Some employees stood out for their special skills or unique personalities. This account highlights four of them.
Uncle Owl
Uncle Owl was a kind black gentleman who ran our grandmother’s sheep farm across the road and was the only one trusted by New Papa to work in his garden. Standing around while my parents talked to Uncle Owl was one of my earliest memories of my grandmother’s farm. Being too young to have much of a grasp of sanctioned names, and not realizing that “Al” was a name, I stuck with words I knew and just assumed his name was Owl. While Uncle Owl was a hard worker, he, like the other help, did not much like working for New Papa. Uncle Owl liked to harvest vegetables in their prime; New Papa demanded that they be kept on the vine a week or two longer so that they could get as big as possible. His asparagus always had stalks in excess of an inch thick, and the peas and lima beans were always starchy and tough. Toad said that Bom Bom once broke her tooth on one of his peas. Uncle Owl was a very pleasant and easygoing guy who easily won the hearts of all the grandchildren. We judged most adults by how tolerant they were of our antics. Uncle Owl always had a quick smile, and he didn’t care if we built hay castles in the sheep barn or if we ran around like banshees. He also knew how to get along with New Papa – a skill mastered by few. It was a well-known fact that when Uncle Owl knew that a long day in the garden lay ahead, he would go down to the barn and hide in the workshop. It was a pass our parents compassionately gave him.
Uncle Owl came to work on the farm in the late 1930s. At that time, he was responsible for driving Dad and his siblings to and from their grade school, twenty-five miles away from the farm. Several years later, in an isolated incident of poor judgement, Uncle Owl was pulled over for driving erratically after being over-served at the local watering hole. The arresting officer determined that he had never held a driver’s license.
Later on, lonely for a wife, he found a newspaper ad for a woman in New Rochelle, NY, looking for a husband. What really caught his eye was that this woman came with a refrigerator. He sent for her; she arrived on a bus with all of her belongings, including the refrigerator, and they lived a long and happy life together.
Charlie Forhectare
Charlie was a farmhand in his mid-thirties. Attempting to teach a young Uncle Herman a lesson for leaving his .22 rifle lying around, Charlie took it home to see how long it would take Uncle Herman to miss it. Unfortunately, Charlie’s wife noticed it first and shot Charlie with it during a domestic quarrel.
The injury was overcome, although the only lesson learned was by Charlie.
Hans VanderTease
My father was fond of telling us, after we had done something ill-conceived, like dropping rotten apples into his newly drilled water well, that we were Uphams and that made us smarter than 97% of the people in the world. I found this curious because all of the people I was surrounded by seemed to be in the other 3%.
That was until I met Hans VanderTease. Hans VanderTease was a Dutch hillbilly who worked on our grandmother’s farm. What I remember most about the VanderTease family was their colorful language and toothless grins. When I was very small, I thought they spoke Dutch. It didn’t take me long to realize that they merely had a skillful command of all of the words I wasn’t allowed to use, words that even made my dad wince. Still, I was mesmerized when they spoke. They used these words interchangeably as nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. They lived in one of the farmhouses on the property and always yelled at us to shut the screen door that didn’t catch, in order to keep the bugs out. Under normal circumstances that would be a reasonable request, except that their dog had ripped the screen off the length of the door months ago. Their dog looked very “mad” and mangey, and I was never sure if he wanted to lick me or bite me, so I always made sure I hid behind my dad. I knew a lot about "mad dogs" having just cried through the Disney film "Ole Yeller" a few days earlier.
My father and Uncle Herman always let the VanderTease hunt on the farm. While they had never discussed hunting protocol, they were under the impression that the VanderTease had procured licenses and hunted lawfully. As it was, nothing could be further from the truth. One November day when Uncle Herman was complaining to Hans about an unsuccessful morning spent duck hunting, Hans told him that he didn’t know why he bothered hunting in the fall. He always had the best luck in the spring and summer, when the animals were young and more vulnerable, and the game wardens weren’t in the way.
Candy
Candy was a flirtatious, full-figured wench who worked in the kennel. She frequently drove Bom Bom on her errands. She also drove Aunt Amory crazy with the company she kept. Aunt Amory referred to the seedy Port William male interests that came looking for Candy on the farm as “river rats.” Being amenable to profitable romance, Candy once offered to help entertain Uncle Herman’s hunting guests. He politely declined her offer. Still, she had a “can do” attitude and was very eager to please. While Candy was intellectually celibate, she took a great interest in “rural community service” and ushered the farm foreman’s grandsons into manhood. These sessions generally occurred in the spring and summer, in one of the duck blinds that the VanderTease were not using.
Her other interests included demolition derbies, as both spectator and participant. As long as there wasn’t a peroxide embargo, she didn’t have a worry in the world.
Clean-up Editor: Toni Gardner, Author of Walking Where The Dog Walks
