Being farmers and always busy, we never took family vacations. The only acceptation to this was that one summer our parents rented a lake cottage for 1 week. It belonged to George Brumby (Wow, what a moniker). It cost $60.00 for the 1 week. This seemed like an elaborate sum of money back in the late 1950’s. The cottage was located at Oberlin Beach at Huron. We spent a lot of time on the beach and really had a lot of fun. We went swimming every day. Those were the days before the lake was polluted and the water was clear. When we weren’t swimming, we did a lot of neat things on the beach. We built a lot of sand castles and forts. One thing that always fascinated us was that every time we dug holes in the sand we would strike water. While digging a hole by the breakwater, I struck a lot of gray clay. I took a big glob of it and made an ashtray for my mother and father (see pic of it below). Roger Waite, a family friend, brought his boat everyday. The name of the boat was “The Brat” (I wonder if he named it after me?) Our mother was a good water skier and did a lot of it behind “The Brat”. I tried it once and every time at the start, my leg would go one way and the other the other way. I did “the splits” on the water! The same thing happened when I tried to ski on land. I guess I was never meant to ski either way. The bedroom had 3 or 4 bunk beds. They were wooden and painted with what I call “public building green”. A lot of family friends visited us that week including the Jones’ family. The kids all stayed over night one night. One of the kids was my classmate Jan and she slept on a bunk in the same room. Since I was only 9 or 10 at the time, she could do this since my hormones weren’t on over drive yet. She was the only girl I ever “slept with” until I got married. Oddly enough, out of the 54 people I graduated from High School with, she’s the only one whom we still can’t locate even 40 years later. Hmmm I wonder if “sleeping with me” caused her life long psychological problems. It did for my first wife.

To the best of my recollection, this was the first place Tim and I started to have “olive fights”. This consisted of aiming at each other and blowing in the bottom hole of an olive and shooting the pimento at each other. This was in the days when they had real pimentos in them and not the “minced” ones now days.

 

Near by the cottage there was a horse. Since we had a horse, I often went to pet it as it came up to the fence where I was. The horse’s name was “Arrow”. I liked that name so much that I “changed” my middle name to “Arrow” too. Since my middle name is just “B”, I thought it was great to have a “real” middle name for once. This only lasted through the summer due to the fact that Michael “Arrow” Tillinghast was too long to fit on the order blanks for all the stuff we ordered from the backs of comic books. A neighbor girl had “Blanding” turtles. I’ve never seen or heard of them since. About 3 years ago, I went back to Oberlin Beach and looked to see if the cottage was still there. Much to my surprise and delight it still was. Now it seems so small and I wondered how we got all those people in there. I guess we were really “close” to our family friends.

 

HEY JAN, IF YOU HAPPEN TO READ THIS, CONTACT ME AS SOON AS YOU CAN! WE MISS YOU AT OUR CLASS REUNIONS. I’M REALLY SORRY THAT I MAY HAVE CAUSED YOU LIFE LONG PSYCHOLOGICAL PROBLEMS. YOU KNOW HOW IT IS WITH YOUR “FIRST ONE”!