At the Hamm's

From 1946 until 1948 we lived at the William Hamm estate on the corner of Fox Street and Orono Orchard Road. The estate consisted of perhaps 20 acres, the very large white main house, barns and fields for horses, a home for the caretaker and his family, and the guest cottage, where we lived.

Mr. Hamm was William Hamm, Jr., grandson of Theodore Hamm who was the founder of Hamm's Brewery. In 1933, he was kidnapped while walking to his St. Paul home by the Karpis Gang and held for $100,000 ransom, a huge fortune at the time. While the Hamm home in St. Paul is famous, the Hamm estate in Orono is hardly known at all.

At that time it was normal for people who worked for the wealthy families, to be given living accomodations on the estates. Since Dad worked for the family, we were given the guest cottage to live in. Small and cozy, it was a white clapboard bungalow with a screened front porch and an enclosed side porch. Entering through the front porch with it's gray-painted plank flooring, you entered the kitchen, perhaps the second largest room in the house. It was complete with a white linoleum floor, an oven/stove combination...one of those steel models that rose up on tall legs from the floor, a refrigerator and a modicum of counter space.

Immediately off the kitchen to the left was the bedroom..."master" bedroom would be a little too grand to describe it...where Mom and Dad slept. If one went straight ahead from the porch, through the kitchen, the main room was the entire length of the house with large windows overlooking the tennis court to the west. I bedded down in the enclosed porch which was entered through french doors from the main room. My bedroom was nice in the summer with an entire wall of windows that could be opened, not so nice when the temperature fell below zero. I remember waking up on a cold winter morning with my blankets frozen to the wall.

Heat to the cottage, and the main house for that matter, was supplied from an old coal burning furnace which occupied most of a half cellar which was entered through a door cut into the foundation where the ground fell away from the house. It was a "gravity" furnace...common at the time...heat rising warmed the house. Unfortunately, coal fired furnaces were notorious leakers and coal dust usually found it's way onto Mother's white curtains causing her to wash and iron the things constantly.

I loved investigating things...perhaps all young children do...and one of the things I truly loved investigating was the coal bin...the storage area for loose coal...in the cellar. Cool, damp and dark, and populated by only the coal and that enormous old furnace, it was an enticing place for a four year old in the summer. I would invariably leave my exploration and return to the house covered in black coal dust, much to my Mother's chagrin. I also met the most terrible creature I had ever seen up until then down there...a large yellow and black salamander...who scooted away as fast as I did, though without the screaming.

Dad bought me a dog...a little black puppy which I named "Pudgy". I absolutely loved him. We'd play together all day long...wrestling and running. Unfortunately, Pudgy didn't stay pudgy very long. Pudgy grew to be very large. He was still my very best friend...but...one day when he was eating his food on the front porch...Dad came home and walked in. Pudgy wasn't fond of even me when he was eating...but Dad was not his favorite at any time. He refused to let Dad in the house...growling severely and showing his, by now, quite large teeth. Dad decided to show Pudgy who was boss and went in. He bit Dad. Pudgy left to live with a nice farmer two days later.

I was an only child...I had no brothers or sisters to play with...so I invented my own excitement. The tennis court was clay...meaning that it required a great deal of preparation and maintenance. In the spring, the caretaker would rake the surface and then roll it with a large water-filled roller pulled or pushed by hand. The top was covered with new green clay chips every year and after any hard rains...and the stripes were white cotton tape, tacked into the soil. It was a lovely court and the Hamm's would often have friends over for tennis parties. Of course, everyone wore their tennis whites...and Mom would dress me in mine...white shirt and shorts and little white tennis shoes.

I would sit betwen our cottage and the court, on the lawn, watching the tennis matches. Mr. Hamm appointed me the ball boy...at four years old...and I would gleefully wait for a ball to come out of the court so I could chase it down and return it to the players. I heard one lady ask who I was...Mr. Hamm told her...she stated that I was "just darling"! I told my Mother.

Friday and Saturday evenings were scheduled for dinner parties at the homes of the wealthy families of the lake area. At 5 or 6 in the evening, the long line of black Cadillac limousines would begin arriving. Driving up the circle drive in front of the main house, each, in turn, would stop at the front door, the chauffer all dressed in black with a black cap would exit the car, walk around to the rear door closest to the entry, open it, and stand while the lady of the car, dressed in the finest of fashions, would exit. Usually, the man would get out on his side and walk around to walk with his wife to the front door. The people were always the same and alternated their weekends between hosting and attending.

While the guests were inside, the chauffers would pull their cars down the back drive, turn them around to face the front door, and wait for the party to end. In the summer they'd get together and smoke a cigarette and enjoy a cup of coffee that the kitchen staff would bring out. In the winter, they'd all huddle in two or three cars, the engines running and the heaters on throughout the party.



In the fall of 1947 I started kindergarten at Long Lake School, (now the museum). Mother walked me out the long driveway past the barns and the caretaker's house, to the side of Orono Orchard Road. I remember a girl also being there but I don't remember her name. It wasn't too long before a brand new 1947 Ford station wagon, a "woodie" as we now call them, pulled into the driveway with a lady driving. There were already two other kids sitting on the wooden floor in the back. The girl and I crawled in with some help getting over the lowered tailgate, and scooched around to find ourselves a spot against the sides of the car. Up went the tailgate, down came the back window and we were off to school.




I remember very little of kindergarten...except the lovely nap times we had. Each of us had to bring a little rug to school where we kept them. At nap time, we'd have a small bottle of milk and some crackers and then roll out our rugs on the auditorium floor. Mrs. Virginia Bird, our teacher and a lovely lady, would turn off all the lights except a few dim ones on the stage. Then she'd start a record playing on an old 78 rpm folding suitcase-like record player...soft music for us to nap by. A funny little memory just came to mind: Mom and Dad would always say "Mrs. Bird is calling all her little birds" when it was time for me to go to school... Wonderful.

After kindergarten was over, we moved down Fox Street to our "new" house...the one that many of these letters are written around.