Memories of the Fifties

My parent's tombstone is perhaps not from "your" quarry but the same kind of stone. (Hallandia Bårarp,

It is from a quarry about 20 kilometers further north.
I have the red ones for my parents and husbond.

Ours is red, too, but a bit different to the one above.

What a perfect paddern the Swedish church in Paris has.

On May 17, 1952, the last passenger train on the line towards the cement works left the station of my native town.



It was a great event, but most locals just took the train to have some refreshments in a popular country pub. That's what my parents did ... and it was my first train trip, too.

When I lived in Calwa there was a train switch station not far behind the neighborhood. We were close enough to wave to the engineers and caboose men. I loved those old steam trains. One day Roger pointed over there and I saw an ugly square engine. "That's a diesel," he told me. It was just a short time until diesels were the only ones used. I hated that.

We used to carry my grandfather's lunch to him at the depot, where he was station master and telegrapher. It was a hot meal, and we carried it in a similar tin. Really, only one child was needed to carry it, but there was a mean dog down the alley, and I used to throw rocks at it while my sister carried the hot lunch in the pail.

One day, my grandfather wasn't there when we got there, so we just left the pail. On the way home, the mean dog chased us back to our yard. He then turned around and pooped on the lawn. That was his big mistake--my grandfather stepped out of the back porch, raised his shot gun, and shot that dog in the backside. He explained to it that he had filled the re-load with rock salt, so it wasn't going to kill the dog.

From then on, when we walked down the alley, that dog would would bark at us, threateningly . . . from behind a shed.

My parents had some appletrees in their garden and my mother was very proud about them.
She noticed that somehow they disappeared and one day she saw the neighbour selling HER apples on the market in town.
We have/had very strict gunlaws in Sweden.
Anyway my father talked to the neighbour and told him someone had been
stealing apples. And father also said he had gotten a special allowance from the police to shoot with salt at any thief. Of course it a plain lie, but it sure help-
Dogs and thieves

I take it the theft of apples dropped off a good deal.

Stopped compleately.