29
Pearl Kennedy remembers the enjoyment of a "chopping frolic"So tell me about a choppin' frolic.
"Well, they'd come - so many men would come and chop the wood and they'd go to different places and you'd have a big supper cooked for them and in the evening you have someone in and you'd have fudge, sometimes ice cream."
That's what he said - you'd freeze up some ice cream.
" Homemade ice cream, corned beef, and cabbage stew."
Is that what you would have - corned beef and cabbage?
"Yeah, and I used to have a houseful of them too."
Did you enjoy that?
"Yes, I didn't mind it. I don't think I could do it today."
And what time of year would you have those?
"Been in the fall fore Christmas wasn't it, sometimes before.Sometimes before Christmas, 'cording to when they was cutting the wood. Sometimes it would be in the winter probably January or February."
From an interview conducted by Marie Hutcheson for Passages
30
Truth or Fiction ?One of our more enterprising and adventuresome woodlot owners had a few novel experiences while carrying out his work.
His sawmill was powered by a windmill and on a fairly windy day he happened to get a little too close to the rotating arms. One of the blades caught in his braces and away he flew. Before the braces gave way, he had traveled around the circle several times.
He was quite an inventor as well and experimented with wind power on a number of occasions. At one point he had made a huge kite out of discarded canvas sails, which he sewed together. Having attached a container of rocks onto the kite, which he carefully weighed to correspond to his own weight, he tied himself to the tail. Somehow his calculations didn't turn out quite right and the kite was tail heavy. The kite took off willingly and with great enthusiasm but the inventive lumberman did not achieve great height. While several observers tried valiantly to rescue him, the kite whipped the tail at impressive speed through the surrounding trees and bushes. By the time they finally got him free, he was completely naked and his clothes were in irretrievable shreds.
This in no way daunted his spirit as he tried again with a set of wings rather than a kite. As his friends retrieved him from a pile of barbed wire he stated that he had made only one mistake - he hadn't allowed that the wind was blowing across the barn.
He did live a charmed life because when he started using a one-half horsepower engine to run the mill, he used the gas in the engine to fill his kerosene lanterns in the house. He even set the lamps on top of the gas barrel to fill them. One day, when the engine was being a little stubborn and he wanted to stop it, he decided he could accomplish that by just taking hold of the flywheel with his hand. The flywheel being more stubborn than he, picked him up and threw him head over heels directly into the pigsty beside the shed.
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