Text by Rachel, a student at Presque Isle Middle School
Images by Maine Memory Network
Albert, my grandpa, was born in Caribou in 1942. He has lived there, except for the four years he went to college in Bangor.
He lived next door to a family who had a big barn and remembers running as fast as he could to get past the horses. His neighbors farmed with horses that would pull big drags with rocks piled on it. The drag would make flat paths. That looked like little roads. Albert and his friends would take their tricycles and wagons and pretend that they were driving on the highway.
When Albert was in high school, he worked at the JJ Newberry Company as a stock boy and cleaner. He also worked for his father by cutting down trees and making pulp. He and his brothers didn’t mind working for their father, but it was hard, stinky work. He got wet and slimy, and it was awful. Even the horse went crazy from all the black flies.
When he was in seventh grade, Albert had a paper route delivering the Bangor Daily News. He had fifty customers, and woke up at 5:00 AM and delivered the paper every day for six years until he graduated from high school. No bike though, because that was how one of his brothers had died.
Albert decided to attend Husson College for four years. He was the first in the family attend, even though he was not the oldest child. He came home for the summers and sometimes on the weekends.
Albert’s father worked many jobs. One was as a dairy farm inspector while my grandpa was in high school. Albert was old enough to help his father do the inspections once a month. While his father went to one farm, he and his brothers Dale, Keith, and Philip would go to another one. They could get two farms inspected at once.
The men would go from New Sweden to Ashland to do these inspections. They would do two milkings on one farm one in the evening and one the next morning. When they went to Oxbow, they would spend the night. In Oxbow, the farm owners also had two boys Albert’s age. When Albert went there, he would always play with them and their horses. He loved to stay in that house because the bed had so many warm blankets on it.
To do the inspections, they would put the milk in pails and weigh it. Then they would take their samples. The men would put acids in the milk samples to see how much butterfat was in the milk. Then they would multiply the amount of butter fat by the pounds of milk that could be made from that the farmers could determine how profitable they would be. Some farms had as few as a dozen cows, and some had as many as sixty. Even though there were many dairy farms then, now there are almost none.