Handbook N-P - Fulton County Public Library

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headed home and driverless. as he was most of the time. he would end up in the barnyard where
his sleeping driver would wake up.
“One night on the (Tippecanoe) river bridge north of town (on old U.S. 31) he met
another rig and must not have given him quite enough room. There was a clash of wheel hubs. I
awoke with a start but we continued on our way.
“Another time .... I had him tied in front of Edyth's on Madison Street. When I went to
get him, no horse or buggy. I had no idea where to find him. I notified the night police and
prepared to stay until daylight.
Bernice Bussert's dad had a livery stable just east of the Louderback Garage (then at the
Collection Connection site, 527 Main Street). An old man by the name of Crist was his night man.
They always kept a man all night as people would come and go all night long. Old man Crist said
afterwards that he saw this horse come up to the barn door with no driver so he just took him in
and put him up. He knew the horse as I had put him up there several times. So Crist came over to
the Hawkins house in the morning and told me where Bill was. Was I relieved!"
By now "things were getting more serious with Edyth and me, so I must have started
thinking that I had better know how to make a livelihood."
Thus began Dad's journey into the adult world. First came a trip far north to Detroit to
follow up a tip about a factory job. “That was quite a trip for a green country boy by hims elf,” Dad
recalls.
And so it turned out to be'.
“I can remember getting into Detroit after night, pretty badly scared. I remember going
into a large rest room under the street and going to the rest room, but I got into the ladies' (room)
and an old Negro cleaning woman chased me out. I finally found the place where I was to stay but
I don't remember going to the factory at all. I do know that I was on the first train home and that
was enough city for me.”
Next came a summer season as a silent partner with eldest brother Anson in a general
store at Maxinkuckee, a crossroads settlement on the east shore of that Culver lake. He drove a
delivery wagon pulled by a dapple gray horse, delivering orders to cottages on the lake and driving
four miles north to the train station at Hibbard to bring freight back to the store.
There was no future in that arrangement, he decided, so he turned to another brother.
Vern was operating the general store at Richland Center, on the northwest corner of another
crossroads where there also were church and school. Dad bought him out and decided this was
good ehough to get married, since he and Edyth would have the store to live from.
And so in the autumn of 1914 it was done, both store and marriage, but only half of the
arrangement proved successful. Dad started the county's first mobile huckster wagon with a twocylinder
Groboski truck “with solid rubber tires that whenever they got on a wet bit of grass or
barnyard, there you would sit and spin.” The combustion-engine mo tor soon doomed his Center
store experience. His customer base dried up; people began driving their new autos to Rochester
for groceries.
Dad sold out and with Mother moved to the west side of South Bend, where he took a iob
as grinder at the Oliver farm impleraent factory.
Grinding corn plow axles all day was just “as if they had put me in prison, the only
difference was that I was allowed to go home to eat and sleep.”
He lasted only a month.
Rochester beckoned and there the young Overmyers settled for the rest of their lives,
except for two short returns to the family homestead. In Rochester Charley would raise his family
and, in time, find his business success.
More of that next week, as I conclude this review of Dad's memoirs, a story redolent of
an age now long gone.
[Rochester Sentinel, Tuesday, August 24, 1999]
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