Wartime Fashion

Michelle: Tell Pete about the mishap during your wedding getaway leaving the reception!

Colonel: It was wartime. Everyone was practically in a small Methodist Church. It came a time when we wanted to leave. So I head out to the car and got my car, started it up. I didn’t have my hat! My military hat! In which, was our marriage license. It was buried inside the hat. In that day, when you registered at a hotel, you had to show your marriage license. Yeah! So I had it with me tucked around this military side and the marriage license was out in the house. So I had to go back and get it. If I had driven off I would have had been in a bad way. At that time, you HAD to be in military uniform. I had no civilian clothes.

Michelle: None?!

Colonel: NONE. I gave away every item of civilian clothes I had before I went into the service. Because I knew you were in military uniform 24 hours a day. You could not be otherwise. And I didn’t have my hat, I’m in trouble! I kept one suit in my mother and fathers closet. Of course it didn’t fit five years later when I came back. I don’t know what I did with it.

Life on Chesterbrook Farm

Recounting his days growing up on Chesterbook Farm:

Colonel: Everyone knew it as “The Big House” on Chesterbrook Farm. That was where the owners lived. Of course, it was a very, very, very nice house! Everybody referred to it, ya know, “I’m taking this over to the big house!” Yeah, yeah. That type of thing.

Michelle: Is that where you learned to horseback ride? Do you remember your first time or who taught you?

Colonel: Yeah. I was on a Chestnut Mayer. Sunwood! I don’t know where they got that name. Stanton Norwook (spelling? Man who tended and ran the stable) taught me. When I went into steeplechase and so on, there was a famous horse or two that came there for a race. And I did have an occasion to exercise SeaSoldier. Which was a brother of Clyde Vanhoesen, a winner of the Kentucky Derby. But SeaSoldier was not that caliber and he was just local and so on. Stanton would exercise him with a long whip and a lease to make a circle. And he let me hold that leash for a few moments while that horse was on the other end. He would snap a whip, he wouldn’t touch the horse, he would just make a noise. He’d snap that whip and that horse would go round and round and round. It was a simple way of exercising the horse!

Pete: Michelle was telling me that you used to ride your horse around for groceries and to the stores and everything.

Colonel: Oh yeah, yeah.

Michelle: Did you have your own horse at any time?

Colonel: At Chesterbrook, yeah. It was theirs, but it was mine while I was there! I had to take of him and groom him and everything. They had riding horses available. Every morning the dairyman would take the milk from the farm out to the siding of all the railroads. Where he would hoist the milk cans up on the platform and the train would come by, stop, and he would roll the milk cans into the box car. And they would take off, and he would come back. Once a day, because they milked twice a day. But the milk from the first milking at night was put in the spring house. It was in cold, cold water, and that’s where they kept it overnight until they took it out the next morning. Far from today!