A Country Store. The Labor Day Parade.

High Woods had been having a church fair since the 1890's, so it was already an established tradition when Henry Wilgus moved to High Woods.  Henry was an Episcopalian as was his wife, May Van Bramer Wilgus, so it is probable they did not attend the Dutch Reformed church nor did they embrace some of its stricter 19th century ideas.  My mother, May Wilgus, and her good friend Virginia Whitely, who was primarily a summer person, attended the Sunday school when they were children.  Church goer or not, everyone loved the Labor Day Fair, and, in the days of Old High Woods, it started with a parade.

The parade was outstanding. Imagine having a parade down a rural road featuring people in costume, an old fire engine and a very handsome cowboy riding a palomino. It  started at the corner of -- giving these roads the names they have now -- Glasco Turnpike and High Woods Road, then went down High Woods Road to Wrolsen Drive, from Wrolsen Drive back to Glasco Turnpike (which would take it to where the Wilgus store was), then back down Glasco Turnpike to Church Road, and then up to the church. That was the High Woods Circle, or the High Woods Block -- the stretch of Glasco Turnpike from Wrolsen Drive/Dutchtown Road down to High Woods Road, then circling back around to the beginning spot on Glasco Turnpike -- which was also the corner (across from the store) that had Henry’s memorial to High Woods veterans of World War II.[i]

Probably, the parade halted at the Wilgus store for a moment before making a grand entrance at the Fairgrounds.  Perhaps, sodas and beers were gathered and quaffed.  The last quarter mile up the hill to church road would be the merriest, and there would be a crowd waiting to welcome the marchers.

In the early 1950s, Bard College upgraded its fire department, and got rid of its old Model A fire engine. Harvey Fite bought it primarily for its pumping power, to pump out his pools for cleaning, but he also painted and polished it, all gleaming brass, and fire engine red paint, and HIGH WOODS NO. 1 printed on the side. Harvey Fite, Bert Wrolsen and others actually helped put out a few local fires.[ii]

Diana Boggs, Green's Grand daughter, Aruba the dog

Tad Richards, Jonathan Richards

Harvey with the fire engine and Bill Johnson on his beautiful palomino became sort of unofficial grand marshals of the Labor Day parade. They would lead the motley procession from Glasco Turnpike around the High Woods circle and back to the church. And trucks full of festive folks joined it along the way.

In the 1930’s, after the repeal of Prohibition, Henry had once entered a truck full of beer in the High Woods Parade.  Along the way, he gave away drinks to the willing.  In those days, there was a split in the community over the idea of drinking beer, so Henry’s beer float was not popular with those who equated beer with the devil.  Jean Wrolsen called it “a confrontation of good and evil.”[iii]

Norman Boggs 
Band welcomes parade

If Labor Day proved to be sunny and mild, the parade was a charming event in a beautiful setting.  Now, all that is left are people’s memories — and these few pictures.  There must be more pictures out there in old scrapbooks, but it is doubtful that they will ever be gathered together in one place.  I have noticed in reading old newspapers from the 20's and 30's and focusing on the High Woods section, that most of the news came from the Church activities.  On occasion, there is a mention of Henry's activities like his attempts to start a kind of bus service to Saugerties, and, of course, he received a good deal of press during his attempt to build a new school in High Woods and get a bus to carry kids to the Saugerties High School.  That is a story for another blog entry.

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[i] Thanks to Tad Richards for his descriptive words and good memory.

[ii] Again, Thanks to Tad for his description of Harvey Fite’s fire engine.

[iii] Wrolsen, Jean.  “High And Healthy.  Henry Wilgus and High Woods” in Toodlum Tales. August, 1979.  Saugerties, N.Y.  1979

A Country Store

            Here it is, Christmas again, and instead of thinking about Bethlehem and the manger, I am thinking about Job.  Once, I asked my friends Mary Ann and Danna to discuss Job with me.  It’s a very ancient tale by scholarly accounts and pre-dates the Christian era by about four hundred years.[i] The tale is old, but the concern is the same.  Why do bad things happen to good people? It sounded like it would make a good topic for discussion, but it was a futile exercise because Danna is a committed atheist and refuses to treat God as a character in the story, and Mary Ann is a feminist whose main concern is Job’s wife’s suggestion to “eat dirt and die” sometimes translated as “curse God and die”.

I called my brother, Norman, and he reminded me of the idea of infinite regress, reasons for reasons and so on and on.   He brings up the old problem of circularity as in the chicken or egg proposition.  These are ideas that make people uncomfortable.  My brother suggests this phrase as an alternative:  “Things happen and I reason.”  We share a laugh, and a Merry Christmas wish.  I miss my brother at Christmas, but North Carolina is a long drive.  We are getting older, and we have fewer family members.

            I am attracted to the beginning of Job’s tale that shows God is an entity that will bet.  Satan taunts God, and God takes him up on a proposition to test Job.  First Satan is allowed to take away Job’s worldly possessions and family members and then his bodily health and comfort.  Job has many friends who posit reasons for his affliction based on the assumption that God punishes for a reason.  Their ideas would fuel the contemporary self-improvement industry with many new book titles.  How about:  God is Just; Learn Seven Ways to Avoid Being Wicked or Perverse.  Job maintains that he is puzzled, and, in the end, he demands to speak directly to God.  I am not a scholar, but I think it is unusual for God to appear because a human demands it.  God appears to Job in a whirlwind, and, basically, the answer is who are you to question me.  I am God.  I made the universe.  That reason still stands today.  It is inscrutable.

Huntington’s Disease (HD) runs in my family. [ii] It has wiped out substantial numbers of relatives all of whom are missed this time of year.  It is a dominant gene.  This is how it works:  If you inherit the gene you get the disease.  It’s a 50/50 proposition provided you don’t have two parents with HD which would increase the chances significantly.  It is a disease that secretly begins at birth.  You can’t be a recessive carrier.  If you luck out, you and your future children are safe from HD.  I am safe as is my brother, son and three other cousins who lucked out in the great HD lottery.                                
Any gene negative child will end up as a caregiver to an affected parent or family member.  Caregivers are under constant stress.  Death usually happens before the age of fifty.   My great-grandfather lived into his sixties, but my grandmother, aunt and two cousins all died between forty-five and forty-nine.  The death is a hard one very like ALS.  Woody Guthrie died of HD.  My younger cousin, Sarah, kept track of Woody’s son, Arlo, as if his fate was tied to hers.  We used to watch Alice's Restaurant at Thanksgiving and nod knowingly at Arlo's declaration that HD ran in his family.  We would laugh when that fact did not disqualify him from the draft.  Instead, it was the arrest for littering.  People in an HD family see the signs years before the serious symptoms manifest.  It is just a little something in the gait and a slight movement of the lips.  Sarah lived with me for many years until I was no longer able to help her. 

Sarah loved Christmas.  In the late 1970’s we did not have much money and wanted a free tree, so we staked out a good one growing by the side of the road.  On a starry night, we got into our plum colored Gremlin and slowly drove up the West Saugerties Road.  With our object spotted, we jumped out of the car, sawed it down and stuffed it in the back seat then beat a quick retreat to Boggs Hill.  We decorated the little tree and celebrated heartily with a glass of wine and cigarette. 

In later years, we laughed at the memory of our purloined tree. Sarah died at age 48.  Then, Sarah’s younger sister, Nola died. [iii] As I stood with Nola’s two children in the Woodstock Cemetery, I tried to look at them with the eyes of a stranger.  I did not really know them, they have grown up in Chicago and Italy, and it was a relief to distance myself from them.

When I was a child, I wondered why my mother never mentioned her mother.  There were no “mom” stories, no memories of books shared, and no Christmas moments.  I now think it was Delayed Stress Syndrome.  My mother’s teen years were shared with a mother with HD.  In all, my mother saw five family members come down with HD, and she did not have the advantage of understanding the whole genetic proposition.  The disease was simply referred to as “The VB curse.” She must have lived many years in fear of that curse. 

Fear of the VB curse probably made my mother the unbeliever she became in her life.  She once told me that her maternal grandfather (an HD victim) said that only bad people went to church, and she believed him.  When I wanted to go to Sunday school like the rest of the kids, she would just drop me off at the village green in front of the Dutch Reformed Church.  I was on my own.

Job was a practitioner of his religion.  That is why God chose him.  Job was very careful in his practice to offer burnt offerings for all of his family members in case they had neglected their own duties.  “For Job said it may be that my sons have sinned and cursed God in their hearts.  Thus did Job continually.”  Feminists will note that he did not seem to have the same problem about his daughters.  I have always thought of a practitioner as a person with a context for devotion.  (I think I might have read that somewhere.)  Burnt offerings did it for Job.  [iv]

Before Sarah lived with me, she and her husband, Carl, lived with our grandfather Henry Wilgus.  He was getting elderly and didn’t mind the company.  One night, I got a call from her.  I could hear Grandpa’s voice in the background loud and insistent.  Sarah was alarmed and asked me to come down and see what was causing the problem.  I arrived and could see right away that the main problem was a half-pint of whiskey tucked into the cushions of the easy chair.  He wanted me to know that there were diseases older than the Bible, and that I should beware.  He was no more specific. I knew what he meant.  He had cared for his father in law, wife and daughter, and, now, we both could see the very early symptoms in Sarah’s walk. Henry had seen generations die of HD. I changed the subject to other things, and he calmed a bit.  Then, he asked me to someday write a book called A Country Store about his adventures as owner of the High Woods Store.  Grandpa was a transplanted Jersey boy.  He was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey.

If I could go back in time as an observer able to view the scene, hear the voices and smell the cooking smells of a Sunday dinner at my grandfather, Henry Wilgus’s country store in High Woods – If I could really go back for one hour with the Ghost of Christmas Past – I would be joyful.  Instead, I have to rely on my seventy year old “mind’s eye” and the helpful advice of other family members.

Dinner was at twelve on Sundays.  There would be a dozen or so places set at a table for family and others who might happen by.  Kids would zoom around the empty dance floor or, in the summer, look for new kittens, search out wild strawberries or, hang around the rail near the “High Woods Honor Roll” sign at the corner.  Henry had created and placed the sign there to honor local people who served in WWII.  (Eventually, the County made him take it down as it was not properly authorized to be that close to the road). 

Seated, then, at the long table, bowls of food would pass from hand-to-hand.  There were always boiled potatoes, mushrooms in savory gravy, canned peas, and a baked meat such as chicken or fish.  A stack of white Bond bread cut in half and butter would always accompany the meal.  Dessert would sometimes be canned peaches or fruit salad, but there was always the option of strawberry, chocolate or vanilla ice cream.

Henry was an active man always ready with lively conversation.  For kids, the opening line was often, ”I’ll give you a nickel if you can spell Mississippi."  That was a good deal since a candy bar cost a nickel.  For fellow fishermen, such as fiddle player and dance caller, Percy Hill, there were good natured  gibes such as “You’re a god damned liar” as they engaged in the fun of tall fishing tales.  There were true quarrymen, like George Whittaker, who would come in after 1 PM for a beer.  (No alcohol until 1:00)

I think I will start a blog on the subject of Henry Wilgus’s country store.  I don’t know where it will lead, but I do know that there was once a shining bit of true American rural life centered in a small part of Saugerties, New York called High Woods.  The people were fun, inclusive, intelligent and brave.  They loved nature and tended to be quite patriotic.  Their meeting place, for a time, was a small country store that had a small filling station, served beer, and had a dance floor and juke box.  Local artists and writers felt comfortable there and came by for beer and dancing.  Everyone did know your name, and, if you were new, they would learn it right away.

Thanks giving with the whole family circa 1959:  Boggs Norman, Diana; Wetterau May, Alan, John, Meed, Mark; Wilgus Bill, Elizabeth, Ellen, Bill, Jr., Bob, Mrs. Wallace Petito Peter, Grace, Sarah, Peter, Jr. Nola, Long Dog Aruba New Juke box in the dance hall

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[i] I am using The Dartmouth Bible.  Boston.  Houghton Mifflin.  1950.

[ii] HD used to be known as Huntington ’s chorea because of the uncontrollable movements that develop in the course of the disease.

[iii] Nola

Dashing about illuminated with a warm smile-- That was Nola as a child.  She was the youngest of all the cousins.  As the baby, she was allowed large amounts of mischief.  She would sit on your lap for a moment, and then be off again.  She was Grandpa’s pride and joy, and well loved by her parents.

               My most resilient thoughts are of Nola as a little, little girl. Full of mischief and exuberance. 

You could tell that she liked to be happy 

and her enjoyment was infectious and made everyone else a little happier too. She had a great capacity for love.

 When Tammy and Nola came to Woodstock, we were overjoyed to find our dear Nola with the same wit and fun nature undimmed by her HD symptoms.  It was especially nice for her Aunt May to see her again. 

[iv] Cato in his treatise on agriculture reminds the housekeeper in the rural manor that ‘the master practices religion for the entire household’.”  P. 17 vol 1 Boggs, Norman Towar.  The Christian Saga.

A Country Store: The Fishing Contest At The Wilgus Store In High Woods

     When the annual smallmouth bass fishing contest at the High Woods store was announced, the game was on! The sign-up lists were posted at the left of the cash register in the kitchen.  They were always on white ruled paper divided by columns into three categories:  Your Name, fish weight and fish length.  The bass had to come from the Ashokan Reservoir. [i] Prize categories were first, second and third at the top, and, of course, the booby prize for the smallest, most puny entry.  In addition, all entries would have to be brought into the Wilgus Store, weighed on the store scale and measured with the store ruler.  It started on the first day and ended on the last permissible day of bass season, so it tended to run June through October. 

     There was a strategy to keeping careful track of all the players.  Everyone was concerned to be the first to report their catch because it would provide a benchmark for others, and they might end up with the booby prize and at least a year of teasing.  One year it had happened to Shorty Benjamin who, luckily, could counter with great good-natured style and a commanding voice which tended to precede him into the store.  When it came to the yearly fishing contest, one and all wanted to be part of it.  After the initial sign-up, all would check back at least weekly to see who had turned in a good catch.  There was an oral tradition in High Woods consisting of bragging, weather forecasts, and remembrance of fishing past with some serious exaggerations.  

     The store kitchen was like a welcoming home, and people tended to gather there. Nearby was a cooler holding beer and soda, and you could slide the cover aside, peer in and select your favorite.  It had stopped working years ago, but Henry kept it going by filling it with ice chipped off large blocks which were delivered every couple of days. The soft drink side had a large range of flavors from the sweet orange of Tru-ade[ii] to the spicy birch and root beers.  Norman had to be careful when stocking the cooler that no bottles exploded from sudden contact with the ice.  Mark remembers standing around with the men in the store kitchen, drinking a birch beer and Listening to Henry call Percy Hill a G-- D--- liar concerning his recent fishing escapades. 

     There had been many adventures and miss-adventures among the High Woods fishing fraternity.  I say “fraternity” advisedly since it was primarily men.  There were a few good fisher women who were in the contest, but the crowd in the kitchen tended to be men while women gravitated towards the tables and chairs that surrounded the dance floor. Almost everyone drank their beer or soda from an eight ounce glass provided by Henry as drinking from the can or bottle was considered childish or even impolite.

     Henry said that the Reservoir had its own weather.  Large lakes often can muster up a storm rather quickly.  The air suddenly gets a yellow tint, and a wind comes up.  One day while fishing with DeWitt Felton, Henry noticed a change, so he suggested that they go in closer to shore.  DeWitt said “I ain’t afraid of no storm!”, and he kept on fishing.  There were rumbles of thunder, but DeWitt was still unruffled.  Then, chance sent down a bolt of lightning that hit the water, shot inland and took down a tree.  Dewitt started rowing for his life, but the boat made no progress.  Henry then reminded Dewitt they would have to lift the anchor in order to get anywhere.

     Henry had some good advice when it came to anchors.  He told a cautionary tale about a friend who used chain for his anchor line.  When a storm hit, he could not lift the anchor as it had gotten wedged among rocks and roots, so he had to ride out the whole storm, scared to death, in his little open boat.  “Always use rope that can be cut in an emergency.”He also advised to use an anchor with flukes because it is less likely to get caught on the bottom.

     People had opinions on bait.  Worms, of course, of the “nightwalker” sort, crawfish, minnows, frogs and, at that time, dobsons (now protected)[iii] were all used.  Then there was the matter of rods and reels.  Shorty Benjamin was a fly rod user as was Percy Hill.  Shorty said he could pick a flower out of a lady’s hat at forty yards.  Henry and most others used the Baitcaster.

      There were also techniques to fishing the Ashokan.  Chris Rafferty was a restless fisher who fished from the shore.  He moved along quickly if they weren’t biting.  Henry would stay in one place for quite a long time even taking a snooze while the Klang rode around its anchor.  After a time, he would declare that it was time to move and catch whatever was available.  It was better to catch Sunnies and Rockies than nothing at all. [iv]

     
     Here is a picture of Henry taking a break during a fishing trip to eat a banana.  Henry said when he first brought bananas to sell in the store in the 1920's, some people in High Woods had never seen them before.  He is sitting on the Klang with a fish net stowed behind him in the boat.

Time moved on through the summer.  Tranquil moments on the reservoir could, in those days, be interrupted by a train headed up towards Big Indian.  October would bring a new list of winners.  Honors and Booby prize would be awarded when the gang would all meet bringing wives, children and anyone who happened by to a jolly Saturday Night Dance at the Wilgus Emporium. 

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[i] The Ashokan Reservoir Native American for place of fish

[ii] ”Tru-Ade was a pasteurized, non-carbonated soft drink. It was made with concentrated fruit juice and was available in both orange and grape flavor. Tru-Ade went out of business in the 1970s

[iii] Dobsonflies spend most of their life in the larval stage, during which they are called hellgrammites, "grampus," "go-devils," or "crawlerbottoms", and are familiar to anglers who like to use the large larvae as bait Hellgrammites live under rocks at the bottoms of lakes, streams and rivers, and prey on other insect larvae with the short sharp pincers on their heads, with which they can also inflict painful bites on humans. The larvae reach to 2" to 3" in length, with gills all along the sides of their segmented bodies that allow them to extract oxygen from water. From Wikipedia.

[iv] The rock bass (Ambloplites rupestris, Ambloplites constellatus), also known as the rock perch, goggle-eye, or red eye is a species of freshwater fish in the sunfish family (Centrarchidae) of order Perciformes. They are similar in appearance to smallmouth bass but are usually quite a bit smaller.