SWIMMING: On Friday, we asked readers how they filled the summer days of their youth.
Local woman Frances Wolfe Haight called Friday to us tell about her own youthful shenanigans in Mount Jewett.
“When I was about 13, I was diagnosed with a heart murmur,” said Haight, explaining that she had to go to a clinic in Bradford every spring and fall. She had a list of activities from which she was supposed to refrain.
That list did not stop her from hitchhiking with a group of other youths to swim at Kushequa on a regular basis. If they couldn’t get a ride, they’d walk to an area Haight knows as Farmers Dam, which was down in the woods nearby. “If you didn’t know it was there, you wouldn’t see it.”
She wasn’t sure who came up with the idea to take the swimming adventures, but around 10 to 15 people usually made the trip. When hitchhiking, “We’d scatter in groups so we’d get a ride quicker.”
“I never did learn to swim, but I did love the water,” Haight said.
Sometimes the youths would pick strawberries in the woods near what was then the Mount Jewett Airport. The older kids would tell them not to pick berries in one spot on the other side of the airport because there was grouchy neighbor there.
However, when she became older she figured the older kids were just trying to hide the best berry patch.
One autumn, when she was around 15 years old, she went to the Bradford clinic for her checkup. The doctor “said my heart was 75 percent improved.” He asked what she had been doing, and she explained she spent the summer hitchhiking to Kushequa to swim.
This was not the only time Haight proved the doctors wrong. She was told later that she would never live to have a child. “I had seven,” Haight said.
On one summer day when the youths were planning to go swimming, the group met a man they knew who was driving a tractor with a wagon who agreed to give them a ride. Haight’s brother helped his friends into the wagon, then, realizing there was no room left for him, sat on the back end of the tractor.
“When we got to Mount Jewett and got off, I noticed he was limping,” she said, and asked him about it. It turns out, during the ride “his leg was against the exhaust pipe,” burning his leg.
According to Haight, she was lucky to grow up where she did.
“We lived on the street for kids, Anderson Street,” she said. “Always had more kids than anybody else.” It was easy to find enough kids for a ball game, and living near the woods, wild flowers and berries were available for the picking.
