Randolph S Little

On Childhood in Forest Home
By Randolph Scott Little

[Editorial note: Randolph Scott Little wrote these memories of his childhood down around 2016-2017, helped by home movies made by his parents.  The memories focus on the years between 1940 and 1963.  The first chapter is reproduced here. Find a link to the rest below.]

Chapter 1
Seventy-five years ago I lived in a garage apartment on Warren Road.  The upper level was a two-car garage; downstairs was a cozy living space.  It overlooked a small orchard behind the Knox house on Forest Home Drive.  In May the apple blossoms were bountiful and beautiful.  My father was the coach of swimming at Cornell and my mother was a statistician in the College of Agriculture.  They enjoyed fishing and back-packing, so I soon became acquainted with most of the Fall, Cascadilla and Six-mile Creek watersheds, as well as the inlet and Cayuga Lake itself.  My mother carried me on her back in an Adirondack pack basket.

A few years later, when my first of three sisters was about to be born, we moved to the top of the hill at 120 Warren Road.  I got my own bedroom and in the evening enjoyed listening to “The Lone Ranger” on the radio with a fire in the fireplace, while my parents read the Ithaca Journal and tended to the day’s mail.  With a younger sibling in the house, I began to learn independence.  The back yard had a small flat area, then rapidly sloped downward to the woods above the Short and Whetzel houses.

Those woods had overgrown an older apple orchard and contained a mixture of other kinds of trees.  The old apple trees were quite climbable, as was one white pine.  Those provided good learning experiences in many regards.  It is easier to climb up than to climb back down.  Some species make excellent climbing trees; others are brittle or leave you covered with pitch.

On winter evenings I would look out the kitchen window to spot the headlights of cars coming across the lower bridge.  If one turned right toward Warren Road, I would run to the living room to watch for headlights coming up the hill.  With a bit of luck it would be Dad coming home from the Old Armory for an awaiting dinner.  If fresh snowfall might make the hill too slippery, he would take the long way around – across Triphammer bridge, out to the Community Corners, across Hanshaw Road to Warren Road, and down to 120.  On those nights it was fun to watch cars trying and mostly failing to make it up the Warren Road hill.

I entered Cornell in 1944 – to attend the nursery school that was part of the College of Home Economics in “Martha Van.”  We had only one car, which Dad usually took to the Old Armory on the far side of the campus, so Mom would walk me over to nursery school, carrying my younger sister in a pack basket down the “shortcut” (the Forest Home Walkway), across the lower bridge and along Beebe Lake to Toboggan Lodge, then up to the back of Martha Van.

Summer brought a whole new realm of possibilities, many of which involved Fall Creek.  Of course I had learned to swim and respect water at an early age, so Fall Creek from just above the dam by the lower bridge all the way up to Flat Rock was my summer playground.  Crayfish and hellgrammites found by turning over rocks in shallow water made, I thought, good presents for my father the fisherman.  He always accepted them with tactful pleasure, although his passion was clearly fly fishing.  Using live bait was not his preferred style.  But, what the heck, he had taught me that crayfish and hellgrammites make good bait, particularly for fishing for small-mouthed bass in Cayuga Lake which he did every fall.

Exploring Fall Creek at other seasons was instructive, too.  “Ice out” during the spring thaw was always eagerly anticipated.  Just watching the jumble of ice blocks and trees stampeding downstream, virtually unstoppable until they spilled into the gorge behind the Byway, was an awesome experience.  Sometimes the build-up in the gorge nearly reached the height of Table Rock and was tempting to step onto.  Temptations like that were a significant part of growing up in old Forest Home.  One could learn a lot just by watching and contemplating what could happen next.  When the water forced the underlying ice out into Beebe Lake, leaving the impromptu bridge to suddenly collapse into the gorge, the lessons could not have been more meaningful and lasting.  Old Forest Home was a living laboratory.

For more chapters, about swimming, cycling, bird-watching, and more, see https://www.fhia.org/on-childhood-in-forest-home/.

Birth announcement in The Ithaca Journal on Dec 18, 1940.

Birth of Randolph Scott Little, Dec 17, 1940 at Ithaca Memorial Hospital.

"Mr. and Mrs. Gordon S. Little of Forest Home are the parents of a son, Randolph Scott, born Tuesday evening at Memorial Hospital."