Bernard Meacham: “Oh what fun we had in that one-horse open sleigh”

By LeAnn R. Ralph

COLFAX — The phrase from Jingle Bells, “dashing through the snow in a one-horse open sleigh” carries many good memories for Bernard Meacham.

Meacham is 94 years old and is a resident at the Colfax Health and Rehabilitation Center. His wife, Wanda, is 91 and also lives at Colfax Health and Rehab.

A visit from the Elk Mound Girl Scouts, who went caroling at CHRC and sang “Jingle Bells,” jogged Bernard’s memories of the sleigh.

When he was a youngster, Bernard had his eye on the neighbor’s one-horse open sleigh for quite a while.

“The one-horse open sleigh was in the attic of a hay barn for a very long time. Finally, I was friends with their youngest boy, and I said, ‘Let’s get that out of there.’ So we did. And their dad let us use it. We had a horse named Dick, and he took to that one-horse open sleigh. He loved it just as well as we did,” Bernard said.

“The only reason we had that sleigh is because we knew it was up in that barn, and we asked if we could take it down and use it,” he said.

Dick was a bay horse who had once been a race horse.

“He was old race horse, and he had some years on him. But apparently he loved kids. He’d drive into that river and pull the buggy behind, and he’d stand there swishing his tail, and he’d look around him to see what we were doing. And we’d dive under his belly,” Bernard recalled.

Not only did they use Dick to pull the sleigh, but they also had rigged up a buggy and used him to pull the buggy during the summer.

Bernard says they were probably 15 or 16 when they took the horse out with the one-horse open sleigh and the buggy.

“They had a road cart for exercising in the summertime, so we got a buggy somewhere, and we put a cover on it with gunny sacks so we could drive down to the river in the summertime and smoke. We’d smoke smoke-wood. And then we’d drive the horse right into the water. He enjoyed that as much as we did,” he said.

Bernard chuckled. “We’d sit there with that smoke-wood, with smoke rolling out the back, and we thought we were fooling everybody.”

Sleepy Hollow

Bernard grew up between Trimbell and Ellsworth on Highway 10.

“We went to school, and we were right on the edge of the school district. You couldn’t get any farther away from the school than that. And we walked that every morning and every night. And in the real cold winter, one of the neighbor men would haul his children in a grain box filled with straw. We’d get in there with the grain box with straw, and it was really a lot of fun. We loved snuggling in that grain box. It was so warm with all that straw,” he said.

And what about Christmas programs at school?

“Oh, Lordy, yes, I remember Christmas programs. We went to school at Sleepy Hollow. And it was a hollow. The road went down into a valley. The school had a stage built right into it. And the teacher would put on plays. And the whole school district would come to watch,” Bernard recalled.

“If I could choose a time and a place to grow up, it would be right back there,” he said.

“Me and my older brother, he was two years older, and if I couldn’t think of some deviltry, he did. And the worst thing was my dad, he would thump us on the head with his knuckle. We would pretend it hurt, but we hardly felt it,” Bernard said.

High school

“I sure enjoyed growing up out in the country … when I got older, we moved into town. Getting to high school back then was kind of a problem. There were no buses. So we moved into town (Ellsworth), close enough so I could walk,” Bernard said.

“We lived on a corner, and right across the corner, south side of Main Street, was a lady who ran a boarding house for girls (going to high school),” he recalled.

“It just so happened when I came back from working on the farm in Roberts, when school was ready to start, there was a girl I knew, and I went across to talk to her. And what do you know, there sat my wife,” he said.

“I went back home, and I took my mother to the window, and I said, ‘Right there, that little blond, I’m going to marry her.’ She said, ‘You are not.’ She really got put off about that one. But when I did marry her, well, we’ve been married 75 years,” Bernard said.

“She’s a sweetheart. And her mother was just like her. An absolute angel on earth. Wanda’s father liked to drink. He couldn’t pass a bar without stopping in. Why her mother put up with it, I’ll never know. Except back then, divorce wasn’t very well received. She lived with it,” he said.

Electrical contractors

Bernard served in World War II.

“After I got home from the service, I bought my dad’s old place. And I got a loan from the county agent. They could lend money to farmers. I bought some cows,” he said.

Unfortunately, the cows did not work out very well.

“Me and my friend heard that were a lot of farms that could be wired in South Dakota. REA just came in. We’d had it quite a while already. So we drove out there, and we stopped in a restaurant to get a cup of coffee,” Bernard said.

“I had ‘Meacham and Polk’, and only half of ‘electrical’ on the sign. It was supposed to be ‘electrical contractors’. I only got ‘electric’ on it,” he said.

“And do you know, I had four or five people ask me in the restaurant if we could come and wire their farms. We’d wire two farms a week. We brought a young fellow from home who wanted to work with us. We paid him good money, too, because he was a good worker. We could wire two farms a week. You had to move, though. You couldn’t mess around,” Bernard said. 

Family

Bernard and Wanda had four children. The two oldest are gone already. Their eldest son died of a heart attack at the age of 70. Their daughter ended up with colon cancer.

They have seven grandchildren.

Bernard says he always objected to their children giving them gifts for Christmas.

“It wasn’t a very good idea for the kids to give us Christmas presents. It was our job to give them to the kids. But once in a while they’d slip one in for Ma and Dad. One time it was tickets to a dinner. So we went and took in the dinner. I tell you, it was a dinner. It was good food. It was good eating. But they still couldn’t beat my mother’s food,” he said.

“When she was baking bread, she’d take a chunk and flatten it out, and she’d put it in hot grease. When it got done, she’d pull it out and sprinkle it with powdered sugar. Almost as good as potato pancakes. I love potato pancakes to this day,” Bernard said.

Carbon monoxide

Bernard had initially wanted to be a pilot in World War II but a faulty exhaust system in his car ruined that idea.

“I wanted to be a pilot in the service, but the day I went to write the exam, my car had an exhaust leak. It filled the cabin. My dad rode with me, and by the time I got to where I was going to write the exam, I had a headache. It was absolutely splitting,” Bernard said.

“We stopped, and we both got out and vomited. It was just terrible. My dad said ‘I don’t think you should write that test now.’ And I said, ‘Am I ever going to get back?’ Well. Maybe. Maybe not. I said I’d try it, and if I didn’t get it, they’d let me do it again. I missed it by three points. And they told me I could come back. But I never did,” he said.

Flying typewrites

Instead of serving as a pilot, Bernard ended being drafted.

“I left the day my son turned a year old. We were picked up by a bus at the courthouse. I’m standing there holding my boy, Mike, and the women are standing there crying,” Bernard said.

“My wife had to learn to live without a husband. But she got a good pension. What she got every month was more than I made before I went into the service because of our one boy. So they lived pretty darn good. I had my home paid for by that time. But I hated to leave my family like that,” he said.

“I spent 36 months in the service, six on Iwo Jima. There were 40,000 men and eight nurses. You’d see a nurse going by in a truck, and you’d hear, ‘hey, there’s a girl!’ It was a novelty,” Bernard said.

Even though he could not be a pilot, Bernard did serve in the Air Force.

“I really wanted to be a pilot, and I missed it because of that splitting headache, and they did say I could come back and try again, but my wife said, ‘No, you missed it once. Let’s leave it that way.’ I didn’t want her worried about it either, so I went into the regular service. They found out I could type, so I flew a typewriter all through the war,” Bernard said.

“I had a lieutenant who said he could assign me to be a typist and asked how I’d like that, and I said, ‘I wouldn’t like it at all. I can type, but I don’t like to do it.’ I didn’t want to think about sitting there all day long, typing. He said, ‘We could probably send you to the Air Force,’ I don’t know why. I guess because I could type. I got into the Air Force. It was a good life. We were assigned 25 pilots in training. They ate in our dining room, so consequently we ate better because they were officers. You couldn’t imagine that an Army cook could put out good food like that,” he said.

“This one guy was a cook and lived in a room by himself at the end of the barracks because he had to work nights, so he could sleep all day. And my bed was right next to that room. When he was up and around, we’d get to talking, and we got to be good friends, and then he started bringing me home food from the kitchen.”

Lonesome Christmases

Bernard remembers that while he was serving in World War II, Christmases were lonely holidays.

“Christmas while I was in the service was an awful lonesome time. I never did get home on Christmas. A lot of the guys did, and I could never figure out if I ever did something that they wouldn’t let me go, but I never got home,” Bernard said.

“I had a boy, a year old, and we would have been married three-and-a-half years then already. I wanted to get home. After awhile I got an apartment and brought my wife to where I was based, and then it went better,” he said.

Bernard was based in St. Petersburg, Florida. 

Before his wife got there, he lived in a hotel across the street from the commanding officer’s office.

“My wife kept not getting her allotment, and there she sat with no money. It worried me. So I got up my courage and went across the street … (the commanding officer) said, ‘what can I do for you?’ So I told him what was up. The guy in charge of the Sherman Hotel where we stayed, I had given him money to send home, and he never sent it. There was always an excuse. I told the commanding officer about it,” he said.

“Pretty soon that guy was standing in the office of the commanding officer. ‘Now Sergeant, where is this man’s money.’ ‘Oh, I’m sorry sir. I didn’t send it. I spent it.’ And he said, ‘You won’t do that often.’ He broke him right there. He took his knife and cut off his stripes. So then he was a buck private again. It made me feel good. But I felt sorry for the guy, though. It broke his heart,” Bernard said.

When it was pointed out that the man had taken Bernard’s money, after all, he said, “Well, yes he did. But it took a lot to get to be a sergeant. I got it back, though. They deducted it from his monthly check, and I got it all back. That major was a dandy. Once in a while, I’d meet (the major) out around somewhere, and he’d stop and talk to me,” he said.

“We had another lieutenant, he was kind of a lonesome guy, but somehow we got to be good friends. And he would go with me and my wife, out to a restaurant or something, and we’d be walking down the street, and the other soldiers and sailors would salute him, because he was a lieutenant. And he’d throw a salute back. I almost got to feeling that they were saluting me, with him walking beside us!” Bernard said.

Fishing trip

Although Bernard was never able to be a pilot in the service of his country, he did learn to fly.

“I learned to fly an airplane. A Cessna 172. I wanted to fly to Alaska. So I talked my brother into it, and he went with me,” Bernard said.

“We landed at a place with a nice big lake, but the weather ahead was bad. The manager of the airport said we were going to be delayed two or three days,” he recalled.

“The airport manager had a car and told us to take his car and where to go fishing. I never in my life seen the beet. I got the worm on my hook first, and before my brother could finish his, I pulled out a northern this long. You can’t believe the fish were that thick. They were almost walking on each other,” Bernard said.

Long life

Bernard says he doesn’t know how he has lived this long.

“No one in my family, or my wife’s family, were this long-lived,” he said, noting that he and his wife both had aunts that lived to be in their 80s. 

“It was fun growing up. And to grow up with my brother Leon, what one couldn’t think of, the other one would,” he said.

Bernard recalled, too, that his mother had a way of frying potatoes that was out of this world.

“She used bacon grease. You couldn’t hardly stop eating them,” he said.

“And watercress. It’s delicious. It grows in the water, and we’d cut it off just above the roots, and then it would grow back, so we didn’t waste anything. We’d have strangers come along and pull it out by the roots. We let them know. You don’t pull it because then it doesn’t grow back. You cut it,” Bernard said.

“My dad was a gentle man. He was a wonderful man. He was a carpenter and worked with the same guy for 40 years. The only reason he quit is because the guy he worked with quit. But Dad decided to go on. He had kids, us boys. We worked with him and started building and repairing houses … my mother was a saint if ever there was one, what she put up with,” Bernard said.

All together, there were five boys in the family, and two sisters, although one sister died as a baby, and Bernard’s oldest brother died in an ice boat accident.

“We weren’t rich, but my mother and dad made a good life for us,” Bernard said.