This One is on Me
The life-story of an old doctor who saw many changes in medicine,
in industry, in social customs, and the world in general
By Dr. James Lee Fisher
(1895-1987)
Edited by
Eric Davis & Elizabeth Fisher Davis, 1997
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Including a collection of photographs from dry plate glass negatives taken by his father, George Elmer Fisher, a telegrapher on the Panhandle Railroad.
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Every man should leave some record of himself. I do not remember my Grandfather Fisher and never saw Grandfather Goff, but I would like to know how they lived, what they believed in and how they met the problems of their day. They left no record.
Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, "Every man is an omnibus in which all his ancestors ride." Being something of an ancestor now, it seems proper to put down some things about me so that my descendants will know how I lived and perhaps thus know themselves better.
James Lee Fisher
, 1977
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Chapter I
Carnegie, Pennsylvania
I was born August 14th, 1895 in Carnegie, Pa., the fourth child of George Elmer and Anna Martha (GOFF) Fisher. The gruesome details of my birth were often related to me by my mother. It seems that she had a contracted pelvis and bearing children was extremely difficult. The first two children were stillborn, one boy and one girl. Then came my brother George Ross Fisher [born March 15, 1887], who was born prematurely without much trouble. She was advised by old Doc Mendenhall not to have any more children but eight years later Father took her to the World's Fair in Chicago and she came back pregnant.
Her return
from Chicago was precipitate because of the death
of her father, James Thumwood Goff who was a prosperous farmer near
Frazeysburg, Ohio. He was driving across a ford in [Wakatomika] Creek between Dresden and Trinway in his buggy when he was accidentally drowned. It was said that he was drinking in Dresden and this made my Mother a militant prohibitionist.
Mother was
born on a farm near Frazeysburg, the daughter of James Thumwood Goff [son
of Thomas Goff and Mary Ann Mart] and Nancy Ellen
[Dunn] Goff. They were prosperous farm people and their table always was
loaded with good food: fresh milk & butter from the spring house, hams
from the smoke house, chickens and eggs from the hen house. Their own honey,
fruits and baked bread were common fare. For dessert they served "float",
a cornstarch pudding with whipped cream or "ambrosia", a mixture of fruit
with shredded coconut. My mother was always a farm girl interested in birds,
flowers and gardens, but most of all in home-making. She was scornful of
father's efforts to raise vegetables and flowers. He was a town boy.
Grandma Nancy
[Ellen DUNN] Goff was a quiet and gentle person. At
sixty she was a wrinkled old lady in a black bonnet with ribbons under
her chin who lived in succession with her married children Lee, Thumwood,
Henrietta, Frank and Anna. Whenever there was a birth or sickness, she
was there. When she stayed too long with one, the others were jealous and
would send for her.
Grandfather
[James Wilson] Fisher [son of George Fisher
& Sybilla Margaret Shamel] was said (by my mother) to have been a fine
man. He was the station agent at Adams Mills,
Ohio on the Panhandle Railroad
which he helped to build. It is now the Fort Wayne Division of the Pennsylvania
Railroad. He died a few years after I was born and I do not remember him.
Grandmother [Margaret (Long)] Fisher and her
two daughters Ella and
Rose were cordially hated by my mother. I thought
they were alright but too mushy, always kissing me.
My birth was extremely long and difficult,
and was accomplished by forceps, which were a new invention in those days,
and only used as a last resort. I bear the scar on my forehead to this
day in a location which to any obstetrician would mean a very unskillful
application of the instruments. My eight year old brother looked at me
and thought I was a mess.
My
earliest recollection is about the turn of the Century. I can remember
George running into the house saying, "Look ma, I've got some more 1900
Calendars!" Another early memory was when I was four years old and father
would come home from work. He would seat me on the palm of his hand and
hoist me up as high as he could reach. It never frightened me. He was a
man who loved life.
My father [George Elmer Fisher] was a
telegrapher on the Pennsylvania Railroad making thirty dollars a month for a twelve
hour day. He was a handsome man, a telegrapher in an isolated tower on
the Pennsylvania Railroad somewhere between Pittsburgh and Columbus. He
left his one-room red schoolhouse about the fifth grade, to be a water
boy for a section gang where his father was
a foreman. How he learned telegraphy I do not know, but he could read and
write and figure well enough and someone taught him telegraphy and the
Morse Code which was a new thing then (ca. 1875). At the age of nineteen
or twenty (ca. 1883-4), he was installed in a signal tower along the railroad
at Frazeysburg, a telegrapher who clacked back and forth to the train dispatcher;
received messages, set the signals, and pulled big levers which set the
switches. I was never told the details of the romance between the young
telegraph operator from Adams Mills [Ohio], and the plain farmer's daughter
of Frazeysburg. It was an incongruous match, but it lasted for 60 years,
fighting all the way.
Father was interested
in photography and bought a camera from our family doctor [Dr. R. L. Walker
of Carnegie, PA]. It cost $60 and mother was furious because that was two
months pay. It was a big thing mounted on a tripod and he focused by covering
his head with a velvet cover while he looked at a ground glass image upside
down. After focusing he inserted the gelatin coated plates and everyone
kept still for two or three seconds while he pressed the lever. It took
clear, sharp pictures if you did everything right. He was always taking
pictures, mostly of people. He mixed his own
developer and fixer. He developed the glass negatives in a darkroom and
printed the pictures by sunlight. I still have the camera in our attic
[now in the possession of Eric & Liz Davis]. It is an antique collector's
item. I have an album of pictures taken by it which are priceless records
of our early family life [see the linked images from this page].
We lived in
a rented house in a decent part of town. It had 6 rooms and we were proud
of the inside toilet with a big box high up on the wall with a long chain
to pull. Mother cooked on a big coal stove in the kitchen and we had a
cozy fire in the dining room with a big fender
in front with brass knobs on it. We had a fire in the parlor when company
came but mostly we lived in the dining room. I can remember how father
would put slack on the fire at bedtime so it would keep. Mother would put
a big jar of buckwheat batter on the fender to raise and when I started
up the stairs I could see the firelight flickering on the brass knobs,
and the big glazed pot, and knew there would be buckwheat cakes in the
morning and the world was good.
Our cellar had a dirt floor
and rough stone walls. It was reached by steps from the outside and usually
smelled of apples which we kept down there in barrels. We had no refrigeration
of any kind and it was a problem to keep milk and bread and butter. Mother
baked all her own bread and there was usually a jar of ginger cookies in
the pantry. We had a small yard in front with a picket fence and gate,
and a large yard in the back usually filled with my brother's pets.
George
loved pets. We always had a dog and rabbits. Besides [these] there
were guinea pigs, white rats, chickens, sometimes ducks and usually pigeons.
Every time he would go out to uncle Lee's or Thum's
at Trinway he would come home with turtles or ducks which would be turned
loose in the yard. There was a high board fence around it but they were
always getting out and being searched for through the neighborhood.
George was not very popular
with the neighbors, especially around Halloween. Those days Hallowe'en
was a succession of nights starting with corn night, then gate night, then
privy night, and ending with Halloween proper when all Hell broke loose.
On corn night the boys threw corn against the windows, on gate night many
a bonfire was fed by wooden gates, and the morning after privy night there
was much snickering among the boys and angry threats by irate householders.
To have one's privy pushed over was the height of indignity and very inconvenient,
besides. After Hallowe'en there were always indignation meetings and vows
to punish the culprits if caught, but they never were.
In the winter the sleighs used
to drive past our house and when we heard the bells we always ran out and
tried to hop on the runners for a free ride. The drivers would whip their
horses which added to the sport, and it was often more dangerous to get
off than it was to hop on. But falls in the snow never hurt us and we never
minded the cold. There was skating on Chartiers Creek and we all had skates
which clamped on, and were secured by a skate strap. They were always coming
off, especially if our heels were worn down. Father was an excellent skater
and thought nothing of skating up to Bridgeville and back, a distance of
ten or twelve miles. He enjoyed skating until he was in his seventies when
he fell and banged his head on the ice and didn't know where he was for
a while. Then he quit.
My
father was a handsome man with black hair and a black mustache. He was
active in the Methodist Church and sang in the choir. He had a way with
the ladies and mother was very jealous. She worked hard and kept borders.
At our table there were usually two borders and one or two relatives and
on Sunday a visiting minister or missionary.
They always seemed to come to our house. Father was very agreeable and
especially kind to the ladies. He played the violin,
the cornet and the banjo, all self taught, and knew a lot of funny
songs. The neighbors came over on a summer evening to hear him play the
banjo and sing [songs like] "Kentucky Babe". He taught me the songs and
I would sing with him.
Anyway, we had a happy home.
We envied nobody and when the end of the month came Mother would take the
book to the grocery, Mr. Kumpf would add up the items, she would pay the
bill and he would give her a bag of candy for the kids. Mr. Porter would
come around and collect the rent, a little would be put in the bank and
we were all set. All of this out of thirty dollars a month!
When I was eight years old
there was trouble with Father's job. He expected to be promoted to train
dispatcher and didn't get his promotion. He had joined the union, the Order
of Railroad Telegraphers, and he thought he had been found out. They usually
fired men who joined a union those days, and membership was kept a secret.
He was very unhappy and dissatisfied. About that time, he met a man who
was a broker and was looking for a telegrapher.
This man was not
a broker as known today. His firm had no seat on the New York Stock Exchange.
He operated what was later known as a "bucket shop".
His firm had an office in New York which leased a telegraph wire connected
with any town where they cared to open an office. The office in New York
would relay quotations on the prices of stocks to their outlying offices
where traders could buy and sell stocks on margin. The margin then was
three points which meant that a man could buy any stock for three dollars
a share. He could also sell stock he didn't have at three dollars a share.
If he thought a stock was going up, he could buy 100 shares for $300. If
he thought it would go down he could sell 100 shares for $300. If stock
cost $100 a share he could buy 100 shares, not for $10,000 but for $300
on margin. If it went against him he could put up another $300 margin or
be wiped out. If it went with him, he could take his profit and get out.
He didn't own the stock, he was betting on which way it would go. It was
gambling but at that time it was not illegal. All that Father knew was
that he was offered a job at more than he was making, but he had to move
to another town.
Chapter II
Freeport, Pennsylvania
So
we moved to Freeport, Pennsylvania, up the Allegheny, thirty eight miles
from Pittsburgh. It was a small town and we liked it there. We lived in
a little house up on the hill on Washington
Street on the edge of town where we had apple trees and peach trees, a
well with a bucket and windlass, and the most delicious water you ever tasted.
Down the walk a sensible distance (50 feet) from the dug well was the privy,
a two-holer where flies buzzed lazily in the summer. In the winter it was
not so inviting, so chambers were kept under the beds and night time would
often find me on my knees by the bed for other purposes than prayers although
they were not neglected.
Strange to say, we were more
advanced there in some ways than in Carnegie with its bathroom. We had
gas lights and a gas stove in the kitchen. We bought an Edison phonograph
with a big morning glory horn and listened to Collins and Harlan sing "Bake
Dat Chicken Pie" and "The Preacher and the Bear". We bathed in a washtub
on Saturday night in front of the kitchen stove and wore long woolen underwear
and felt boots in winter.
Up above us on the hill was
the McCue farm where I went every day to get the milk. They had a big swing
on a huge oak tree on the hillside and there were seldom less than three
boys on it at a time swinging out in space and yelling to make it go higher.
There was a spring there which fed two ponds where we skated in the winter
and if we fell in when the ice was thin we ran home to get warm in the
kitchen and put on some dry clothes.
It was lovely
there in the summer. On my tenth birthday my brother gave me a baseball
and a new fielder's glove. Each of them cost a quarter and they were tops.
He was a telegraph operator then at nineteen years of age on the Pennsylvania
Railroad making fifty dollars a month and money was no object. The backyard
was full of pets which mother cared for most of the time because he
was working. I brought a stray black dog home
one day and Mother threw a pan of water on him to chase him away. He was
not completely discouraged by that and hung around and soon she was feeding
him scraps from the table and he was one of the family. He had a kennel
filled with straw out in the woodshed and I used to crawl in there and
talk to him. We understood each other perfectly. No one can tell me that
dogs can't talk. They just don't use our language.
Father had a great deal of
trouble with his bile while we lived in Freeport. The spells usually came
on Sunday morning after he had been down to Pittsburgh on Saturday night.
He would have violent pains in the abdomen with vomiting. Mother would
send me down town to fetch the doctor. I would find him and go over to
the livery stable and wait while they hitched up his horse so I could ride
out to the house with him. The doctor said father's bile was too thick
and gave him medicine and he would be out to work Monday. He took me with
him several times to Pittsburgh and taught me to eat oysters on the half-shell.
We had no telephone or electricity
but when I used to visit my cousin, they had a telephone and when it would
ring they used to let me listen. It was a party line and their ring was
one long and two short but when it rang everybody on the line listened
and the conversations were very interesting. It was a way of obtaining
news about births and deaths and trouble and it made greater cohesion in
the neighborhood.
I had my first automobile ride
in Freeport in 1905. It was a red roadster with two cylinders and when
we were having a church lawn festival he brought it around and let everyone
have a ride for ten cents. It was thrilling. We persuaded my Mother to
get in the car but when he cranked up the motor she hopped out. Nobody
was going to put anything over on her, she said.
It was a great adventure to
take the train to Pittsburgh for the day. The bustle and confusion of the
traffic was exciting for a small-town boy. One had to be careful at crossings
not to be knocked down and run over by the big horses pulling drays and
beer wagons. Occasionally an automobile could be seen, but not often. It
was standard procedure to go to Boggs & Buhl in Allegheny (now the
North Side) for school clothes, then Kaufman's for lunch (always a hot
roast beef sandwich), then in the afternoon I would have an ice cream soda
at a drug store for five cents which was the highlight of the day.
We lived in Freeport about
three years and then Father announced that we were leaving to go to New
Castle. I shall never forget that moving. All the crating and packing was
done by ourselves. You didn't call a mover in those days, you packed everything
yourself, then hired a man with a horse and wagon to haul the stuff to
the freight station. Father was working in New Castle and Mother did all
the packing and cried most of the time. We sold off George's pets, gave
away our big tent, threw away countless old items which would now be priceless
antiques and said goodbye to the Kelly's, the Mosses, and the McCues. My
dog went along, riding in the baggage car. I have had a horror of moving
ever since. My mother counted up in her later years that she had moved
fifty times in her married life and every time we moved my antipathy increased.
Chapter III
New Castle, Pennsylvania
At first we lived
on Boyles Avenue and I went to Highland Avenue School. It was a good town
and father was making good money ($100.00 a month). There were steel mills
there and the Greer tin Mill was the largest in the world. Across from
the school was Boyles' field, an enormous meadow where we played baseball
and where the high school games were played.
My brother bought me a bicycle
when I was twelve. I had a dog and there were good playmates. In the summer
we went up to Second Dam on the Neshannock Creek to swim or skated up and
down the sidewalks on roller skates. Polo was popular those days, played
on roller skates like hockey and for a quarter we could go see the professionals
play, then go out the next day and commit mayhem on each other. It was
great to get on the front seat of a summer street car and ride out to Cascade
Park which seemed the most beautiful place in the world, full of silvery
fountains and music and the smell of popcorn.
We lived in
New Castle about eight years with a short interlude when we moved to Newark,
Ohio for nearly a year. That was during a panic business depression about
1908 when Father was out of work and the brokerage office closed. He was
an office manager then, sometimes running the wire
himself and sometimes hiring an operator. Frequently the firm in New
York with whom he had wire connections would fold up, they were not very
stable and he would be out of business until he made new connections. The
New York Stock Exchange was clamping down on these small firms which had
no seat on the Exchange and it was getting difficult for them. This time
it was bad and he had no wire so we went to live with Aunt Ett [Marietta McCann] in Newark
and he went to work on the B & O Railroad.
Newark, Ohio was a nice town.
We had relatives there and in Trinway and always went visiting them in
the summer. While living in Newark Mother sent me down the street to Della
Slaters to take piano lessons. I liked music but it was hard to take lessons
and practice when the other boys were out playing. Mother was a practical
psychologist and used to praise everything I played and ask me to play
them again, even the simple exercises, so she could hear them. So I would
do it, just as a favor for her then run out and play with the boys. I never
gave up the piano and later it was a great pleasure and comfort to me.
When father
got wire connections again we went back to New Castle and lived at 126
Quest Street which wound up the hillside and was so steep that we would
walk off the street at the front door and when we got back to the kitchen,
the back porch was on the third floor. New Castle's hills made for a great
sport in the winter, the coasting was thrilling. We made our skis out
of tongue and groove flooring by planing the ends thin, soaking them in
hot water and curving them upward. A leather strap was nailed across the
middle to slip our toes in and we were all set. We would come down Quest
Street at a great rate and if we could make the curve at the bottom and
come out on North Street standing up we thought it was great. I never could
jump, though. The skis always came off. There were a few automobiles those
days but not many and they were not much of a hazard. When we were coasting
or skiing they were supposed to keep out of our way.
In 1909 I entered high school
at the old school on the corner of North and East Streets. It was old and
crowded. The upper grades went to school from 8:00 A.M. to 1:00 P.M. and
the freshman from 1:00 P.M. to 5:00 P.M. Some of the teachers taught two
grades and they had a long day. There were no junior high schools then.
In 1911, my junior year, we
went to the new high school up on Wallace Street. It seemed very nice to
me, a big auditorium and a gymnasium. I went to school from 9:00 A.M. to
3:00 P.M. and then went downtown and cleaned Father's office for $3.50
a week, spittoons and all. In the summer I worked at the soda fountains
in Love & McGowan drug store which was the center of social life for
the younger set. People coming home from Cascade Park or the nickelodeon
would stop in there for a nut sundae or a cherry dip and it was a lively
place. I had long known that I was going to be a doctor and thought a drug
store would be a good place to work but I never got near the prescription
counter. Love and McGowan paid me $10.00 a week but I should have paid them
for all the ice cream I ate.
My first date with a girl was
at the end of my Junior year when it was the custom to give a dinner-dance
for the Seniors. I don't remember much about it as I was slightly delirious.
Neither Gladys Anderson nor I danced but we watched the others and had
a long talk and made great plans for next year.
In my Senior
year I was seventeen years old and beginning to
realize that time was running out. The girls were looking very attractive
to me but not vice versa. I was the youngest and smallest boy in class,
a pale youth with pimples and having frequent bouts of tonsillitis. I belonged
to the Boy Scouts, went to Sunday school regularly, and my dear cousin Goldye
[McCann] had taught me to dance the waltz and two step the past summer,
but Gladys had got herself a big lanky fellow and had no more time for
me, and when the boys and girls paired off together during lunch period,
nobody paired off with me except Harold Baer and Bill Stewart, and there
was no romance in them. Something had to be done.
When the call came for football,
I reported to the squad. Nobody took me very seriously. I found an old
torn pair of football pants in the locker room. I had my own jersey and
Mother sewed up the pants and I went for practice. We practiced kicking
and running and falling on the ball. The Coach put me at playing end on
the second team and there I stayed. That satisfied me. My ambition was
to play in the annual game between Juniors and Seniors which was as important
to me as the game with Sharon or Butler. I worked hard at football practice
but the best thing that could be said for me was that I was always there.
The job of the second team was to take a pounding from the first team,
and we sure took it. After practice I would run down and clean my father's
office, go home and eat supper and then do my homework. We had study periods
in school and I was smart enough to do most of my homework then. Marian
Hover was a big help, too. She would do my Virgil translation while I would
do her German. I would go down to the Methodist Church and take her home
after choir practice on Friday nights. I took her to the Junior-Senior
banquet that year and waltzed with her. When I was leaving for college,
I asked her to kiss me good bye and she wouldn't do it. That's the way
it was.
When the Junior-Senior football
game came up, I was ineligible because I was on the regular team and could
not play in class games. I got in the big one that year with Sharon. We
were way ahead when the coach sent me in and our team was penalized five
yards on the first play because I was offside. I felt disgraced but nobody
said anything. I was very surprised when I got my "N" to put on my jersey.
The year was not a total loss.
I was an honor student, ninth in the top ten of the class. It was the custom
at graduation for each of the honor students to give an oration. My subject
was "Modern Advances In Medicine". My material was collected from popular
magazines and Sunday supplements and was pretty lurid. The High School
auditorium was filled with fond parents and relatives of the class. Nobody
could see my knees shaking because of my long black gown when I exhorted
them to cooperate with these wonderful men of science who were doing so
much for suffering humanity. When it was over, Dr. Womer of the Health
Department congratulated me and offered his help in furthering my medical
career. It was not necessary as I was already accepted at Jefferson Medical
College [Philadelphia], but he was my friend for many years afterward.
Please send comments and questions to:
Eric & Elizabeth Davis
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©
Eric Davis 1997