The Burlington Free Press from Burlington, Vermont • Page 50

Jones Brookers take care of their own rib- '3r fi4J iUfcA "We all take care of our own," Mrs. Francis Jacques was saying, seated in her cozy living room, heated by a large wood furnace. "We don't ask anything. We look out for ourselves and live independently. We fight our own battles.

"We're not like in the city and go and call the police and say we're scared. "We go out with a gun and shoot in the air." Ella Jacques, her husband and their adopted son live in a single-story wood-frame home on Jones Brook Road. Jacques, who is 69 but sometimes "feels 90," spends long hours puttering with his goats and other animals, or working in his shed, which is filled with tools, bolts, nails, screws and other, supplies. Mrs. Jacques, raised on the Brook, thinks most of the trouble comes from outsiders.

"It's basically the outside people that come here that are wild. It isn't these Jones Brook families that are outlaws," she said. "Jones Brook has a reputation," she said, "of being a bunch of poor shacks with people not trying to improve themselves. "I know I live in a shack, but we take care of our own. "You want to sell your property, you say it's on Jones Brook and that's against you." But Mrs.

Jacques bubbles with pride and enthusiasm when she talks about her hard but fun-filled life. Popular adventures were the kitchen junkets, parties with square dancing and singing at a neighbor's home. They usually were held in the kitchen, the largest room in the farmhouse. Fiddlers were a featured attraction. "They weren't paid.

They just played for enjoyment. The women brought food, the children stayed upstairs and the men paid their way 99 in. In these days, though, most Jones Brook families watch TV, she said. "They don't get together like they used to. It's not like the old-time families that got together for Francis Jacques and one of his horses card playing and dancing." In these days, it's also a struggle for some of the older Jones Brook families to get by.

Jacques, who hasn't worked since 1949 because of a disability, spends his time repairing and reselling ars. And he saves everything. "If there's a washer on the ground, he has to have it," Mrs. Jacques said. "I've been out there all day long, puttering around, one thing after another," her husband said.

The other day, he was repairing a barbed wire fence with bare hands, in sub-freezing temperatures. "The only trouble with me is I love animals," Jacques said. From time to time he keeps goats, rabbits, chickens, pigs, horses, cats, dogs and geese. "You know he's called the skunk man?" Mrs. Jacques asked.

"See this stuff here," Jacques said, holding out a small pint-sized jar in front of him. "That's what keeps me going." It was a small jar of skunk oil. Jacques catches skunks alive and and "shoots them in the head. That stuns them right there. They don't make no mess." "He goes out and gets them," Mrs.

Jacques continued. "He's never been wet on yet. He boils the fat down for oil for arthritis." "The only thing that got me walkin' is skunk oil," Jacques said. "When they've run over one, they're not good because the blood gets squashed into the fat. "I'm getting awful low on it right now.

I'll go anywhere to pick up one." He said he's got the police on the lookout for him, but he'd appreciate hearing from anyone who's got a live skunk. "Ten minutes after I massage my knee with skunk oil, I feel fine." then, he's had no love for snakes. "My mother played a melodeon," she remembers, and "my mother and father used to sing a lot." Once in a while, they'd go to church. But, they sometimes heard conflicting messages from the visiting preachers. "One would say you should plait your hair and fix up, and another would sav, 'Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like the lilies in the fields.

You shouldn't fix up and brighten "It was really funny," she says. Did Jones Brookers of her generation go to church regularly? "No," she says, although "we used to go some. It was more the younger people. I don't think I went after I was 12 or 14. We weren't very religious out there." It was the same for the next generation, Kenneth Smith says.

"I imagine there were some of them that did come downstreet" to attend services, he says, but "I don't know any of them that did. "That's one thing they never built up there is a church," he says. Getting downstreet has always been a chore for folks who live up the Brook. For some, it has been a matter of economics, of not having a vehicle in which to ride. But even for those who always have had a car, the four miles or so of what Mrs.

Ruggles calls the "forgotten road" is a bone-jarring ride in summer, a slippery trip in the snow and sometimes impassable during rainy periods. One of the families in the more remote part of the district is the Ciampis, who bring together much of the past and present of Jones Brook. Leo 'Bud' Ciampi lives in a green, cape-style home just above the confluence of Jones and Herring brooks. His 73-year-old mother, Mrs. Mario Ciampi, lives in a small trailer nearby, and his married daughter, Vickie, lives even further up the road in a new mobile home.

Vickie says her rural upbringing has given her a sense of independence that isn't shared by some who are used to a more urban environment. "If you were a Jones Brooker, you walked where you went," she asserts. She admits, however, that she was a bit unsettled when she first moved up to her mobile home and heard all sorts of animal noises around her. "It was mating season for the bears, and they were calling back and forth across the mountain." But Jones Brookers have learned how to take care of themselves, she contends. "Especially if Continued on rage 16 Continued from Page 13 bolted into the house, slammed the kitchen door and upset his father's shaving mirror.

His father cut himself, and then "belted me," Kelley recalls. And ever since then, he's had no love for snakes. "I was shootin' them with a .22 pistol," he says, "but they got so they could duck em." He has upgraded to a 12-gauge shotgun. To get to the old Jones Brook school, Kelley, used to ride a Flexible Flyer, hitched up to his dog, Buddy. He and the dog would slide and run down the long hill to the Jones Brook school, and then he'd pat the dog in the rear and Buddy would head for home, dragging the sled two miles back up the hill.

Traveling on snow was both a necessity and a form of recreation on Jones Brook. Bea McManis has warm memories of cold times spent with her neighbors "out sleddin' and tobogganin'." Other forms of recreation in pre-television days on Jones Brook centered on visiting the folks who lived nearby. "Like everyone else," Mrs. McManis recalls, "we had one of those old phonographs; we used to go back and forth to the neighbors; we played cards a lot; we used to sing. 14VermonterSundoy, December 28, 1975.