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“It Can’t Happen Here Again” as told by Frank Bailey
A boy growing up in Columbia County – the story of Dr. William Cady Bailey, physician, of Chatham, N.Y. and his youngest son Frank Bailey.
In Three Parts
______________________ This story about the life of Dr. William Cady Bailey as told by his son Frank Bailey was submitted by Jane Wood, a descendant and frequent submitter to this website. Enjoy reading about the life of a country doctor in Chatham, Columbia County, New York!
PART 2 At first, however, it was a struggle merely to survive. Every winter Frank was confined to the house from three to five weeks with a cold or the complications resulting from it. The living – conditions of the sixties and seventies were far from ideal for a boy with chronic bronchitis. Frank’s most potent childhood memories would always be of the cold, the constant, immitigable cold, the streets heaped high with snow, the ice frozen in the pond. In the wintertime, the house was heated by only two stoves, one the cook stove in the kitchen, and another in the sitting room. The whole family undressed in turn before the sitting room stove, each member putting on a long red flannel nightgown after brushing his teeth with the single worn-out family toothbrush. The children would dawdle in the warmth until a word from Mrs. Bailey would send them streaking barefoot to their unheated bedrooms, where they spent the rest of the night trying to warm the sheets. The beds boasted of no springs, cords stretched from the rails at both sides and from tip to bottom providing the foundation for a cornhusk mattress and a deep featherbed which helped to warm them somewhat in winter and almost suffocated them in summer. Rainwater was pumped from a cistern into the kitchen, and once a week the children bathed there in a wooden washtub under the watchful eye of Mrs. Bailey. Two other rooms in the house filled the little boy with a certain awe: his mother’s parlor, and his father’s office. The floor of the parlor, which was seldom used, was covered from wall to wall with a Brussels carpet in a pattern of large red roses. The most important piece of furniture here was Mrs. Bailey’s whatnot, about five feet high, filled with her most cherished bric-a-brac and wax flowers under glass. Along with other accomplishments of a well brought up young lady of the time Mrs. Bailey had learned to be very skillful at making wax flowers, but she valued her decorative china and glassware even more highly. Frank was terrified one day to find her in tears because his little sister had broken a particularly prized glass vase that had cost perhaps two dollars. It was in this parlor, one Christmas, that Frank suffered his first cruel disappointment in humankind. A Christmas tree had been set up there, and on it someone had placed a small bottle of cologne for the boy. He received the gift enthusiastically, shouting for everyone to hear: “Oh! Colog-ne water!” pronouncing it as it was spelled. With crude indifference to his sensitive feelings, the grown-ups burst into laughter at his mispronunciation. The little boy wanted to cry with the injustice of it. The gift, the tree, the day for him were irretrievably ruined. The shame of being laughed at for his childish ignorance was to remain with him all his life. Dr. Bailey’s office was originally no less awe-inspiring to the boy than his mother’s parlor, but as he grew older, familiarity with its furnishings ceased to excite wonder. The few tools and appurtenances of the doctor’s many-sided activities were here: a large medicine chest to contain his homemade medicines, as well as scales for weighing out the medicine, and a mortar and pestle for making powders, a dental chair, a bag of instruments, a bookcase filled with medical books, and a desk. If need be, the doctor resorted to other rooms in the house to conduct his business. For example, when Frank was seven years old he saw the last bleeding ever done by his father in the kitchen of their house. The office must have been considered too small for the patient, a woman weighing at least two hundred and fifty pounds. The doctor put a lancet into a vein in her arm while Mrs. Bailey caught the blood in a basin, and no one noticed the open-mouthed boy watching from the door. Frank’s persistent illnesses made little difference in the family routine except to give his mother extra work. The household regimen was on the New England village pattern, although they lived over the state line in New York. Their diet was marked off from that of their neighbors only by particular preferences of the doctor or by the special skills of his wife. Saturday night brought not only the weekly bath but also baked beans and brown bread, the beans cooked for forty-eight hours, the bread for twenty-four. Dinner, which was served in the middle of the day, consisted of a meat dish, fresh greens and vegetables from the garden in summer, and potatoes, turnips, and parsnips in winter. When Frank Bailey grew old enough to buy his own meals he never ate another parsnip. The meat was never broiled; it was either fried, boiled, or stewed. Whenever they had steak, it was one of Frank’s duties to place the meat on a board and pound it with a hammer, this operation being intended to make the steak edible after it was fried. Salt pork with cream gravy was another standby greatly enjoyed by the children. Frank Bailey says that it took a long time to digest the salt pork, but it kept nourishing you and nourishing you in the process. An ancient fowl, boiled for a long time, became a choice dish when served with cream gravy and dumplings steamed over the pot in which the bird was cooked. The art of cooking such dumplings has gone out with other things less worthy; large, light, fragrant, they came to the table in an aura of savory steam and disappeared only too rapidly. Because of Dr. Bailey’s easy-going business methods, the family sometimes had table delicacies for which their appetite was dulled by excessive repetition. At Fog Hill, ten miles from Chatham, the doctor had a very sick patient who had no money with which to pay his bill. Since the illness was long and it was a long drive out to see him, the patient urged Dr. Bailey to accept twenty-six guinea hens, which the doctor took only with the greatest reluctance. The hens were put into the barn back of the house, where they were anything but a source of delight to the neighbors, a fact which anyone can appreciate if he has heard a guinea hen early in the morning. In consequence the Baileys found it necessary to eat guinea hen practically every day until they were all gone. “I was quite allergic to guinea hen for over thirty years,” says Frank Bailey, “and I can’t say I enjoy them now.” The doctor had great faith in the nutritive value of sweet corn, and whenever he brought home a bushel in lieu of cash payment for his services Mrs. Bailey would cut the kernels from the cobs and the boys would spread it on the roof of the house to dry. Later it would be taken down and stored away until the wintertime (including the dust and soot from the roof), when it would be cooked up to resemble the creamed corn we know. During the sweet corn season they often had corn pancakes for breakfast, which was a delectable meal at any time of the year. The corn pancakes (not fritters) were made of large quantities of corn cut green from the cob, a little mild or cream, and a small amount of flour, the batter fried on a griddle, and served with quantities of butter and sugar. As soon as little Frank could reach above the cook stove, he used to help his mother stir the hasty pudding or fry the corn-meal mush. Fried mush was all very well, but the prospect of buckwheat cakes for breakfast would make a boy bounce out of bed on the coldest morning. Along toward the end of October, when the trees had begun to turn and the smell of wood-smoke was the first sensation to strike the mind as Frank awoke, the batter would be started with all due pomp and circumstance. Only stone-ground buckwheat from the neighboring farms was used for the flour. The batter was set in a huge stone crock behind the stove to rise, buttermilk, buckwheat, and yeast being added from day to day, even the cakes that had not been consumed cut up and turned back. The first cakes fried from the batter were indifferent; it was not before a week had passed that the ripening flavor could be marked, and thereafter not even the chore of standing over the hot stove to fry the cakes for the whole family could dampen the children’s ardor for this perennial favorite. Supper consisted almost always of food with explosive names and bland taste, like Johnnycake and buttermilk pop, the latter a strange concoction made of buttermilk boiled and thickened, into which bread or crackers were broken. For sweets they had apples in great quantity, which the doctor considered essential to a good diet, and a large variety of home-made preserves, usually spread generously between slices of shortcake or biscuit. Steamed suet pudding was another favored dessert and very filling. Holidays, and Thanksgiving in particular, brought their own festive dishes. While Frank’s grandparents lived in New Hampshire, the members of the clan forgathered only after long trips from many directions at Thanksgiving, but when Mr. Utley built his house in Chatham, it was but a step down the street for the Baileys. Nothing gave the boy’s grandmother greater pleasure than to feed her children and her children’s children, but as strong temperance advocate she had to be constantly on guard against lurking danger. When Dr. Bailey first advised his ageing father in law to drink a little brandy every day as a heart stimulant, Grandmother Utley had the strongest misgivings. She was accustomed every year to prepare the mincemeat for the Thanksgiving pies early in October, setting the meat, raisins, apples, molasses, and spices away to mellow in a huge wooden bowl with the necessary boiled cider. But her eyesight was beginning to fail and, mistaking the bottle, on one occasion she used brandy instead of boiled cider. Before she discovered her error, the mincemeat had gone into a pie, and some of the pie had gone into Frank and one of his young cousins. Thereafter nothing could convince the poor old lady that she had not launched her innocent grandchildren on the career that leads to a drunkard’s grave. Ordinarily little of the food eaten at the Bailey’s came from any great distance. In April and May the fish peddlers drove into Chatham from the Hudson River, fourteen miles away, with a load of shad and herring, announcing their arrival by a loud blast on a tin horn. The shad, roe or buck, were eaten immediately, but if there were too many herring to be consumed at once, the remainder would be strung on twigs through the eyes and smoked for winter use. Oysters were seldom in the market and because of lack of refrigeration were never sold on the shell. They came in small wooden kegs, which were so expensive that only rarely were the Baileys extravagant enough to gratify their appetites for a stew or a dish of scalloped oysters. Coffee was unknown in the household, but the doctor drank one cup of tea a day with his dinner. It was a moment to be marked off forever in the boy’s life when he saw his first banana, which was brought to him by the relative of a schoolmate, an imposing man who lived in New York City and was a tugboat captain to boot. The fruit was so strange and the gift so unlooked for that Frank could with difficulty be induced to eat it before it spoiled. Certain articles of common use were made at home for reasons of economy, soft soap, for example. To lye extracted from wood ashes Mrs. Bailey added what we nowadays call “waste fat” and poured the soap while it was still liquid into pails which she drew on for all her washing. It was not the sort of soap that made for “the sin you love to touch”, after washing the dishes in its suds you felt lucky to have come out of it with any skin at all. Ever mindful of the boy’s frailty, Dr. Bailey one day decided to give him a goat-cart, in which Frank could drive about the village streets and get the air without exerting himself. But the doctor reckoned without a profound knowledge of the nature of billy goats. To Frank the arrival of Billy the Goat, on the back of his powerful stepbrother, was an event of the first magnitude. It was some days before a wagon and gear could be procured, and then Frank and four of his playmates assembled solemnly for the harnessing. It took all their arts and all their strength to accomplish this. Billy the Goat had a single-track mind: his only purpose in life was to return home as fast as possible from wherever he had been reluctantly driven. He would take all corners on the homeward route with incredible speed, overturning the cart and spilling Frank and a friend who usually accompanied him. Almost no trip was made without damage to the wagon; usually it arrived home in pieces. The doctor could always have it repaired free of charge because the local wheelwright never paid his bills for medical treatment, but it eventually proved too expensive a luxury at that. Frank frequently drove his cart to the store for the family groceries and for fodder. Occasionally on these trips he took along a heavy jug to be filled with New Orleans molasses, a household necessity, especially for making gingerbread. One day when he was returning from the grocer’s, Billy decided to break the speed record for the run home. With his beard streaming in the wind, ignoring Frank’s shouts and frantic clutch on the reins, he galloped madly down the street. At the very first corner the cart turned over, spilling Frank, fodder, jug, and all. When the little boy arrived home a few minutes later, bruised, weeping, covered with molasses and dirt, Mrs. Bailey announced firmly that Billy would have to go. And so the goat went out of their lives, without any regret on his part, in a blaze of molasses streaked glory. Frank mourned the loss of his headstrong steed, but not for long. His carefree days were over; that fall he went to school. All the fond references to the little red schoolhouse in American song and story have been written either by those who never knew them or by persons with a short memory. The district school that Frank Bailey attended, with its stuffy rooms, its dusty, dim maps, its worn textbooks, and its unbelievably filthy toilets, so revolting to a child brought up in a home of spotless neatness, was a cruel deception. Despite a constant stoking of the stove in winter, it would be hours before the chilblained feet of the children became warm, and then a frightful itching and burning sensation would set up, to last until dismissal time. In fall and spring there would be either not enough air or a capricious draft that would send the papers whirling. The teachers, but little older than the oldest pupils, and scarcely more informed, ill paid and overworked, had no notions of pedagogy and only primitive ideas of discipline. The wonder is not that they taught so little, but that they were able to impart even the rudiments of learning to the dazed, squirming children. When he had conquered his first repugnance to the smells and confinement of school, Frank turned out to be an excellent student. The atmosphere of his home was studious and hard working; no excuses or evasions were permitted when there was a job to be done, whether it concerned schoolwork or household chores. His parents could always give him an intelligent answer to his questions, but where work was concerned his mother insisted on his assuming the responsibility for the tasks assigned to him. |