When the High School was at the corner of
Chestnut
Street and Lincoln Avenue a student would sit in the classroom and
watch
an elderly gentleman walk around his year and tend to his bird dogs in
a
house across from the school on Chestnut Street. This was in the
year 1925. The man was Mr. Bill Schlecht, a former operator of
his
family bakery that was still being operated by his brother Lou.
The
bake shop was at the railroad on the main street. One day years
later
when I was working in Neumeyer’s Mr. Schlect was in the store and said,
“Bill, I saw you walking the street the other day with your little boy,
and I thought to myself that I knew four generations of the Day
family.”
I was intrigued and I asked him to tell me something about my
grandfather
whom I knew nothing about. He said he remembered him very well
because
as a boy he and all the other kids in Haddonfield love to play in the
lumber
yard on Euclid Avenue by the railroad. He went on to say that he
used to jump from one pile of lumber to the next, pretending they were
a string of freight cars and getting from one car to another. The
piles, of course, would get disarranged and pulled down sometime.
Lafe Day was the foreman of the yard and in this office nearby he kept
a piece of lathe. Frequently he would catch on of the youngsters,
and Mr. Schlecht sadi that more than once he had felt tender from the
whaling
he had gotten from the broken lathe. Lafe Day’s name was a
contraction
from Lafayette, and his son’s name George Washington Day, would seem to
indicate awareness of a background of which later generations were
ignorant.
My great grandfather was, maybe, Christopher Columbus Day!