When we were little, Mom and Dad bowled in a couples league at Forest Lanes in Forestville, NY on Friday nights.  Since we lived in Dunkirk, after supper we'd all get in the car and drive over to Grandpa Spec's house.  Grandpa and Grandma Spec lived outside of Forestville on Creek Road.  They had an old, small house and a three story barn, and a garage, and a tool shed in Grandma's flower garden near the house, and Grandpa had a big vegetable garden out between the cow pasture and the road.  Across the road Uncle Rich, who was Grandpa's brother, had a newer house, where he lived with Aunt Pauline, and my second cousins Donnie and Linda.  Dick had already got married and moved out by this time, and he lived a half mile up on Laona Road, just off Creek Road, in a new house he built on part of Uncle Rich's farm land.
Mom and Dad would drop us off with Grandpa and Grandma Spec to be babysat.  After they visited for a while, Mom and Dad went to the bowling alley for their league and whatever else they did there - sometimes supper, because the Watermans (Rich and Fran) who ran the bowling alley had a great menu.  They had terrific beef on kummelweck sandwiches. They were so good we later had them cater my high school graduation party.  Anyway, we were left with Grandpa and Grandma.  If it was still daylight, I would go out in the garden with Grandpa and follow him around if he was picking anything.  Then I'd follow him down to the lowest level of the barn, where there was usually one cow and a calf.  Grandpa would milk the cow, spill some of the milk into a pie tin for the barn cats, and give some to the calf.  Sometimes I would get some, or the rest would go in the fridge.  Grandpa sometimes milked the cow into a pail that had a rubber teat on the side, and that's how the calf would drink the milk.  This was all done by hand.  I would follow Grandpa around until all his chores were done.  We'd throw a bale or two of hay from the upstairs of the barn down through a trap door to the basement where the cows were.
After Grandpa's chores were done, I'd run across the road to "help" Uncle Rich with his chores.  He tolerated me pretty well, but he didn't necessarily like me being there following him around.  He had 20 or 30 cows, some heifers and some calves, and he milked his cows with a milking machine.  The vacuum pump ran on electricity and was in the milkhouse, right next door to the barn and the silo.   The vacuum lines went into the barn, and along both rows of stanchions.  He usually had two milkers going, and each cow got milked in turn while Uncle Rich did the other chores of feeding them, etc.  The only thing Uncle Rich would let me do was use the big pitch fork to lift the cow flops out of the gutter behind the cows and put them into the wheel barrow he kept by the back door.  If the wheelbarrow got full, he wouldn't let me wheel it out along the plank on top of the manure pile and dump it - it was way too heavy for me anyway.
After Uncle Rich's chores were done I would go back across the road.  Grandpa usually watched TV and Grandma came into the living room after all her chores were done in the kitchen.  Usually we'd make a pot of popcorn in an aluminum pot on the gas stove to eat while we watched TV.  Sometimes Grandma would make up some caramel sauce and we'd make popcorn balls.  They also had an old pump organ in the front sitting room.  Sometimes I would play the organ.  This was an organ that had foot pedals that powered a bellows, and you had to continuously pump the bellows for any sound to come out.
My biggest memory of Friday nights was one weekend that we had a really bad thunderstorm.  I had run across the road to help Uncle Rich.  When the storm hit we had just started doing the chores.  It was dark out, and the lightning was pretty fierce.  Then the power went out.  The milker was still on the first cow.  So we waited, after fining flashlights, for the power to come back on.  But the power didn't come back on.  We had kept feeding the cows, but they weren't getting milked.
Uncle Rich started talking about how the barn had a system built into it to run the milkers off of a tractor.  There was a pipe that went through the barn wall that you could hook a vacuum hose to.  This would provide the vacuum needed to run the entire milker system.  The connection on the outside barn wall could be connected via a vacuum hose to Guggenheimer valve.  Uncle Rich called lots of things "Guggenheimers."  Especially if it was a high tech item.  In this case, the Guggenheimer was a vacuum valve that you could screw into a spark plug hole in the tractor engine.  You took one of the spark plugs out, and screwed the Guggenheimer valve into its place.  The valve had a handle that you could swing to turn the vacuum on or off.  And it had a hose fitting that you could plug a vacuum hose onto. 
So we just pulled Uncle Rich's Allis Chalmers nose up to the barn wall (in the driving rain) and shut it off.  Then we set about searching the barn for all the necessary fittings and parts.  Uncle Rich kept mumbling about "there used to be a way to milk the cows off the tractor" and "there needs to be a pipe for this part" and "I thought I put that hose over behind the silo."  He hadn't used this system in years, if he ever had.  So we found a bunch of parts.  He took a spark plug out and screwed in the Guggenheimer valve.  He started the tractor and it ran with only 3 plugs.  We found the hose and other fittings and got all the parts hooked up on the outside of the barn.  Mostly all I did was to hold the flashlight so he could work.
On the inside of the barn we had to tie the pipe that came through the wall from the tractor line into the milker system.  Uncle Rich found a bunch of parts and was up on a step ladder with pipe wrenches and me holding the flashlight.  He was trying to figure out all the connections and it was getting later and I was trying to be very helpful.  I was pretty excited because this would be really cool - to milk the cows by tractor!  Plus I liked helping Uncle Rich and this would be an amazing accomplishment.  He couldn't figure out which parts went where and kept trying them different ways.  I kept suggesting "Maybe it goes other end around" or "maybe the big end goes down" and etc. until Uncle Rich finally got exasperated and said "Maybe shit boy, shut up!"
He eventually got it all hooked up and we milked the cows by tractor.  What a great memory.