Week 35: Disaster

Peggy and Joe c. 1936-1937

In late 1936, before my mom Peggy and her brother Joe were old enough to go to school, the Williams family experienced a disaster one cold winter day.  The farm was located near Osceola, Indiana, on the county line between St. Joseph and Elkhart Counties.  Earlier in the afternoon my grandma and grandpa had worked together spreading chicken manure on their fields. Grandma Irene slowly drove the pickup truck while Grandpa Lester stood in the bed, shoveling out chicken manure.  Five-year old Peggy and four-year old Joe stood on the running boards so they could watch instead of being alone in the house.  When the job was done and everyone was hungry, the family went inside so Grandma could start cooking some dinner.  The water pump on the enclosed back porch had frozen. When Grandpa saw that  he decided to try to thaw it using a gas torch.  That turned out to be a very, very bad idea.  

1930s era farm truck

A similar pump

The walls of the back porch had been insulated with layers of old newspaper which quickly caught fire from the heat of the gas torch.  Grandpa yelled, "Irene, the house is on fire!  Get the kids out!"

Grandma, flustered, hurried from the kitchen with the frying pan holding their dinner and set it outside.  Next she ran for the kids, bundled them up, and led them across the yard to a fence near the barn and told them to put their hands on the fence and not to take them off.  My mom can remember holding on to the fence, crying, and jumping up and down as she and her brother watched the house go up in flames.  Grandma ran into the house several times to get armloads of clothes before the fire made that impossible.

No fire department ever came to help.  Since the farm was situated on the county line, neither St. Joseph nor Elkhart County fire crews claimed responsibility to help.  Grandpa and neighbors did what they could with buckets of water, but they were no match for the flames.  The house was a total loss. 

Grandma's sister Clara and her husband Fred gave Lester, Irene, Peggy, and Joe a temporary place to stay in South Bend while the family decided what to do next.  The decision was to fix up an empty chicken coop on the farm by putting sheet rock on the walls and a covering on the floor.  A wood stove was installed to keep the coop warm and the four Williamses moved into the chicken coop.  Mom doesn't remember how long they lived there but I found a picture labeled "Taken at the Olive Street house in 1937".  The weather looks warm so it was probably the summer after the fire on the farm.  The house fire disaster and life in the chicken coop were in the past.  No one was injured, but bad memories of the fire never left their minds.