Clifford Buck Recalls by Karen Jones

CLIFFORD BUCK RECALLS . . .

Karen Jones

The following article was published in the September, 1971, issue of Pleasant Valley Life, the 150th Anniversary Souvenir Edition. The Year Book is very grateful to the author, Karen Jones, and to Dutchess Suburban Newspapers, Inc. for permission to print this excellent article about a member of our Trustees who is one of the County's outstanding historians. Karen Jones is the Managing Editor of the Dutchess Suburban Newspaper, Inc. He wears black and white sneakers; sports suspenders attached to teal blue trousers. A recent growth of chin whiskers highlights a full-usually smiling-face. His eyes twinkle as he scans his memory for recollections of his past. He's Clifford Buck . . . and his age is seventy.

He's a casual, relaxed man who nearly bounces from room to room in search of information to answer and illustrate my many inquiries.

Once again I'm confronted with the realization of how meaningless age is . . . you can be thirty and dead of life or seventy and full of it! Buck is obviously a man of the latter category.

Born in the Town of LaGrange on December 4, 1900, Buck traces his Dutchess County ancestry back to about 1710. Genealogy is his forte, and his expertise in the field is well known not only in this country, but throughout the country. "Mormons", says Buck, "are known for their interest in tracing back their ancestry." He noted that an organization in Utah has his name and from time to time requests that he trace a particular family thought to have lived in this area.

Buck's interest in tracing genealogies began back in 1930 when he was overcome with curiosity about his ancestry. And if you've ever taken a look at the county tax records and early census, it's easy to understand that one has to be extremely curious to read, not to mention decipher, the early handwritten records. "Most of my ancestors lived in Dutchess County," says Buck. "They came in the 1710 immigration from Germany, and the first Buck appeared on the 1718 county tax list."

Clifford explains that once he was interested in genealogy, it was not long before he quite naturally became involved in the history of the county. "You start finding out about the people and can't help but get interested in where they live and the history of these places."

FAMILY FARMING

Cliff Buck's early years were spent in assisting with the family farming, which he describes as pretty much the same everywhere. "Farms were mostly on a small scale. We had about a dozen cows and sold cream to the Creamery. Most of the farms, including ours, frequently hired a man, besides the boys in the family, to do the work. We raised corn, oats, hay and got our power from horses.

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"Hay was gotten loose, and handled that way with a pitchfork. There was no telephone, no electricity, and no running water. In fact, I walked about a, tenth of a mile to get drinking water. It was also my duty to tell the neighbors when it was time to thrash, and since there were no phones I would go a quarter to a half mile to inform them."

If we balk at the problems with mail delivery today, at least we should keep in mind that it's much more frequent than it was in the early 1900's. According to Buck, mail was delivered semi-weekly, on Tuesdays and Fridays — the same day the Poughkeepsie Eagle came out, and not everyone received farm delivery. "It was my job." said Buck, "to take mail to the neighbors where there was no drop. I also delivered the Eagle, and for that received ten cents a month."

EARLY EDUCATION

Buck remembers attending a one room country school house of about 15 to 20 students. In order for him to attend high school, his family paid a tuition fee, and each day he travelled to Poughkeepsie. "You had to get there yourself," Buck recalls, "either by horse and wagon, sleigh or bicyle, depending on the weather. The high school was seven miles from where I lived then. People from this a,rea had it a little easier," he recalled. "They could go by train from Salt Point and Pleasant Valley to Poughkeepsie."

Buck received his B.S. degree in Agriculture in 1922 from Cornell, returned home and worked on his father's farm for a year, and "decided I should get married." With the $1000 his grandfather had left him plus an additional loa,n he was able to purchase the 105 acre farm in Salt Point which he still occupies. Since that time he has sold off several plots of the land and figures he now owns eighty to eighty-five acres in the town.

POTENTIAL GROWTH

Clifford says that in the past few years several older couples have decided to buy land from him and move away from the city. He recalls that it started with one couple who couldn't get over looking out at the beauty of the open land with all the trees and amount of spaces. Buck said they told him he should always try and keep it that way. "Since that time they have convinced several other couples to purchase property from me and move into the adjoining areas. What they don't seem to realize," Clifford remarked, "is that if they continue to encourage people to move in around them, they will no longer have all the open space and trees that once made them move to the area."

All this moving from the city to the country and picking Salt Point to settle in couldn't bother Buck in the least. Clifford Buck is a realist. "I have no question that Salt Point will go the way of the cities."

But you couldn't pay this man to return to the "good ole days", "As far as I'm concerned," Clifford replied, "I don't want to go back. It's

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nice to think about those days, and I am sure we enjoyed them. It's much better today with the health and living standards that exist . . . there's more time for recreation. Besides, human nature is still the same. "I'm not particularly concerned that the world is going to the dogs any more today than it was then. It just took longer to hear about things then."

FIRST MOVE

On March 1, 1923 Buck moved into his house in Salt Point."We raised 1000 hens to sell eggs . . . not many cows . . . about 15 or 20 . . . for milking and we sold the milk to Borden's in Salt Point. We also raised three acres of potatoes and grew corn, oats, wheat and hay. We kept on with the cows, but we gave up the potatoes and poultry by 1945 because more years than not it was unprofitable. "By then we had pure bred Guernsey. We kept that up until 1957 or '58, at which time I had thirty milking and about twenty young animals."

Buck recalls those early years of his marriage when he and his wife had decided that they wanted five children. He chuckled as he remembered the gossiping neighbors upset over the fact that his wife no sooner delivered a child than she was pregnant again. "And, I am certain," he said, "that they were convinced that we wouldn't stop till I had a boy. Our fifth child was our first boy."

Cliff Buck's wife kept boarders during those years of their marriage to help supplement their income.

SLOW TO CHANGE "The town of Salt Point hasn't changed much since then. There are approximately a dozen new houses . . . there were about 25 then. Some of the men must have worked as day laborers, but I really don't remember. About 1929, I do recall going into Salt Point and finding about ten men to dig potatoes . . . today you couldn't find one."

Buck remembers that a couple of men in the town worked on the railroad. "There was a feed store where Williams Lumber now stands . . . looked about the same though. The father and uncle of the present owner of DeLavergne's owned the same store. One of them was the postmaster, too. Joe Galvin was the mail carrier and did garage work on the side in the afternoons and evenings. There was also another small store at the south end of town. "Salt Point had one blacksmith when I moved there; at one time there were two. You could get most everything you needed in town, but a lot of people would go once a week to Poughkeepsie to get clothing. I can remember selling eggs to a store there for a while. Mother would go into

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a music store and listen to records for her Victrola . . . but you could get most things in Salt Point. "Harry Ostrander had a meat market and he peddled meat throughout the county. I took his bobsled one winter and helped him peddle. "I can remember the first few years when I was farming, said Buck. "You would put your car up in the winter because they didn't bother to try and keep the roads open. Then I remember one year some politician remarked that he planned to keep the roads open all year round . . . and that's how it started."

Buck's children are grown and no longer living in the immediate area. Three of his daughters are married and live in the state: Rochester, Albion and Cortland. A fourth daughter is "doing a type of missionary work in Mexico learning some unwritten languages of still existing Indian tribes, at the Institute of Linguistics. She recently translated the New Testament in their language." His son is teaching at a Boston university in the political education field.

Since 1945 Clifford has a very lucrative job selling insurance from his home office.

By previous agreement, a friend and former partner took over the business when he reached seventy last year.

Buck's wife died of cancer in 1955. She had been active in 4-H activities for many years.

Cliff Buck's life continues to be extremely active. His mind is keenly alert and he is one of the few persons in the county who has the patience and knowhow to read old county records for information about people and places. He says that for many years he worked on it in "hit or miss" fashion . . . an hour or two at a time whenever he would get into Poughkeepsie. "Any more than that and you get too tired . . . but I learned how to do it and do it rapidly." Buck now has more than a dozen file drawers in his home filled with records and cross references of the many histories of people and places which he has traced.

He is active in the Dutchess County Historical Society. A trustee and treasurer of the Dutchess County Library Association, he remains a member of the Upton Lake Grange for which he has held numerous offices in the past.

Clifford Buck is obviously a man geared to bounce through another seventy years, as full and exciting as the past.

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