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

Our house on Nebraska Ave. was a 2- bedroom English Style bungalow that my dad John Mick built from the bottom up.

When it was first built it was heated with the old style coal furnace. This consisted of an iron- heating unit that was surrounded with a sheet metal covering that allowed the heat to rise through a single register. The heat entered the center of the house through the floor that had a large grill about 4 foot by 3 foot. This grill would get extremely hot and you had to be careful where you stepped especially with bare feet. Mother covered it with a throw rung in the summer.

The control that operated the draft door on the heating unit was a dial on the wall in an upstairs room. By turning the dial left or right it moved a chain up or down that ran down the wall, through the floor and into the furnace. You could control the temperature in the house by moving this dial that closed or opened the draft door, providing there was a fire in the firebox. I can remember my folks getting up often at night to keep the heat coming especially during a cold winter night. That register was a great place to stand to dry off after a bath.

When our folks were first heating our home it was at the close of the depression in the 20’s and soft coal was a premium fuel and sometimes hard to come by. It was a common practice for my mother and Mrs. Hans, our next-door neighbors, to bake one or two apple pies. They would then take my wooden wagon with the pies and walk along the railroad tracks that ran behind our house. They would offer the pies to the railroad guards who were guarding the coal cars parked on this siding. The guards would casually roll off a few big chunks of soft coal in payment and I would pull them home. My wagonload would heat our home for many hours. We were not destitute but these few pieces of coal did help in our recovery from the depression.

It seems to me that when I was small the snowstorms we encountered in those days were more severe than today. They certainly were deeper and lasted longer through the winter months.

Mr. Hans who lived east of us worked at the Chevy plant as a machinist. To save money he would often walk to work and back home again. One winter day he left the plant and started walking home when a very bad snowstorm that had been blowing since early morning became a real northeast blizzard. Mr. Hans made it to with in a block or two of his house and became disoriented because of the snow. He finally realized that he was only a few yards from home and was lucky he made it without freezing to death. He had tripped over one of his children’s sleds that had been left in the yard so he knew he was home even though he could not see the house in the blinding blizzard.

Things have changed a lot since we lived on Nebraska. Every home had a burning barrel where we could burn paper and refuse of all kinds. This often would stink up the neighborhood something awful. I am glad that they are outlawed today.

Mother put all left over scraps or garbage in a large pail kept under the outdoors back steps. There was also a garbage pail that held ashes from the fireplace and cinders from the furnace.

The garbage man would walk down our drive way to the back of our house, pick up these two large pails and hold them over his shoulders and carry them to the waiting truck on the street. It was my job to bring the garage pails back down the driveway where they were stored through the week.

All or most of the garbage or table scraps were delivered to the Genesee County Hog Farm on Mt. Morris Rd. They fed thousands of hogs with this garbage, glass and all. The profit made form this business went back into the County coffers, so they say?

Much of the cinders that were picked up from people’s homes were used for street surfacing for years. Our street was not paved until after the second world war.

It was very evident that Flint was an automobile town and back then most people were very proud of Flint and GM products. There was a company that came to town in the 30’s and as an advertising stunt built a ¾ mile oval track on the corner of Court and Dort Highway.

Everyone in town came there to see a team of drivers trade off and on keeping their cars running, non-stop, seven days a week, for over two months. They were advertising how well their cars could stand up to the grueling 100,000-mile non-stop marathon. I am not sure but I believe it was Chrysler Corp. and they used Dodge cars. They had a lot of brass to do this in a GM town like Flint.

We didn’t have air conditioning in those days, when the summers were hot and there were a lot of summer days that were hot, we just moved our activities down in the basement. Mother would do her ironing down there as well as cooking.

When the hot weather continued into the fall canning season the many bushels of peaches were dipped and pealed and canned in the cool of the downstairs.

My Dad and Granpa Johnson used a large backed red tile block to lay up the walls of our basement. These blocks were better insulators than the cement blocks of today and kept our basement cool and dry.

In the southeast corner of our basement they put in a 500-gallon cistern. The water that used to fill this cistern came from the run off from our eve’s troughs and as a consequence was very soft water. It was not used for drinking water, only for washing clothes.

When Lois and I purchased this house in 1942 from our folks, this cistern was till operating well.

When I was in Junior High School my dad purchased a small green house from Mr. Pierce who’s home was on Arlington Ave. The greenhouse was dismantled and moved piece by piece to our place. Dad rebuilt it on the east lot next to our house and built several large flat beds that were used as hot beds for starting young seedlings in the early spring.

The greenhouse was heated by a small hard coal hot water heater that circulated hot water under each flowerbed. This worked very well but had to be tended very carefully during cold winter nights. Dad would get up often at night to tend the fire.

Dad called his hobby the Iris green house and he raised some very fine flowers that he was noted for.

The following pictures show the greenhouse and the flower garden on the east lot.

It was sometime before this that my mother and dad decided to enlarge our house. A second story was added along with a large sun porch and new front entrance. Dad was very proud of the cut stone fireplace that went up the front of the house. There was a bedroom for each one of us boys along with an upstairs bath and shower and a master bedroom. This made our house the biggest on the block and thanks to my dad and mothers hard work it was the prettiest.

It was around 1934 that dad decided to invest some of his hard earned money and he purchased a 20 acre plot north of Flint on the west side of Clio Rd. It had a small house and garage with a 4- acre wood lot. The land on the west end of this property was good farmland. I think that my dad had a secret desire to someday build a home there in the country.

He purchased a 10 HP, two wheel, walking tractor and planted a big garden. My mother seldom went there. I think she was making a statement that she was not too enthusiastic about country living, moving to the north west side of Flint did not appeal to her in anyway.

I spent a couple of summers playing around the property. We were all excited on one spring day when my dad was turning over the soil, getting ready to plant his garden and we found a number of excellent Indian arrowheads. That summer we found many more arrowheads, uncovered by the soft gentle rains. So many that we thought we had discovered an Indian burial ground, Wow!!

There was a low spot that often had a few inches of water in the early springtime. As summer came along the water of spring contributed to a heavy under growth in the low spot. It was so thick that you had to cut the spindly shoots even to be able to walk through. What fun!!

We built camps and hiding places to play in with these slender green sticks. We had an abundance of bows and arrows and some sharp spears that were great fun to throw.

On one occasion an over enthusiastic buddy of mine threw a sharp spear that accidentally crooned off a tree and struck me in my cheek, yes it did go all the way and I could bite the end with my teeth. However it was easily removed and I bled very little. There was no mention of this accident for a few days until my cheek became quite sore.

When I called attention to it my dad got out the Zinc Ointment, which was his favorite remedy.

The treatment was to clean both inside and outside of my mouth with a cotton cue stick covered with Zinc Ointment. After a few days the treatment became less painful. We seldom went to a doctor as most people do today and besides a guy had to take some of the pain as punishment for such a dumb stunt. Hadn’t I been warned once or twice, not to throw these sharp spears?

My Dad was a very gentle first aid nurse and he would help me with my problems if I would just let him know when I had troubles. He did this same treatment for me on another occasion when I stepped on a big spike in a block of wood.

This wood would be delivered to our driveway from the salvage dept at Buick. The deliveryman was a friend of my Dads and he would deliver the best and cleanest on request. These blocks were oak cut from the pallets used in shipping engines to the plant. Most of them were 4x4 blocks about 14 inches long. They were dumped from the Buick Salvage Truck into our driveway. It was my job to see that they were thrown into the basement coal bin so the driveway would be clear when dad arrived home. I would return from school around 3:30 in the afternoon and see this huge pile of wood and know I had an hours work to do.

You had to swing the basement window up on the inside to protect it from flying objects. Every once in awhile a block would hit the window casement and the window would shatter into a thousand pieces. This was looked upon as poor wood throwing and required a reduction in my meagerly allowance.

I much preferred the delivery of hard coal to our house, it only required a coal shoot and down it went with a roar.

One day I was in a hurry to go and play ball but first I had to get that wood into the coal bin, fast, so I took a short cut and climbed through the coal bin window and dropped down onto the floor to find I had stepped on a block of wood with a long spike. You guessed it. It went clean through. Dad said it was a good thing that it was a shinny clean spike other wise I would have had to have a shot too. The ball game was called on account of a short cut.

I previously mentioned that we had a hot water heating system in our house after it had been enlarged. Each room had a cast iron radiator for heat. In our sunroom there were some long low radiators that were ideal for setting on while I listened to Jack Armstrong on our radio.

One snowy winters day I came in to get warm and dry off. Of course I was all wet so I stretched out on the warm iron radiator. And you guessed it, when I reached back to turn on the light a strange sensation came over me. It felt like a thousand shots running up and down my body. I think the only thing that saved me was the fact I fell off onto the floor and the light went out, (more ways than one). That was a reminder, “not to do that again“.

I can’t remember other accidents that I had at home but I am sure there must have been many. Whenever I had a scratch or bite, Zinc Oxide was always the best remedy.