Stories from my mother #1 - My Dad

When my mother was in her 80's she decided to document some aspects of her life.  She didn't know what a blog was, but these seven stories are the equivalent of one.  So that they may be preserved and others may have the advantage of reading them, I'm going to reproduce them here in this blog.  The titles are the ones that she chose for them.
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Harold Granger Pierpont was born in 1898. The story was that his mother had to leave a Grange meeting to go home and give birth to him, hence the middle name Granger. His mother died shortly after his birth and his father gave him to foster parents, who were childless. There were 5 brothers and a sister at home with his Dad. Although his Dad remarried, he continued to live with his foster parents, who lived on a farm in Prospect. His family maintained some contact with him, but it was a long wagon ride from Waterbury. There was no high school in Prospect and students had to find their own transportation to Waterbury, so he and most of  his friends only went through 8^th grade in a one room school. There were social activities for the young people in the church and there was a very active Grange. The young people paired up with each other and at 18 he became engaged to Sara Blackman. They married at 21.

They rented apartments before buying their home just before I was born. I was the third child. He had a milk route of his own and even had bottles with his name printed on them, but then went to work as a milk peddler for Maple Hill Dairy.  He had a love of the outdoors and was self taught about plants and other nature things. He enrolled my sister in a Girl Scout troop when she was 10 and then I started when I turned 10. The meetings were at night over a mile from our house, so he walked us down there and played checkers with the janitor while he waited to walk us home. The Captain (as they were then called) found out that he knew about electricity, (he had taken a correspondence course). She asked him to teach girls to earn their electricity badge. That led to his teaching badge requirements in flowers and trees. Eventually he also became a badge consultant for the Boy Scouts, too. Not very many families owned cars, so when the troop wanted to go anywhere, the Captain rented the dairy’s rack body truck  and my Dad drove it as a volunteer.

One time we went on  a hike in Wolcott,  and he drove the truck  so he also went on the hike on the Blue Trail. It  went over the dam to the New Britain reservoir and the caretaker came after us for trespassing. So Dad contacted the Blue Trail organization and ended up as a member. He spent many happy hours maintaining some of the trails and even developing new ones.

He became an active member of the Applachian Mountain Club and  the Naturalist Club. He was an active member of the Mill Plain Union Church and was a Sunday School teacher and then the Superintendent of it. He didn’t preach religion, but lived it.

He loved music and had learned to play the reed organ when he was a child. He had my older sister and me take piano lessons. We only took for about a year and weren’t good about practicing , but then he had my younger sister take them and eventually she studied organ. He was very proud of her.