The more we share the more we have to share
The following information was submitted by Mike Kearney (email: mikejkearney@yahoo.com)
Mike writes: "My Uncle Bud Lynch will be 93 next December 4. He has prepared his autobiography which includes a lot about growing up in South Clinton and beyond. Perhaps this might be of interest to you and others."
This is a wonderfully interesting interview. Not only does it detail Bud's life, but the lives of many people of that era, giving us an insight to the way things were for most people in the early and mid 1900's. I did a similar interview with my mother and she told me some of the same things. I hope this will induce each of you out there to interview your relatives ASAP!!
I have put the beginning below to wet your appetite. To read the complete interview, please Click Here.
MS. COSTABILE: This is Beth Costabile, and we're having a discussion with Raymond Lynch on September 16th, 2001. Grand pop, let's start with the story of your birth as you were told.
MR. LYNCH: I was told that I was born December 4th,
1909, and that in those days they had women doctors that came to the home. And I
was the third child of Albert and Theresa Lynch. I was born in what I found out
later was a little old shack on 16th Avenue, South Clinton, Iowa. It that had
nothing but a kerosene heater in it. They didn't have any other kind of heat
except the kerosene heater, which was a little round heater that you poured
kerosene liquid in and lit it, and that threw off heat, and that was the only
thing they had to heat the whole house.
The house was still standing when I was about four years old. So after that, I
think when I was five years old, it had been torn down. And when I saw it first,
there was no one living there. It was empty.
And I can't tell you the exact year that we moved to 17th Avenue. My grandfather
loaned my father $900 to buy a house on 17th Avenue, and the house number, as I
recall, was 530 17th Avenue South. And my grandfather's house was two doors to
the north of us. You had a house which was really a shell, and we had a kitchen
that had a big iron cooking stove, and it also served for heat, because we had
no other heat in the house except the big stove in the kitchen and you cooked on
it. And you used coal and wood for heat.
And then at the end of the stove there was a tank that was filled with water that would be warm all the time so there would be water, because we did not have water in the house.
The only thing that we had in the house that was
half ways, you know, what you might call modern, is one gas light in the
kitchen, which was a pipe that came out of the wall and then had a little
needlepoint thing that ended on the end of the gas pipe. And you'd strike a
match and light, turn the gas on and light it, and that little thing would throw
a little light, light enough in the kitchen that you could see to cook, to eat
and so on.
The only other lighting we had were kerosene lamps which you put kerosene in the
bottom of a lamp and had a shade above it, glass shade about 12, 14 inches tall.
And then there was another room we called the living room which you could only
be there if you were sick. And there was no heat in that part of the house. The
only heat was in the kitchen.
The reason we congregated in the kitchen because it was warm. We did not get a
stove for until after World War I. And it was a great big round, we call them
potbelly, and they were tall, about five feet tall. And you used hard coal,
which was small, little pieces of coal, and you put it in a bucket and poured it
in the top. And then after you got the fire lit in the middle, what you call the
firebox, because the coal would burn down and the little pieces of coal would
filter on in to keep the fire going. And before you go to bed at night, you'd
take ashes from beneath it and put them around the edges to keep the fire going
so you're not burning up all your coal.
So when we got the potbelly stove, and it was a very fancy thing with little Isinglass so you could see the flame when it was burning.
MS. COSTABILE: Were you named for anybody in your family?
MR. LYNCH: No. The only one I was named for - my middle name is Joseph because everybody at St. Mary's, when they were confirmed, were named Joseph. My father's middle name was Joseph, my brother's middle name was Joseph, and I was - I don't know where the Raymond came from.
But Joseph you got from the Bishop with a slap on the puss. You knelt under the altar railing, and he came down and he'd crack you and name you Joseph. I think every kid in our line had Joseph.
MS. COSTABILE: Now, did your family get together often? You had some extended family that lived close by.
MR. LYNCH: Two doors from us, my grandfather John Weinbeck and grandmother Hannah Weinbeck lived. They came over here from Germany. And you could get all the information on that, dates and places and everything in Mike's genealogy book. You can do the same with respect to Michael Lynch, who came here from Ireland in 1843. And Iowa was not a state then, it was a territory. The federal government gave immigrants land. And he came over and got 40 acres of land at the land office in Dubuque, Iowa, which was about 40 or 50 miles north of Clinton, where I was born.
Over the years he amassed about 380 acres of farmland, and he had, again, a large family. I'm very familiar with the first son, Michael, and he was in the Civil War and was in four or five battles. He was in the Battle of Vicksburg, which was one of the famous battles of the Civil War, and he got sick, and they had to send him to St. Louis, to the hospital. And he died in the hospital in St. Louis and was buried in St. Louis.