I grew up on Rose Lane in the Catskill Mountains. Someone told me that there was no need to explain that it was a rural environment if you lived on a road named after your family.
A hundred years ago my grandfather, Ishmael Rose, built the road along with his house, barn, shop, and outbuildings. He had four kids, three boys and a girl.
In the spring of 1941, the family decided they wanted a swimming pool. Doesn’t everybody? Being just a notch above subsistence farmers,for us paying somebody to put in a pool was just not an option.
“Promethean” might be a word used to describe my family. No lesser words should be used to describe them. In the early spring of that year, they set about digging a pool with picks, shovels, an old Fordson tractor and a homemade Fresno. If you don’t know what a Fresno is, ti saluto, you have lived a charmed life.
When the hole was completed, the sides were laid up with rocks hauled down from the quarry on the mountain behind the house and up from the stream bed below. The dry laid stones would not hold water, so the surfaces had to be covered with concrete. A ditch was dug up to a spring on the hill above the pool, and a pipe was installed to provide for a water supply.
The entire operation was primitive by today’s standards. The diving board was an oak plank with a burlap bag to prevent slipping covered its business end. The flotation devices were old inner tubes from tractors were big enough to hold three or four kids.
Every May the pool’s water was ice-blue and ice-cold. By June it had warmed both in color and temperature. It had no filter. By July, despite the buckets of copper sulfate added at regular intervals, it had changed, from cerulean to sea green. Though the copper sulfate did little to discourage the growth of algae, it did turn our hair an amusing shade of green. By the end of August, only the bravest of the lot ventured to swim in the pea soup.
The details of pool care
The pool had no cover, so it spent the fall collecting leaves, the winter shrouded in ice, and the spring breeding frogs. On the day before the Memorial-Day cleaning a brave soul would go down the embankment and pull the plug from the drainpipe. The holiday would find a nearly empty pool with puddles of slimy organic matter in the corners. Care was taken to remove amphibians and reptiles in various stages of development to a more prosperous location. A garden hose and stiff brooms were used to scrub down the sides and floor.
When the scrubbing was complete, we would take a break to allow the sun to dry both the pool and the participants.
The best part came next. Five-gallon buckets of whitewash were mixed by hand and applied with big, broad brushes. Painters and pool were given a liberal coating. Older kids whitewashed the higher parts of the wall, small kids did the lower parts. Everybody did the floor. We were usually done by noon, just in time for a cookout with hot dogs, burgers, and a number of salads, none of which contained vegetables, unless you want to call macaroni a vegetable.
A history of service
My grandfather Ishmael had been in the Army during World War One. He did his basic training somewhere down in the Carolinas and was ready to board the boat to Europe when the armistice was signed.
My mother’s father, Victor, was there as well; also a world-war vet. He was from the city side of the family, with a degree in chemistry. He was assigned to Indian Town Gap in Pennsylvania. where they were working with mercury fulminate, an explosive.
Remembering Lorin Rose, founding Geezer
Victor developed the habit of catching the train back to Brooklyn on weekends. Once, while he was gone, there was an explosion in one of the labs. It seems grandpa had neglected to get a pass and was thought to have died in the explosion. The higher-ups were both relieved and peeved when he showed up later that day. Fortunately, men with his credentials were hard to find, so his indiscretion was overlooked.
My aunt Murial, a nurse at a local hospital when World War Two started. One day she was seeing to an elderly woman who was complaining about everything. She told the woman to suck it up. There was a war on, and some people had real problems.
The head nurse took Murial aside and told her that the Navy was desperate for nurses. Murial signed up and spent the war in San Diago caring for servicemen returning from the Pacific Theater.
My father’s secret mission
My father Malcolm was there. He enlisted in the Army Air Corps the day after Pearl Harbor. He was trained to be an aircraft mechanic.
He did well enough in training that they sent him to Indianapolis to teach other recruits. Indianapolis Indiana, the city so nice they named it one and one-half times.
Malcolm was not enthralled by either the the city or the job. On day an officer came there asking for volunteers for a mission. My father asked what kind of mission. A secret mission, he was told. “Does it have anything to do with Indianapolis?” my father asked. The answer was no, and my dad signed on.
Four hundred men were flown to Florida where 100 C-47 sky trains awaited. Each plane was assigned a pilot, co-pilot, navigator, and a mechanic. The next morning, they were given a heading and an envelope. They took off and, as instructed, followed the heading for an hour and then opened the envelope. A paper inside directed them to an airfield in Venezuela.
The morning after that, another heading, another envelope. This next one sent them to Brazil. From there, it was the Ascension Island, and after that across Africa.
And so on. The final destination was northwest India, where they were to fly over the Himalayas to supply a Chinese army. Flying over the Himalayas was a misnomer. A C-47 topped out at ten to twelve thousand feet, while the mountains were 20,000 feet or more. They had to fly through the mountain passes. Weather could be fierce and unpredictable. They lost a third of the outfit in the first six months.
Survival techniques die hard
My uncles Donald and Durand were also there at poolside. They had been drafted while still in high school, given GEDs, and sent to England in the 82nd Airborne. From there they went into Belgium in gliders and got to liberate Europe on their senior trip.
We had a small family construction business: my dad, uncles, and me. When we were doing an addition, it usually started with my uncles and me digging the footings. Sometimes the dirt we were digging reminded them of some place they had dug a foxhole in, like Belgium, France or Germany. I did not realize at the time that I was getting a fairly comprehensive education on the nature of Western European subsoils.
Though it had been 20 years since the fall of Berlin, they would stop, look up, and try to identify every plane that flew over.
Survival techniques die hard. I finally told them, “Relax, fellas, they’re all ours.”
There are no longer any Roses living on Rose Lane, I recently heard that the most recent owner of my grandfather’s old house had the pool filled in.
Though it saddened me to hear that, 80 years was a good long run.
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