In the course of one’s life there will be a smattering of strange or humorous events that you can look back upon with either a smile or the shake of your head. Here are some of mine, not in any particular order, but rather as they pop into my head.
Back around the 1940s, the pastor of the Colebrook Congregational Church was a gentleman named Henry Wharton. He was the minister there for a good many years and was a thoroughly well-liked man by all who knew him. One of his close friends was Bob Whiting from North Colebrook.
Bob also didn’t have an enemy in the world that I ever heard of. Somehow these two friends got into the habit of calling each other precisely at 7 every morning. If Bob was the caller, he would say, “Good morning, Bishop, this is the mayor,� and if Bob’s phone rang first, he would hear, “Good morning, Mr. Mayor, this is the bishop.� Then they would say whatever they had in mind, hang up and go about their daily routine. This kept up for quite a long time.
Then one morning at exactly 7 a.m., Reverend Wharton’s phone rang and the voice at the other end said, “Good morning, this is the bishop.� Before he could finish the sentence, Wharton interrupted him with, “Bishop, hell! I’m the bishop, you’re the mayor!�
Well I suppose you will guess the ending of this before you read my ending, but the situation was this: Some prominent member of the religious community had died overnight, and a bishop in Hartford was contacting various members of the clergy to inform them of the scheduling of events pertaining to the funeral. Pastor Wharton thought it too good a story to keep to himself, so called Bob and told him, and Bob, always a connoisseur of good humor, made sure the rest of the town knew all about it before sunset.
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My father was a game warden during the time of World War II. His exact title was patrolman, a position now long gone, replaced by “conservation officer.� The reason he had the job was that all of the eligible men who had held such positions were in the service, and my father had an exemption, which I will tell you about later. He patrolled an area on the west branch of the Farmington River from the Massachusetts line in Colebrook River to the iron bridge in Pleasant Valley and Sandy Brook from its confluence with Still River to the Beech Hill Bridge.
The district manager for the state forest lands, S. E. Parker, whose office was in the building still used for the same purpose along the river in Barkhamsted, lived in a house long since removed that sat next to the Barkhamsted Senior Center. There used to be a barn 30 yards or so south of his house. This was pulled down sometime either in the late 1930s or early ’40s, and in the area inside the cellar walls, (there were only two, on the south and west, as it had been built into the side of a hill) Parker had established a vegetable garden. He had a green thumb, I guess, as it was a nice-looking garden.
Each day my father would go by that barn twice, once in the morning and once in the afternoon. Along about mid-summer he spotted a nice, fat woodchuck happily munching away on a row of carrots.
The next day the same thing; it was perfectly plain that this rodent had found himself a patch of heaven on earth and at Parker’s expense. My father, figuring that he should look out for the interests of a man who was not only a friend, but also his boss, in a way, brought along his Smith & Wesson .38 and that very day popped that animal with one shot.
Then he figured perhaps he should tell Parker what the gunshot had been about, so he stopped in at the office and gave out the good news. Poor Parker sat open mouthed and then said that the woodchuck, although wild, was sort of a pet. The garden had been planted expressly for him, containing only vegetables he liked; Parker would watch him every morning as he ate his breakfast, and it made him feel good the rest of the day.
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Why didn’t Uncle Sam call up my father, Paul, during the Second World War? It was because he was able to follow directions to the letter, that’s why! My father had been born in 1904, so would have been 37 years old when Pearl Harbor occurred, well within the age bracket of men the Selective Service was looking for.
One day he received a form from said Selective Service, the purpose of which was to ascertain the eligibility of the addressee. Part of the questions were: What kind of work do you do? If you work in a factory, don’t say you work in a factory, tell exactly what you do in that factory. If you work at a bench, don’t say that; say exactly what you do at that bench.
Now, my father owned a small farm; we had two or three cows, a horse, a flock of hens, a goat, two dogs, several cats, both barn and house variety and, when he got done with his farm work, he did carpentry and general repairs.
They want to know exactly what I do, do they? OK, I’ll fill out their form.
“In the morning, the alarm goes off at 5:30, I turn off the alarm, throw back the bed blankets, swing around and put my feet on the floor…(then he went into minute detail how he put on every item of clothing, how he went out to the backhouse — or do you prefer to call yours an “outhouse? — what he did in the backhouse, how he went next to the barn, carrying a 12-quart milk pail, how he gripped the part of the cow that the milk comes from, etc., etc.)
I’m sure you get the drift. Anyway, off the government form went, and in due time he received a Selective Service card with his name on it and containing the classification of 1-A (H).
1-A, is it? Guess I’ll be hearing from them any day now. So he waited, and waited, and no call-up notice was forthcoming. As a matter of fact, it never came.
The war ended and the boys came home, one of whom was a fellow named John Samulas, who had been with the Connecticut Department of Fisheries and Game before the war and now had his job back. Johnny used to drop in frequently at our place and one day my father mentioned that he thought it strange that he had never been called up, what with being 1-A and all.
John said, “Do you still have that card? Let me look at it.� When he saw the (H), he started to laugh. That was the code letter meaning that you were insane, or at best mentally unstable.
I can still hear my father saying, “I only did what they asked me to do. I filled out that form exactly the way they wanted!� He didn’t do it to be funny; he was just following directions.
Bob Grigg is the town historian in Colebrook.
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