Clyde Stewart

One Summer, not sure when, a family friend, Charlie Parlette and friend of my brother, had a company that cut and sold ..... sod ...... Perhaps as dirty and tough a job as there is. I tried my hand at it, did a little work, but I think I gave up, just too much.

To use this thing, you crouched down, with the knee behind that curved handle, the blade in the sod to be cut, and they you would push your arm, with you knee, to cut the sod. I had blisters on the back of my right arm, and also on my leg, between the knee and the hip. Grueling, hot, work.

Charlie would find a farmer with a nice field, rent it, mow the grass down and then the cutting crew would to their job. The farmer ended up with a nice field of dirt, which he could then plow and plant.

He had a big old flatbed truck which we would stack with the sod and deliver to town where it had been previously sold. We generally unloaded it and in many cases, laid the sod in the prepared yard.

Charlie was a Steele Graduate, '39, in my brothers class. He and Red Wallace were two of my brothers friends, and they spent many hours in the back of 319 South Brown, playing basketball on the concrete floor of an old garage that had been torn down. It was a neighborhood gathering place, A game every summer evening, neighbors, friends, some got pretty rough.

OK, Clyde Stewart. During WWII Dayton was a hub for wartime manufacturing, many plants converted to war effort products. There was an influx of people from West Virginia, Kentucky, all over. Especially from Kentucky, the closest state. "Briarhoppers" were everywhere, as they were called.

One Friday afternoon, Clyde Stewart told us he was taking a week off, going on vacation. "Going back to Kentucky to  visit your relatives, Clyde.?"

"No, all my relatives live here in Dayton!"