And when the second payment on the second mortgage came due-every six
months there was a payment due-the man came in and said to my father, "Mr.
I'm sorry, I can't make that payment now, but I've got a barrel of
whiskey here. I'll give you that on account, and as soon as I sell a few head of
cattle, I'll give you the rest of the money." I think the payment was 0 every
six months.
Well, a little while later we heard that the still that he was operating in the barn
had been blown, the explosion knocked the whole side out of the barn, and he
disappeared and we never heard of him again. He apparently was running the
cattle as a front for a still. This, you remember, was during Prohibition.
So we had the farm back and we'd plant beans one year and we'd plant peas
the next year for the cannery. Some years they'd say, "Well, we can't take
them. Just plow them up." Other years, we would pick the beans. That's about
as hard work as I've ever done-stoop labor, picking beans for the cannery.
We liked it when they planted peas because they were harvested mechanically,
vines and all.
Anyway, the farm never really was profitable and finally, in
was
after I had graduated from college and had gone out West-it was taken by the
city of Baltimore as part of the Patapsco Reservoir area. The upper end of that
reservoir floods into our farm and has drowned out some of my first
recollections about water, which go back to playing in the stream, playing in
Run before I was six years old.
Q .. I wanted to ask you, as a matter of fact, if I could interrupt, whether you think
your early experiences on the farm -which you obviously remember rather
vividly-may have influenced your career and what you finally went into. Do
you have any feelings about that?
A Yes, I think it did in two ways. One was that my earliest recollections are
playing in that stream and climbing up on a big rock. There was a big rock
there that must have been all of six feet high, like a boulder, and it kind of
sloped into the hillside, so you could walk around the back and get up on top
of it. And I think this is my earliest recollection-being up on that rock, and
my grandmother, who took care of me most of the time while my mother was
off doing other things and running the farm, grabbed me so I wouldn't fall. I
must have thought it was great fun to get up on that rock. So I did it again and
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