The barn fire wasn’t mentioned in his obituary, but it was included in hers.

They lived on the family farm. A dairy farm. In North Monmouth, Maine.

A call to the fire department came at 9:30pm on Saturday, August 8, 1970.

According to an article in The Lewisport Daily Sun, the barn had measured 40 by 60 feet and usually contained 32 milking cows. Thankfully, the cows had been turned out to pasture just 20 minutes before the fire was discovered. Three calves were also rescued.

Fire Chief Irving Jewell made note that there was one casualty. The family cat, caught in the cellar, succumbed, poor thing.

Overnight, a crew watched for flare-ups, equipped with a hose relay from a neighbor’s property six-tenths of a mile away.

And whose farm was this?

Dad’s Aunt Eva and Uncle Ted. Aunt Eva was Grandma Vayo’s younger sister. She was born in 1914 and married farmer Tadeus “Ted” Waliski when she was 30 years old.

Ted grew up farming with his dad, Konstanty (my favorite new name) who’d emigrated from Poland in the early 1900s.

Ted and Eva married in 1944:

Seeing as how I have a live-in dairy-farm-expert, I asked Farmer Gary if the newspaper reports provided enough hints regarding the cause of the fire.

It wouldn’t have been spontaneous combustion, he said, since they’d just put up the hay.

Upon further thought, though, he changed his mind. It wouldn’t have been the fresh hay that caused the problem, but hay that was already in the barn. If those existing hay bales hadn’t dried sufficiently, the moisture might have caused a chemical reaction, leading to the hay heating to 130° F. and higher. All that was needed to ignite was a flow of air, just like the air that would have blown into the barn along with the new bales that day.

The barn was a total loss. The “ell” which connected the barn and the house was damaged, but not beyond repair. The firefighters had concentrated on the ell in hopes of saving the house, which they did.

Impressive, yet not unexpected, was the help from friends and neighbors. And not just the night of the fire, but in the following days, as Ted took to milking the cows in a shed.

Chick Orchards provided a generator and brought hay to the Waliski farm. Francis Rickards bulldozed debris into the cellar hole as the clean-up progressed.

And the Fireman’s Auxiliary held a benefit:

Ted’s mom, Elizabeth, moved out of the farmhouse while it was being cleaned and repaired of smoke and water damage. Ted and Eva welcomed her into their nearby home during that time. News reports quoted the fire chief as stating the farm was partially insured.

According to his obituary in 1983, Ted went to work at a steel-rolling mill for several years. From what I can tell by looking at real-estate transfers, the family sold the farm in the years after Elizabeth’s 1974 passing.

Here’s a photo of 66-year-old Ted in 1981:

Can’t help but wonder if Aunt Eva was pleased to know I married a dairy farmer. (I may have met her over the years, but frankly I only remember hearing about her.) I hope it didn’t bring back too many memories of that awful night in 1970.

Jump forward to 1990 and here is Aunt Eva with my parents and Dad’s parents:

I’ve got one more photo of Aunt Eva to share. Here’s Eva on her wedding day with her mother, whom Dad called Grandma Jennie.

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