I have three older sisters. My dad was one of thirteen kids and his family. My grandfather’s name was Ernest Coppes. He was a pipeline dealer. He did well pipelines and water pipelines.

Like I said, my dad was one of thirteen children, and they had one child who died from the hiccups. That child had the hiccups for three weeks straight. His system couldn’t get enough oxygen into his body.

My father was a house mover. Beginning at about eight years old, I did the work of an average man. I used to help my dad move houses in the summertime. At the age of twelve I was working full eight hour days with my dad. I had the owners of packing all the wooden cribbing around that he used. Those were 6in. by 6in. beams each 6ft. long. We also used for by fours that were 4ft. long. These were made out of the native wood, not the wood they get nowadays. These beams were real hard wood.

If we only had to move a house a couple hundred feet, we had planking and rollers. I would move the rollers from the back to the front as we moved the house along. We used a winch truck to pull the house.

I used to pick up those planks, throw them on my shoulder walk them to the front of the house and lay them down again. One diet we were working with couldn’t believe it. It was like a conveyor belt and we kept the house moving. So I moved both the planks and the rollers.

I have a picture of my dad moving a Perma-stone house. He moved it in front of the courthouse here in Findlay. In that picture you could see the house rolling right in front of the courthouse here in Findlay. A Perma stone house is one of the heaviest house is you can move.

One time my dad took a glass of water, filled it up to the brim and set it on the counter inside the house. He wanted to see how skillful he was in moving houses. By the time he got to his destination the glass was still full of water! He spilled very little of that water, maybe a drop or two. Not much.

When I got out of the service, the house moving business was dying. My dad didn’t take me into it; he sold the business. At that time he went on disability because he was spending about four months of every year in the hospital. He had what they call factor five. It’s a blood-clotting disease. I inherited that from my dad.

My mother passed away at the age of 62. She had cancer. Her mother also died from cancer. My father’s father died of cancer. It kind of runs in the family. My dad passed away at the age of 65 with a heart attack. My mother had a brother who died of a heart attack as well. That runs in the family, too.

So you I went to school during the winter months and worked with my dad during the summer months.