It is always exciting when a new baby is born. Recently on TV, we were watching the program, “Outdaughtered”, where a family expecting their second child end up with five little girls. They already had one daughter approximately 5 or 6 years old.
This took my mind back to Folly Mountain in the early forties. A new baby had been born, making the population approximately 71. The story goes like this:
A neighbour, whose wife was in labour at home, knocked on our door at approximately 3:00 a.m. He had walked about two miles to our house, but this time as he was walking the road, he came to a brook beside the schoolhouse. It was raining, and the bridge had washed out. Thank the Lord the railroad was nearby. He had to go back and walk the railroad, which was close to our house.
Nowadays you would be startled if somebody knocked on your door at 3:00 a.m. You would be afraid to answer. But not in 1940. If someone knocked on your door at that time in those days, you assumed it must be a neighbour who has an emergency. Also, in those days, there was only one phone in the community.
But this time our neighbour’s wife was in labour. We had one of the few cars in the community and he asked my brother, who would have been 16 or 17 at the time and the only driver in our household, if he would go and pick up another neighbour, who was a midwife, to take her to his house. After stopping at our house, he continued on to another neighbour, another half mile down the road, to use their phone to call the doctor and get him out of bed to go to his house.
The doctor had a car that would travel about 20 miles an hour over gravel roads. It reminds me of Dr. Baker on Little House on the Prairie. His horse and buggy probably did about the same speed as the doctor’s car in this story. To the best of my knowledge, though, everything turned out well. The baby, mother and father, doctor, midwife and my brother all survived.
All would remain quiet on Folly Mountain until the next emergency arose.
Leslie Jobb