There Was No Such Thing as Child Labor Laws
At our home between Indian Head and Normalville, Pennsylvania we got our water from a hillside spring. The water was always cold, clear, and sweet tasting. The water was flowed by gravity through a galvanized pipe from the springhouse down a long slope and into our home. Eventually, the pipe became corroded and needed replaced. The ditch had to be reopened to replace the pipe. The ditch needed to be deeper than eighteen inched to prevent the water in the pipe from freezing. The opening was about one thousand yards.
Our dad, Carl Beck would dig when he got home from work and he would assign about five yards each day for my brother Ken and I to dig while he was at work. Ken and I took turns. It wasn’t too bad. I would use the mattock and he would spade out the loosened dirt and rocks, but Ken would get tired and he’d do something to make me upset. I would chase him to retaliate, but he’d run to our mom, Sybil Miner Beck and she would send me back to work and keep him in the house to separate us.
I headed back to work in the ditch and as I glanced back’ Ken was shooting me a big smile. I ended up digging most of the ditch myself. One day we found a huge rock in the way. We tried to dig it loose, but couldn’t. It lay across the entire width of the ditch. We dug on both sides but it extended far to both sides. We dug the dirt from the top, then dug more of the dirt from under the rock. Unable to move it, we left it in place.
When Dad came home he was not pleased to see that we hadn’t dug the assigned length of ditch. He saw the rock and was upset that we hadn’t dug it out, until he tried to remove it himself and couldn’t. Dad used a heavy sledge hammer and a pry bar to shift or break it into smaller pieces, but couldn’t get to break. The size of the rock was more than the size of a kitchen table top and was nearly two feet thick. We eventually removed the dirt from under it, then passed the new plastic pipe beneath it finally deciding it was better to leave the rock in place to return the flow of water to our house.