Vol. 2-Interview-Kascak

8/22/72 Tape 12-2 -6M/M John Kascak interviewed by Denis Mercier 151

I have a, in a, he made a clothes closet there for me, there were some shelves there, and, you know, you couldn't always be opening that trap door every time you needed something. So we'd take a... JK: Well, it wasn't big enough to keep a whole lot down there, either. MK: No, no. But we took out a jar of this and a jar of that, and we'd put it in the shelves in the clothes closet, so you wouldn't have to be goin' down the trap door! That's the kind of cellar we had! DM: Oh, brother! Is there any special arrangement of how you plant things, you know, what did you put next to each other? Any, you know, this might be like a, you know, "cues" for gardeners, or "How to Plant a Garden and Have Everything Come up Right"--is there any special arrangement at all? JK: Well, you should folley (sic) the rule of not plantin' the same thing in the same place every year. You should stagger your plants, you know? Don't put 'em in the same place all the time. DM: But I mean, is there an arrangement, like, things will help each other if they grow next to each other? Let's say, to keep the bugs away... MK: Oh, we never... JK: That we never--hah--never worried about that... DM: You never worried about that? MK: No, no. JK: ...kept track of that, I wouldn't say. DM: You did rotate your crops, you did rotate things? JK: I'd rotate them, yeh, I'd change here and there, you know. But what would help one another, like you say, I wouldn't be able to tell you that. I wouldn't know. DM: Do you ever use any kind of fertilizer at all? JK: Well, we use 5-10-10, what they call, you know. DM: But that's all? No other fancy stuff, just... JK: We'd put some lime in once, you know, throw some lime, dig it in. DM: Isn't that high in nitrogen? JK: No, I don't believe that... MK: No, he doesn't mean that you use it, he's askin' is it high in nitrogen? JK: Oh, oh. Well, see, that's somethin' we don't know either, because we never had it tested. MK: ...never had our ground tested. JK: You should do that, you should, because, lot of times we'd say, well, the year is no good, the weather was no good. And maybe at the same time it's not that, maybe it's the ground needs something. You should have it tested and then they'd tell you what you'd have to put in to make it better. MK: You'd have to send it to Harrisburg. DM: How do you control bugs? Is there any special thing you do to control bugs? JK: Well, we have a powder, an Ortho powder they call it. DM: But that's relatively new. What did you do before? Anything at all? Or just hope that the bugs didn't come? JK: Well, we didn't use anything there for a good while. When we started to plant we didn't use anything. MK: No. This is only I don't know how many years back we're usin' this now. DM: The Ortho spray, or powder? MK: Powder. JK: Powder. You can make a spray if you dilute so much in the water, you know. You can make a spray out of it. DM: What are the most pesky bugs right now that you are worried about in this area? Potato bugs? JK: Well, we have the potato bugs that we have to put up with, and outside of

8/22/72 Tape 12-2 -7M/M John Kascak interviewed by Denis Mercier 186

that, I can't say that there are other bugs that bother too much. DM: Any corn borer, or any of that? MK: Well, you find them occasionally... DM: But not very often. MK: Not too much, not too much. I know we used to have punkins... JK: Pumpkins, yes... MK: And they had an awful lot one year, on, and I said no more, I'm not plantin' no more... JK: I don't know what... MK: We never planted them after that. There were too many of them. JK: We don't plant the punkins, and we don't have the bugs now. They must have been, come with the punkins, or something, I don't know! DM: Yeh, because there are a couple of healthy pumpkins growing right in the middle of the yard that was, you know, an abandoned house, up there. It looked like some kids at Halloween threw a pumpkin out there, and all the seeds grew up, and it's healthy, it's beautiful. Blooms all over it, pumpkins startin' to form... MK: Oh, these were terrible. I said, I don't want anything like this in the garden. I'll buy my pumpkins. JK: Oh, it really used to be a good, ah, he understood a little bit about plantin'. He always had a nice garden up there. Oh, yeh. DM: I knew he was a good gardener... JK: Yeh, he was... MK: His mother, up there, she lived like below us on the same street, but she had, there were some, see, certain, I don't know how many homes there were on each side, they were bigger homes, like this, and then we lived way up further where the homes were small. And she had one of the nicest flower gardens and vegetable gardens you'd want to see... JK: Oh, all kinds of flowers... MK: His mother. Oh, boy. DM: You should have seen what I had to do there this year. I had to trim all the trees back, they were all grown. Nobody had trimmed the trees for I don't know how many years. I had to mow down the yard was this high... MK: Up here? DM: Well, when we moved in it was this high. Part of it is still this high, I haven't gotten it all down yet, but, I went clear out to the alley and beyond, you know? Then I have to work my way over to the company store, because nobody is working that, even the grounds keeper hasn't fixed that yet, so I've been hackin' it down, little by little. MK: Oh, but his mother, she had all kinds of flowers, and a nice vegetable garden they had. They lived up there. JK: Yeh, he always had a nice garden down here, too. MK: Yeh, yes. JK: He didn't have as much flowers as... MK: No, as the mother, after they moved from there down here... JK: ...the mother had up on the Back Street... MK: Because she got old and feeble and then she died, and after they moved here, and I guess all the flowers were left up there. She had a nice garden, flowers. Her garden was always bloomin' with some kind of flowers. DM: There are still a lot of flowers up there. MK: Is there? DM: Oh, yeh. MK: Yeh? DM: Bulb flowers and seed flowers. They're both there.

8/22/72 Tape 12-2 -8216 M/M John Kascak interviewed by Denis Mercier

MK: Um-hm. DM: I notice that you have chicken wire up there, or something. Is that to keep rabbits away, or what? JK: to keep the rabbits away. They go for the... MK: Beans. JK: ...beans, red beets, cabbage... MK: Yeh. JK: ...the cabbage, when it's planted, they go for that, they get the leaves off. MK: Lettuce, lettuce, Daddy... JK: Lettuce, they go for that. I have that fenced off, so they can't get in there, you know. DM: Isn't it a combination wooden fence and chicken wire? Isn't it chicken wire so far up and then a wooden rail around the top, so they can't climb over that? JK: Well, no, I don't have anything, just a couple pegs drove in, and then in the fall I'll take it apart and roll it up and take it away, you know, because it'll only hold the snow back in the wintertime. And then I may get another year out of it. If it stays out in the weather too long, it goes bad. DM: It gets rusty and brittle. Do you have any flowers in the garden at all? Do you have any flowers that you are growing? I forget now. MK: Well, we have some, but I haven't been plantin' too many now, I can't do it. DM: Do you have any perennials, some that come up every year? MK: Yeh, we have the... JK: ...the red rose, and then you have the pineys...peonies, or what do you call them? MK: Peonies, oh yeh, we have beautiful peonies there. We have some lilies that come up. DM: Tiger lilies? MK: Them-, no, 24-hour [space] lilies. They weren't so nice this year, though. And... DM: Nothing was too good this year... MK: I always see that I have some petunias in. I had gladiolis, but I... JKI: Gladiolis come up, but I don't know if they're gonna get a flower... MK: ...Dad planted them, because... DM: I thought I saw gladiolis... MK: ...I can't bend down to plant now. And I always put zinnias in, but this year I didn't. And there are some Sweet Williams that will come up alone, and some pansies. I like them that come up alone! Ha ha! DM: Do you have any fruit trees out there at all? JK: Just a cherry. MK: Just a cherry tree. There were a lot of fruit trees, but they didn't bear, and we chopped them down. DM: Don't you have just a straight path going right out the door up to the garage? You don't have any winding little pathways, you just have a straight path? MK: Just straight up. DM: Okay. Let's see. Anything else...I guess you do, you do can the surplus like beans and stuff, do you put up anything? MK: Yes, we did, up until now, but... JK: This year we don't have any to can! Ha ha! MK: We don't have any to can, and ah, I would still like to get some tomatoes to can, but I can't buy them for twenty- nine cents a pound to can. I'd sooner buy a can. You know tomatoes are very high this year, even from the farmer.

8/22/72 Tape 12-2 -9248 M/M John Kascak interviewed by Denis Mercier

DM: Oh, nothing came out very well this year. Too much water, and too much cold weather, I think. Do you ever have to water your garden? JK: Oh, yeh. DM: I bet you didn't have to during June and July! JK: Well, no, no! MK: Well, Dad was waterin', I guess today already, or yesterday. JK: This morning I had the hose on a little bit, yeh. MK: He takes care of the garden. I don't do anything... JK: It don't seem to help too much, but still you don't like to see it there, the ground so dry and the plant is askin' for it... DM: Right. When the leaves start to droop and wilt and everything. Did you ever keep any animals, back on the Back Street? MK: Only chickens. JK: Just chickens, that's all. MK: Just chickens, that's all we kept. DM: What else did people keep? I know they had cows, some of them had cows... MK: Yes. JK: Pretty near everybody in town had a cow at one time. MK: Didn't we try to raise turkeys, too? JK: No. We often talked about it, but we never did. MK: I kind of thought we did, on the Back Street. DM: Did you have the animals fenced off in the back, and then the garden toward the house? MK: Yeh, way way in the back. JK: The back alley, in the back of the lot, you know. DM: That's where all the chickens were? MK: Yeh. DM: And let's see. You must have bordered right on the woods, or bordered right on an open field, on the Back Street, right? JK: There was an open field on the back of us. DM: You were on the far side of the street, so that you had no problem as far as keeping people awake at night with the chickens? MK: Oh, no. I can even see here where we lived, up on the Back Street, Daddy. DM: Was there any room to do anything else in the yard besides raise crops and livestock? Every square inch was filled up? MK: Down at the bottom we had a little bit of lawn, and then after, from there way up to the yard where the chickens were, why we used that for planting. DM: I mean, did you ever have any place to just sit outside, and, you know, I don't know whether you had a porch or not, but, any place to just sit on the grass and have a good time, or... MK: Oh, ah, well there was, like here, a space, and then we had, as you came out of the house, we had a larger porch on the side than here. And there was a roof on it, and we had a swing there, the children always, it was in the shade... JK: I think that swing is still hangin' up there! I made that swing, it must be forty-five years ago. And the here, that were in here, makin' that picture, they didn't want no swings or anything hangin' on the porch, you know, so they took that one down and they put it over here alongside the house. And I took that one, that I had hangin' up there, I already discarded it, I didn't do away with it altogether, but I wasn't gonna use it no more, but I still hung it up there under, I had a little roof there to protect my wood pile, and I hung it onto that. So I took that down, and I hung it under my cherry tree there, where this one is now, and I used it for

8/22/72 Tape 12-2 -10287 M/M John Kascak interviewed by Denis Mercier

that summer, and it's still usable. Forty-five years ago, that's the first swing that I ever tried to make. DM: That is really a great testimony to your ability to make... MK: And then he makes for people, he made a couple... JK: Oh, I don't know how many did I make after that. MK: He made some for people. DM: I hope they paid you a few dollars. JK: Well, the most I got was five dollars, I guess. MK: But you supplied... DM: Five dollars for a whole swing? MK: ...the lumber, didn't you? JK: Then I supplied the lumber. MK: Yeh. Oh, he was too... DM: What would you charge if you made one today? JK: Ha ha! I don't know. MK: He was too good, too good to the people. DM: I was gonna say, you were too generous. MK: He was, he was. All the time he'd put in. He'd come home from his work, and then he'd, sometimes he wouldn't even have anything to eat, and he was gone, workin' and buildin' those kitchens, and garages and everything else. DM: Didn't they feed you, didn't they take care of you when you were doin' that? MK: Well, if it was this here, he came home, or, this here, sometimes they had a lot of idle time then. They were workin' only two, three days a week. then when he had the other idle days, he went out, too, and he did the big jobs, start those big kitchens or garages. Um-hmm. See, right here is our garage in Back Street there. Right there. DM: I wondered if you were looking at that. I thought that's what you were lookin' for. JK: Yeh, that's it, there. MK: That's it. You can tell it was different. It was painted gray. It was a nice garage. JK: Oh yeh, it was, it was... DM: It was painted gray? Didn't it have to be the company color? MK: Well, no, see it was made by the people in, the people that had built, they had a contractor to make it, so, it was painted, you can see it's painted light. It looks different than the other garages there. You see? DM: Oh, it certainly does. Yeh. It sticks out, quite a bit. MK: There, do you see? And the house was right down in there. DM: And that was the only thing gray in the whole town? MK: Well, I guess the others, I don't know, some of them didn't even have them painted, did they? JK: No. DM: But all the houses were either red, or... MK: Oh, they were all red, they were all red. They looked nice when they were red. JK: Some of the red was fadin' away, too, you know, like this green is now, but it was still red, anyhow. DM: Did you ever have any religious shrines out in the yard? MK: No, we never did. DM: Everybody uptown has religous shrines in the yard. Nobody downtown does. I don't know why, but... JK: I guess the better people live uptown!