph Koenig who saw some items made of Aluminum at the Columbian Exposition of 1893. The items came from Germany. Up to then only novelties were made of the new metal. So when Joseph started making combs and other useful items of aluminum he started the aluminum industry in the United States. By 1916 when I started work there the company had grown large and were making many items. They were the largest manufacturers of aluminum cooking utensils. I worked at Plant Number Two. It was on the south side of the river. The work in the factory was hard. All my life up to this time, I had worked out in the open air so I didn't care much for the dust and dirt and for factory work in general but I stuck it out until August 5, 1919. In 1917, I again tried to get a mail carriers job. I had to have a physical examination taken. The doctors report indicated that I had defective eye sight so on December 27, 1917, I received an official paper stating that I had been turned down and I could not get a carriers job.

With the start of World War I, we all had to register and carry a card showing our status as far as the draft was concerned. I registered on 12th day of September, 1918. I was later put in Class 4. Division "A". Right now (1964) I can't tell you what that meant anymore. I was thirty-three years old at the time and our family numbered six. My wife and I and four children. We were living at 1412 Hawthorne Avenue, at the time. As I said in 1919, I quit and looked for an outside job again. Now we were living on the north side of town on 20th street.

On August 10, 1919, I found some outside work with the Motket Bros. They were contractors who were building houses in Two Rivers. While I was with them as a carpenter they built fifty homes on the south side and on the east side of town. This job ended because they had filled the needs of the market in this locality and they moved to another city.

By the time our family numbered seven, Dorothy, Herbert, Martha, Alma, Edna, Elva and Alice. On April 5, 1920, at 8:30 a.m. we lost our youngest daughter, Alice. It saddened us terribly but we adjusted to it.

About this time I started working at the Aluminum Goods Manufacturing Company, Plant No. 4. I was there until the following year, 1921. I heard about an outside job with a coal company. I thought I would like this better so I started working for the william Boehriner Fuel and Oil Company. My job consisted of managing the yard, unloading cars and delivering orders of wood and coal to the homes that had ordered them. In 1924, my son Herbert helped out. He did some of the work unloading railroad cars of coal and sacks of lime. He helped me with the sawing too. The wood came into the yard in four foot lengths and had to be sawed into 16 inch lengths so the people could get it into their stoves to burn. He told me one day, "I don't like this job."

I bought a house at 1302 Hawthorne Avenue. We lived there until we moved out to the farm in Gibson.

We made wine many of the years that we lived there. We made Bee Wine from raisen etc. and Chokecherry Wine. One time when we went chokecherry picking we put all of the small children in the baby buggy and you older children had to walk way out to the lighthouse. It was a four mile walk.

We also had an acre of ground about a mile out of town towards the northwest. We used this ground for a garden. Each spring we would plant it and tend it through the summer and later harvest the produce. We had a lot of beans that you children had to help pick. WE sold them for extra cash to fee our family. Those were the days! The potatoes we would plant on Memorial Day because it was a holiday and our whole family was at home to help.

In April of 1926, I started working for the Strue Construction Company . They had paving contracts for streets and roads. I worked with them until the work stopped in the fall.

On the first of October, 1926, until the spring of 1927, I worked at Kahlenberg Bros. They had been making engines since 1895. They were one of the pioneer internal combustion engine builders in the United States. In 1898, William R. Kahlenberg designed and built for John La Fond, Pioneer commercial fisherman of Two Rivers, a marine gasoline engine for a fishing boat of the so-called Mackinaw type, which then employed oars and sails to reach the fishing grounds. The success of the first engine led to its use by fishermen all along the lake shore. With the increased cost of gasoline in 1914, the company developed a new line of diesel engines operating on fuel oil instead of gasoline. Soon they were selling world wide and had expanded to other related items. When I started working there they were also manufacturing propellers, marine whistles, air horns and navigating aids. This inside work, as always, didn't appeal to me too much.

When I heard about a salesman being needed to sell a line of brushes to the housewife I looked into it to see if it had any possibilities for me. I thought it did so I started selling Fuller Brushes on a country route.

I learned to drive a car when I worked at the Boehringer coal yard. I had to drive a truck then, so I learned. One weekend I bought a Ford Model T touring car. Well, I practiced to run the darn thing and it was all together different than a truck. The truck was a lever shift that I shifted with my right hand. The Ford was a pedal shift. Everything had to be done with the feet. The hands were busy steering and operating the spark and gas levers. When I thought I knew how to drive we were out to the Henry Thielbar farm on Sunday. There was a celebration honoring my mother. It was Doris Blum's birthday. Late in the afternoon as we left the farm and started home we came to a sharp corner. The car struck some loose gravel and skidded and overturned in the road ditch. It landed on its top and we were all under it. Ma and me and one or two of the children and Dorothy and Alvin. Alvin hurt his back hurt and Ma had her shoulder broke. The little ones and me did not get hurt. The car came out the best. It only lost its top.

On December 11, 1924, our son, Edward H. Walter Blum was born. He did not live long. He died on January 16, 1925. It could be that he was injured before he was born when we had the accident with the Ford out at the Thielbar farm.

All in all I had a number of cars, Fords, Chevrolets, Studebaker and Graham Paige to mention a few.

I want to say too that we always belonged to a church. When we were married we joined the Mishicot Church, St. Peters Evangelical Lutheran Church which belonged to the Wisconsin Synod. When we lived in Two Rivers we joined St. John's Congregation, also a Wisconsin Synod Church. These were all started in the 1850s by the pioneers like my father and preachers who had come over from Germany with all the immigrants. When we moved to Mishicot we again joined Two Rivers church. We felt more at home there. All of our children were baptized and confirmed in the Lutheran faith.

In April I again started working for the Aluminum Good Manufacturing Company in Plant No. 4. I stayed here until we moved out to the farm in Gibson. We worked for a short time and then nine of us were layed off. I was out of work for nine months. This was the start of hard times. The stock market crash and the resulting depression were to be hard on us.

I remember about this time our son, Herbert, lived with us. He paid board and room and we also had taken in boarders to help defray the cost of the living expenses. Herb was working yet. He liked to play around with his radio. He would sit up all night and listen to the radio. He got angry when we scolded or bothered him. It wasn't easy to find something to feed the family with. Ma scrimped and saved all she could and we just managed to live. Dorothy and Alvin were married in 1925, so they were gone but the other children were still home. Herbert, Martha, Alma, Edna, and marie. Things looked very bad so I decided to try and make a living farming again. At least, I thought, we could raise most of our food and meat. We could have a garden and it could supply much of the food as it did here in the city from our acre of ground. We moved out to the farm at Gibson on April 15, 1929. We moved there in time to get the crops in. We were there for fifteen years.

Those were the depression years. No one had any work or money, just a lucky few had a few hours work a week. We didn't know where our next dollar was coming from or how much we would have to eat. The future always looked real dark but we struggled on. The government was trying to help with relief money that could be earned by working on projects that were set up for this purpose. We could work off our town road tax by hauling gravel on the town roads or work with our horses on other road projects that the town had setup to be done. The government also made it easy for us to borrow money to buy a farm. That is how I bought the farm. I borrowed the money from a government agency. The payments were low enough so that a farmer should have been able to manage to pay this money and keep farming. IN this way it kept a family off of the relief rolls and kept a family producing something to feed the nation.

When we moved out to the farm we started with four scrubby cows. My first milk check was only $3.00 for the month. We had about fifteen chickens, two horses, and two scrubby pigs. This was not much for a man to make a living on and to feed his family. The yearly payments looked ever bigger and bigger as time went on and we tried to find some way to make a dollar to buy food and to get food for the cattle too. One consolation was that at least we had a roof over our head and somehow we managed a way to exist.

Eggs were nine to fifteen cents a dozen. This seemed like a source of income but remember we had to feed our family first. Milk sold for sixty cents for one hundred pounds. Here again we had to feed ourselves first. Milk was needed in the house to feed the family too. If it hadn't been for the woods we would have starved. At the south end of the farm there were several acres of woods. In the woods were White Cedar, Hemlock, Ash, Beech and other hardwoods. the hardwoods supplied firewood and White Cedar provided fence posts and the Hemlock provided lumber. We burned wood in our stoves for heat and cooking. The lumber was used for repairs around the buildings. The grocery store and the feed mill took firewood for payment in place of money so we could at least get some groceries and some feed for our cattle.

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