The Forties

It was September 1946. For the Smith family the move from St. Paul was completed, but start of school was delayed two weeks because of the polio epidemic. For the kids, this was a welcome reprieve, but we had to pay for it with a shortened Christmas and Easter vacation. It was already too cold to swim in the lake that fall, but in the coming summers we more than made up for it. Click on the thumbnails to see them full size; return with your browser's BACK button.

For city kids, who had never known anything but block after block of houses, curbs and paved streets, the chnage was profound. We were surrounded by lake, swamps, open fields and working dairy farms. We waited for the school bus across the road from the heighboring farm's pig pen and came to recognize some of the pigs individually. We knew many of the cows in the adjacent pasture by their names. Among our schoolmates, the concept of the work ethicc, known as "doing chores" was very deep-seated and touched all ages. The town had one high school and one athletic team for each major sport, which was the focal point and unifying source of community pride.

Although the whole environment was completely new, our lives revolved around the Clear Lake property, which absorbed our attention, especially in the summers. The flow of the seasons was dramatically punctuated by the freezing over of the lake in November and especially the dramatic breakup of the ice-pack in April. The breakup always occurred in one day when a strong breeze came up and drove the ice floe onto the shore, piling up large stacks of broken ice, accompanied by a sustained, musical tinkling sound. Within the space of a single afternoon, a sodden, lead-colored mass of dirty ice, spanning most of the lake, was blown away and, by evening, an expanse of open water and flowing waves announced the final end of winter.

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