Harley Ellsworth Pike, circa 1920: logger, farmer, fireman, teamster and surrogate father.
By Robert E. Pike
Vermont's Northland Journal
July 2013
It was bittersweet to find this unpublished profile of my great uncle, the man Dad generously credited with stepping in to raise him when Dad's own father, and Uncle Harl's widowed brother, left his three children to be raised by the family on the old Pike homestead in Upper Waterford.
I had only known my great uncle as an ancient man with legs bowed at the knees from arthritis, from the epitaph Dad had carved into his tombstone in Glenwood Cemetery in Littleton, NH, from the stories of the Herbert kids who had the advantage of an extra grandpa as their next-door-neighbor, and as the man to whom Spiked Boots: Sketches of the North Country is dedicated.
When Vermont's Northland Journal put out a call for farm stories, I took Dad's 7,000 words and pared them down:
Just as the Boston & Maine Railroad was about to promote Harley Pike to engineer and give him his own engine (the dream of every fireman), he was called back home to the family farm in Waterford. His old parents told their only unmarried son that if he didn’t return to help them, they would probably have to go to the poorhouse. Perhaps [Robert Taggart and Mary Ellen Pratt Pike] exaggerated, but the hint was sufficient. No good rural New Englander, except under direst necessity, ever went to the county poorhouse.
Dad wrote what he could, or wanted to, remember sometime after Uncle Harl died in November 1968. By the rejection letters I also found, I knew the full 7,000 words had never been published. Now that I'm coaching memoir writers, I see where my father needed encouragement - courage, really - to revisit a Yankee childhood in which everyone was trying their best with a hardscrabble way of life they knew would end when the upper river valley was flooded for electric power.
I edited the unpublished essay to fit the "old farming ways" theme for The Northland Journal. If you want a hard-copy of this issue of the magazine, just let me know. The cost to buy and ship is approximately $10. You can send me e-mail: Helen@HelenPike.com. Thank you.
Vermont's Northland Journal
July 2013
It was bittersweet to find this unpublished profile of my great uncle, the man Dad generously credited with stepping in to raise him when Dad's own father, and Uncle Harl's widowed brother, left his three children to be raised by the family on the old Pike homestead in Upper Waterford.
I had only known my great uncle as an ancient man with legs bowed at the knees from arthritis, from the epitaph Dad had carved into his tombstone in Glenwood Cemetery in Littleton, NH, from the stories of the Herbert kids who had the advantage of an extra grandpa as their next-door-neighbor, and as the man to whom Spiked Boots: Sketches of the North Country is dedicated.
When Vermont's Northland Journal put out a call for farm stories, I took Dad's 7,000 words and pared them down:
Just as the Boston & Maine Railroad was about to promote Harley Pike to engineer and give him his own engine (the dream of every fireman), he was called back home to the family farm in Waterford. His old parents told their only unmarried son that if he didn’t return to help them, they would probably have to go to the poorhouse. Perhaps [Robert Taggart and Mary Ellen Pratt Pike] exaggerated, but the hint was sufficient. No good rural New Englander, except under direst necessity, ever went to the county poorhouse.
Dad wrote what he could, or wanted to, remember sometime after Uncle Harl died in November 1968. By the rejection letters I also found, I knew the full 7,000 words had never been published. Now that I'm coaching memoir writers, I see where my father needed encouragement - courage, really - to revisit a Yankee childhood in which everyone was trying their best with a hardscrabble way of life they knew would end when the upper river valley was flooded for electric power.
I edited the unpublished essay to fit the "old farming ways" theme for The Northland Journal. If you want a hard-copy of this issue of the magazine, just let me know. The cost to buy and ship is approximately $10. You can send me e-mail: Helen@HelenPike.com. Thank you.