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Chapter 1
The Hill
Most folks around Henrietta simply called it “The Hill.” Everyone knew what they were talking about: Zurcher’s Henrietta Service, a combination gasoline station, country store, and, at one time, a truck-stop restaurant operated by my father and mother. At various times it stocked groceries and a cooler with meat, cheese, milk, and eggs. A small lunch counter offered Page’s Ice Cream, homemade soups and sandwiches. Out front were two gasoline pumps and a cooler filled with iced bottles of soda pop. Our staples were newspapers, milk, bread, cigarettes, pipe and chewing tobacco, potato chips, and candy. We sometimes had fresh oranges, watermelons, and other produce, depending on the season. We were a convenience store before such a term was coined.
But it was much more: When there was a death or an accident in our small crossroads community, our little store was the unofficial headquarters where money from neighbors was collected to buy flowers, or where a cigar box might be placed to pick up donations to aid a family facing hardship. Being the only store in the community, it was a sort of unofficial community center where farmers or their farm families would meet to leave messages and trade gossip and the latest scandal while comparing prices of apples, potatoes, milk, and other commodities they produced. And then upstairs over the store were three rooms that served as my family’s home as I entered junior high school. We were there literally by accident.
Have you noticed that life can be so promising one minute and then, in a split second, everything can change?
The first ten years of my life were spent growing up on my grandfather Currier’s farm in Henrietta. It was an idyllic life with fields to roam, creeks to play and fish in, cows and horses to care for. No one played a greater role in shaping my life than my mother’s parents, Canarius and Caroline Currier. In the last years of the Great Depression and during World War II they were the rock in my life. They gave me and my parents, Oscar and Grace Zurcher, love and shelter.
My father was an insurance company executive for twelve years. He started at the height of the Great Depression with the Town and Village Insurance Service of Columbus. By the early 1940s he was traveling Ohio in charge of recruiting new agents for the independent company.
Living with my mother’s parents wasn’t unusual for a family during the depression. But with the start of 1945, as World War II was winding down, my parents had finally been able to save enough money to purchase a former one-room schoolhouse that had been converted into a home on Garfield Road, just across the pasture from my grandfather’s barn.
My father hired a carpenter to do some modernization to the building, which had no electricity or running water. We were able to dig out a basement underneath the building, and the tall ceilings allowed us to install a second floor with bedrooms and a modern bath. We were all looking forward to the job being finished by the end of the year so we could spend Christmas in our own home.
On Halloween 1945 my father was scheduled to go on a trip to central Ohio. He stopped at the new home to check on the work the carpenter was doing. Since the war had ended in August, it was much easier to get building supplies, and the job was moving along ahead of schedule.
The carpenter had just finished installing window dormers on the second floor. He asked my father to climb up onto the scaffolding to inspect the work on the roof. Dad was walking along the wooden scaffolding along the roofline when he lost his balance. He made a desperate lunge at the edge of the roof but toppled off the scaffolding and fell nearly fifteen feet, momentarily catching his right foot in the cross-members of the scaffolding. His weight nearly tore the foot from his body. Only an Achilles tendon kept his right foot attached to his leg. He hit the ground with a thud and was mercifully knocked unconscious.
The carpenter scurried down the ladder and had to drive to nearby Henrietta School for a telephone to call for an ambulance. He then drove frantically back to the house, where he found that my father had come to, but was in great pain and was losing blood from his badly injured foot. The carpenter managed to tie a tourniquet around Dad’s lower leg to slow the bleeding until the ambulance arrived and rushed him to Oberlin’s Allen Memorial Hospital.
Family doctor Lester Trufant, who was also a surgeon, happened to be on duty when the ambulance arrived, and he took my father directly into surgery. He told Dad that the injury was so severe that he would probably have to amputate the foot. My father pleaded with him to try to save it. Against his better judgment, Dr. Trufant spent several hours reattaching the foot. What followed were weeks and months in and out of hospitals as my father fought infections and had more surgery to try to restore some use to the foot.
Ironically, although my father worked in the insurance industry, his company had no benefits, and he carried no hospitalization coverage. The bills mounted as the long hospital stays continued, and my mother and father realized that the dream of their own home was slipping away. The final straw came in the spring of 1946, when my father received word from Town and Village Insurance that, because he was unable to work, they were stopping his pay and severing his employment. With no job and with more medical expenses still ahead, my parents sold the unfinished home.
It was a frightening time. There were very few jobs since the massive war effort was being powered down, and returning war veterans had first shot at those that were available. So when we learned that the operator of the store at Henrietta Hill had passed away and his widow wanted to sell the business, my father and mother talked long into the night and decided to gamble their remaining savings by purchasing the small country store. That spring, when I was ten years old and my brother, Noel, was just four, and my father was still on crutches and facing more surgery, we moved our family into the three small rooms above the store that was now Zurcher’s Henrietta Service.
Henrietta in the late 1940s and early 1950s was a conservative little northern Ohio farming community. My high school class had only eight students. Our store was miles from the nearest sizeable town or supermarket.
Henrietta Hill was nine miles south of Lake Erie. It froze in the winter as lake winds swept in from the north. Frost would coat the windows of our tiny business as farmers came in out of the cold, their boots leaving an earthy-smelling residue of manure on the linoleum floor.
As cold as it was in the winters, we melted in the summer as golden acres of wheat and green fields of corn sprouted in the soggy heat. A large roaring fan in front of an open window or door would push the muggy air over the counters of our store as the motors on the coolers worked nonstop to overcome the humidity. Yet, there were spring nights when the soft perfume of lilacs and apple blossoms from the many orchards that surrounded Henrietta Hill wafted through open doors and windows.
And, finally, there was autumn. It was when our fields and orchards turned Technicolor, and our woods took on the gold of the sun. Farmers offered fresh produce at small stands in front of their homes. The senses came alive with the smell of burning leaves and smoke from wood fires, all the odors intertwined with the fragrance of ripe apples. In the evenings a few regular customers, mostly farmers, would gather on wooden soft drink cases under the portico of our store, bathed in the flickering light of our Sohio sign, to watch traffic go by on State Route 113 while drinking an RC Cola or smoking and talking quietly with their neighbors at the end of a long day.
Our number-one best seller was chili. My father always had a big pot of it cooking on the back of the stove. I cannot ever remember the pot being empty—my father, in fact, called it “never-ending chili”—and for the life of me, I cannot remember the recipe.
You have probably heard the old saying, “If you knew what they made hot dogs from, you probably would never eat one.” The same went for the chili we served at Zurcher’s Henrietta Service. My father would toss in things like a cup of coffee grounds, apple cider, and onions fresh from the garden once in a while. When the contents dipped below a certain spot on the pot’s chili-encrusted innards, we would also dump in tomato soup, kidney beans, and a couple of pounds of hamburger, adding pepper until someone sneezed—preferably not into the pot. I suspect some other things got in, too. My father’s ever-present cigarette was known to occasionally drop its ashes into the chili. Also, being a teenager at the time, when I was called on to refill the chili pot, I might have just come in the door from changing the oil in a car and didn’t take time to wash my hands before scooping up a couple of handfuls of fresh ground meat to toss in. I am also sure that perspiration from our foreheads dripped into the kettle on the broiling summer nights when we’d stir the chili with a large spoon. It never won any awards, but we sold barrels of it. In spite of this—or maybe because of it—I have never been exactly crazy about chili.
* * *
The late 1940s were a time of hope. The young men who had become soldiers and sailors and interrupted their lives to fight World War II were home. They were again working in garages, farms, small businesses, and factories. Some were headed off to college. Memories from the whirlwind of the Great Depression and from the ashes of world war were fading. The future beckoned with the bright light of optimism.
It was against this backdrop that I grew from a boy into a man. I was living in a time when the world was finally offering hope. Thoughts of vacations and travel had been few for more than a decade, but the world was putting itself back together. For veterans and their families, a new era was at hand that would provide time to relax and to discover beaches, parks, forests, and other attractions, some just a short trip from home. The road beckoned. It called me, too.
As a teenager I was expected to run the store after school, cook food, wait on grocery customers, and pump gasoline for an eight-hour shift, sometimes all by myself. Before the coming of turnpikes and the Interstate Highway System, rural communities like Henrietta were isolated. Business was slow in the evening after dinnertime.
I would often walk back and forth on the gravel driveway in front of our store, wistfully watching the occasional truck or car hurrying past us on the state highway that connected Elyria, thirteen miles to the east, with Milan, twenty-five miles to the west. I would often fantasize about the people I saw in those vehicles. I saw them as salesmen, hurrying to their customers; young men heading out for an evening of fun with a pretty girlfriend; mysterious strangers off on adventures that would carry them far across our state, perhaps into faraway cities I had only read about.
I longed to travel with them, but I saw only a blur of faces, and the dust whipped around me by the speed of their passing vehicles. The illuminated red and white gasoline sign and the 150-watt bulbs that illuminated our gasoline pumps were my key lights; the dusty gravel-filled parking lot was my stage. I longed to walk away from this tiny community. To raise my thumb and jump into the first car that would stop and offer me a ride, not caring where I was headed. Just to see what was at the end of the road that ran in front of my country store.
With my father’s permission, I did it a couple of times. Once I hitchhiked from Henrietta to Columbus to see the state fair. Another time, a friendly customer, a truck driver, gave me a lift to Cleveland before dawn. I watched the sun rise over the Terminal Tower and felt the hustle and bustle of the morning rush hour as we waited for a warehouse along the Cuyahoga River to unload his truck. After breakfast at a roadside diner, we headed back west. By afternoon I was again on the gravel parking lot of Henrietta Service, my thirst to travel only temporarily sated.
[Excerpted from Tales from the Road, © Neil Zurcher. All rights reserved. Gray & Company, Publishers.]
