The family Grocery Store business had been sold and my father, Aunt Frances and Uncle George were working in nearby Franklin, Indiana. The plan was for all of us to spend the summer months at the nearby camping site of Sugar Creek.
So following her six-week checkup after the birth of my baby sister, Connie, my mother found herself, along with our family, our dog, Skippy, my Aunt and Uncle, bound, for a rustic Hoosier vacation complete with crawdads and mosquitoes.
Cabins along the creek had bedrooms, a large living room area, and a kitchen. A hand pump provided water from a well for the kitchen and the community bathhouse outside held shower and restroom facilities for the camp. Meals were prepared on a stove fueled by wood in our kitchen.
This arrangement was one step above Daniel Boone’s first living quarters lifestyle and we children loved it. Daytimes were filled with brave expeditions along the creek bank with other children in the small settlement and nights in our cabin were filled with stories told by the adults about the years when the Kernen youngsters were small and raised in a saloon by their widowed father.
There were always marvelous stories because the family had been in the Saloon and Grocery business since the turn of the century and they were well known in Louisville. Of course, we sat in awe while listening to what their cook often said, “There’s a gun in every corner and anybody can shoot it!”
Uncle Frank always won first place in the annual turkey shoot and my father could play poker before he could walk. If Aunt Sis didn’t want to go to school, she would go off and ride her horse. At least that’s what the stories said. Uncle George told the longest stories.
I recall seeing my mother, along with other ladies of the camp, washing their family’s clothes one morning. They were standing out in the front of the row of cabins with large washtubs stacked on top of bins. They were scrubbing away, each using washboards that would someday be hanging as antiques in Cracker Barrel Restaurants.
I wondered if our Mother was unhappy leaving her wringer washer behind for this gleeful Indiana summer. After all, although at home in Louisville in our basement where the wringer washer was housed, she also used two huge tubs for rinsing. A wringer washer was far easier than that summer washboard.
An automatic washer was somewhere in her distant future and mine as well, but I did not know that as I turned away from the wash day scene and went off to play at the creek. For me, it was a very fine summer. Looking back, my Mother was a Sugar Creek hero.