Pop

In Camptonville because the heavy winters might hinder attendance of the majority of children on the bus routes a whole month vacation was taken after Christmas. The first Christmas in Camptonville we four kids came down with scarlet fever! About three days into the siege when mother was at her wits end, "That Man" appeared at the door.

He had been living in North Bloomfield when he received a premonition that mother needed help. He didn't have a car at that time so he set out on foot from North Bloomfield, striking straight across the mountain ridges and valley streams to get there. I learned his name was Richard Rondel Pfiffer, and he introduced us to 'Graveyard Stew' with lots of garlic.

Mister Pfiffer stayed til the crisis was over, but while he was there he took care of all the things that mother could not. He then returned to North Bloomfield. I waited for the mail every day because he had promised me a BB gun when I was sick. It never came. Mother bought me one for my birthday one million years later.

By 1936, Mr Pfiffer had married mother and became "Pop". He was a veteran of WWI and a member of the 1st Aero Squadron at Chanute Field in Rantoul, Illinois. Pop used his veteran's bonus and bought the property on Jackson Street, as well as many building suplies from people in the surrounding countryside.

The old house on the property provided lots of salvage; lumber, windows, doors, sills and nails. I spent hours pulling and straightening nails and piling lumber, which was used for concrete forms, protective sheds for the new lumber, and hothouse frames using old window sashes. In them we started tomato plants and used them for the production of parsley.