A chapter from “An Artist’s Story,” the life story Lee wrote in his eighties. In his words, as he wrote them.

It wasn’t long after our wartime interlude that Lois and I began to have thoughts of moving some place in the country. A place that would be good for us to raise a family and so we started looking. We found 10 acres south of Flint near the very small town of Rankin. We put our place up for sale and it moved quite rapidly. We took the money and paid off my dad the balance we owed him on the house on Nebraska. I believe that my folks were happy with this because my dad said he could now pay off his indebtedness and he would own his own house on East Moreland drive free and clear, he was in his late 50’s and it was the first time that he was completely out of debt. He and mother had helped us a great deal along the way to our independence.

Thanks to a GI loan we were able to buy our house on Brewer Road and we became “country folks“. This house was owned by Russell Tuck who had purchased an old school house and moved it onto this 10 acres. The house was small but it had a lot of potential. The 10 acres was considered to be a small farm so we started out like farmers, planting fruit trees, raising chickens and even a few rabbits. We had room for two goats that we soon found out were a lot to try and handle. We kept them on a chain and they were often stronger than we were and would pull us till we could not keep up. We soon sold them to some Jewish people who made them into roast lamb for one their religious feasts.

When we moved in there were a lot of things that were needed to make it a house. The old pot bellied coal stove was the first thing to go. It only kept you warm on one side, whichever side was nearest the stove and you had to be closer than three feet to warm that side. Kenny and Rod slept on bunk beds in the bathroom this was handy Ha! Ha! It was an easy way to potty train the boys and you didn’t loose much sleep in the process.

Mom and I can’t remember where Barb first slept; we think she was in a dresser drawer at first. Anyway we made other improvements, we put in an oil fired furnace and an inside pump for the well water.

The kitchen had a very small window over the sink and Lois wanted to see the outdoors, so in went a long window (handmade) and she had a lovely view out the west side all the way back to the woods.

The view was wonderful looking west to Ried Torrys woods and the creek that went through our land. We often had deer in the eve and some times during the day.

This woods belonging to the Torrys was so large that we even lost one of Reid’s new born calves which we finally found a few weeks later no worse for ware, but the mother cow was a little upset.

Barbara Jean was born Sept 1948 on Brewer road and how happy we were to have a girl to belong in the family. She was a joy and always has been.

Barbara was an exceptional baby and was able to get Rod and Kenny to do anything she wanted them to. They had some wonderful times together as they grew up. They built forts and hideouts and swung from the box elder trees in our front yard. She was lost sometimes when the boys went off to school but made up for lost times as soon as they returned. The children seemed to have more time to make up their own games and discover new experiences because this was before TV.

It seemed to me that the three of them grew up in an instant, right in front of our eyes. It only took a moment and we had to add on to our “little school house“. It just was not big enough, we needed more room.

The building we started out with was once a school; it was well built and had a good foundation. That was the kind of building we were looking for, one with a good foundation, not built on sand.

We had sold Glen Terry’s old Chevy and went to Durand and purchased a brand new Jeep. The five of us fit into this little car quite well. During the spring planting season it came in handy working up the fields. I felt proud because this was my first new car.

Lois had no trouble learning to drive the Jeep so we made plans to add on to our “little school house“. The first thing we needed was a deeper basement. Reed Torry loaned me an old gravel scoop that was originally meant to be pulled by a team of horses. This worked very well behind the Jeep with Lois driving and it wasn’t long and we had a deep hole next to the house. Lois would put the Jeep in four- wheel drive and I hand operated the gravel scoop. It worked out fine but it became exciting as the hole went deeper. Lois had a steep drive down and an extreme up-hill pull. All went well and we together moved a lot of dirt, of course we tied the three kids to a tree so they would not get in the way.

I had a lot of hand shoveling to do to finish up what we missed. We worked hard that spring but it wasn’t long and footings went in and the walls went up. The kids had a lot of fun playing in the big pile of dirt in our front yard.

We had to put in a sump pump to pump out the excess water that seemed to come in from all fronts. This new basement was a few inches deeper than the old one and before I could put in the new basement floor we had a whopper of a rainstorm while I was at work. By the time I hurried home we had a swimming pool where once we had planned to build new bedrooms. By this time I had found that the water had washed out the old dirt under the footings and the wall started to slant at an alarming rate. This old wall held up the north side of “little school house” and if it had not been for the 12x12 plate that was originally used in this old building our house would have been in our new swimming pool.

This wall fell within a few hours and the only solution I could come up with quick was to let this big hunk of cement wall fall over and become a super sub floor over which I poured a new basement floor. I then had the strenuous effort to prop up the 12x 12 plate with new telescoping poles. When the rains stopped and we all dried out we kept right on building, we needed those bedrooms quick.

As we progressed with our new addition I soon found out that I had to make adjustments in the wall thickness because our “little old school house” was made with rough-cut timber from long ago and nothing was the same thickness. I had to adjust for the new cut lumber of today. It seemed to us that we might not have our new addition done before winter, wow!! What to do now? Barbara no longer fit in the dresser drawer and Rod and Kenny were not too enamored with sleeping in the bathroom.

It became apparent that I needed some help. My dad showed up with his “know how” and his good old tools and he promptly got the four corners of our house square. My brother Allen came up from Lansing and drove a lot of nails in a day and our “little school house” began to look like a house. The window went in and the front door was moved over and we were ready for the cold winter months. Thanks to our helpers our house became a home, just before the first snow.

On the corner of Brewer and Ried Rd. sat a real one- room schoolhouse called the Johnson school and that’s where Kenny, Rod and Barb got a good start into education. The teacher was one of the best, Lois Hosie.

The school was less than a ½ mile from home on a mile long graveled road with few houses. A big huge Oak tree sat along the west side of the road and was always a landmark both summer and winter.

We had a little white duck that became a pet and he longed to follow the kids to school. His name was Lucifer and one day he got the wanderlust and took off west on the creek to the nearest farmhouse where there were many of his kind. He must have felt at home there because he never came back. I think he wound up as roast duck for their Sunday dinner.

Lois Hosie was an excellent teacher who had her students well prepared at the end of the school year. We all out grew that school and the kids moved on, onto bigger and better schools in the district. Lois Hosie moved to other schools too and later in her career became the principal at Pierce school in Flint. She was an outstanding educator and well known through out the Flint school system.

When we moved to Brewer Rd. we were only a few miles form the very small community of Rankin. This little crossroad center was first call Mundy Center; in 1885 the name was changed to Rankin it grew over the years but never became a thriving metropolis.

When we moved to the little farm on Brewer Rd. the town of Rankin consisted of a General store operated by James Reddick, Presbyterian Church, the Mundy Township Hall, Gas station, the Rankin Bar and last but not least, the McInally Hardware. There were around 15 homes also and it was located on the corner of Grand Blanc and Jennings Rd.

We started attending the Presbyterian Church around 1949. There were many new young people that had moved into the Rankin area. This helped the church grow. Lois and I attended a Sunday school class on a regular basis led by the pastor’s wife. The pastor was a retired minister by the name of Rev. Robert Wise. He came out of retirement as an answer from a call by the Presbytery for a minister to fill this pulpit that had been vacant for years. Under his leadership the church at Rankin rebounded and became alive and well.

Mrs. Wise was also retired, but from the Flint school district. She had been an English and History teacher at Central High School. She helped us a great deal in our understanding of the Bible. Rev. Wise had written a number of books on the subject of integration long before the days of Marin Luther King. He and his wife not only wrote about integrating with other people, but they lived it. They had a home in the black district in the south end of Flint and both of them were well known in this part of town. It was because of he and his lovely wife that his church grew.

Our Sunday school class became so big that the only room large enough was the church kitchen. It had a huge table in the center of the room, which we all sat around. We put our small babies, like Barbara, on the table and took turns pushing them into the center to keep them from falling off. It was hard to concentrate on the lessons but we made do and grew in faith as well.

During our time there on Brewer Rd. we made many lasting friends, like Gordon and Virginia Habermal on Torry Rd., Ben and Mary Hugan who lived on Ried Rd. and Doris and Dud Smith. They are gone onto much better, the reward of eternal life with Christ.

It was a good place to live and a fine place to grow in faith. In those days the country roads were mostly gravel however Fenton Road was a paved through-o-fare.

Our little jeep came in very handy each spring. When the frost went out the roads were impassible except for a 4-wheel vehicle. Bill and Beulah Munsel lived on our road, she was a car dealer for Buick on Dort Highway and Bill worked for Genesee Bank. During the spring thaw I would pick them up at a little store on Fenton Road and they would ride in to their home in the Jeep. Many times our spring drives would be part on the road and part in the farmer’s fields. It often took till July for the roads to dry up to where they would again be a dusty speedway. It took years of prodding to convince the Genesee County Road Commission that our roads needed improving. I might add that they are still not convinced.

During the time we lived on Brewer Rd. Lois’s dad L.R. Sanford retired from AC and he started building a resort at little Wolf Lake near Lewiston, Michigan.

We would pack the kids into the Jeep and make the long drive north, and it was a long drive in those days, it took nearly 5 hours in the Jeep. We didn’t do that trip very often.

Lois’s mother and dad experimented with trying to drive to Texas for the winter months. They would pull their house trailer under the old apple tree next to our house on Brewer Rd. and stay for a week or two until the cold weather would compel them to head for warmer temperatures down south. We were sorry to see them go but we were also happy they went.

Kenny and Rod were cub scouts and belonged to a cub pack that I started in the school district. We often had more kids than we could handle but we were able to do all the usual things that boys loved to do and then some. We were young and had lots of energy then Ha! Ha!

Lois even had some time left over from the kids and she joined a group of women from the Rankin area who were members of a home extension group. This gave her a little break away from home with out the three children that seemed to demand her time. She made a number of friends in this group including Mary Hugan.