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Kathryn Finegan Clark: By the Way – Memories of Bedminster

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A lively Wanda Bickel lives comfortably in her 92nd year but she recalls with fondness the little world she inhabited as a child – the days when “nothing existed 10 miles outside our house.”

She grew up on a farm “just over the hill” from her current Bedminster Township home. One of six children, she was 10 years old when electricity arrived. Before that, news of the world was delivered on a battery-operated radio “that didn’t always work.”

Kerosene lamps lit up the rooms in those days. “You couldn’t see into the corners,” she said, and added wisely “but you can’t miss something you didn’t have.”

The one-room Yost School she attended never did have electricity. “If you sat in the middle of the room it was hard to read on dark days. The kids who sat on the sides had the light from the windows.”

Matriarch of the sprawling Bickel family, she has six children, eight grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren. Her husband, Sam, died four years ago. They had been married for 66 years.

Wanda’s looks belie her years. She is witty, kind and clear-headed as she recalls her childhood in the agricultural community that was Upper Bucks. She still gardens, mows the lawn, is wicked with a weed whacker, still uses a wringer washer, preferring that to her modern one, and hangs the laundry outside, For more than five decades she has been tending the grave of a nephew who died when he was only 7.

She is certainly one of few women who have a road named for them. When her late husband and his brother, Bill, built a road in Tinicum Township, they named it Annawanda after their wives. “Most people think it’s an Indian name,” Wanda said.

“I like the way we grew up,” she said. “You learned responsibility first at home, doing farm chores, and then you were responsible at school.”

In the one-room schoolhouse, a single woman ruled over as many as 30 children in grades One through Eight, with the fear of “the strap” maintaining discipline. “The kids were good, though. We wanted to learn. We were poor, but everybody was poor, and we were happy.”

And they were kind, too. She recalls one boy whose family was really poor. “He had no shoes and walked to school in his older sister’s shoes and used a silk stocking as a belt. Another wore an adult’s old coat that reached the ground. “But no one laughed at them,” she said. “It just was the way it was.”

Those were the days when some children would bring turnip sandwiches for lunch, or maybe lard sandwiches. For most farm families, fruit was plentiful. Potato chips, though, were a treasure not often bestowed.

It was a world where boys took their guns to school because they would check their traps on the way home. “There was a place to stand the guns and they were not to be touched during the school day,” she said.

“We all went barefoot all summer,” Wanda said, and she recalls one warm autumn day when one of her brothers decided to walk barefoot to school only to have to walk home barefoot after a sudden snowstorm. Snow-covered roads then were hand-shoveled by men paid 50 cents an hour.

The big event of the school year was the Christmas play. “It was performed at night and the farmers would bring their lanterns and hang them around the room to provide light. It gave a nice feeling to the room,” Wanda said.

Christmas brought no presents for children, but the lavish Polish feasts every Christmas Eve were memorable. “We would cover the table with straw and lay linen on top of it, like the Christ Child’s manger, and there would be 13 dishes. My mother had a beautiful voice and she and my uncle would sing Polish songs. We thought it was wonderful.”

Wanda spoke Polish as a child but her father insisted the children learn English before they started school. Now, she recalls only a few Polish words.

She said her father found it difficult to make a living farming and worked for some years as a milkman in Philadelphia. “He only came home every Thursday and Sunday, and we took care of the farm, but when World War II started he found a good job in a defense plant.”

That’s when the family’s fortunes improved and things began to change for this amazing woman who has lived through the dark days of the Great Depression, has seen man walk on the moon and begin exploration of Mars – so much history to contemplate.

kathrynfclark@verizon.net


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