Chapter 3: Angel casting her mind back to April 1936

Anjelica Harris

Listening to Joey talk about those old days, I I remembered that I had fond memories of that old dairy and the Milk Bar which was opened up in the front of the dairy in Main Street. We made small experimental batches of ice cream in the dairy and we needed somewhere to sell it. That milk and soda bar turned out to be a goldmine almost immediately and was the place to be seen in town from 1932 onwards.

Thinking about Joey and Joe, took me back to two events that changed my life in 1936.

We used to start early morning and finish early at the dairy, no shift working around the clock like nowadays. As the last one to leave the dairy office in mid-afternoon on a sunny spring morning, I, Anjie Harris, nee di Angelo, locked up the Conrad Dairy on Jefferson Street and drove my new Ford sedan down to the elementary school to collect my son Joe Junior. We were living well, working hard of course, but we felt we were building something for the future.

I couldn’t stop smiling that spring day, but Junior was so full of what he had learned during the day. He was such a sweet kid, beautiful too, his looks taking after his father Gianni more than me. His skin was not as dark as mine, but with his straight black hair and square build, he had a strong Mediterranean look about him that I knew would drive the local girls wild in ten more years or so. Now, about to enter his fortieth year, Joey is a handsome man, still single as he seems ‘married’ to his service.

He was so full of what he was learning that Junior never even wondered why his Momma was even more cheerful than I usually was on that beautiful spring day. I loved my job running the financial side of the Conrad Dairy and loved my husband Joe Senior even more, so Joey Junior didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary in my complete happiness.

Joe was still out spraying fertiliser from the air when we got back to the farm. Junior had a few barn chores to get through before washing up for dinner. Granny Harris was starting to lay the table and Junior took over the task, once Granny had checked the cleanliness of his hands and the state behind his ears, while she mashed the potatoes and stirred in the butter, we always had plenty of butter. Junior had heard the plane come in to land on the grass landing field up near the main road. While Junior was in the barn he knew his Papa would lock away the plane and the chemicals safely in the new hangar before he was home. There was water plumbed in at the hangar so he could wash up and change his clothes, isolating any chemical contamination to that one spot.

I had changed out of my office clothes but was still much more smartly dressed than I normally was in the evening, Junior may have thought if he noticed. Although the Harris farm was one of the best in the county, we were not accustomed to dressing for dinner like some more fancy folks did.

I waited until Joe parked his bike by the farmhouse before I headed him off from the kitchen to sit in the front porch for a quiet word with him before going inside together. Five minutes later we both burst through the kitchen to announce that Junior was going to have a brother or sister before the year was out.

It made me very happy, seeing all the smiles on my family’s faces. My family. They were my family, but it had taken time to get here.

Joe always described himself as being born an ‘Average Joe’, when we were joking about, which we did pretty nearly all the time, we had a happy home life as Joe was always calm and collected, however excited Granny Harris or I got about anything. He would joke that with his missing half a leg and half of his ear, that he was now ‘Less than Average’. But to me, Joe was a man better than any other man I knew up to then or since.

I was reminded of those first few weeks before my baby Joey was born, when I got to know Joe well and grew really fond of him in the shortest time, he was so attentive to me in the final weeks of my pregnancy so I knew he would be there for me when his first fruit of his loins was born. Back in those days there was no allowing the father to be present at the birth, it was the domain of the midwife and they would only have womenfolk present. But Joe regarded Joey as “our” baby and they had a wonderful relationship that sometimes reduced me to tears.