he first twelve years of my life were spent in Muncy, Picture Rocks, Sunbury, all in Pennsylvania, and a portion of that time was spent in the State of Nebraska. About three years were lived on the plains of that state, where there was nothing at all to see except the wide open spaces, deer, buffalo, (bison), coyotes, Indians and rattlesnakes. My people sold their claim here which they had homesteaded and we then lived in Waho and Fremont, Nebraska until we moved to Sunbury, Pennsylvania, and from there to Picture Rocks. When I was twelve years old I was sent to Overton, Bradford County, to learn to be a farmer. I liked the work and after a year and a half I left there and hired out on a farm at the princely salary of eight dollars a month. I next turned up at Dushore, Sullivan County, where my duties consisted of taking care of a horse etc, and I stayed there, taking care of horses and helping in the barroom, where I bottled one or two kegs of beer a week. When the boss was not around I also tended bar. I next turned up at Wilkesbarre, Pennsylvania, where I had a job with a soft drink bottling firm at three dollars a week. As I paid three dollars a week board, I found that I could not save much at this rate, so after a few weeks I left here and went to work in a combination restaurant and saloon as a waiter. This not being very satisfactory to me, I secured a job as a clerk in a small grocery store whose owner was not a well man and who was not in the store very much. In a month or two it became evident that the store was too much for me and so, as I had told the proprietor that my folks lived in Sunbury, one fine morning he told me to get in the wagon with him and he drove me to the station, where he bought me a ticket, then told me to go home and stay home. I went to Sunbury where some pals of mine lived and after fooling around a few days with them, I freighted it to Muncy and walked six miles from there to Picture Rocks where my folks really were. In Picture Rocks I got a job in the finishing room of a furniture factory. In those days most of the furniture was decorated with birds and flowers, all sorts of colors and plenty of stripes etc. From here I went to a furniture factory in Williamsport and then decided that I wanted to go back to Overton to see the people there. When I reached Overton I found that the people with whom I had first lived had invested in a store that had a postoffice connected with it. I received a warm welcome and was immediately placed in charge of the store and postoffice. There were only two mails a day, one coming from Forkesvill and one back in the afternoon. There would be only one mail pouch to exchange when the stagecoach came through. I had now become a leader in the community and as hardly anyone in Overton had ever eaten ice cream and few had even heard of it, I remembered how back in the old days, my mother had made ten gallons of it every Saturday, about which I knew very as I had had to turn the freezer, a tedious job. I told the older girls about it and suggested that they get together and we would all make some of it. They all brought the eggs, the cream and the other fixings, including cake. But we had no freezer, so we filled a dishpan with cracked ice and put the liquid in a small bucket in the middle and went to work. It turned out fine and they each had a big dish of ice cream with cake all around. It was the first ice cream they had ever eaten. After this I branched out in the housepainting business and painted thirty six houses in the vicinity, including Forkesville, Dushore, Overton and New Albany. As time went on I flirted around with several different girls but finally settled down with Mary Dieffenbach. Later on we were married and went to Williamsport to live. I worked here for a time until I met a painter from Duboise who talked me into a proposition there. I stayed here until word got around that there were all kinds of opportunities for work in Emporium. We moved there and I made out fine. It was here that I learned sign painting. After this Mary's folks wrote for us to come home, and as I never could stay long in one place, we dug up and went to Overton, where I worked for five or six months. Barnum's circus was in Towanda about this time and as father Dieffenbach and his son Tom were going to see it, I went along as supernumerary. At the circus I noticed that the band had no drummer so I applied for and secured the job. I had drummed in the Overton Band, so when I joined the circus band the job was not altogether new to me. The next morning, I found myself in Sayre with the circus and the day after that we arrived in Binghampton. It was tough going so I jumped a freight and finally arrived at a small town where I had had some friends, but found that they had moved to Utica, so I walked the thirty miles to Utica and found my friends whom I was very glad to see. I saw by the poster's that Barnum's circus was due in Utica the next Monday but I did not look them up. I left Utica and went to Ilion where I got a job and stayed about two years, and then went to Pottstown as my father had written that things were booming there, but Pottstown was on the bum as there were no jobs to be had there. I lived with my folks in Pottstown for a while but finally located a job in the town which I held for about a year, then hearing that Boyertown Casket Company was hiring help, I went there and got a job finishing caskets. I now had charge of the finishing department at Boyertown and held it until the manager of the factory went to the casket factory at West Grove, when I went with him. I stayed at West Grove, Chester County, Pennsylvania, about seven years and in my spare time got to raising breed chickens of which I had about twelve different varieties, and, with an incubator, I soon had several hundred chickens. I sold them all except a trio of each breed, and rented a farm at the far end of town, where we had a nice big house which was modern for those days, having a good lawn and all kinds of fruit trees and berry bushes. Here I got my chicken business going again and made an incubator that hatched three hundred chickens at a time, so, in a couple of months, I had hundreds of chickens running around the place. I then bought a horse, a cow and some hogs. At that time we really lived, our cellar always being filled with vegatables and fruits of all sorts. There were four acres in wheat when we rented the place and the wheat went with the place. When the wheat was ripe, we cut it, hauled it to the barn, and threshed it out by hand with an oldfashioned "flail." We sent the grain to the mill and had enough flour to last us at least a year. After two years of this we had enough as it was very hard work and Mary, (whom I always called Mother) and I worked from sunup until long after dark, Sundays and holidays included, so we moved back into town, taking with us a fine buggy, horse, and a nice Jersey cow. About this time I perfected a patent on which I had been working for a good while, by which I could take a piece of common oak furniture and turn it into quartered oak furniture. I sold the use of the patent to a dozen or more furniture factories, and then sold the patent outright to Joseph Rose & Company, on South Second Street, Philadelphia. I called the name of the process Royal American Quartered Oak. I was now receiving a number of offers to take charge of different furniture factories which I told my boss about so he raised my salary five dollars a week to induce me to remain with him. I went along on this basis, but, these other people kept writing to me to come along, so I finally gave a month's notice and went to work for A. G. Bert at Yeadon, Pennsylvania, and we moved to the adjoing borough of Lansdowne. After I had been with these people about a year and a half, a furniture factory in Philadelphia offered me thirty dollars a week. [Personal Recollections of James E. Travis (unpublished)]

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