A number of years ago four old friends sat down over coffee and relived their memories of a neighbor and a friend, O.B. Savage. Two of the men, Alfred "Bub" Laubach and Dayne Kline, were neighboring farmers along Route 487. The third man was the former County Agent for Columbia County, Stanley Hummer. The fourth man, John King, owned a 127-acre fruit farm that was once the orchard for the McHenry Distillery, once known as FarField Farms. Dayne Kline is the only one of the four who survives.
From the recollections of these four men, from stories we remember and stories told to us by people who knew O.B. and his wife Margaret and their son Richard, we have collected some stories we think most people will enjoy reading. We do issue the disclaimer that the life and times of O.B. Savage were unique and slightly out of kilter with the way that most of live today.
If you THINK that you might be offended by some of the stories that we will tell, we can assure you that you WILL be offended and you should consider not reading the Benton News for the next few days. We apologize in advance to anyone who is offended by the following true stories--well, at least they are true to the extent that they have been told to us or we have personally witnessed them happening.
We'll start today's story when Bub, Dayne, John and Stanley Hummer sat down to discuss the man the four knew so well. Two of the men were his closest neighbors, one lived a little further away and one knew O.B. from his farming days when he inspected his outstanding crops of field corn that always grew in the fields surrounding where L&K Mills now is located. Bub Laubach especially was well versed on O.B., since O.B.'s grandfather, Moses, lived on the farm later owned by Bub, the next farm north of O.B.'s farm. Most people throughout the state immediately recognize the farm because of the ornate and unusual barn on it, an item of immediate interest to many as they drive by.
Bub lived on the farm a half mile south of the Borough line in Benton after he bought it in 1943, the same farm where O.B.'s grandfather Moses Savage (1852-1933) had previously lived. Bub remembered that O.B. "was a real good neighbor, he had a lot of real good stories, and there was never a better neighbor in the valley. He gave free advice, although maybe some of it wasn't so good."
Dayne Kline remembers that O.B. Savage's grandmother and his grandmother were sisters. "He was a good neighbor, would do anything for you, in difficult times he would be right there." But Dayne quickly reminded us that "O.B. sometime shortly after he was born became a problem and that problem continued until he died, in that he was going to do things just a little differently than the majority of people."
Dayne cites as an example the time that O.B. went west, because "a girl in Berwick, a girl in Nordmont and a girl in Danville were all looking for him at the same time." O.B.'s worst problem was in Berwick. The "girl's father in Berwick had been born in Italy" and O.B. said he didn't like the knives that the father used. The story came out later that "the man had sharpened three or four down to the point where he had to change knives just waiting for O.B. to come home." O.B. had gone west and he took his cousin Carl Savage along. The boys stayed away about a year until the heat was off.
O.B. sent a package home to his father COD while he was on his trip, about 1931 or 1932, "when potatoes were 39¢ a bushel. Bub Laubach remembered that his father-in-law happened to be at the station when he picked it up. The package cost him about $100 to retrieve, which was a lot of money in those days. He opened the package and it was filled with rocks from Colorado. Bub's father-in-law never got over it, because he never saw a man cry like O.B.'s father did when he opened up that box and found all Colorado rocks, $100 worth.
The section above was last updated Thursday, December 28, 2005 7:20 PM
O.B. invited a select group of friends to his shed when he was going to brew up a little on his still. I have seen members of the Sheriff's Department and the State Police stop "on the flats" during this time of the year, and I still remember the sinking feeling the first time I looked out through the barn door and saw the unmistakable emblem of the Pennsylvania State Police come to a stop a few feet away. I immediately thought of the man who had taken his vacation on an island in the Pacific--Alcatraz!
A story we heard involved O.B. starting up his still. The person who told this story recalls brewing the drinks around noon. A state trooper patrol wagon pulled up outside the barn, and he heard a man say, "Well, if we aren't looking through the bars tonight, we'll know that O.B. has some pull." The trooper came into the barn and said to no one in particular, "What are you men doing?" Nobody answered the trooper and O.B. and the trooper went outside. About one o'clock or so, another man entered the barn, wearing a sheriff's uniform and demanded to know if the state trooper had been in. He never let on like it was a put-up deal.
Several men remembered sitting and having a sip--just a sip "because it only came out in drops." The apple cider when brewed came out at 135 proof. "In fact," John King recalled when he told the story, "I have just a little bit left up there in the house." The concoction was so potent that "we had a man down at the drug store in Bloomsburg test it out for us. A little bit in a glass would burn a blue flame."
John King remembers going to the sheriff's office to get a gun permit. The man in the office said "I don't believe that I have ever met you. You know O.B. Savage?" John innocently replied, "Oh, sure, I know him. I was one of them guys who was in the barn there when we were running the still." The officer of the law gasped for breath, and replied in a low voice, "Holy mackerel, I never thought that I would hear that." John recalled that "later on he said, you know, we ought to do that more often."
O.B. often stayed with his grandparents on what is now known at the Bub Laubach farm. O.B. could sneak out an upstairs window and climb over the porch roof and go "uptown." O.B. didn't have a lot of money, so he "got stealing his Granddad's chickens for spending money." The grandfather quickly caught on and said he was going to shoot whoever was stealing his chickens. O.B. then stole his grandfathers' shotgun, saying "you can never tell what the old devil might do. He just might shoot someone" and Bub added, "It could have been O.B."
O.B. went through a religious period and during that time he took up the collection plate in church, but said that after he started smoking he couldn't get enough out of the collection plate to make it worthwhile so he stopped going to church.
O.B.'s father, Orville (1897-1936), would take wholesale produce to market in Wilkes-Barre, beginning at 3:30 in the morning. One time O.B. took four or five barrels of cabbage to market for his father, with instructions to sell the whole lot. O.B. was the only wholesaler who brought cabbage that day and so all the retailers in the market got together and bought all of O.B.'s cabbage. It didn't take the buyers long to realize that all the barrels had a foot of cabbage leaves in the bottom and a couple of stones. O.B. wisely didn't go to market again that year.
O.B. once had an appendicitis operation. Dayne Kline went along as a helping hand at market, Dayne's first time to make the trip to Wilkes-Barre. The wagon was loaded with potatoes and Dayne remembered that they were only selling a bag of potatoes now and then. A man and his wife pulled up with a good-size wagon when O.B. was not around. Dayne started loading the man's wagon with O.B.'s potatoes when O.B. walked up. The lady Asked if the potatoes belong to this man? "Yes,"
Dayne replied. The woman huffed, "Unload them. The last time we bought from this man we got too many stones." Dayne unloaded the potatoes.
Dayne Kline recalled the first time his wife, Ruth, got a chance to know O.B. O.B. stopped at Dayne's farm to borrow some bags to use during combining time. O.B. purred to Ruth, "I never met you before, but I'll tell you if any of those cats of yours ever comes down to my place, I'll fix em." Ruth bristled up since she liked cats and there were usually a bunch of barn cats at her back door. Ruth was about ready to ask him to leave, but O.B. continued, "they crawl up on my windshield and I don't want cat tracks on my car. I want that car clean." Pausing long enough to catch his breath, O.B. told wide-eyed Ruth that "the other day I caught one. I fixed him good with some lard and gasoline stuck up there under his tail and then let him go." Ruth snorted that she didn't think that O.B. would do anything like that! O.B. said "I did, and that cat took off and went around and around the house. The next time it came around it just dropped over right there by my feet." Frantic, Ruth asked if it died. "No," O.B. said, it ran out of gas."
This section last updated Thursday, December 29, 2005 7:17 PM
O.B. clearly had his mind on other matters when he once spread clover seed on the wrong field. His father, Orville, was furious, and O.B. later explained that his father chased him all around the barn on one leg. Ruth Kline innocently asked why just one leg, and O.B. told her that he had to, the other one was up my XXX.
O.B.'s relationship with his father was on the wane. Once when a salesman came to the farm and wanted to know where his father was, O.B. told the salesman that he was down in the pig pen and said "He's the one with the hat on."
Dayne Kline recalls that O.B.'s "dear mother, Annie, was just as patient as a person could be" and tells this story from sometime in the early years before Dayne went into the service in 1942. An innovation was just arriving locally, called a "strainer pad," to keep dirt out of the milk being poured into containers. Annie still used a curtain since they only milked one cow, just enough to satisfy the family's dairy needs. O.B. would do anything to get out of work, especially milking cows. One night, for reasons we don't understand, O.B. put dirt on the top of the strainer and put a second strainer on top of the first strainer. Annie left milk settle through the strainers and when all the milk was strained, she squeezed the strainer pad without realizing the presence of the dirt and "it changed all the milk from white to brown." Dayne Kline recalled that was the "last time I ever had her rice pudding.
This sectin last updated Sunday, January 1, 2006 7:19 PM
A story from Bub Laubach recalled when O.B. would go to Canada fishing, O.B. would take the cow to the hard road and chase her up to Bub's farm. Bub would take pity and would milk her until O.B. came back from Canada. Bub remembered that "She was a pretty good cow. Come right up the road. O.B. said she knows where she'll get taken care of."
O.B. had a chance to get some surplus potatoes off the market during the war years by storing them in his barn. The Government paid for the storage by volume. Dayne Kline remembers seeing O.B. with a front-end loader making a pile of dirt in the middle of the barn and then layering potatoes on top of the pile. The Government agents would then measure the pile and would pay by volume. The Government eventually came to the barn and sprayed the top of the pile of potatoes with some kind of dye to make sure that no one ever cheated the Government.
O.B. always had a lot of hunting stories, many of which were a little far fetched. Once O.B. filled out his hunting tag in his home, where it was nice and warm, before he even went hunting. Former game protector Chet Siegel ran into him on the mountain and wanted to see his tag. "The tag was filled out with weight, number of points and everything" and O.B. hadn't yet shot his gun. O.B. told Dayne, "I'll tell you, I had to do a lot of fast talking."
Former county agent Stanley Hummer checked five-acre corn yields throughout the county. The guidelines were to select "five rows of corn, pick the corn and take it in and multiply it by the factor." Stanley recalled that "The first time I went up, O.B. had corn in the back of his truck, and told the County Agent, "We want to make a good record for Columbia County!" Stanley didn't comment on the remark, but left the corn in the pick up. Once, Stanley sent the assistant county agent to O.B.'s farm when Stanley's schedule precluded him from making the trip. Stanley warned the agent to "Watch yourself in checking the corn." Later, Stanley asked "How did you get along?" The agent replied that "O.B. got some extra ears from the next row, but every time O.B. picked one, I dropped one."
O.B. needed weight on the back of his pickup truck during the snowy winter months when he drove to work at the fertilizer plant. He worked for the Fred E. Lord Fertilizer Company, Bloomsburg, and always announced to phone callers that they had "reached the Lord."
One winter day a little snow started spitting when O.B. headed home for Maple Grove. Fred Lord himself came by and asked O.B. what was under the canvas on his truck. O.B. said it was a "few bags of fertilizer for traction to get home." Well, Fred Lord responded, "in the morning you make sure you have traction coming back to the plant."
O.B. always wanted Bub to buy his fertilizer from Fred Lord and he told Bub that if he paid cash, he would get a discount and would get a discount if Bub picked up the fertilizer himself and told Bub that "if you are careful when you open the bags we pay you to buy the bags back so we can use them again." One Sunday O.B. was burning bags, and Bub reminded O.B. that "you get a rebate when you take the bags back." O.B.'s response was simply, "You don't when you steal the fertilizer in the first place!" Another time O.B. brought green fertilizer home, with a consistency somewhat like concrete. O.B. spent hours trying to get the fertilizer loosened up so he could use it. Bub asked "Why don't you take it back and have them regrind it?" O.B., responded, saying, "I daresn't. I stole it."
Once during the winter, O.B. and his father went to a sale, a public auction. During the auction, the snow began falling heavily. The men kept getting stuck as they were driving home. Orville pushed while O.B, steered and drove, but made the mistake of telling O.B. "Now when you get it going, keep it going." O.B. later told Dayne, "So I did and come on home and made him walk."
This section last updated Monday January 2, 2006 6:03 PM
Margaret Savage was O.B.'s wife, and was usually referred to by her husband simply as "Mrs." After she got a job and left the farm, O.B. charged her $.50 a day to take her to work and back. One day he came home from Bloomsburg without her, because he said "she was behind on her pay." O.B. kept house for Margaret when she got a job. He said that sorting clothes took up a lot of time, but that "After you wash the white ones and the colored ones together about four times you don't need to sort them."
O.B. once saw a parked car in his cornfield, so he walked over to check on who was in the parked car. O.B. heard giggling coming from the car and he could make out that there were people in the car without too many clothes on, two people in the front and two in the back. O.B. boldly walked to the car window so he had a good view and asked "What are you doing in there." A timid voice responded, "I am not doing anything." "Well," O.B. said, "well then get out here and hold the light for me."
Another story involved the time in O.B's younger days when he allegedly took a woman for a ride up on what Bub Laubach called "the ridge route." They got out of the car and walked in the woods. When O.B. announced that he was going for a blanket, the woman went the other way around and drove the car home stranding O.B. to walk home.
O.B. loved to attend the Bloomsburg Fair, where he helped Harry Knouse make apple cider. O.B. became intrigued with the "prowess" machine where a maul was used to pound the weight machine and a gizzie would shoot up and ring a bell. A barker coaxed O.B. to hit the bell, O.B. got three chances. The first time he hit the mark, the gizzie went up half way. The next time he hit it, it went up three-quarters of the way. The next time, he purposely missed the target all together and smashed the table where the prizes were kept, then ran away with the worker for the stand right behind him. O.B. yelled over his shoulder to Margaret, "get me a couple of cigars."
Orville, O.B.'s father, had a Fordson tractor which got to missing and bucking. Bub remembered that "old Fordsons were known for that," and he recalled the story about Orville tinkering with the engine. O.B. convinced Orville that it was probably the sparkplug, and handed his father an "iron-handled screwdriver" as he quickly walked away.
The man who rebuilt the famous church-like barn and added the belfry after the August, 1890, tornado devastated the property was Hilbert Helme. Readers may want to turn to the FEATURES section at the top of the page to read more about the history of the barn. Needless to say, it was a fancy barn. Columbia County went through a period where a number of "fire bugs" were setting barn fires. O.B. bought the insurance to insure the house and barn from an insurance office between Orangeville and Benton. O.B. would stop in after work and ask if his fire insurance was up to date, telling the agent that "I might have a barn fire one of these day." Bub Laubach remembered that O.B. did that several times and one day received a policy cancellation in the mail. The insurance agent apparently figured the barn was soon going to burn down.
Bub Laubach remembered the time that potatoes were being planted. Raymond Baker, from "across the creek," was helping. A thundershower came up about noon. Bub Laubach remembered that "it was a wonderful place to eat at the Savage residence" and that Margaret was a good cook. This day, however, Margaret was not ready for the workers. The wet and weary men came in from the field and O.B. said "Mrs., it is time to eat." All they had to eat was a potato for lunch and "about this time the storm got really bad and the lightening came in the end of the barn and struck the hay mow. O.B. and other workers had to push bales out the end of the barn to keep the barn from burning down. The men later hurried into the house to finish their potato and to dry off. About that time, lightening struck the house and Bub remembered that "the faucets lit up like a florescent light." O.B. reared back, and said "I better quit my xxxx lying, that's getting pretty close."
We should mention that the reason we started this series was that Elizabeth Christian told me of a former Danville resident, now deceased, who worked for O.B. at one time. The man was George D. Young and he passed away in 1986 at the age of 90. Mr. Young often told his son, George, now in his eighties, about the experience of working for O.B., including the fact that he rode his bicycle to the farm from Danville every day.
Dayne Kline remembers that he "saw O.B. really upset one time. O.B. got taken." He decided to sell out and he had a auction. Dayne recalls that it was "quite a sale." Guy Bangs asked Dayne to help clerk the sale. Everything seemed to be going pretty smoothly until 1 o'clock when they were to sell the farm. O. B. had previously sold three or four acres of his land to a feed mill owned by Otto Ford, who wanted the whole farm. O.B. had primed Frank Beishline and Dave Floyd to bid up the price on the farm. One o'clock came and bidding was going pretty good. Dayne saw Frank Beishline bidding and knew that he had three or four hundred acres and thought "well, maybe, he is going to buy O.B.'s price." Bidding got up to $60,000 and the bidding slowed down and the auctioneer worked and worked to get another bid. It got to the point that there were not going to be any more bids. Dayne didn't realize and most people didn't realize that something was going on. Dayne went back out to the house to where the bills were being paid. In just a few minutes, the main auctioneer came back and took out of the cashbox about $3,600. Dayne witnessed that he had taken out his money. Pretty soon O.B. came in and wanted to know if the auctioneer had been in. Dayne innocently said, "yes, this is what he took out of the box." Dayne later said, "Well, I'll tell you. That sale didn't pay off too well for O.B. It came out in the paper the following Monday that Frank had bought the farm. Frank didn't buy the farm and never did buy the farm. Eventually, Otto Ford did buy the farm, but it was a private sale when it was sold."
Every spring O.B. came up to Bub and told him that he had first chance to buy the farm. Bub said that "it wasn't in my line of work to pay what he was asking" for that farm.
At that sale, there were at least a dozen new scoop shovels sold. Mac Johnson looked the shovels over and gasped, "O.B. right here are my initials. I know where you got this shovel." O.B. had not got all his shovels at the same place, but he usually came home with a shovel.
Charlie Knowles always prided himself on his hunting ability. He always said that he would never shoot a ringneck unless it was flying. O.B. took him to task on that, saying "Charlie, that is a bunch of bull." "No," Charlie said, "I would never shoot a ringneck unless it was flying." O.B. knew that Charlie went by the farm each morning, so "O.B. took a nice, mounted ringneck rooster and sat it there along the cornfield. O.B. got back in the cornfield." The next morning, "Charlie came down the highway, saw the ringneck and jammed on his brakes and jerked the gun out the door and banged the stock so hard that it broke it right off." In 1988, when Charlie was getting up in years, Dayne asked Charlie if he remembered how "O.B. would fool those fellows who would hunt down that way with that dead ringneck rooster." Charlie, said, "You son of a bitch, what did you bring that up for?"
O.B. had a sister, Mary, who was a schoolteacher who lived in Asbury. She taught Dayne Kline in sixth grade. Dayne remember that he had always called her Mary, and remembered the disappointment when she told him, "Now, Dayne, you are going to have to call me 'Miss Savage.'" Dayne said "That imprinted on me so much that when she was in her 70s, I still called her Miss Savage." Dayne notes that she was "A great educator and instilled a lust for education in her students. Dayne said "She saved the farm with her school-teaching money back in the 30s. Her father was about to lose the farm. It was all but gone."
We passed these stories long simply so they are not lost, since they are very much a part of the history of the upper Fishingcreek Valley. During his lifetime, everybody knew O.B. and we should not forget him now. We don't believe that O.B., if he were with us today, would be upset at our telling of these stores. In fact, we suspect that O.B. would share many more than we have told here. We will from time to time add additional stories to the PERSONALITIES section on the side panel, where stories about Hurley Shultz, J. Wayne Yorks, Frank Edson, Dr. Frank C. Laubach, Jim Vance, Jim "Ivory Knuckles" McHenry, The Heg Family: Biddle, Charlotte, and Philip, Ira Ricketts McHenry and O. B. Savage, are recorded.
The next time you drive past the O.B. Savage barn, think of the 1890 tornado that carried grain bags with the name Hulme on them all the way from the farm in Maple Grove to the Stegmaier brewery in Wilkes-Barre--some 30 miles away. Think of the force of the winds that would tear down a large barn. Think of the Bloomsburg and Sullivan Railroad as it was being built across the farm and the payment of $500 in cash and $500 in one dollar stock certificates for the balance for the right to built the railroad across the farm. And remember that the life of O.B. Savage will never be duplicated by another human being.
O. B. died in the late 70s. John King remembered that he was coming back from Florida when the funeral was going down the road. John had just retired, and was about 65 at the time. Bub Laubach said "He will long be remembered. He was a good neighbor. Do anything for you day or night, it didn't matter, only one time that I called on him he hesitated." Bub then told how a cow was having a calf and "we had to pull it out of her. Called the vet and he couldn't come for another couple hours." Bub put ropes on back of calves legs and stuck a pitch fork in the ground and told O.B. to "put your foot on it and put pressure on." O.B. hesitated, saying, "We'll pull it in two." When the calf was finally delivered, O.B. told Bub "Never call me again for this job. I can't go this."
If O.B. would have channeled his life into story telling he would have rivaled Will Rogers. It is good to remember a man like that.
O.B. did a lot of lot of dickering over his gravesite, finally choosing the Benton cemetery as the place where he was to be laid to rest. John Brewington ran into him one day and said, "O.B. I just realized that I am going to be buried next to you in the cemetery. Do you mean I have to spend the rest of eternity next to you?" Bub Laubach, when he told that story, ended by saying, "They are both up there now.
We have told this story before, but we'll recycle it. The story originally was told to us by Richard Shoemaker. We once chatted with Richard Savage, Berwick, a son of O(rville) B(artley) Savage, and grandson of Moses Savage, who figures prominently in the story. Richard Savage remembers hearing this story from his family as he was growing up.
You'll have to pay attention or you'll get confused, since we are talking about a couple of "Orvilles" and a couple of "Moses Savages" in this story.
O. B. Savage's father was also named Orville and his grandfather was Moses Savage, named, possibly, for his uncle who also had the name "Moses." This uncle is who the story is about. Now aren't you glad we told you to pay attention!
Moses Savage--and we are talking about the uncle--went to seek his fortune in California during the gold rush of 1848. Moses Savage returned from California in the winter of 1857 and a Bloomsburg man, William H. Gilmore, drove Moses to Rohrsburg where Savage intended to spend the night in a hotel just West of Rohrsburg Corners before reuniting with his family the next morning. William Ager was the proprietor of the hotel. The hotel is now gone.
Both W. W. Parker, Rohrsburg, and Savage's nephew, called Moses Savage (now we are now talking about O. B. Savage's grandfather), and gave the same accounting of the following story. We researched the story from old Morning Press and Columbia County Historical Society documents.
A Benton relative of the uncle Moses stopped at the Rohrsburg Hotel and saw someone who looked like Moses sitting near a stove. No one was expecting Moses to return from California unannounced, but the stranger looked so familiar that he asked if the man might be Moses.The proprietor of the hotel did not acknowledge that the man was Savage. The Benton man went home, but thought about it through the night and returned in the morning.
The proprietor of the hotel told him the next morning that the man was a "drummer" and not Savage. Mr. Gilmore, however, confirmed that he had driven Savage to the hotel, but no trace of Savage was ever found. Gilmore's story was that Savage intended to surprise his relatives with the fortune that he had made in gold, and that he had much of it in valises he carried with him. O.B.'s father Moses later said that a man by the name of John Black showed him blood on the floor of the hotel when it was razed and that valise frames were found in the basement. The gold never turned up, and neither did Moses.
A short time later, the well of the hotel was filled in. A man by the name of Parker claimed that people had stopped liking the taste of the water than came from the well.
The Savage family never had the money to look into the whereabouts of Moses Savage or to press for an investigation.
Controversy swirled when the proprietor of the hotel announced that he was going to California to seek his fortune in gold. He apparently was not gone long, but when he returned he had gold and that apparently made a lot of people in the Rohrsburg area talk about the mysterious disappearance of Moses Savage. The properties in California owned by Savage turned up as sold and the deeds had been signed, although the Savage family felt that they had been forged.Fact or fiction?
There is fact in the story and there may be some fiction. Most probably, we'll never know what the fate was of old Moses Savage. Mull the subject over the next time you drive through Rohrsburg.
