Pigs, chickens, cows, horses and memories
Nope, I didn’t grow up on a farm. But there was a farm on the estate where my grandfather worked, and it was a working farm. My grandparents always had chickens and a goose or two, but that was the extent of their farm animals. The rest of the animals lived about a half mile away in a barn that now houses golf carts at Linden Hall.
Although there was a family that lived on the estate who were in charge of the animals, sometimes my granddad had to help them. Specifically, I remember him taking my brother, my cousin Tom and me to the barn to milk the cows.
As a seven- or eight-year-old kid, that fun memory is seared into my brain because we not only learned the right way to pull on those udders to get milk into the bucket, we also were encouraged to drink that golden white, delicious, warm milk directly from those cows.
After getting our fill of milk, we were taken for a ride in a large elevated metal contraption that ran the entire length of the barn. Yep, it was how that got the manure from the barn to a pit outside. That pit was the source of fertilizer for the fields of corn and other vegetables and crops. We rode back and forth in that “poop trough” (sans poop) for at least an hour. There was lots of laughing and screaming as we were pushed back and forth through the barn.
The most exciting part of visiting the “farm” section of my granddad’s workplace came when I was about 12 years old. It was around then that the Pittsburgh Police Department decided to retire some of their majestic horses to Linden Hall. I’m not exactly sure how many horses there were, but it seemed like there were more than six, and we were allowed to ride them.
My favorite horse was mostly white and had one bad eye. Knowing what I know about aging now, it might have just been a cataract, but we always had to be sensitive to that eye when we approached, mounted or guided the horse so that we didn’t startle it or run it into a tree limb.
On some hot afternoons granddad, who was always ahead of his time, played “take your grandson to work day,” and, as he’d meticulously work in the formal gardens in front of the mansion at St. James Park. I sat in a nature-grown seat in a mulberry tree picking and eating berries from the branches around me. That tree with the twisted seat-shaped limb is still there.
On hot summer Sundays my folks, grandparents, cousin, aunt and uncle and sometimes a few other relatives would play in the swimming pool on the grounds.
None of us were good swimmers. In fact, my dad could only swim by using a side stroke, and my specialty was underwater swimming, but it’s really hard to breathe under there. We had car and truck inner tubes and could easily spend the day there with the adults sitting on army blankets beside the lily-filled pond next to the pool. There were no life guards, butfor all intents and purposes, there were no other swimmers. Looking back at those great summer Sundays, it was like we had our own private pool.
After a few years, just like everything in my life, things changed. New owners took over, the barn and farm animals were sold or butchered. A golf course was built, and our private pool went away and was eventually replaced with a public pool.
Some days a helicopter would fly in from one of the Pittsburgh TV stations, and the passengers, big local television celebrities, would golf, and I’d play the day away.
Those were really good times
Nick Jacobs of Pittsburgh is a Principal with SunStone Management Resources and author of the blog healinghospitals.com.