Chapter 2: 1969

Joey Harris continues his eulogy

I asked Momma how they met. She was a heavily pregnant widow, Anjelica di Angelo, who hitched to Conrad to stay with her sister. But Aunt Connie had already left to go back to Chicago. The hospital nurse told her that Papa was looking for dairy workers and that being Friday she should wait in the general store and watch out for his motorcycle and sidecar. She didn’t have any money left and stubborn as she is, she wouldn’t wait in the warm store, she stood outside in the wind and snow. When she saw Joe pull up and limp to the steps, she looked into his eyes and fainted. It’s all right, she was carrying me inside her and I turned out fine!

When she woke, she was in bed at the farm. I came along a couple of weeks later and soon Momma was Papa’s right hand. She had worked in a bank, before she married my biological father, and she soon sorted out the farm books. Papa was no fool, but paperwork was his blind spot and Momma naturally filled in that gap. He didn’t think he could afford to pay for farm hands to help, especially since the dairy here in the city had gone bust and his milk was going to waste. But Momma found out about Granny Harris’s brother’s nest egg in the bank, put away for a rainy day.

Well, she told him straight, ‘Joe, it’s sure raining on you now!’

She set up a meeting with the local bank which had foreclosed on the dairy. They had no buyers for the business, or any residual money in the accounts to clean up the milk which had gone sour and was stinking out Main Street, so Momma set up Papa to buy the place lock, stock and barrel for a dollar. She organised staff for clean-up, and to staff it, wrote to all the old suppliers and customers and new ones and they soon had the dairy back in full production. They took on more workers at the farm and they were soon making serious money.

The same bank had a branch 150 miles away that had foreclosed on a crop dusting business, with three planes, spares, several trucks including a fuel tanker. They asked Momma if they thought Papa with his wartime flying experience might take the business off their hands. Momma drove us down to the airfield to look them over. Papa again bought that company lock, stock and barrel for a handful of bucks. On our second trip down, Papa flew one plane back with Momma strapped in holding me in her arms. My first flight in an open aircraft and I was just a few weeks old, no wonder I took to flying like a fish to water. Papa had already prepared a field close to the house as the home airfield and arranged for a new barn raised over the weekend to be used as a hangar. The next trip he had some of the men drive back the tanker and other trucks, filled with barrels and drums of goodness knew what spraying chemicals. He even brought back Old Ernie Peterson, the aircraft engineer who managed to keep those World War One veteran planes in the air for the previous ten years. Old Ernie taught me everything mechanical about those planes, and he sure helped Papa keep those planes going for many years.

I learned how to fly from Papa in those old planes, even Momma learned to fly and she was out crop dusting during busy times as well as catching up with the dairy management and farm books. Soon, Papa, who never lacked for ideas, opened a milk bar in the town, where all my school friends hung out; for a long while it was the only place in town that sold ice cream and sodas.

It was a couple of years later that Momma got dispositions from her husband’s relatives to declare that he and five other family members were bringing three trucks over from Canada, ladened with spirits to beat the Prohibition, and believed killed, so she was free to marry Papa, who was still a bachelor in his early forties. And Papa adopted he as his son.