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My line starts with Lyman R. Lyon my great great Grandfather. His daughter Florence married Charles Collins Merriam and unbeknownst to them they became my great grandparents. They had one son Lyman Lyon Merriam who married Delia Brandreth. That union produced three daughters, one of whom, Sarah Louise Merriam was to be my mother. Sarah married Carl Trube an engineer and inventor and they had one son, myself named Merriam Trube. My Dad died in Ossining, NY when I was 4 months old in a fire that occurred in the workshop where he was developing a revolutionary aircraft engine.
After that my mother Sarah, her mother Delia Merriam, her aunt Bertha Weld and her sister Kathleen decided to live in Florissante with me along for good luck. When my Grandfather Lyman Merriam died in 1936 money was tight the ladies took in boarders in the summer, ran a tea room and started an antique business that Sarah continued into her seventies.
I grew up with free run of the woods, fishing the creeks with a steel telescoping rod and worms, running logs in the river under the three way bridge and swimming off the boom, biking all over town, learning to shoot and to hunt, to camp out, how not to get lost, how to handle felling and splitting axes, the two man saw to fell trees and cut logs, how to shinny up young maple and birch trees and swing'em down to the ground, how to make it in the winter with snowshoes and on skis, how to hunt rabbits with a beagle and shotgun and how to drive the old truck when I was 10 years old. This was an old chevy with wooden spokes in the wheels, spark advance lever and throttle lever on the steering wheel, a hand crank, choke and horn-a beauty, my first car love.
Later I worked on Sherman Burdicks farm in Collinsville and later the paper mill. Went to Stevens Tech where my Dad and Lyman had gone and became an engineer. I worked my way to San Francisco one summer, the Navy called, Venezuela called, the Aerospace and now I am near Denver and have the Rockies for skiing, backpacking, hunting, fishing and a slew of interesting things to do.
I still miss Lyons Falls but the old life is gone. The paper mill is closed. The school is closed. Florissante is a B&B. It used to sit on a square mile, now 16 acres and built in 1889 it needs work.
I'm not the same carefree boy that lived there in the 1930 &40's. Today's kids grow up in housing developments - don't have the freedom we had.
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