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Cousin Harold

Cousin Harold is about 4 years older than I, and now lives so far away that meeting in person is hard to pull off.  So we talk on the phone every so often.
Our conversation always focuses on the distant past, UFO's, or the history of atomic weapons development.  As children, we often visited each other's homes with our parents, but usually it was in the direction of his place, a farm of about 40 acres.  This 40 acre farmstead was in flat farming country in western Michigan, good for growing corn as we shall get into later.
Going to the farm was always a fall event for some number of days as it was afforded by "teachers convention".  Harold's mother, my aunt, was a school teacher and teachers convention pulled her away for several days---that's when we visited the farm and ran wild.
Harold tells the story of how  he and Art burrowed down in the sandy area behind the barn, making  a large cavern with a small entry hole over which they pulled a cover.  The cover was in turn covered with sand, so that when the cover was in place---and they were inside this cavern----no one could find them.  Harold's sister Ruth and I were always hunting for them and never knew they were "right beneath our feet".
This farm had a lot of history, it appears from Harold's remarks.The "back forty" acres had an old house on it, long abandoned by Harold's ancestors---it had no plumbing and no electricity.   Every summer, a Mexican "family" would move in and then hire themselves out for agricultural work.  The kids went to the local schools, and many wore no shoes.  This was in the 1940's, so I guess this guest worker program is not all that new.
Harold's dad, John, was an excellent mechanic, having gotten a lot of his experience in World War I as a mechanic on military vehicles.   On the farm, there was an old vehicle, which they called the doodlebug.  It originally was an old truck, but shortened in length by cutting the driveshaft way back, taking a section out of the frame, and then pulling the rear axle up nearer the front axle.  It was like a hybrid between a truck and a tractor.  The four of us always played around with it, and even drove it to Posky's store about two miles away.  License to drive this  unlicensed vehicle?  Hah!  The main safety aspect of all this was that Ruth was the only person allowed to drive it while the rest of us were around.

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