About Me
I'm Paul Hemen, sole proprietor for Hemen's Antiques of Arundel, Maine. I've been in this business for over thirty years. I suppose my interest in this old "junk" began when I attended an auction of a failed farm down in Tennessee. The contents of the house were all spread out on the lawn, beneath huge sycamore trees, and around the barn were various farm implements and an old worn out Farmall tractor. But I digress.
My dad's family hails from Alaska, and my mom was the daughter of Tennessee sharecroppers. They met at a U.S.O. dance back during the big one, WWll, for those of you too young to understand the lingo. After the war ended, they married and settled in Fairbanks, Alaska, where I was born, along with eight of my eleven siblings. (we were Catholic, need I say more?). Dad worked on the "DEW LINE", which was an early warning system, set up in Point Barrow, Alaska, designed to give us ample time to respond to a Soviet invasion.
At some point, we had a two room log home built at Big Delta, Alaska, and moved into one of the rooms, the other being used as a "meat locker", as my dad was a big game hunter, and it wasn't unusual to have several carcasses of moose, caribou, and grizzly bear, hanging from the rafters, along with smaller game, like ptarmigan and snowshoe rabbits, mostly to feed the team of huskies and wolves that we had accumulated.
My ma got homesick, so we gradually migrated south, spending a couple of years in Wenatchee, Washington, where my grandparents ran Hemen's Refrigeration, and shipped Washington apples all over the world. We lived there a couple of years, then on down to Gary, Indianna, where my mothers parents had relocated to from Temmessee, and had invested in an apartment house,,,to this day, I don't know how the happened to pull that off, considering they were lowly dirt farmers prior to that. But, they didn't last very long there and we ALL headed on down to Tennessee after about a year. One of my fondest memories of that year in Gary, was chasing these huge rats in the alleys, (they were quite abundant). The were fast, new the territory and would scurry into any available hole or opening in the pavement or down a sewer grate.
Once in Tennessee, we bought a 100 acre farm out in the sticks, with an old run-down house that had never owned a coat of paint, and was called "The Old Warhurst Place", and was said to have housed Ulysses Grant on his quest to defeat the South during the Civil War. My brothers and I were always on the search for "souvenirs" of the period, without much luck, I would have to say.
We attended a school in Collinwood for a year or so, then, sold the farm and moved to Iron City. My most profound memories of that brief stay, was having our hogs poisoned by neighbors, and we hauled their carcasses out to an open field to decompose, but the local gestapo constable, who happened to live across the street, came to "investigate", and ordered us to burn the hogs, which we did out of fear of being arrested,,,,,,,,,took a few days to gather enough brush to complete the task. The stench was absolutely horrible. We always suspected the constable's family of having poisoned the hogs, and in retrospect, I can't say as I could blame them. We were immune to the smell of the hog pen, and didn't understand what the ruckus was all about at the time. Several months later, the constable flipped his vehicle over an embankment on a causeway in the middle of the night. A trucker crossing the causeway late the following afternoon, noticed the overturned car, and the constable was rescued alive, but suffered back damage and was paralysed. I remember experiencing some sense of private glee, upon hearing this news. It wasn't due to the hog burning issue alone. His son, who had been a chum of mine, even though he was twice my size, turned against us,"Bluewater", which was actually in the township of Loretta, Tennessee.
