Pleasant Point ~ 1961
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I immediately called Margeet to drop the news on her that we would be soon “Be On The Road” again, moving to Oswego, and that she should start thinking about getting ready to move. I guess she was used to moving around by then, because the only question she asked was, “When do we have to be there?” When I called, Margeet had just gotten off the Bible School bus from Vacation Bible School with all three kids.
Warren Weiss and I drove to Oswego, stayed overnight at a motel, and the next morning we met the owner’s representative to drive to the site where the new plant was to be built. It was about 4 miles out of Oswego, along Lake Ontario, near the village of Scriba. A construction trailer had been parked in a small clearing for our temporary office.
The site of about a thousand acres was mostly wooded, and about half of it would be cleared for the plant. A contract had been awarded to A. S. Wikstrom of Skaneateles, N. Y. to do the preliminary clearing and grading of the site. My first job was to lay out a rough perimeter of the area to be cleared of trees, and a Ragnar Benson field engineer came from Pittsburgh to help me.
The piles of trees were burned by throwing old tires on top of them and then spraying the pile with gasoline with a tanker. Soon there were dozens of fires throughout the site, and the smoke from the green trees was thick, and the piles smoldered for several weeks. The job joke was that they had cleaned up all the old tire piles in northern N.Y. and were now starting to bring them in from Pennsylvania! This was at a time before the existence of all the government agencies which now enforce clean air and pollution laws.
After being in Oswego for about two weeks, I rented a cabin at Pleasant Point, a few miles from the jobsite. Built around the early 1900s, the main building was once a resort hotel with a large dining room looking out over Lake Ontario.
The next weekend when I returned back home, we packed up everything we thought we would need for the summer and drove up and moved into one of the cabins. Margeet and I thought it would be a great place to spend the summer while looking for a house in Oswego, and it was.
I bought an old wooden boat with a 3/4 hp motor so we could fish for the lake perch and bass that seemed to be plentiful in the lake waters off the point. It was too crowded for all five of us, so I would fish with one at a time, or Margeet and I would go out with one. I remember one evening when Margeet and I were fishing a short distance offshore with the kids playing on the rocky shore. Margeet was having great success and BJ was fussing onshore, and kept asking her Mom when she was coming in. Margeet, out of character, threatened her with dire consequences if she kept it up.
It was great to have the family all together again. I was given a company pickup truck to drive to and from work, and every afternoon the kids would walk out about a quarter of a mile to an old apple orchard where they would meet me coming home. They would all pile into the back for the ride to the cabin.
About every other weekend during the summer, the owners would have a clambake on Sunday, and the cost covered both dinner and supper. The steam kettles for the clams would be set up under the trees along the shore bank with the water heated by a wood fire. There was grilled chicken and sausage, corn-on-the-cob, fresh-baked bread and rolls, fresh oysters on the half shell, various desserts, tap beer and soft drinks. All for $8.00 for adults and $3.00 for children.
On a Friday afternoon early in June of 1961, while at work on a project at U.S. Steel’s Braddock Plant, I received a call from our General Manager in our Pittsburgh office, Gabe Bodick, that he was sending me to Oswego, New York to work on a new job the company had just been awarded. Our company, Ragnar Benson, Inc., was to be the general contractor for a new aluminum rolling mill for Aluminium of Canada. I was to meet one of our vice presidents, Warren Weiss near Canonsburg to drive up there two days later on Sunday.
On Sunday, Margeet and the 3 kids went with me to Canonsburg so she would have the car while I was gone. After dropping me off, she went to find an old neighbor in Mount Lebanon when she had lived there with her family in the early 40s.
Wikstrom’s superintendent and I decided that the best approach would be to start somewhere in the middle and gradually work out to the exact outer boundaries which could be accurately set later. Wikstrom moved in a large D-9 dozer to knock down the trees along the line we set for them, and had other dozers push the whole trees into large piles to be burned. We spent about two weeks in the clearing.
By the 1960s it had been vacant for years and rundown, until an older couple from Syracuse bought the property, mainly to open it as a restaurant. There were six two-story cabins built along the shorefront, mostly vacant except for weekends when fishing groups rented them. The property was on a point jutting out into the lake, and was one of the most scenic spots in the area, and always seemed to have a fresh breeze blowing in from the lake.
The lake perch ran in schools, ranged up to almost a pound, and would hit just about any bait thrown into the water. Quite often, we would catch at least a dozen, which I would filet for dinner. Our kids tell us today that they ate so many perch back then that now they aren’t often fish-eaters!