Dirt Farmer's Son. Terry A. Maurer
worked summer jobs at Camp Grayling, the Michigan National Guard Camp near the four-mile road farm. I personally spent six years in uniform from 1950 to 1956 at the military school. I always say that my dad was too old for World War II, I was too old for Vietnam, and my son, Stephen, was too old for Iraq. The US would have a war every twenty-five years, whether they needed one or not. My family was just born at the right time. I think it was Will Rogers who said there should be a law saying, “You can’t start another war until you’ve paid for the previous one.”
My grandma Cherven would always have a bag of wax bread wrappers for my mother to take home to use for cleaning the top of the woodstove in our kitchen. Sometimes my grandma’s brother, Uncle Emil Glusak, would be there. Once, he asked Tony and me to help find his eyes. We really thought he lost his eyeballs. I thought, How can he look for anything? “None are so blind as those who can’t see,” according to Yogi. Then he told us that he lost his glasses. I don’t remember if we found them.
There was another great uncle in my life in those early days. Uncle Mac was Doc Godfroy’s (Uncle Doc is what we called Dr. Godfroy) father. I am sure he was in his late eighties when he lived with us on the farm. He had his own room downstairs in the big house and even had furniture (fancy stuff) made of horsehair, I was told. Besides remembering his funeral at the house, he was laid out in the front room for everyone to see. Probably a year or so before he died, Uncle Mac gave me a dime once and said, “Split this with Tony.” I knew I had a big job to do, so I got a hammer, placed the dime on the metal piece cemented to the back steps (the piece of metal used to scrape manure off your shoes), and proceeded to pound on the dime. I thought the thin piece of metal and the hammering would allow me to cut the dime in half. My mother saw me and asked what I was doing. I told her, “Uncle Mac said to split the dime with Tony, and I’m splitting it.”
Uncle Mac and Uncle Doc came to Roscommon from Monroe, Michigan, at the start of the Depression (1930 or so). I learned that Uncle Mac worked for the railroad which traveled from Detroit to Mackinaw City, traveling through Roscommon. Somehow, he learned about the (Fred) Barber Farm and decided to move north from Monroe with his son and only child, my uncle Doc, and a bunch of chickens. Sometime in 1985 (some fifty-five years later) I met the man who drove the moving van from Monroe to Roscommon loaded with Mac Godfroy and his son, Bernard Godfroy. We were visiting Dick and Marie Powers, longtime friends of my wife, Mary Ann Horning Maurer, on their son’s (Earl’s) farm near Battle Creek, Michigan.
It wasn’t until 2011 in Redwood City, California, when Mary Ann and I were visiting the Powers’ daughter, Barb Kirkpatrick, when I asked her who it was I met in Battle Creek, Michigan, twenty-five years earlier at her parents’ farm. It didn’t take long to figure out that it was her great uncle, Lauren Munson—wife was Mae from Monroe, Michigan, who moved my uncle Doc and his father to Roscommon in 1930. Munson owned a general store in Monroe and had no children. Uncle Doc’s mother had died earlier of what I don’t know, maybe from the flu of 1918. They are all now buried in the big cemetery on Front Street in Monroe, Michigan. It is the same cemetery where the IHM nuns are buried. There is a very large marker near their site for a Maurer. Must be a distant Maurer to my dad’s family, which was from the Nashville and Hastings, Michigan, area.
Actually, my grandpa Laurence Maurer and his father, I think Jacob, are both buried in Hastings. There is a Godfroy Street in Monroe, just south and adjacent to the IHM motherhouse and St. Mary’s Academy, and the old military school where I spent six years of my life. That academy was called the Hall of the Divine Child (HDC), and in 1985 it became Norman Towers retirement home. The Hall was closed due to declining enrollment and the high cost of lay teachers after the Second Vatican Council.
Actually Uncle Mac or maybe it was his father who lived in Monroe, in the very early days of the state, was friendly with the local Native Americans. Michigan became a state in 1837. At any rate my dad told me that my Uncle Doc’s father or grandfather smoked the pipe with the Native Americans who lived along the Raison River. Sometimes Mr. Godfroy would wake up in his house to find six or eight Native Americans asleep on the floor in front of the big fireplace. They frequented the warm house, especially in winter. His house was always open for the Indians.
Monroe is the birthplace of General Custer, and there is a large beautiful statue of the general on his steed. The statue is directly across from the Catholic church on the corner of Elm and Main Streets, next to the river. Well, the reason for mentioning Mr. Godfroy and the Indians is that one night, the chief had a dream about Mr. Godfroy riding into the Indian campgrounds on a great white stallion. The chief interpreted the dream, believing it was a sign that he should give the property along the east side of the Raison River from Dundee to Monroe to Mr. Godfroy. That would be about thirty miles of river frontage valuable then but a fortune in 2010. My dad says I could go to the Monroe abstracts and verify the claim. I never took the time, but you can only claim what you can defend I always say.
Just a note about the relationship of my dad, Bernard L. Maurer, to Dr. Bernard Godfroy. My dad’s maternal grandmother was a sister to Doc Bernard Godfroy’s mother. I think that made them second cousins. So now, here is how I came to be born in Grayling and raised in Roscommon.
In 1935, my dad went to visit his cousin Bernard Godfroy for deer season at the Roscommon farm. He never returned to live in Nashville again. Godfroy wanted to be a doctor, but he had to finish high school first. So he made a deal with my dad to milk the cows and take care of the farm while he finished high school at night. He then went to Olivet College and got his medical degree from St. Louis University in the mid-1940s. He was a dermatologist. My dad met my mother, Pauline Elizabeth Cherven, at church in Roscommon, and they were married in 1939.
Here now is a letter from my dad, Bernard Maurer, soon after his marriage to my mother, Pauline Cherven, in 1939, to Bernard Godfroy, who was in med school at St. Louis University. This letter really lays out what a dirt farmer was doing on the farm as the country is coming out of the Great Depression.
November 9, 1939
Dear Bernard,
Winter is here, for the ground is covered with snow and looks as if it would stay, it came yesterday, plenty, wild and woolly.
Been busy every day, thought that my work would be all caught up by this time. Am after the wood, just seemed as though I couldn’t get to it before. Have just one load of ashes to put on the potato ground, then that is all done. About three loads left so I’ll put that on the corn field. The wheat looks good, have but two loads to finish covering the whole field on the hill. The quack grass should be sick for spring. Dragged it four times and disked it once, of course each time I went over it twice. Annabell had a heifer calf the other day and it was a nice one, about time, luck was coming our way, don’t you think?
The pullets are coming right along and the old hens are taking their own sweet time. Most I get from them is 15, am putting the lights out at 2:30, going to put them out at 2:00 next week. Wish they would get going so I could get some money for us.
It is giving just about enough for feed, cost an average $17.00 every 10 to 12 days. But in ten days I expect them to get over the 100 mark if they keep on the way they have. The pullets sure are laying big eggs, you wouldn’t know they were pullet eggs, no small at all so far, mix them up with the eggs from the old hens and you can hardly tell the difference.
I am going to try cooking up the scraps from the table along with a little mash and give it to them about four o’clock, what do you think about it? If it works it would pay to buy some cull potatoes at Gaylord for 20 to 25 cents to cook up.
Am feeding them 100 lbs. of whole corn a night. By this I mean a 100 lbs. lasts as long as a batch of mash so they are getting with the ground corn 250 lbs. Most of the corn goes to the pullets.
Pauline is still cleaning house and getting things the way she wants them. You won’t know the old shack when you come home. I tell her not to work so hard but it does no good, she is going from the time she gets up until 8:00 or 9:00 o’clock at night.
About the wedding I’ll send you what was in the paper and that will tell you better than I can. Everybody gave us a good time. All the presents I’ll leave that up to Pauline to write and tell you.
Oh