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Many years ago, I was put in touch with an Arizona man who had spent his boyhood years in Fullers. During many phone calls as Ed LeViness reminisced about his youth during those Depression times leading to the early World War II years, I jotted notes. With his permission, I wrote this story about his boyhood years in Fullers.

Fullers had once been a prosperous little 19th-Century farming community with its own post office, general store, and railroad depot located on the Western Turnpike where it was crossed at grade level by the West Shore Railroad (now CSX). By the 1930s, the businesses and depot had disappeared with the tracks now crossing overhead by trestle.

However, the people living there continued to feel a sense of community, chiefly because their small one-room District No. 13 Fullers School continued to give the area its identity.

Just as the Depression began in 1929, the LeViness family: Jack, Ruth, and their 4-year-old son, Edward, accompanied by Edward’s Chesbro grandparents, moved into a house (now taken down) on Route 20 in Fullers. Upstairs the discovery of phone books from several Midwestern cities led Jack LeViness to suspect the place might earlier have been a speakeasy.

With the house came 180 to 200 acres of pastures and hayfields and a barn. The family milked 20 dairy cows, grew silage corn, and cut acres of hay. Earl Gray, a Dunnsville man, would come around with his hay press, a device that used actual horse power to compress hay into bales.

There were several other active farms along Route 20 in that area, including the Van Patten farm just west of the railroad tracks (where 84 Lumber is today) with the barns across Route 20. The Coss farm, located at the corner of Fuller Station Road and Route 20, was also divided by Route 20. The Coss farmhouse was the old Fullers Tavern (also taken down now).

Milking cows by hand was still the rule in those days. The large 40-gallon metal cans containing milk were placed daily on a wooden platform at the edge of the road waiting to be collected by the milk truck that at the same time left off freshly washed cans from the day before.

Some of the more affluent farmers in Guilderland were using tractors, but many including the LeVinesses continued to rely on horses. Behind their house was a chicken coop with registered New Hampshire red hens producing high-quality eggs that were sold locally.

As Ed grew older, he was expected to do all sorts of chores, regularly milking cows and cleaning out the henhouse. His mother and grandmother canned large quantities of fruits and vegetables for the family.

Accumulating enough income to support a family was no easy matter during those Depression years. In addition to earnings from farming activities, Jack LeViness worked at General electric in Schenectady, but had had his hours cut back to two days a week.

Until he retired, Mr. Chesbro was a West Shore engineer. Ruth LeViness and her mother added to the family finances by hanging a sign out front of the house with the inviting name “Sunny Croft,” earning spare cash from tourists or boarders.

Owning a car was a necessity for any family residing in Fullers. An older model Durant that needed to be cranked to start was the car that brought the LeViness family to Fullers. Later, the family moved up to a Hudson Terraplane, produced between 1932 and 1938, “inexpensive, but powerful,” and by 1941 Jack LeViness was able to purchase a new Chevrolet two-door sedan.

About once every two weeks, the family drove to Altamont to shop at the A & P, and there were weekly trips over to Guilderland Center to worship at the Helderberg Reformed Church where Ed attended Sunday School.

Moderate traffic rolled over U.S. Route 20, the old turnpike having become a two-lane paved highway that was a main route west. A few farmers could still be seen out in horse-drawn wagons, giving Tommy Croote’s blacksmith shop on Fullers Station Road steady business.

Ed was just old enough to recall the old covered bridge at Frenchs Hollow being taken down in 1932 to be replaced by a new two-lane bridge. A weathered railroad-crossing sign remained along the road even though it had been a long time since anyone had to worry about tangling with a train on a grade level crossing in Fullers.

Passing motorists could stop for a dollar’s worth of gas at Oliver Cutler’s Socony gas station on the southeast corner of Fuller Station Road and Route 20. At the antiquated gas pumps, it was necessary to push a handle up and down for gas to fill a glass cylinder at the top, gravity allowing the gasoline to flow into a car’s gas tank.

Every now and then, men of the neighborhood gathered at the gas station for a friendly game of penny ante cards. Each player contributed a small amount of money for the pot and used matchsticks to keep track of the winner of each hand, allowing whoever ended up with the biggest pile of matchsticks to take home the pot.

Adventures

In addition to chores and school, Ed had fun and exciting adventures with several boys his own age. He remembered his bike carried him down Fullers Station Road and Frenchs Hollow Road to Cain’s farm where there was a field used by the kids to play baseball or to the Normanskill where there was a great spot just below the falls for a cooling swim.

Winter brought sleigh riding either on hilly Fullers Station Road or Frenchs Hollow Road leading down to the Normanskill. Most challenging was the steep hill on the north side of the Normanskill where French’s Hollow Road sharply curved just before going over the bridge.

One time, a family acquaintance took Ed up in an antique biplane with two open cockpits and double wings on a flight over the local area, beginning Ed’s lifelong love of flying.

As the boys got older, muskrat trapping helped to earn some much-needed cash. Ed found the best spot to catch muskrats was along the Normanskill near the footings of the railroad trestle.

By state law, trappers had to check traps daily, a serious responsibility for a boy, who then had to skin any muskrats he caught, preparing the pelts to be shipped to a fur wholesaler. Ed received a Remington .22 for his 11th birthday, a gift he prized all of his life.

Honing his marksmanship skills by taking out woodchucks on nearby farms, Ed found local farmers were delighted to be rid of the rodents whose deep holes created a serious menace in their fields.

Not all pleasures were found in the neighborhood. Radio provided all ages with information and entertainment from afar.

An Atwater Kent radio on legs sat in the LeViness living room where Ed sat listening to shows like “Tom Mix Ralston Straight Shooter,” “Fibber McGee and Molly,” and “One Man’s Family.”

About once a month, the LeViness family drove to Schenectady to see movies, usually at the State Theatre, but sometimes splurged on admission to the more expensive Proctor’s where the program not only included a movie, but also vaudeville or a big band. The movie of his childhood that made the biggest impression on Ed was “Gone With The Wind.”

School days

Windswept, open farm fields surrounded the Fullers one-room school on Route 20. In cold weather, a potbelly stove was fired up, first with kindling and, when that blazed up, coal was added. An active parent-teacher association was involved with the school whose members brought in hot soup at lunchtime during cold winter days.

Ed walked each day to school. A bright boy, he was placed in second grade almost immediately.

He had fond memories of Miss Isla Heath, the teacher who not only taught the basics to all eight grades, but enriched the children’s lives by taking them on nature walks, encouraging them to act in plays, and to be patriotic and kind.

Ed was once the recipient of a birthday-card shower from his fellow classmates on the occasion of his 10th birthday when he was housebound recuperating from injuries caused when he was hit by a car.

Miss Heath was expected to coolly handle crises as well. One winter’s day, the snow was good for packing. At recess, the kids were having a great time lobbing snowballs at each other over the schoolhouse roof.

Ed made the error of peeping around the corner of the school building only to see a frozen missile coming straight at him. Quickly pulling back, he hit his head on the building’s sharp corner, cracked open his scalp, and immediately began to bleed profusely.

Miss Heath performed emergency first aid, piled him into her Ford coupe, and then raced up Route 20 to deliver Ed to his mother. Eighty years later, Ed still had the scar!

The children looked forward to two holidays as welcome breaks in the routine. At Halloween, ducking for apples was the highlight because Miss Heath stuck a nickel inside of one apple. 

With one apple for each student floating in a water-filled wash basin, one by one, the students began to duck down to retrieve an apple, each child hoping they would go home with that precious nickel, which in the 1930s bought an awesome amount of candy.

At Christmas, there was always a decorated Christmas tree and students performing in a play put on for the whole community one evening just before the holiday. Mothers had made costumes and Miss Heath rigged up a stage curtain of sorts for the performance. Santa showed up and there were refreshments and a wonderful time was had by all.

Boys’ and girls’ 4-H clubs provided both practical and social activities for Fullers’ young folks. Ed’s parents were each leaders and even Miss Heath helped out with the girls’ group.

Both groups had hands-on projects and exhibited at the Altamont Fair each year. Building birdhouses was an example of one of the boys’ projects.

Meetings were at various members’ homes where refreshments were a treat often followed by recreational activities such as one winter’s night when the boys went coasting after their meeting.

Members learned social skills as well. After one meeting of parents and teachers at the school, 4-H members displayed their finished projects and then served refreshments to the adults who attended.

Often, activities were co-ed. Once there was a ski party followed by refreshments and every now and then a joint activity with another 4-H group such as the roller-skating party the Berne-Knox 4-H invited them to attend.

One year, Ed attended 4-H camp at Kinderhook Lake and attended Albany County 4-H Council meetings. Having been named to the 4-H honor roll, Ed was invited to dine at Albany’s Ten Eyck Hotel at a Kiwanis luncheon.

To earn an eighth-grade diploma, the New York State Education Department requirement was to pass seventh- and eighth-grade Regents exams in basic subjects. If all seventh-grade Regents were passed in seventh-grade, the student was allowed to move directly on to high school.

Ed was one of those pupils who qualified for high school without sitting through eighth grade, joining the other high school students from the Fullers, Parkers Corners, and Dunnsville Common School districts who attended Draper High School in Rotterdam.

The three local districts paid tuition to Draper and provided transportation by Bohl Bros. Bus Co. of Guilderland. Ed had no trouble making the transition from the one-room country school to Draper, graduating in the class of 1943.

War years

For high school students in the early 1940s, the future was ominous as the Second World War raged in both the Pacific and in Europe.

At graduation time, Ed, Raymond Bradt, and Vard Armstrong, two of his childhood friends from Fullers, traveled to downtown Albany to enlist in the Marines.

Because Ed had skipped elementary grades, he was only 16 and was told to return  when he was 17, have his father sign the permission papers for an early enlistment, and then come back down to the recruiting station, which he did.

His friends who were already 17 were able to enlist once their fathers had signed the papers. Ironically, it was Ed who was actually called first. He fought in the battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa with the 5th Marine Division.

All three returned home safely.

As Ed remembered, others of his generation who served from Fullers were Jacob Bradt and Robert Croote in the Navy; Emerson Van Patten in the Army Air Corps; and Anna Croote in the Women’s Army Corps, Margaret Culver in the Marines.

Morris Becker, who served in the Army, was wounded in Germany and Frank Pospicil, a Marine, was killed at Iwo Jima.

At Union Station, Ed’s parents waved goodbye to him as he boarded the train bound for Parris Island, his idyllic Fullers boyhood behind him forever.

****

Edward Arthur LeViness died on Dec. 7, 2017 at the age of 92. He returned home after World War II but then served again during the Korean War, and was honorably discharged in 1952 after which, according to his obituary, he quickly moved to Arizona where he worked as a cowboy, before attending the University of Arizona on the GI bill, earning a master’s degree in biology. Married with three daughters, he worked for three decades for the University of Arizona as a range and livestock specialist, helping cattle ranchers around the state.

Most New York State caves are closed to visitors from Oct. 1 to May 1. For information about Clarksville Cave and other area caves, visit www.northeatserncaveconservancy.org. I thank David Wallingford and his son Owen Tobias-Wallingford for their assistance in photographing the Clarksville Cave.
 

For generations, the Clarksville Cave system has drawn sport cavers and scientists alike.

Lying under a preserve owned and managed by the Northeastern Cave Conservancy, the cavern is half-an-hour drive from downtown Albany, just off Route 443. Histories of the village record visits to the cave in the mid-1800s, and graffiti from the Civil War Era and before are carved in sometimes elegant characters on its walls. (The precise moment at which graffiti go from being vandalism to history has never been determined, but carving on cave walls today is — to put it mildly — strongly discouraged!) 

There are forms of vandalism other than carving, of course — spray-painting and littering of the passages with trash are sadly not unknown; some forms such as muddying formations by climbing on them may be unintentional but are no less damaging.

Regrettably, most of the Clarksville Cave’s delicate formations such as stalagmites, “soda-straw” stalactites, and the translucent “draperies” were broken off long ago, though in hard-to-reach areas of the cave some flowstone deposits and the unusual natural dams called “rimstone pools” have managed to escape vandalism.

In years’ past, visitors were invited to scratch their names into the walls; two of the most prominent were left by one “D.C. Gould” whose name was carved in neat letters on Aug. 12, 1864, and one “E. Brinley” whose name was incised in 1839 on a wall above a pool.

Yet, in spite of visits by untold thousands of people over the decades, the Clarksville Cave and its preserve remain iconic examples of geologic processes, and specifically of cave geology — known as speleology.  Teachers of Earth science and geology in both secondary schools and colleges have used it as a resource for many years and, in the summertime, camps and environmental groups from all over the Northeast run field trips to the cave.

The preserve covers some 19.4 wooded acres, and within the forest are trails that lead not only to the cave’s multiple entrances but past classic examples of karst geology features: exposures of the bedrock called the Onondaga Limestone in which the cave has formed; mossy sinkholes and vertical shafts; and long solutionally-widened fractures in the bedrock called grikes.

In very wet weather, one of the cave entrances becomes an artesian spring and hourly thousands of gallons of turbulent water under pressure bubble upward against gravity and flow into the nearby Onesquethaw Creek.

The Onondaga limestone formed in a warm, shallow sea during what geologists call the Devonian Period, some 400 million years ago, when the landmass that would become North America lay much farther south than it is today and the Equator ran through the section that would become New York State. 

It is a very clean limestone — almost pure calcium carbonate — with little or no clay or sand within it.  This indicates that there were no high mountains near where it was forming that would have shed sediments into the water. It is densely packed with fossils such as crinoids (sea lilies), trilobites, clam-like brachiopods, and several species of coral.

The corals in particular are indicative of an environment of clear, relatively shallow, water. In some sections, the limestone is studded with nodules and shelves of the silicate rock called chert — or flint — which has precipitated there through processes still not completely understood.

The ages of caves are often difficult to determine. Except for lava caves such as those in Hawaii that form in real time as lava flows cool, the age of a cave has nothing to do with the age of the bedrock from which it has formed.

But one of the obvious features of the Clarksville Cave system is that it contains enormous deposits of rounded pebbles and cobbles in a clay matrix: remnants of debris left when glaciers retreated at the end of the last ice age some 12,000 years ago and their meltwaters roared through the cave carrying massive quantities of sediments.

These deposits can be found in even the loftiest parts of the cave. They indicate that the cave passages were there before deglaciation and for a time were choked with tightly-packed sediment; subsequently post-glacial streams found routes into the cave through the limestone bedrock layers that border Stovepipe Road west of the hamlet and elsewhere and began to flush out the sediments.

However, clues to a cave’s age are the features known as speleothems: stalactites, stalagmites, and flowstone that form from mineral-saturated water seeping into the cave. The old rule-of-thumb that every cubic inch of such features requires 100 years to grow has been shown to vary tremendously from one cave to another, but a massive flowstone feature such as that in the accompanying photo (Figure 3) undoubtedly required tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years to form.

To put it simply — Clarksville Cave is old!

It has formed along a tectonic fault that shows itself in many places in the cave passages and at the surface where scratches called slickensides and folds in the bedrock appear.  One particularly prominent display is in the bed of the Onesquethaw Creek just a few yards east of the stone bridge on Plank Road. 

Within the cave, the ceilings of many passages show a slight tilt from west to east as a result of the fault movement. This tilt has allowed great quantities of mineral-saturated water to enter the cave over millennia, with the result that masses of flowstone accumulated on the western sides of the cave passages — much of it now damaged — and in some places the waters have acted as a natural cement, turning large piles of glacial debris into the sedimentary rock called conglomerate.

The cave was frequently visited in the 1800s — at least for a time its owner offered guided tours by lantern light and the cave was written up in Harper’s Weekly.

Until the early 1960s, the system was regarded as two separate caves, with one entrance in the village close to Route 443 called “Gregory’s Cave” after its then-owner. It consists of a series of lofty chambers connected by a wide tunnel carrying a meandering stream and terminating after around 450 feet in a pool rising nearly to the ceiling — a feature which cave explorers call a “sump.”

A longer section entered through a sinkhole in the woods bordering the hamlet trends north and was known as “Ward’s Cave.” Around 1,200 feet long, this section resembles a subway tunnel through which flows the upper stretch of the same gurgling stream, rising in a deep artesian pool near the north end, known rather grandly as The Lake.

But for years after the 1948 publication of “Underground Empire” by Clay Perry, which dealt with the caves of New York State, explorers were intrigued by Perry’s statement that the two caves were connected by what he described as a half-mile long tunnel lined with calcite crystals.

Then, during the summer of 1962, an extended drought hit New York State and the water level in the sump in the Gregory section dropped almost three feet. Following the cave explorer’s directive — “Follow the water!” — within a couple of days of each other, one group of explorers from Albany and another from the Boston area waded through the sump and found that the cave continued in the direction of the Ward section.

To this day, no one is certain which group was first; cavers are notoriously — some would say obsessively — reluctant to give details about their discoveries. But within weeks the word was out that a major breakthrough had been made in Clarksville and that the two caves were now connected.

To everyone’s amazement, in lamplight the then-pristine formations in the connection section did indeed sparkle in the form of calcite crystals that seemed to cover every surface. This discovery obviously raised the intriguing possibility that some intrepid explorers in the distant past had also made the connection yet somehow left no trace of their passage.

Alas, most of the crystalline surfaces are today obscured under a coating of mud left by the boots and clothing of more recent visitors.

Yet even so, the connection is not without its wonders: mysterious side passages that sometimes loop back upon themselves; the artificial-looking rimstone pools; bedrock twisted and distorted under pressure of the fault movements; great slabs of rock coated with slickensides; a high, funereal chamber where lengthy roots from trees in the forest above hang like black veils in the gloom; a 40-foot wide waterfall whose currents of crystal-clear water send echoes throughout this section of the cave, sounding eerily like energetic conversation; and on almost every exposed surface the marvelous, mysterious Devonian fossils.

One can easily understand why the Clarksville Cave is considered a veritable textbook of geologic phenomena.

Today, being under the protection of the Northeastern Cave Conservancy and its appointed cave managers and lying so close to so many colleges and primary and secondary schools, the Clarksville Cave will continue to attract sport cavers, adventurers, and students for generations to come.

And, while walking or crawling through its inky-black recesses, one can only wonder what secrets the cave yet holds in the unknown passages from which its waters come, and the mysterious conduits into which they flow.

Another Old Men of the Mountain breakfast and again, the scribe was unable to attend. The first problem involved a painful shoulder, but a shot took care of this pain almost immediately. The second non-attended breakfast involved a bout with COVID (again).

The first time with the disease left this scribe battling blood clots on the lungs. Still trying to get rid of these clots and along comes another stretch with this disease.

This scribe is currently typing this while just finishing the 10-day quarantine and, except for feeling weak, feels pretty good, although tires easily. This scribe is fully boosted, and wears a mask almost religiously. Hmmm! Can one be almost religious?

The Old Men of the Mountain meet whether this OF is there or not; this time it was at the Middleburgh Diner in Middleburgh, on Tuesday, Dec. 27, and thank goodness there are OFs who take attendance and supply a few notes.

This lets this scribe compose some sort of report on the OMOTM by using this information and a few selected old notes not used in other columns. This information and the names help keep bill collectors and truant officers away from the OFs at the current breakfast.

At the ages of most of the OMOTM, the blending of the years seems to just melt from one to the other with not much fanfare. The OFs are not much on resolutions; to the OFs, resolutions don’t seem to mean much and most gave up on them years ago. Never kept any anyway.

One OF mentioned that, to keep a resolution, if that is what you want to call it, takes more than one person; it takes at least two, maybe more, to keep the resolvee on the resolve. This makes sense.

One OF said, “When it comes time, years don’t seem to mean much; 2019 is no different than 2022. Even the news is the same, only the names are different.”

Another OF commented that one thing that does change is it gets easier to count friends and relatives because the number is lower. This OF was echoed by another OG who uttered, when it comes to gathering, it used to be weddings and births, now it is hospitals and funerals. What a cheery group that breakfast was.

What matters in life?

The OMOTM quite often speak about family and how important that is.

Some OFs say their family is spread all over the country, and a couple said their families are not only spread over this country but the world. Japan and Germany were mentioned as they used to draw people in the military and in some cases still do; now though it is jobs.

As the OFs age, to have family close by helps. None of the OFs want to go to the “home.” This is where family really helps.

One OF said the old saw about treating your kids right in the beginning is a good idea because they are the ones who are going to select the home they are going to pack the OF off too.

Another OF mentioned how they took care of their elderly parents, and now they are the elderly parents, and still have maintained the lifestyle that they are yet to be a burden to the kids.

Still another OF said his kids were such a PIA that he couldn’t wait to be a burden to them.

This little old-fashioned and long-held statement about kids being a pain this scribe thinks is just talk — the OFs should think about what kind of PIA they were to their parents.

One OF said that the big old farmhouses were meant for multiple families, and the old folks, including in many cases aunts and uncles, all lived and died in the same place and many were buried in family plots right there on the farm.

An OF took his crooked finger and waved it in the air and said we all strive to get old. The OF said we are preached to, to not smoke, and eat well, get plenty of exercise, and don’t drink all that stuff so we can live longer.

Well, I am here to tell you getting old ain’t fun. For what? So you can live in pain, can’t dress yourself; heck, if I knew then what I know now, the motto would be, “Hey, live life to the fullest, be happy, die young, and skip all this old-age crap.” (There ya go!)

Blizzard

The storm that hammered Buffalo was really bad; however, the OF mentioned our own blizzard on the Hill that hit us in the fifties. Just like the Buffalo storm, it was very local. You could drive a few miles and there was nothing.

“There was a big difference in this one,” an OF said. “Our storm affected few people but Buffalo is the state’s second largest city. That is a lot of people impacted by this weather.”

It seems no matter where the OFs run to, sooner or later a natural disaster of some sort is going to catch up with the OF.

The OFs made some comments on life as it is as they trotted to the Middleburgh Diner in Middleburgh, and the members of this happy group were: Miner Stevens, Jake Herzog, Roger Shafer, Harold Guest, Wally Guest, Jack Norray, Lou Schenck, Herb Bahrmann, Paul Nelson, Roland Tozer, Warren Willsey, Russ Pokorny, but not me.