When I was nine we moved to the fire station and dad became the full-time truck driver and station manager. We lived in a large apartment above the station. Bob and I loved all the activity of living down town. It was a great adventure. Especially for Bob as the train tracks were just outside his bedroom window.
Family in the upstairs apartment at the Tecumseh firehouse. Left to right: Carolyn Chase, Elizabeth (Maynard) Manley, her sister Mildred (Maynard) Chase, seated on the floor Marilyn (Manley) Kilbourn. Young boys standing Ashley Chase and Robert Manley. Seated far right Charles Judson Manley.
During our time there Baldwin’s Hardware Store caught on fire one winter night. I slept through the all of the activity of firemen from many departments as they came to the station to warm up and get coffee that mother made for them, but Bob helped warm up their gloves and anything else he could do to help.
Charles Judson Manley, my paternal grandfather. Marilyn’s father.
The police station was in the same building and dad was deputized as an officer and answered the phone and did other duties as he could without neglecting his duties at the fire station. One day Marge came to play with me and as she started up the stairs a rat cornered her on the steps and wouldn’t let her go up or down. She screamed and the police on duty came running. When he saw what had happened he pulled out his gun and shot the rat.
Every two weeks Dad only had one Sunday off. By this time Charles and Alice were married and Vickie was a baby and they were expecting Katie. How I loved playing with my own live babies. I never tired of spending time with them. When they lived on the “farm” Charles would pick me up after work and take me home with him on Friday nights. When I was twelve we moved back home on Kilbuck Street.
Dad’s job changed to working every other day. On the days he worked mother or grandma would pack his meals in a basket and Bob or I would run down to the station with it. He only got the holiday off if it fell on his day off. We spent many Christmases without him.
Marilyn (Manley) Kilbourn – Childhood Memories
Carolyn, Ashley and Marge Chase are cousins to Marilyn.
Milk was delivered by the milkman (Art Deffler) who put it in the refrigerator if we weren’t home. The door was never locked. We bought our groceries at Andersons down town in Tecumseh. We didn’t have a car so the groceries were delivered by horse and buggy by Ernie Van Vleet. Mother would usually go to the store on Saturday nights and give them a list of what she would need to have delivered on Monday for the week.
One Saturday night Bob and I talked her into getting a big watermelon. But we couldn’t wait until Monday to eat it. We insisted that we could carry it home (about three blocks). Of course, we couldn’t and dropped it before we got out the door. Needlessly to say we didn’t have watermelon that week.
Also because we didn’t have a car we walked to church (about eight blocks) for church service, Sunday school, evening service and again on Wednesday nights for prayer meeting, no matter the weather. And we won many pins for perfect attendance.
Mother sat Bob and I on either side of her in service and if we couldn’t sit still and behave, she would twist our ears until we settled down. And if she noticed that our faces weren’t quite clean enough, she would give us a spit bath. She would spit on a hanky and then clean the offending smudge on our face.
We also had Vacation Bible School for two weeks every summer. Eva Clausen and Celeste Richardson were usually the quest presenters of VBS. Celeste Richardson was the first and only black person we ever knew for many years, and we were thrilled when mother would invite them to come to our house for dinner. We learned many Bible verses and got coveted prizes for memorizing them. In the winter there were always revival meetings for two weeks. We went every night, no matter the weather.
Left to right: Ashley Chase, Marilyn (Manley) Kilbourn, and Robert Manley
We always had a large garden and I didn’t like it one bit when mother would send us out to pull weeds or pick the vegetables. Probably because Bob and Ashley would throw rotten tomatoes at me. We also had chickens until the town ruled that they couldn’t be raised in town any longer. But we could keep the ones we had until they were all eaten. The last one became a pet and would eat out of my hand. I’ll always remember the day it laid an egg in my hand when I fed it.
Marilyn (Manley) Kilbourn – Childhood Memories
Ashley Chase’s mother was Mildred (Maynard) Chase. Ashley’s father was Sheldon Chase. Mildred and Elizabeth Maynard were sisters. Sheldon Chase and Charles Manley were half brothers.
Therefore, two sisters married two half brothers making Ashley and Marilyn one-and-a-half cousins.
Bob is Robert Manley, my father and Marilyn’s brother.
“Nothing is ever really lost to us as long as we remember it.” ― Lucy Maud Montgomery
This week my paternal Aunt, Marilyn Ruth (Manley) Kilbourn, my father’s sister, emailed me a document she’d written of her childhood memories growing up in Tecumseh, Michigan in the late 1930’s through the 1940’s. I have read the many pages at least half a dozen times and with each reading, I’m transported to a captivating past. My Aunt Marilyn’s words not only provide a glimpse into her daily life and the lives of my father and paternal family, but they also drop the Manley/Maynard family into American history as a whole.
Tecumseh, Michigan was one of the original pioneer settlements in the Michigan Territory (one of the first in Lenawee County) and came into existence via a communal log cabin in 1824. By the 1930’s Tecumseh embodied typical small town America where everyone knew one another and life hummed along through prosperity and lack, bound together by the deep and binding connections between families and the community as a whole.
Marilyn, named after her oldest brother’s ‘girlfriend’ and my grandmother’s sister, Ruth (Maynard) Oswald, was the third and last child of Charles Judson Manley and Elizabeth (Maynard) Manley As she mentions others in her memoirs, I will provide further detail on those individuals at the end of the blog entry in a footnote versus breaking the flow of her writings. For those people that she records that were part of the Tecumseh community, I will do my best to find out a little more about them via Ancestry.com.
On a final note, I am beyond-words grateful that my Aunt not only took the time to pen her childhood memories for the sake of our future descendants, but that she has permitted me to share them here. It is an honor to be the gatherer and keeper of the family history and I am humbled to be entrusted with this important task.
Mother and Dad telling me that I was so small that I fit in the palm of the doctors hand when I was born. They never knew for sure exactly how much I weighed. They wrapped me in blankets and put me in a shoe box on the open oven door of the old wood cook stove to keep me warm. I had to be force-fed with an eye dropper every two hours to keep me alive. Mother’s best friend, Lois Johnson, didn’t even know that she was pregnant when she came to tell mother the good news that she was pregnant with Linda. What a surprise she got.
Marilyn (Manley) Kilbourn, Charles Manley and Robert Manley
Charles was an only child until he was eight years old and then Bob was born. When I was born eleven months later, it was almost more than he could take and told his teacher. Miss LaPointe. that if it happened again next year, he was going to leave home. I think he was glad I was a girl because he begged mother to let him name me after his “girlfriend”. I always knew I was special to him.
We didn’t have a bath until I was older, so on Saturday nights mother would haul out the galvanized tub and we would take a bath in the kitchen. We used the same water for all us kids and I suppose being the girl I got go first.
Charles was always very loving, kind, caring and generous. And all of the neighborhood kids loved to play in our yard. We were very poor growing up during the war and depression. One day mother scrapped enough money to buy a special treat…a pint of ice cream. Charles was so excited that he yelled for all his friends to come on over and have ice cream with us. Of course there was nothing mother could do, but share it with them.
Charles was also “all boy”. One day when mother had the diapers on the clothes line for two babies, Charles and his best friend, Clyde Smith, took a muddy stick and managed to strike every diaper on the line with mud. Our overworked, tired mother had to re-wash them all in the wringer washer and hang them back out.
Marilyn (Manley) Kilbourn – Childhood Memories
Linda mentioned in first paragraph is Linda (Johnson) Chase, wife of Ashley Chase. Charles Maynard Manley (1930-2008). Robert James Manley (1938 – )
When I was nine we moved to the fire station and dad became the full-time truck driver and station manager. We lived in a large apartment above the station. Bob and I loved all the activity of living down town. It was a great adventure. Especially for Bob as the train tracks were just outside his bedroom window.
Little Acorns & Mighty Oaks 