- My NEW FAVORITE Comic Strip!
- Tags: | Edit Tags Saturday January 26, 2008 - 10:24am (MST) Edit | Delete | Permanent Link | 0 Comments
- HOM: It's All Relative & Half-Baked!
- Relatives: You don't choose them, but they sure can affect you.
I always liked uncle Darrel. He usually treated me like a friend and made me feel like I mattered, but Dad, his brother, made me feel like I could never be good enough to please him.
What made me take a new look at them was a conversation with one of Darrel's kids last year, who told me he always wished Floyd was his father, because uncle Floyd treated him like a friend and made him feel like he mattered while he could never please his Dad.
I guess there was something in the way my step-grandparents raised their kids that brought that out in them, but it was mind-blowing to hear a mirror image my thoughts & words coming out of my cousin's mouth.
I didn't know the rest of the Ridenours very well.
Floyd McElroy, co-founder of McElroy & Wilken, was married to Dad's sister, Ida. Mac was a kick. I was rarely around Dad's other brother, Elmer, but I sure remember some holiday meals at Grandma Ridenour's where Mac & Elmer were a lot of fun with their practical jokes on each other and the rest of the family. I remember Dad looking away from the table and Mac dropping a dill pickle into his coffee. I remember the look on Dad's face when he went to take a drink, too! I think it was Mac that used to scandalize Mom - whenever he ladled her prized white gravy onto his plate he always sprinkled a few tablespoons of sugar over it.
Elmer had three daughters & Mac had one, and they were all older and more distant than Darrel's kids, so I really never knew them or what they were like.
(Flashback: Mom loved to cook & can and make preserves and was an expert in the kitchen, but I remember when she was in a hurry and grabbed the apple cider instead of the vinegar when she was making bread and butter pickles. Nasty is too weak a word for that batch!)
(Flashback: I must be hungry - food is on my mind! Anyway, one thing Mom never did master was making dumplings. Grandma Streit made the best dumplings I ever tasted, but Mom used the same recipe and never had as good a result.)
Okay, I just ordered pizza - and THEN remembered Grampa Handcock telling of visiting some indian friends near Miles City and being offered some cooked puppy. He said he turned it down.
Yum, Pizza!
TBCTags: | Edit Tags Friday January 25, 2008 - 07:37pm (MST) Edit | Delete | Permanent Link | 0 Comments - HOM: Guns & Gibberish
- Guns were a low-key but important part of life on the farm. Every home had a shotgun, a Winchester 30-30 or a .22 rifle, and sometimes all three, usually in the kitchen closet or on the porch where they were handy when needed. Hawks, owls, crows, magpies, skunks, weasels, feral animals and occasional larger predators were all classed as shoot-on-sight vermin. All of them preyed on our farm animals, magpies would literally pick the eyes out of baby animals if they could get to them.
Growing up around guns gave you a different attitude toward them than city folks had. As kids, we were taught at an early age that guns were dangerous and were to be treated with great respect, and the first sign of a parent trusting a kid's maturity was when they were first allowed to fire them.
Ian was a bit of a gun nut even for those days. I am told that he used a Savage .22 Hi-Power, a very controversial cartridge, for hunting, and I know he owned an early Colt Woodsman and a Remington 12C pump .22 as well as the old single-shot 16 gauge.
Most of us kids started out with cap guns and graduated to BB guns when our parents felt we would handle them carefully. Usually mishandling one and getting caught at it meant the BB gun went back into the closet for a year or so until the parent was will to try again.
My BB guns were all lever actions and I envied the kids with Daisy Pump BB guns - those pumps had a lot more power even though they held fewer BBs.
When we had proven ourselves with the BB guns, we graduated to .22 rifles under strict supervision which gradually eased if we lived up to the trust we had been given. (I lost my guns twice - the first time I shot out a window in the garage, the second time I put a hole in a neighbor's mailbox with a .22. I can't argue with dad's decision, looking back. It was fair.)
The folks raised chickens, as I have mentioned, and at one point hauled an old chicken house over from Aunt Minnie's farm and set it up with a little wire-mesh-fenced yard attached. Back in the day when I was still in the BB gun stage, Mom & Dad were startled by an outburst of noise from that hen house. A skunk got in and started killing chickens. Dad grabbed his .22 and scrambled around trying to find shells - and only located two! Apparently the first shot missed and the second shot wounded the skunk because he ended up killing it with a shovel and then spent the rest of the night bathing in tomato juice to get rid of the smell. I think they ended up burning his clothes and burying his favorite old leather slippers, but after that he kept ammo on hand.
When I got a bit older I was given traps and the use of the .22 to keep the skunk population thinned down. Being efficiently lazy, I used uncle Bill's post-hole digger for disposing of the carcasses. (Wish I still had that digger. It was an antique auger type and the most efficient hand tool I ever used. I have never seen another like it.)
Neighbor Vic Bjornrud had some skunk stories too. He set a trap by a stump along the creek, saw at a distance that he had one trapped, grabbed a club and snuck up behind the stump, figuring on jumping up and clobbering the thing before it knew he was there. The skunk was faster though...
On another winter day he was burning some old slash and wood when his dog drug up a dead skunk. Vic threw the cadaver on the fire, then stood by to warm himself. Either Butyl Mercaptin (skunks secrete it) is explosive or pure hydraulic pressure got too high - the scent glands exploded and sprayed Vic from the waist down. His wife, Gladys, said she would never forget the sight of Vic, dressed in hat and coat and boots and long johns, wading up to the house through the snow carrying his pants at arm's length.
Other gun memories? I ran out of BB's for my old lever-action BB gun so I was just using it as a pop gun - all noise. Unfortunately there was a BB stuck somewhere inside and it came loose when I was in the kitchen aiming out a window. Mom covered for me on that one.
Mom did a boo-boo of her own. A big hawk landed out on the barn so she raised the bathroom window and rested the gun on the sill. Unfortunately the muzzle was a little too far back when she fired and the bullet cut a neat groove through the window ledge. Some years later I did the same thing shooting at a magpie out of my bedroom. Groovy!
Cousin Dale scored the most prestigious kill though. The farms had been missing tame cats and partially eaten cat bodies were turning up for a few weeks when Darrel's dog treed a bobcat in his back yard and Dale shot it. After that no more cats disappeared & he was the hero of the school.
Dad taught me to shoot with an old Winchester model 68 single shot .22 and a target tacked on the side of the old dog house, but I envied Dale and his Winchester pump .22.
More on this subject later, most likely.
TBCTags: | Edit Tags Friday January 25, 2008 - 03:26pm (MST) Edit | Delete | Permanent Link | 0 Comments - George Orwell's Bookshop Memories
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This was so good I had to post it. (And a hat-tip to BoingBoing for the link!)
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George Orwell : Bookshop Memories
When I worked in a second-hand bookshop — so easily pictured, if you don't work in one, as a kind of paradise where charming old gentlemen browse eternally among calf-bound folios — the thing that chiefly struck me was the rarity of really bookish people. Our shop had an exceptionally interesting stock, yet I doubt whether ten per cent of our customers knew a good book from a bad one. First edition snobs were much commoner than lovers of literature, but oriental students haggling over cheap textbooks were commoner still, and vague-minded women looking for birthday presents for their nephews were commonest of all.
Many of the people who came to us were of the kind who would be a nuisance anywhere but have special opportunities in a bookshop. For example, the dear old lady who ‘wants a book for an invalid' (a very common demand, that), and the other dear old lady who read such a nice book in 1897 and wonders whether you can find her a copy. Unfortunately she doesn't remember the title or the author's name or what the book was about, but she does remember that it had a red cover. But apart from these there are two well-known types of pest by whom every second-hand bookshop is haunted. One is the decayed person smelling of old breadcrusts who comes every day, sometimes several times a day, and tries to sell you worthless books. The other is the person who orders large quantities of books for which he has not the smallest intention of paying. In our shop we sold nothing on credit, but we would put books aside, or order them if necessary, for people who arranged to fetch them away later. Scarcely half the people who ordered books from us ever came back. It used to puzzle me at first. What made them do it? They would come in and demand some rare and expensive book, would make us promise over and over again to keep it for them, and then would vanish never to return. But many of them, of course, were unmistakable paranoiacs. They used to talk in a grandiose manner about themselves and tell the most ingenious stories to explain how they had happened to come out of doors without any money — stories which, in many cases, I am sure they themselves believed. In a town like London there are always plenty of not quite certifiable lunatics walking the streets, and they tend to gravitate towards bookshops, because a bookshop is one of the few places where you can hang about for a long time without spending any money. In the end one gets to know these people almost at a glance. For all their big talk there is something moth-eaten and aimless about them. Very often, when we were dealing with an obvious paranoiac, we would put aside the books he asked for and then put them back on the shelves the moment he had gone. None of them, I noticed, ever attempted to take books away without paying for them; merely to order them was enough — it gave them, I suppose, the illusion that they were spending real money.
Like most second-hand bookshops we had various sidelines. We sold second-hand typewriters, for instance, and also stamps — used stamps, I mean. Stamp-collectors are a strange, silent, fish-like breed, of all ages, but only of the male sex; women, apparently, fail to see the peculiar charm of gumming bits of coloured paper into albums. We also sold sixpenny horoscopes compiled by somebody who claimed to have foretold the Japanese earthquake. They were in sealed envelopes and I never opened one of them myself, but the people who bought them often came back and told us how ‘true’ their horoscopes had been. (Doubtless any horoscope seems ‘true’ if it tells you that you are highly attractive to the opposite sex and your worst fault is generosity.) We did a good deal of business in children's books, chiefly ‘remainders’. Modern books for children are rather horrible things, especially when you see them in the mass. Personally I would sooner give a child a copy of Petrenius Arbiter than Peter Pan, but even Barrie seems manly and wholesome compared with some of his later imitators. At Christmas time we spent a feverish ten days struggling with Christmas cards and calendars, which are tiresome things to sell but good business while the season lasts. It used to interest me to see the brutal cynicism with which Christian sentiment is exploited. The touts from the Christmas card firms used to come round with their catalogues as early as June. A phrase from one of their invoices sticks in my memory. It was: ‘2 doz. Infant Jesus with rabbits’.
But our principal sideline was a lending library — the usual ‘twopenny no-deposit’ library of five or six hundred volumes, all fiction. How the book thieves must love those libraries! It is the easiest crime in the world to borrow a book at one shop for twopence, remove the label and sell it at another shop for a shilling. Nevertheless booksellers generally find that it pays them better to have a certain number of books stolen (we used to lose about a dozen a month) than to frighten customers away by demanding a deposit.
Our shop stood exactly on the frontier between Hampstead and Camden Town, and we were frequented by all types from baronets to bus-conductors. Probably our library subscribers were a fair cross-section of London's reading public. It is therefore worth noting that of all the authors in our library the one who ‘went out’ the best was — Priestley? Hemingway? Walpole? Wodehouse? No, Ethel M. Dell, with Warwick Deeping a good second and Jeffrey Farnol, I should say, third. Dell's novels, of course, are read solely by women, but by women of all kinds and ages and not, as one might expect, merely by wistful spinsters and the fat wives of tobacconists. It is not true that men don't read novels, but it is true that there are whole branches of fiction that they avoid. Roughly speaking, what one might call the average novel — the ordinary, good-bad, Galsworthy-and-water stuff which is the norm of the English novel — seems to exist only for women. Men read either the novels it is possible to respect, or detective stories. But their consumption of detective stories is terrific. One of our subscribers to my knowledge read four or five detective stories every week for over a year, besides others which he got from another library. What chiefly surprised me was that he never read the same book twice. Apparently the whole of that frightful torrent of trash (the pages read every year would, I calculated, cover nearly three quarters of an acre) was stored for ever in his memory. He took no notice of titles or author's names, but he could tell by merely glancing into a book whether be had ‘had it already’.
In a lending library you see people's real tastes, not their pretended ones, and one thing that strikes you is how completely the ‘classical’ English novelists have dropped out of favour. It is simply useless to put Dickens, Thackeray, Jane Austen, Trollope, etc. into the ordinary lending library; nobody takes them out. At the mere sight of a nineteenth-century novel people say, ‘Oh, but that's old!’ and shy away immediately. Yet it is always fairly easy to sell Dickens, just as it is always easy to sell Shakespeare. Dickens is one of those authors whom people are ‘always meaning to’ read, and, like the Bible, he is widely known at second hand. People know by hearsay that Bill Sikes was a burglar and that Mr Micawber had a bald head, just as they know by hearsay that Moses was found in a basket of bulrushes and saw the ‘back parts’ of the Lord. Another thing that is very noticeable is the growing unpopularity of American books. And another — the publishers get into a stew about this every two or three years — is the unpopularity of short stories. The kind of person who asks the librarian to choose a book for him nearly always starts by saying ‘I don't want short stories’, or ‘I do not desire little stories’, as a German customer of ours used to put it. If you ask them why, they sometimes explain that it is too much fag to get used to a new set of characters with every story; they like to ‘get into’ a novel which demands no further thought after the first chapter. I believe, though, that the writers are more to blame here than the readers. Most modern short stories, English and American, are utterly lifeless and worthless, far more so than most novels. The short stories which are stories are popular enough, vide D. H. Lawrence, whose short stories are as popular as his novels.
Would I like to be a bookseller de métier? On the whole — in spite of my employer's kindness to me, and some happy days I spent in the shop — no.
Given a good pitch and the right amount of capital, any educated person ought to be able to make a small secure living out of a bookshop. Unless one goes in for ‘rare’ books it is not a difficult trade to learn, and you start at a great advantage if you know anything about the insides of books. (Most booksellers don't. You can get their measure by having a look at the trade papers where they advertise their wants. If you don't see an ad. for Boswell's Decline and Fall you are pretty sure to see one for The Mill on the Floss by T. S. Eliot.) Also it is a humane trade which is not capable of being vulgarized beyond a certain point. The combines can never squeeze the small independent bookseller out of existence as they have squeezed the grocer and the milkman. But the hours of work are very long — I was only a part-time employee, but my employer put in a seventy-hour week, apart from constant expeditions out of hours to buy books — and it is an unhealthy life. As a rule a bookshop is horribly cold in winter, because if it is too warm the windows get misted over, and a bookseller lives on his windows. And books give off more and nastier dust than any other class of objects yet invented, and the top of a book is the place where every bluebottle prefers to die.
But the real reason why I should not like to be in the book trade for life is that while I was in it I lost my love of books. A bookseller has to tell lies about books, and that gives him a distaste for them; still worse is the fact that he is constantly dusting them and hauling them to and fro. There was a time when I really did love books — loved the sight and smell and feel of them, I mean, at least if they were fifty or more years old. Nothing pleased me quite so much as to buy a job lot of them for a shilling at a country auction. There is a peculiar flavour about the battered unexpected books you pick up in that kind of collection: minor eighteenth-century poets, out-of-date gazeteers, odd volumes of forgotten novels, bound numbers of ladies’ magazines of the sixties. For casual reading — in your bath, for instance, or late at night when you are too tired to go to bed, or in the odd quarter of an hour before lunch — there is nothing to touch a back number of the Girl's Own Paper. But as soon as I went to work in the bookshop I stopped buying books. Seen in the mass, five or ten thousand at a time, books were boring and even slightly sickening. Nowadays I do buy one occasionally, but only if it is a book that I want to read and can't borrow, and I never buy junk. The sweet smell of decaying paper appeals to me no longer. It is too closely associated in my mind with paranoiac customers and dead bluebottles.
1936 THE END
____BD____
George Orwell: ‘Bookshop Memories’
First published: Fortnightly. — GB, London. — November 1936.
Reprinted:
— ‘The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell’. — 1968Tags: | Edit Tags Friday January 25, 2008 - 12:36pm (MST) Edit | Delete | Permanent Link | 0 Comments - MorDoc!
- Doc Burns had a nurse we will call Duffy, and I really hated her.
My ear aches only responded to antibiotics, usually in shot form, maybe along the homeopathic lines of "like treats like", pain for pain. If so, Duffy was a lot more effective than the Doc.
A shot from Doc Burns was a "Slam-Bam-Thank-You-Ma'am" epdisode, over before you knew it. Nurse Duffy was much, much, slower. The Doc used a triple-tap, first the alcohol-loaded wad of cotton, SLAP, then the needle, SLAP, the then swab again, SLAP! All done in under a second or so.
Duffy would sterilize the area, make two or three penetrating "hestiation" pokes, then ease the needle in a bit, twist it a bit to realign, then slowly push it in a bit, give it another twist or two for luck and then shove it home, slooowly press the plunger, let the needle stay in place while she wiggled it a bit, then slooowly draw it out. Sometimes she decided to change locations when the needle was half in, so the process was repeated.
Getting shots from her ended the day I twisted around and slapped the needle out of her hand when she was in the "aligning" stage. I got in trouble, but Doc gave me my shots from then on.
Looking back, I suspect Duffy was more careful & cautious than malicious, but to a pre-teen kid, anyone that handed out that kind of pain was pure evil. The good part about Duffy was that years later the Navy Medics & Trainees didn't hold too many terrors for me, I had BTDT in spades.
(Doc Burns' office was in the old Butteries' building which burned down years ago. "The Lot", where the kids gather in the evenings on Main Street, was its old location. My Gandmother-in-law always called it "Butterflies" when she visited.)
As mentioned, Mom switched to Dr.s Wildgen & Gould, who formed Family Medical Associates on North Main. All the memories I have of them are at least positive and some are actually good.
Heh - when Doc Gould stitched my ear up, he mave have given me something for pain. All I did was tell jokes while he worked, and Mom said most of them were quite raunchy. I assume I absorbed them from my numerous uncles, at least that is who I blamed when she quizzed me.Tags: | Edit Tags Friday January 25, 2008 - 11:47am (MST) Edit | Delete | Permanent Link | 0 Comments - HOM: Docs, Diseases, & Dips
- I spent more time than I liked around doctors. I had a lot of earaches and maybe more than my share of colds and such, as well as the usual run of accidents
The first accident I remember was when I was quite young. Mom & I were at the lunch counter in the bus station, in those days located on Main Street across from Norm's, and I slipped off the stool and bit my tongue about half off. This is buried way too far back in the caves of time for me to recall details but I think Rudy was there at the time.
I mentioned the pig-riding episode, but another unique experience the doctor never forgot was digging splinters of wood out of my scalp. I found an old wall tent and erected it at the edge of the field using an old rough 2x4 as the ridge pole. At some point when I was in the tent it collapsed and the ridge pole caught me a sliding bow on the crown which embedded a number of slivers too deeply for mom to dig them out. The doctor thought that was pretty funny, but I didn't.
I still have a piece of pencil lead in one leg - I was trying to stab something & missed and nailed my leg. The Doc said it would be better to leave the lead in my leg as it would have required too much cutting to get it out. (I can't even say I outgrew that klutziness, as I am sitting here nursing the remnants of a concussion from an apparent slip on the ice the other day.)
Speaking of concussions, I got one in grade school that was life changing.
It was late winter of my seventh grade year, and as usual for that time of year a series of thaws and freezes left shallow frozen ponds in the low spots of the fields. One was just outside the school grounds, so we all climbed the fence and had a lot of fun running down and sliding on the ice.
The last thing I remember of that was seeing Jerry Fredericks fall just in front of me when I was running. There is a very vague memory of sitting in the school surrounded by kids, another vague one of Mom speeding into town with me, and then a clearer memory of being in the hospital for a couple of days. I had a bad concussion and a gash below and parallel to my lower lip that went completely through from hitting the ice chin first.
This was life changing in a couple of ways - the minor one being that all the kids were mad at me because the teacher put a ban on sliding on the ice or being outside the school grounds. The major one was that for several years thereafter anything that jarred my head caused massive pain and headaches. A lot of things ended up hurting too much for me to enjoy doing them, and it definitely gave me a handicap when I got in my first real fight in high school.
I got the usual measles, mumps & chicken pox, but I got mine in the summertime and most of the other kids got theirs during the school year. Mom kept me bedridden while I was sick. When I had them, Dad went and stayed at his mother's till I was past the contagious stages.
I think I had the measles when Chuck O'Connell took pity on me and dropped off a book for me to read. The book was "Star Man's Son", SF by Andre Norton, and it hooked me on the genre for the rest of my life. Chuck's son, Larry, is a good friend, and I tried to get that original book from him but it had been donated to the VA hospital in Helena.
(Flashback: I was out of my teens and working for the Forest Service before I discovered that Andre Norton was a woman, and I called the guy that told me that a liar. I couldn't believe a woman could write that well!) (Confession: I still rarely read books written by women or with female protagonists & get called Chauvinistic if I confess my preferences out loud.)
A tonsillectomy and adenoid removal finally fixed the earache problems. I think Mom wanted Doc Burns to do it but he didn't want to and that was when she switched to Drs. Wildgen & Gould, the ones that kept me patched up & pieces of ear sewn on for the next few years. Being free of earaches was a major blessing, I spent way too many hours in a lot of pain with them.
I always had foot problems as a kid, being born with very flat feet. They kept giving me shoes with huge arch supports to try to build them up but all they did was hurt. Sometime in grade school they gave up and let my feet stay flat. I have never enjoyed walking and often wonder how much of that is due to those early foot problems.
Um, lets see, I think there were a couple of the usual less-memorable accidents. I remember playing in Bill's barn and slicing my hands pretty good when I slid down a chain that was hanging from a beam. I remember tumbling down the stairs at Grandma Streit's, smacking open the door at the bottom and coming to rest against the refrigerator, and Mom not letting me play upstairs any more. I remember falling down a set of stairs with a model airplane at someone's house while we were visiting - I survived, biut the model didn't.
(Unrelated Flashback: Mom was scared to death of snakes, & I remember once she was sitting in the car and I walked up with a chunk of rubber hose and dropped it in her lap, asking "What kind of snake is this?". she should have killed me...)Tags: | Edit Tags Wednesday January 23, 2008 - 12:34pm (MST) Edit | Delete | Permanent Link | 0 Comments
This is from Cousin Jerry, Toot's son
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Hi Jim. Unfortunately, Mom's mind just isn't up to the task of remembering anything, particularly as it might relate to specific dates. However, she said that while you mom was there, she stayed with Mom and Dad in Long Beach. Mom and Dad married on Aug 16,1942, so that places Mary there no earlier than August 1942. You probably know something about her courtship with your Dad (Ian), so maybe you can work backwards from their date of marriage to see when she returned to Montana.
I am enclosing a copy of what Mom told Marilynn in 2003, so that's probably about as good as we're gonna do.
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ABOUT MARGARET D. STREIT NICHOLS
The first generation Streit family came to America from Bern, Switzerland when Rudolph, Margaret’s father, was about 3 or 4 years old. He was born in 1878. Though young, he recalled having to help at home in Bern as a child by taking a broom and dustpan to pick up horse manure to use as fertilizer. He also recalled that there was so much sea sickness aboard ship from Europe. It is uncertain what Rudolph did growing up in Iowa, but among a few endeavors, he farmed and began his large family.
Emma Isch had married Frank Will who died of pernicious anemia ten months into the marriage leaving Emma pregnant with their daughter, Caroline. Widowed Emma and her single sister married brothers: Rudolph and Sam Streit. (Sam’s first wife died during the influenza epidemic. His second wife was ‘Miss Burger’ who had tended the house and several children.) Rudolph and Sam had 2 brothers and 2 sisters. One sister was Priscilla, or "Miss Prissy" who married the man who invented the ABC Washing Machine. Margaret remembers visiting them in Iowa and their large house where they "had dinner and spent the night". The second sister was Lena who married and had 2 children. Children born to Rudolph and Emma, in Iowa, included Bill, (whose twin brother died in infancy), Minnie, and Tom. The 4 brothers moved their families to Leighton, Alabama, a small town with one store, leaving the sisters in Iowa. The brothers, Rudolph, Friedrich, Christian and Samuel had bought property to develop individual farms. Uncle Sam’s home was a plantation house already built on his property. Margaret recalls a curved bannister stairway and a veranda.
Children born in Alabama included Rudy, Mary, Margaret and Paul. Two other of Grandma’s children died in infancy. Margaret was born August 18, 1915; the 10th child. The brothers raised cotton primarily, and all the children helped with the chores. Margaret recalls picking cotton and attempting to milk a cow. She ‘lost’ this job, however, when the cow stepped into the milk pail. Her mother’s side of the family was quite musical. Emma played the accordion, piano and the organ, including the organ in the Lutheran Church for many years. One uncle had a band and played the clarinet as did his son, Harry. The entire family spent most holidays at Rudolph and Emma’s home - "at our house" as Margaret stated. The annual 4th of July celebration, however, was at Uncle Sam’s home where he had a barbeque, and they made home-made ice cream...churned by hand. There were usually "about 30 or so" at the events.
Margaret liked cats. Her older sisters, Minnie and Mary, had beautiful china dolls, but Margaret preferred to play with the livelier cats, dress them, and feed them liquid aspirin as medicine which all the children had to take. Mary did not tolerate cats in the house, however. "She would take them, and ‘sling’ them out the back door because she didn’t like to clean up their messes."
Until Margaret was 12 years old, "every couple of years", her Grandfather, John Isch who had moved to Montana came to visit the family in Leighton. Margaret does not recall Grandma Isch traveling with him. Grandpa Isch eventually bought farms for his children in and around Kallispell, Montana. While Rudolph’s three brothers remained in Alabama, he moved his family from Leighton to Kallispell in two vehicles; "an old truck, (about a 1917 model) and a Dodge touring car". This was 1928. They slept on the ground in an old tent, camping in designated camp sites as many other travelers would do. Meals were cooked on a gas stove and they "lived on canned salmon during the trip, and all the silverware smelled of fish". Margaret thought she "never wanted salmon again". Fishing for fish other than salmon, however, was good in Montana especially where they lived on Ashley Creek. The farm included a two story house with a dug-out basement. A well supplied water from a single line, to the house. Rainwater was collected in wooden barrels placed under the eves. Water was heated on a wood cook stove. Bathing was performed in a galvanized tub in the kitchen with the oldest in the family going "first". It was not until the late 50's that Grandma’s dream of a big, luxurious bathroom with running water and a porcelain tub, came true. Among other tasks, Grandma prided herself on two types of gardens; vegetables and fruits as well as showy flowers. (Margaret recalls that as a child, Jerry asked to "please pass the strawberry patch" at the table. Freshly separated cream was a perfect tasty addition .)
The school-aged children walked 2 miles to a one-room school which still stands in a field near the farm. (Years later, Jerry also began school in this building.) The teacher, Miss Ott, lived in the quarters provided in the building and taught first through the eighth grade. On snowy or blizzard days, a sleigh and horse took them to school. During harvest season, Grandpa rose early to work at Grandma’s sister’s farm, (Ella or "Ellie") across the river requiring the children to rise earlier than usual and be taken to the school, often before Miss Ott had risen from bed. Margaret would rather walk anyway because she did not like this early morning routine. Neither did Miss Ott! Also recalled were the wet puddles on the floor. Apparently, the "new" or "younger" kids wet the floor until they learned otherwise. In Margaret’s words, "they weren’t even ‘house-broken’".
Margaret taught herself to drive a vehicle on the farm simply by watching the other drivers. She never did drive a truck.
The oldest sister, Caroline, did not reach her goal to become a teacher. It was Grandpa’s contention that "high school was the ruination, not education of youth as it presented "citified" ideas. If given a good education, he found that the young people would leave the farm for the town and city life. However, with Caroline as an advocate and with Grandma’s encouragement, Margaret was determined to graduate from high school. It required leaving home and living with the Miller family in town doing housework while attending school. "All the girls did housework in those days." After high school, Margaret married and Jerome Anthony was born in 1939. The marriage did not work, and Margaret left home, temporarily, leaving Jerry in the care of his wonderful grandparents. With her close friend, Pat Ridell and Pat’s Uncle Guy Manning, the three went to Southern California for a visit. Margaret stayed while the others returned to Montana. Living with a Jewish family in Beverly Hills, the Houghs, Margaret did housework. There were grown children so child-care was not required. She next worked as a waitress in the cafeteria at Thrifty Drug store on Hill St. in Los Angeles and lived with a friend, Marion. Marion was the niece of Mary Cooper whom she had met while working for Mrs. Whitehead in Beverly Hills. Margaret and Marion enjoyed dancing at Bosley Dance Hall every Saturday night. There, she met George Nichols. They married August 16, 1942, and moved to Long Beach, California. Both worked at Douglas Aircraft Corp. until Glen Thomas was born in 1945 and Margaret quit work. From Douglas, George went to the future Sun Lumber Company in San Pedro. Their first home was a one bedroom apartment at 375 Termino, for 10 years. Jerry came to live with them in 1945. In 1952, all moved to a house at 333 Termino and lived with friend, also named Margaret, and her children. Eventually, Margaret married Frank Dayringer and moved to Garden Grove. The Nichols then rented a home on Mira Mar Avenue near Belmont Heights Methodist Church until 1960 when they moved to an apartment on St. Louis St. By this time, Jerry was in college and had joined the Marine Corp., and Glen served a short time in the U.S. Navy. In 1961, they bought their first house on 15th Street for $9000.00.
No longer caring for children, Margaret decided to attend nursing school after which she worked at Bel Vista and Bixby Knolls Convalescent Hospital. She met Pete Houssells, a patient recovering from a severe stroke. He was an heir to the Star Kist Tuna Company. Pete and his wife, Maggie, asked that Margaret become their private duty nurse. During the 16 years of service with the Houssells, there were several opportunities to travel including to Rio de Janeiro, Hong Kong, the Carribean and two to three times to Honolulu...mostly aboard ship. Several weeks each year were spent at a home with pool in Palm Springs. Margaret did all the driving for both Pete, who attended outpatient physical and occupational therapy at L.B. Memorial Hospital, and for Maggie. There were dinner events and visits between the Houssells and Margaret’s family especially during the holidays. After both Pete and Maggie died, (Maggie years before Pete), Margaret retired but did a bit more traveling. She toured the Greek Isles with a group from L.B. City College, and met friends, Bibi and Hugh, from Croatia, that had been pen-pals with George for years. They now live in Slovenia and visit the U.S. every so often and remain close to Margaret and her family. Another good friend, Verna, and Margaret traveled the western states having no set schedule and some interesting good times. George passed away in August, 1987. In February, 2003, Margaret sold her home on 15th Ave. (for $290,000), and now lives in Cottonwood, Arizona. Changes and adjustments continue with challenges being met each day. Her sister, Mary, has a goal for Margaret to visit Kallispell to see the great Flat Head River basin and the many changes, once again, ince leaving 62 years ago.
Throughout her life, it can be said that Margaret has carried and shared a wonderful sense of humor and finds "pluses" in many questionable situations. ‘Margaret’ means "Pearl", (as does ‘Mary’ and ‘Greta’)...Nature’s soft, lustrous, natural gem. What a joy to find one.
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Hi Jim. Unfortunately, Mom's mind just isn't up to the task of remembering anything, particularly as it might relate to specific dates. However, she said that while you mom was there, she stayed with Mom and Dad in Long Beach. Mom and Dad married on Aug 16,1942, so that places Mary there no earlier than August 1942. You probably know something about her courtship with your Dad (Ian), so maybe you can work backwards from their date of marriage to see when she returned to Montana.
I am enclosing a copy of what Mom told Marilynn in 2003, so that's probably about as good as we're gonna do.
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ABOUT MARGARET D. STREIT NICHOLS
The first generation Streit family came to America from Bern, Switzerland when Rudolph, Margaret’s father, was about 3 or 4 years old. He was born in 1878. Though young, he recalled having to help at home in Bern as a child by taking a broom and dustpan to pick up horse manure to use as fertilizer. He also recalled that there was so much sea sickness aboard ship from Europe. It is uncertain what Rudolph did growing up in Iowa, but among a few endeavors, he farmed and began his large family.
Emma Isch had married Frank Will who died of pernicious anemia ten months into the marriage leaving Emma pregnant with their daughter, Caroline. Widowed Emma and her single sister married brothers: Rudolph and Sam Streit. (Sam’s first wife died during the influenza epidemic. His second wife was ‘Miss Burger’ who had tended the house and several children.) Rudolph and Sam had 2 brothers and 2 sisters. One sister was Priscilla, or "Miss Prissy" who married the man who invented the ABC Washing Machine. Margaret remembers visiting them in Iowa and their large house where they "had dinner and spent the night". The second sister was Lena who married and had 2 children. Children born to Rudolph and Emma, in Iowa, included Bill, (whose twin brother died in infancy), Minnie, and Tom. The 4 brothers moved their families to Leighton, Alabama, a small town with one store, leaving the sisters in Iowa. The brothers, Rudolph, Friedrich, Christian and Samuel had bought property to develop individual farms. Uncle Sam’s home was a plantation house already built on his property. Margaret recalls a curved bannister stairway and a veranda.
Children born in Alabama included Rudy, Mary, Margaret and Paul. Two other of Grandma’s children died in infancy. Margaret was born August 18, 1915; the 10th child. The brothers raised cotton primarily, and all the children helped with the chores. Margaret recalls picking cotton and attempting to milk a cow. She ‘lost’ this job, however, when the cow stepped into the milk pail. Her mother’s side of the family was quite musical. Emma played the accordion, piano and the organ, including the organ in the Lutheran Church for many years. One uncle had a band and played the clarinet as did his son, Harry. The entire family spent most holidays at Rudolph and Emma’s home - "at our house" as Margaret stated. The annual 4th of July celebration, however, was at Uncle Sam’s home where he had a barbeque, and they made home-made ice cream...churned by hand. There were usually "about 30 or so" at the events.
Margaret liked cats. Her older sisters, Minnie and Mary, had beautiful china dolls, but Margaret preferred to play with the livelier cats, dress them, and feed them liquid aspirin as medicine which all the children had to take. Mary did not tolerate cats in the house, however. "She would take them, and ‘sling’ them out the back door because she didn’t like to clean up their messes."
Until Margaret was 12 years old, "every couple of years", her Grandfather, John Isch who had moved to Montana came to visit the family in Leighton. Margaret does not recall Grandma Isch traveling with him. Grandpa Isch eventually bought farms for his children in and around Kallispell, Montana. While Rudolph’s three brothers remained in Alabama, he moved his family from Leighton to Kallispell in two vehicles; "an old truck, (about a 1917 model) and a Dodge touring car". This was 1928. They slept on the ground in an old tent, camping in designated camp sites as many other travelers would do. Meals were cooked on a gas stove and they "lived on canned salmon during the trip, and all the silverware smelled of fish". Margaret thought she "never wanted salmon again". Fishing for fish other than salmon, however, was good in Montana especially where they lived on Ashley Creek. The farm included a two story house with a dug-out basement. A well supplied water from a single line, to the house. Rainwater was collected in wooden barrels placed under the eves. Water was heated on a wood cook stove. Bathing was performed in a galvanized tub in the kitchen with the oldest in the family going "first". It was not until the late 50's that Grandma’s dream of a big, luxurious bathroom with running water and a porcelain tub, came true. Among other tasks, Grandma prided herself on two types of gardens; vegetables and fruits as well as showy flowers. (Margaret recalls that as a child, Jerry asked to "please pass the strawberry patch" at the table. Freshly separated cream was a perfect tasty addition .)
The school-aged children walked 2 miles to a one-room school which still stands in a field near the farm. (Years later, Jerry also began school in this building.) The teacher, Miss Ott, lived in the quarters provided in the building and taught first through the eighth grade. On snowy or blizzard days, a sleigh and horse took them to school. During harvest season, Grandpa rose early to work at Grandma’s sister’s farm, (Ella or "Ellie") across the river requiring the children to rise earlier than usual and be taken to the school, often before Miss Ott had risen from bed. Margaret would rather walk anyway because she did not like this early morning routine. Neither did Miss Ott! Also recalled were the wet puddles on the floor. Apparently, the "new" or "younger" kids wet the floor until they learned otherwise. In Margaret’s words, "they weren’t even ‘house-broken’".
Margaret taught herself to drive a vehicle on the farm simply by watching the other drivers. She never did drive a truck.
The oldest sister, Caroline, did not reach her goal to become a teacher. It was Grandpa’s contention that "high school was the ruination, not education of youth as it presented "citified" ideas. If given a good education, he found that the young people would leave the farm for the town and city life. However, with Caroline as an advocate and with Grandma’s encouragement, Margaret was determined to graduate from high school. It required leaving home and living with the Miller family in town doing housework while attending school. "All the girls did housework in those days." After high school, Margaret married and Jerome Anthony was born in 1939. The marriage did not work, and Margaret left home, temporarily, leaving Jerry in the care of his wonderful grandparents. With her close friend, Pat Ridell and Pat’s Uncle Guy Manning, the three went to Southern California for a visit. Margaret stayed while the others returned to Montana. Living with a Jewish family in Beverly Hills, the Houghs, Margaret did housework. There were grown children so child-care was not required. She next worked as a waitress in the cafeteria at Thrifty Drug store on Hill St. in Los Angeles and lived with a friend, Marion. Marion was the niece of Mary Cooper whom she had met while working for Mrs. Whitehead in Beverly Hills. Margaret and Marion enjoyed dancing at Bosley Dance Hall every Saturday night. There, she met George Nichols. They married August 16, 1942, and moved to Long Beach, California. Both worked at Douglas Aircraft Corp. until Glen Thomas was born in 1945 and Margaret quit work. From Douglas, George went to the future Sun Lumber Company in San Pedro. Their first home was a one bedroom apartment at 375 Termino, for 10 years. Jerry came to live with them in 1945. In 1952, all moved to a house at 333 Termino and lived with friend, also named Margaret, and her children. Eventually, Margaret married Frank Dayringer and moved to Garden Grove. The Nichols then rented a home on Mira Mar Avenue near Belmont Heights Methodist Church until 1960 when they moved to an apartment on St. Louis St. By this time, Jerry was in college and had joined the Marine Corp., and Glen served a short time in the U.S. Navy. In 1961, they bought their first house on 15th Street for $9000.00.
No longer caring for children, Margaret decided to attend nursing school after which she worked at Bel Vista and Bixby Knolls Convalescent Hospital. She met Pete Houssells, a patient recovering from a severe stroke. He was an heir to the Star Kist Tuna Company. Pete and his wife, Maggie, asked that Margaret become their private duty nurse. During the 16 years of service with the Houssells, there were several opportunities to travel including to Rio de Janeiro, Hong Kong, the Carribean and two to three times to Honolulu...mostly aboard ship. Several weeks each year were spent at a home with pool in Palm Springs. Margaret did all the driving for both Pete, who attended outpatient physical and occupational therapy at L.B. Memorial Hospital, and for Maggie. There were dinner events and visits between the Houssells and Margaret’s family especially during the holidays. After both Pete and Maggie died, (Maggie years before Pete), Margaret retired but did a bit more traveling. She toured the Greek Isles with a group from L.B. City College, and met friends, Bibi and Hugh, from Croatia, that had been pen-pals with George for years. They now live in Slovenia and visit the U.S. every so often and remain close to Margaret and her family. Another good friend, Verna, and Margaret traveled the western states having no set schedule and some interesting good times. George passed away in August, 1987. In February, 2003, Margaret sold her home on 15th Ave. (for $290,000), and now lives in Cottonwood, Arizona. Changes and adjustments continue with challenges being met each day. Her sister, Mary, has a goal for Margaret to visit Kallispell to see the great Flat Head River basin and the many changes, once again, ince leaving 62 years ago.
Throughout her life, it can be said that Margaret has carried and shared a wonderful sense of humor and finds "pluses" in many questionable situations. ‘Margaret’ means "Pearl", (as does ‘Mary’ and ‘Greta’)...Nature’s soft, lustrous, natural gem. What a joy to find one.
Tags: | Edit Tags Tuesday January 22, 2008 - 06:09pm (MST) Edit | Delete | Permanent Link | 0 Comments
Actually just a couple of extra memories.
My cousins & I used to ride pigs when we got a chance, sort of like Pat McManus. At Darrel's there was an apple tree in a small pasture, so we used to climb up in it, drop apples down, and when the pigs gathered under the tree to eat themwe would drop off a limb onto the selected victim's back. The rides didn't last long, but they were pretty wild...
Family & neighbors used to give me their runt piglets that would probably die or be puny and I used to raise them, starting with bottle feeding them and working them up till they reached salable size. Dad would sell them for me, deduct the price of the feed I used, and give me the balance. One of those bottle-baby pigs ended my hog riding days when I fell off her and landed on a metal trough. I cut the top of one ear mostly off, which necessitated a trip to the doc to have it sown back on. (For the rest of his life in practice, if I showed up in his office for anything, he would check that ear first.)
Heh. That reminds me of old Doc Ross, the family veterinarian, who used to give us penicillin shots if he felt we needed them when we were at his office.
I had my first and only experience as an anaethsiologist in his office. He was operating on a couple of little pigs for dad and needed someone to handle the choloroform so he drafted me, telling me to drop some on the cloth over the pig's nose if it started to struggle. I did okay on the first one, but the second pig died - either the doc or I goofed.
Just to toss in another doctor & pig-related memory, Dad sometimes kept a boar and some sows in the pasture along the creek behind our house. Doc Burns and a friend came out to hunt pheasants and Doc's friend decided to cut through that pasture. He was about six steps in front of the boar when he hit the fenceline coming out and the fence didn't even slow him down, he cleared it. That old boar had a mean streak and may have been the one that Darrel had to cut.
TBC
My cousins & I used to ride pigs when we got a chance, sort of like Pat McManus. At Darrel's there was an apple tree in a small pasture, so we used to climb up in it, drop apples down, and when the pigs gathered under the tree to eat themwe would drop off a limb onto the selected victim's back. The rides didn't last long, but they were pretty wild...
Family & neighbors used to give me their runt piglets that would probably die or be puny and I used to raise them, starting with bottle feeding them and working them up till they reached salable size. Dad would sell them for me, deduct the price of the feed I used, and give me the balance. One of those bottle-baby pigs ended my hog riding days when I fell off her and landed on a metal trough. I cut the top of one ear mostly off, which necessitated a trip to the doc to have it sown back on. (For the rest of his life in practice, if I showed up in his office for anything, he would check that ear first.)
Heh. That reminds me of old Doc Ross, the family veterinarian, who used to give us penicillin shots if he felt we needed them when we were at his office.
I had my first and only experience as an anaethsiologist in his office. He was operating on a couple of little pigs for dad and needed someone to handle the choloroform so he drafted me, telling me to drop some on the cloth over the pig's nose if it started to struggle. I did okay on the first one, but the second pig died - either the doc or I goofed.
Just to toss in another doctor & pig-related memory, Dad sometimes kept a boar and some sows in the pasture along the creek behind our house. Doc Burns and a friend came out to hunt pheasants and Doc's friend decided to cut through that pasture. He was about six steps in front of the boar when he hit the fenceline coming out and the fence didn't even slow him down, he cleared it. That old boar had a mean streak and may have been the one that Darrel had to cut.
TBC
Tags: | Edit Tags Tuesday January 22, 2008 - 04:25pm (MST) Edit | Delete | Permanent Link | 0 Comments
- HOM: Farm Work
- I covered haying a little last time, this time let's cover some other stuff.
Cleaning the chicken house was about my second most hated job and being almost a bi-weekly task it occurred a lot more frequent than haying season.
Dad would pull the manure spreader up outside the window, then we would move all the feeders aside and start forking the bedding/manure mix out into the spreader, scraping off the roosts, and shuffling things around. When the cement floor was clean, a trapdoor in the ceiling was opened and fresh clean sawdust was tumbled down till the floor was covered in a soft layer several inches thick and the feeders put back into place. (The loft of the chicken house was kept full of sawdust that we bought from sawmills, trucked in, and used a tractor-driven blower to put up into the loft.)
It was not heavy work, but chicken waste is full of ammonia and once I got the smell into my nose it seemed to take days to get rid of it. I was responsible for keeping the waterers full, so I got frequent refills of the ammonia too.
I think uncle Bill hated cleaning those houses as much as I did, because he probably cleaned his on a less-than-annual basis. It was not uncommon to find the skeletal remains of hens still in the nests in his chicken houses. Another family joke started when my cousin Glenn spent a summer at Grandma's and Bill put him to work burying dead chickens. Apparently the holes he dug weren't too deep as after a few rains you could see chicken feet and legs sticking out of the crust in the field. Glenn's chicken tree joined Bill's beer tree in the family legends.
Cleaning pig pens was a different story. They smelled awful and the work was heavy, but the odor didn't cling like the chicken house ammonia did. Pigs were worse to work around though. Chickens made an effort to stay away from you while the pigs thought nothing of walking up and chewing on you or your shovel or running past you at full tilt and splashing you with the wet mix you were trying to shovel.
Pigs are actually pretty clean. When the pens were clean, we put straw down as bedding along the back of the pens and left the front bare so the pigs could use it for waste disposal and sleep on the straw in the back. The pens at Dad's were set up in the south half of a steel shed and the north half was used to store straw bales, so after the pens were cleaned it was a pretty simple matter to pull a couple of bales down and break them open for bedding.
I mentioned feral cats a bit ago. We always had a lot around , and they were a nuisance. A colony of them set up housekeeping in the straw bales and I was given the job of disposing of them with a .22. I found that if I shot one and it fell into the pigpens, the pigs were quite happy to accept it as a snack.
Yes, pigs will eat anything. Ask Bill Pickton!
One pig did give me a scare though. A sow walked up and bit my on the ankle, and I clobbered it over the head with my shovel. She dropped like she was shot, and all I could think was that dad was gonna kill me for killing one of his pigs, but after a minute or two she started twitching, her legs started working, and she ran off. I was relieved!
At one point, Dad decided I was capable of doing all this myself, so he told me to get the tractor and clean the pens. I did it all, from hitching the tractor to the spreader to dumping the load in the field, and when I got done, I walked into the house, went to the fridge, and grabbed a beer. Mom kinda got upset but I told her I figured if I had to work like a grown-up I was going to drink like one. The funny part was I didn't even finish the beer because it didn't taste good. I guess Hamm's was an acquired taste.
The mixture from both chicken houses and pig pens that we shoveled into the manure spreader went out to enrich the fields, a process that a lot of communities frown on now because of odor.
TBCTags: | Edit Tags Tuesday January 22, 2008 - 03:52pm (MST) Edit | Delete | Permanent Link | 0 Comments - HOM: Haying Seasons I
- I guess I have been suppressing haying seasons, my least favorite summer times. Almost always there were two cuttings of hay per summer, sometimes three, and then there was straw baling after the grain harvest.
They didn't affect me till I was twelve or so, when Dad decided I was old enough to drive the tractor that pulled the wagons. Not a bad job, steering a tractor/wagon combo around the fields with a couple of guys riding on the wagon and stacking and a couple more walking alongside to toss the bales up onto the bed of the wagon. It didn't last long though.
Unfortunately Dad & Darrel decided my cousin Dale was old enough to drive & I was big enough to handle the bales so I got promoted to labor. They also streamlined the haying process a bit.
Before, when the alfalfa started blooming they would go out with a mower and cut the hay, let it dry a few days and then rake it into windrows, then go out with a baler and process the hay into square bales of around 80 pounds each. These bales would lay on the ground until all wwere done, then the wagons & crews would go out, pick them up and haul them to the storage shed.
If it rained while the baled hay was on the ground the bales were usually ruined, so the farmers out there (usually the Plummers, the Ridenours, and the Weavers) who worked at harvesting together streamlined the process a bit. They hooked the wagon on behind the baler and the bales came up a chute so the workers on the wagon could grab them and stack them on the wagon. As each wagon was filled, it was unhooked, a fresh wagon attached, and the full wagon hauled to the hay sheds.
At the sheds, one person would take the bales from the wagon and put them on a bale elevator, a motor driven conveyor belt that lifted the bales into the sheds. There, another set of workers stacked the bales as tightly as possible under the protection of the shed roof. Usually by the time one wagon was empty another would arrive.
If the crews were shorthanded, the workers would fill all the available wagons and then the whole crew would put them into the sheds, then return to the field to bale and load more.
If it rained, there were no bales on the ground in the field to be ruined. The wet windrows would be turned over and when they dried baling would commence again. The drawback was that the longer the windrows sat on the ground the dirtier/dustier/moldier they got.
The baler works by picking up the hay, compressing and slicing it to fit into bales, and the dustier the hay, the greater the cloud of greenish dust the baler spewed out. The guys working on the wagon spent most of their time trying to breathe that green air while doing hard labor and usually it took several days after the haying ended to stop coughing up green chunks. Adding high heat to the work meant being coated in itchy green gunk. For a congenitally lazy kid like me, that was a situation you hated.
Straw baling was a mixed blessing - the bales were much lighter, but much dustier, and the dust was much itchier than hay dust. Luckily, school usually started before straw baling did, so I missed out on some of the worst of it.
Darrel usually ran the baler and the tractor that pulled it while Dad was usually on the wagon stacking with me. The baler tended to break shear pins pretty frequently and Darrel had a pretty innovative vocabulary so I learned a lot of new words. When he forgot and left the tools inside the baler and then tried to start it again, the words got a lot louder and I learned to laugh without changing expressions.
Some highlights/lowlights from the years: The times we went swimming in the slough on the way home from haying to cool off and clean up. The time my little cousin, who was riding the wagons for fun because he was too young to work on them, had to go to the bathroom. he went over into the bushes on a steep part of the slough bank, dropped his britches and did what needed to be done, but when he stood to pull up his pants he slipped and did a twisting slide back down the bank - right through the mess he had left. A minute later this badly-streaked screaming little guy came crawling back up the bank yelling for his dad... The time cousin Dale stepped on a loose sheet of plywood when he was stacking straw in the loft over the pig pens and he, the bales, the plywood and all dropped down onto the pigs, causing instant hysteria in all directions...
(Flashback: Darrel castrating a huge old boar in one of those pens. He had a rope on its jaw and it was tied to a center post while he operated. He was about 50% done when the rope broke and I got to see my first case of human levitation - Darrel just flew up out of that pen with his butt about 6 inches ahead of the boar's jaws. It took a while to get that job finished.)
TBCTags: | Edit Tags Monday January 21, 2008 - 08:09pm (MST) Edit | Delete | Permanent Link | 0 Comments - Eighth Grade & Flashbacks
- Not a bad year. Leila Beatty was the teacher, Mrs. Grant had taken a job teaching in Evergreen. I was the oldest kid, which was sorta cool. It was also the year of my one honor.
All the schools competed in an annual Spelling Bee, and I was the representative from Hodgson that year. I managed to stay in till the final rounds, when there were three of us left. I spelled "Khaki" correctly when an opponent didn't, so, like the little Indians, then there were two. I fluffed the last word and the girl I was competing against got it, so I came in second place for the county.
(Many years later, my daughter equalled that with her own win of second place for the county.)
Miss Beatty rewarded me with an afternoon off at school - all play and no work. I was always playing war games & reading war stories and she credited that with my win, so she thought an afternoon of play would be a nice reward. It was.
Miss Beatty introduced us to hot school lunches too, on Fridays. She would cook up a batch of stew or whatever for us. The only specific dish I really remember is "Bubble & Squeak". Never heard of it before or since, though this sounds like it.
She used an electric frying pan, and it impressed me enough to talk Dad into getting Mom one for Christmas. He thought it would be a waste of money, but Mom loved it.
At some point during the Grant years, the old woodshed was emptied out and converted to storage for seasonal thing like Christmas decorations, extra desks, the stages, etc. This was a good system till the day the teacher sent Little Terry & me out to find something that had been stored. We totally rearranged the whole place before we located the stuff, and I guess we didn't do it neatly because we got in trouble.
Another time I got in trouble, Bobby Ballenger & I were racing. He fell, and I guess he hurt his knee. He was laying on the ground making such strange noises that I thought he was kidding and I started to laugh. Bunny Louden got very angry at me for laughing at someone who was hurt.
Mrs Brosten got upset at me once when I spent the night there. Terry & I were playing and I threw a dirt clod at him, missed, and scored a dead-center hit on the clean white sheets she had just hung on the line to dry.
Flashback: Billy D. nailing his dad's prize boar right in the cojones with the rock from a Wham-o slingshot. Poor old pig went totally stiff and fell over sideways. He thought he'd killed it, but it recovered.
Flashback: When I was pretty little, Grampa Streit's place was set up so that cars had to pull into the barnyard and park, a holdover from horsepower days. This involved opening a big gate, driving the car in and parking, closing the big gate, and then using a little gate to get to the house.
Uncle Bill had a mean billy goat in those days, and once when I was walking from the car to the gate he nailed me from behind. It hurt. I swore revenge.
Next time we went over, my BB gun came along, and I climbed up into the barn with it and waited by a window. When the old billy walked by and then stopped broadside at about ten feet, I nailed him on the tip of his pecker with a BB. He went straight up in the air, kicked all four feet together, went "BAAAAAA!!!!!!!" and took off. Revenge was sweet.
Bill always thought people getting butted by his goat was great fun until the sub-zero day he was walking up from the barn with two big buckets of fresh milk and the goat butted him at full speed. He and the milk both went flying. That was the second and last time he got butted, the goat got Winchestered and peace reigned from then on.
Flashback: A mountain Lion was spotted along the river, so everyone was pretty cautious for a while. This gave Mr. Brosten an idea for a joke - he sent Terry out to the barn at night to get something, then ran out & hid in the barn to scare him. The joke misfired drastically because Terry took along a knife for protection, and when his dad jumped out at him, Terry threw the knife at him. Nobody got hurt, but Terry got in trouble till his dad cooled down.
Related story - feral cats were always a farm problem and we always had permission to hunt them. One boy took a potshot at one with his shotgun while it was running. Unfortunately just as he fired the cat leaped for a multi-paned window. Before he shot, the window was missing one pane, after the shot all the panes were gone and the cat wasn't hurt.
TBCTags: | Edit Tags Monday January 21, 2008 - 12:32pm (MST) Edit | Delete | Permanent Link | 0 Comments - It's That Time Again!
- Tags: | Edit Tags Monday January 21, 2008 - 10:30am (MST) Edit | Delete | Permanent Link | 0 Comments
- HOM: Dog Stories
- Buck, my little Cocker Spaniel, would eat anything. One day I was playing with him and tossed him a spool of thread and he swallowed it. A few days later he came in the from a trip outside to go potty with proof he had done it dragging along behind him on a thread. Mom tried to break the thread and he cried, so she clipped it - a procedure she had to go through till it worked through him. (I suspect there is material for some puns strung out and threaded through that hole episode.)
Another time, a holiday, Mom was setting the table and put the plate of turkey a little too near the edge. Buck grabbed a drumstick and took off. Mom let out a screech and took off after him, through the kitchen and living room full of company and into my bedroom where she caught up to him.
He was handy for me to have around at mealtimes, being as I was a bit of a fussy eater who was nonetheless required to eat everything on my plate. He was happy to sit under the table and take whatever I slipped him. Sometimes he was a bit too loud and we both got in trouble.
He ran into problems when I had Mike, though. That lab was protective, and when Buck tried to grab some meat out of the groceries Mom put on the floor while she was emptying the car, Mike knocked him clear across the kitchen.
One day Mom had a chicken get loose. it flew a hundred yards or so out into a field that was so very muddy she sank over her boots trying to go after it. Mike saved the day, retrieving the chicken for her without hurting it.
Buck. We had a neighbor named Buck too, who always helped with the harvest. Mom was getting lunch ready for the harvest crew and my dog was in her way. Mom yelled at me "Get that damn Buck out of my kitchen right now". She didn't know Buck Weaver was standing right behind her... I though the look on her face when she turned and saw him was hilarious, but she didn't.
Buck's favorite resting spot was under the kitchen table where we all ate. It was handy for me and for him, but sometimes problems cropped up - like the time Jean O'Connell was visiting with Mom, sitting across the table from her. Buck was curled up on Jean's side of the table & I was playing in the kitchen. All of a sudden Jean got a funny look on her face and then put her hand over her nose. (Buck had this problem with gas.) Mom told me to put Buck outside, so I did, though I was thought it was pretty funny. Funny until Jean left, anyway, and Mom asked me if it was me or Buck that was responsible for the smell.
Mike was a pretty good hunting dog, but had one really bad habit. He loved to retrieve ducks, but if the duck dropped too clase to the far bank he would carry it up that bank & eat it, ignoring me till he was done and then coming back. Nothing I tried worked to break him of that habit till I popped him in the but with a pellet gun when he was on the far bank eating my duck. He yipped and came back and never did that again.
Maybe I should mention Old Arlie too. He was my uncle Bill's dog in later years. Uncle Paul used him for hunting. One day Paul shot a coyote. Arlie walked up, sniffed it, turned around and puked. I never did figure out why he reacted that way.
TBCTags: | Edit Tags Sunday January 20, 2008 - 05:26pm (MST) Edit | Delete | Permanent Link | 0 Comments - HOM: Addenda, Fill-ins & Dogs
- Backtracking a bit, jumping into the future a bit.
Mom: She spent a few years in California before she got married. Details and dates are gone, but at a guess she went down there to stay with sister Margaret in Long beach. I know she worked as a housekeeper for some folks by the name of Hand, I believe she said she met actor Alan Ladd when she was there. (Ladd, BTW, was a hero of mine, and "Shane" is till one of the best westerns ever filmed.)
Might have more on Mom's CA years later - querying cousin...
I know she had a "Rosie-the-Riveter" job during the war, but I don't know which company she worked for. I have two little riveted-aluminum things she made, an ashtray and a little pulley.
(Flashback: It was nigh impossible for me to learn to pronounce the word "aluminum". Closest I could come was "aluminium", like the Canuck's pronounce it)
----------
Dogs: My first dog was a little black female named Trixie. I don't know where she came from or exactly what happened to her, but I know Mom shut her up in the old outhouse when she came into heat, and then disposed of her one day when I was at school because too many horny male dogs came around.
Penny was next. Black, and maybe a Cocker. He was my playmate till he ran out in the road and was killed. I had been playing with him and Mom called me in to eat. During the meal, neighbor George Wagner came to the door and talked to Mom. When I went back out to resume playing with Penny, she told me he had been run over, had darted out right in front of the neighbor's car. This was my first big heartbreak.
My next dog was Buck. I think I was between eight & ten when I got him. When Mom married Floyd and he moved in, his dog came with him, a Cocker Spaniel named Crickey. Buck was one of her pups. She had two in that litter, and I named one Buck from "Call Of The Wild" and the other Bullet from Roy Rogers' dog. (Roy, by the way, was my HERO. Like a lot of lonely kids, I had an imaginary playmate. Mine was Roy Rogers.)
Bullet went to my cousins, however and was renamed "Torky". I have no idea what insane reasoning was behind that choice of names... Buck was my dog. I had him till I went into the service in 1968, when Mom had him put down. I had trouble forgiving her for that because the guy she had do it was one he didn't like, Vic Bjornrud's stepson David.
Buck slept by my bed at night, and was my constant playmate/companion, though he had to share me for a while at times because I wanted a water dog for hunting. I nearly lost him one day when he ran under the wheels of the old green truck Darrel was driving and one wheel went over him. He was sick for a long time, but recovered.
When I was a senior in 1964, I was given a black lab named Mike. He was a hunting dog and a great guy, but he had bitten a mailman at his owner's place in Whitefish and needed a new home. I think Rudy was instrumental in my getting him. He died of cancer a year or so later. He & I collected 92 ducks and many pheasants in the years I had him
Julie was next. Dad saw an ad for a two year old spayed Black Lab in Spokane, so he went over and got her & brought her home. Crickey had died, so she became his dog when I left home.
Dad loved dogs. Mom liked them too, but preferred to have them outside because of the shedding and extra work cleaning. He called Julie "Laster" because Mom made him promise there would be no more house dogs after her. After that, he became a cat person.
TBCTags: | Edit Tags Sunday January 20, 2008 - 11:33am (MST) Edit | Delete | Permanent Link | 0 Comments
Tags: | Edit Tags Sunday January 20, 2008 - 10:03am (MST) Edit | Delete | Permanent Link | 0 Comments
Potatoes. Let's get back to them for a minute.
Planted by machine, dug up by machine, bagged by hand. You get a web belt with two metal hooks on it, like meat hooks. You hang a large burlap sack on the hooks so that it gapes open, then you bend over and shuffle forward with the bag dragging back between your legs. As you move, you pick up the potatoes that the machine unearthed and drop them into the bag until it is full, then you unhook the bag, stand it up, hook another bag on and repeat the process. The CIA should use it as torture. Back in the 50's, farmers hired crews of Indians to do the picking & bagging. Today I suppose they use machines or immigrant labor.
Once the potatoes were bagged, they were loaded on trucks and taken in to another machine where they were tumble-washed and then rolled onto a conveyor belt. People standing along the belt did a quick sort of the spuds and rebagged them, but in this case the bags were weighed and then sewn shut, ready for market.
The good part about raising potatoes was that it was seasonal. Work your butt off in the spring & summer, relax for the winter, like most forms of gardening or farming.
Raising hogs was a different story. The Ridenour Brothers (hence referred to as RB) had the breeding stock and related facilities for producing pork on a large basis. They raised and ground their own feed, did all the labor themselves, and took biweekly loads of 200# market pigs to the sales in Spokane. The amount of labor was time consuming, from baling straw hay to grinding & mixing feed to cleaning out the pens, doctoring & emasculating the stock, and weighing, loading and transporting them to market.
Dad was the designated driver making the two-day, 500 mile round trip to Spokane over old US 2 in his big 1957 Chevy truck every other week. He was also usually the laborer that kept the pigpens cleaned. Darrel was the mechanic & builder.
--------
I need to do a bit of flashback here to 1948. When my Dad died, Mom had uncle Bill take over the farming and she built a chicken house and began raising chickens and selling eggs door-to-door in town. Uncle Rudy did a lot of the work on the building.
(Flashback memory - every time Bill plowed the field, it got bigger and Mom's yard got smaller - and her blood pressure got higher.)
(Flashback - I think Rudy was working on the chicken house when I managed to step on his dog's paw and got the bite that left a scar still visible on my cheek. My first dog-bite!!)
(Flashback - it was about that time that I climbed up and sat on the roof of a car, grabbed the power lines that ran from the garage to the chicken house, and started swinging on them. I guess they had good insulation because I didn't bet hurt, but it sure freaked Mom out when she saw me.)
She also added on to the old house, which was already built over an older cabin. She had a porch and a small bedroom built on, a partial basement added, and perhaps another porch on the west side of the house that gave access to a dirt cellar under the kitchen. She used the cellar for working with the eggs and of course as a fruit cellar.
Grandpa Streit & Uncle Bill had about the same setup on their place, but they had three large chicken houses, and the cellar was also used for working with the milk from the cows they kept. The milk was run through a separator to get the cream, the eggs were sorted by weight and "candled", when they held each egg up to a small projector-type machine with a strong light so that blemishes, blood spots, etc, inside the egg could be seen. The egg processing was preceded by cleaning.
Actually, Mom would take a metal basket with a handle out to the chicken house. Along the north inner wall of the house was a roosting area for the chickens to sleep on, and beneath the roost were small compartments (nests) where the chicken laid the eggs. Mom would get all of the eggs, then bring them into the kitchen where they would be washed, and sometimes sanded, clean. Then the baskets of eggs went into the cellar for grading and candling and then into cartons for delivery in town.
Mom (and Bill) had regular routes in town where they sold eggs to customers, some to homes and some to stores for resale. They ran these routes on Fridays, which was the day for any other shopping that needed to be done.
Mom was the community barber too. When she married Ian, he gave her an Oster clipper set and told her she was his barber from now on. She got pretty good at it so the other farmers used to come over for trims too. She also gave permanents to the wives out there for a little added income.
In her spare time she gardened. she loved flowers and kept the place overflowing with roses & peonies & daffodils & snapdragons & pansies - my favorites. And she read! She loved books above all. She passed that on to me, and aided me in it. The County library allowed a maximum of five books checked out at a time, and five books didn't last me the full week between the trips to town so she got a card too. Ten books a week was about right for me then.
(Flashback - the next door neighbors were Tom & Pansy Wagner, my godparents. Once upon a time I threw a temper tantrum with Mom in front of them. I guess I assumed she wouldn't punish me in front of them. BIG mistake! I got a switch applied to my bare little butt hard enough to raise red welts. Shortly after, we went over to Grampa Streit's and I dropped my pants to show them to him. I couldn't understand why he laughed at me when I told him I was afraid I would get "affection" in them...)
(Flashback - Mom walking up an icy sidewalk to deliver a half-case of eggs when her feet went out from under her. She hit hard enough to be hurt, but didn't break a single egg - I was proud of her!)
TBC
Planted by machine, dug up by machine, bagged by hand. You get a web belt with two metal hooks on it, like meat hooks. You hang a large burlap sack on the hooks so that it gapes open, then you bend over and shuffle forward with the bag dragging back between your legs. As you move, you pick up the potatoes that the machine unearthed and drop them into the bag until it is full, then you unhook the bag, stand it up, hook another bag on and repeat the process. The CIA should use it as torture. Back in the 50's, farmers hired crews of Indians to do the picking & bagging. Today I suppose they use machines or immigrant labor.
Once the potatoes were bagged, they were loaded on trucks and taken in to another machine where they were tumble-washed and then rolled onto a conveyor belt. People standing along the belt did a quick sort of the spuds and rebagged them, but in this case the bags were weighed and then sewn shut, ready for market.
The good part about raising potatoes was that it was seasonal. Work your butt off in the spring & summer, relax for the winter, like most forms of gardening or farming.
Raising hogs was a different story. The Ridenour Brothers (hence referred to as RB) had the breeding stock and related facilities for producing pork on a large basis. They raised and ground their own feed, did all the labor themselves, and took biweekly loads of 200# market pigs to the sales in Spokane. The amount of labor was time consuming, from baling straw hay to grinding & mixing feed to cleaning out the pens, doctoring & emasculating the stock, and weighing, loading and transporting them to market.
Dad was the designated driver making the two-day, 500 mile round trip to Spokane over old US 2 in his big 1957 Chevy truck every other week. He was also usually the laborer that kept the pigpens cleaned. Darrel was the mechanic & builder.
--------
I need to do a bit of flashback here to 1948. When my Dad died, Mom had uncle Bill take over the farming and she built a chicken house and began raising chickens and selling eggs door-to-door in town. Uncle Rudy did a lot of the work on the building.
(Flashback memory - every time Bill plowed the field, it got bigger and Mom's yard got smaller - and her blood pressure got higher.)
(Flashback - I think Rudy was working on the chicken house when I managed to step on his dog's paw and got the bite that left a scar still visible on my cheek. My first dog-bite!!)
(Flashback - it was about that time that I climbed up and sat on the roof of a car, grabbed the power lines that ran from the garage to the chicken house, and started swinging on them. I guess they had good insulation because I didn't bet hurt, but it sure freaked Mom out when she saw me.)
She also added on to the old house, which was already built over an older cabin. She had a porch and a small bedroom built on, a partial basement added, and perhaps another porch on the west side of the house that gave access to a dirt cellar under the kitchen. She used the cellar for working with the eggs and of course as a fruit cellar.
Grandpa Streit & Uncle Bill had about the same setup on their place, but they had three large chicken houses, and the cellar was also used for working with the milk from the cows they kept. The milk was run through a separator to get the cream, the eggs were sorted by weight and "candled", when they held each egg up to a small projector-type machine with a strong light so that blemishes, blood spots, etc, inside the egg could be seen. The egg processing was preceded by cleaning.
Actually, Mom would take a metal basket with a handle out to the chicken house. Along the north inner wall of the house was a roosting area for the chickens to sleep on, and beneath the roost were small compartments (nests) where the chicken laid the eggs. Mom would get all of the eggs, then bring them into the kitchen where they would be washed, and sometimes sanded, clean. Then the baskets of eggs went into the cellar for grading and candling and then into cartons for delivery in town.
Mom (and Bill) had regular routes in town where they sold eggs to customers, some to homes and some to stores for resale. They ran these routes on Fridays, which was the day for any other shopping that needed to be done.
Mom was the community barber too. When she married Ian, he gave her an Oster clipper set and told her she was his barber from now on. She got pretty good at it so the other farmers used to come over for trims too. She also gave permanents to the wives out there for a little added income.
In her spare time she gardened. she loved flowers and kept the place overflowing with roses & peonies & daffodils & snapdragons & pansies - my favorites. And she read! She loved books above all. She passed that on to me, and aided me in it. The County library allowed a maximum of five books checked out at a time, and five books didn't last me the full week between the trips to town so she got a card too. Ten books a week was about right for me then.
(Flashback - the next door neighbors were Tom & Pansy Wagner, my godparents. Once upon a time I threw a temper tantrum with Mom in front of them. I guess I assumed she wouldn't punish me in front of them. BIG mistake! I got a switch applied to my bare little butt hard enough to raise red welts. Shortly after, we went over to Grampa Streit's and I dropped my pants to show them to him. I couldn't understand why he laughed at me when I told him I was afraid I would get "affection" in them...)
(Flashback - Mom walking up an icy sidewalk to deliver a half-case of eggs when her feet went out from under her. She hit hard enough to be hurt, but didn't break a single egg - I was proud of her!)
TBC
Tags: | Edit Tags Friday January 18, 2008 - 07:24pm (MST) Edit | Delete | Permanent Link | 0 Comments
The school had a wood rail fence on three sides and one test of balance was to walk the top rails. That kind of halted the day the Aamundson boy's feet slipped and he landed straddling the top bar. Nobody want to risk the price of failure after that.
He was also the first kid I ever saw write graffiti on restroom walls.
One classroom protocol required that you raise your hand if you wanted to talk or had a question. Another was that when you had to head out to the toilet, you wrote your name in the corner of the blackboard closest to the door. One at a time was the rule, but once when nature was calling a little too loudly I erased Terry Marshall's name from the board, printed my own, and headed for the boy's toilet. I passed Terry who was on his way back in, and I don't know if he tattled on me or the teacher caught on some other way, but she was waiting for with a switch when I walked back in.
I used to stop at Grandma Ridenour's, where Lower Valley Meats is now located, on my way home so I could grab a cookie from her if she was in a good mood. Once when I was in trouble for something at school the teacher ordered me to ride directly home nonstop. I still stopped for a cookie, but hid my bike behind the house so the teacher couldn't see it if she drove by, then had to concoct a story for Grandma explaining why I didn't put my bike in the driveway as usual. I am pretty sure my reasoning didn't make much sense to her, but I did get the cookies.
I used to get great sport tipping over mail boxes as I rode past on my bike, at least those that weren't attached to post. I got my come-uppance when the owner of one that I had tipped a few dozen times sank the post footings into the ground. When I stiff-armed the box I sliced my hand open and dumped myself off the bike. It didn't move the box at all. That ended box-tipping for me.
Speaking of bike riding, one blustery winter morning I was ordered to walk to school instead of being driven. I didn't feel like a two mile hike in the snow so I grabbed my trusty old bike and rode it. I guess Mom spotted me because when I got to Riedel's, Mary was in the road waiting for me with orders to get my little butt home. I don't remember the punishment for that crime, but I still can't see what the big deal was. Riding a bike was much more efficient than walking, and faster too.
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Transition point. In the mid-fifties Ridenour Brothers stopped raising potatoes and began raising pigs for market. Dad went over there to work every day, so I started riding as far as Darrel's place with him and then walked from there.
When Carol Weaver started school, her mom usually drove her so I just walked up to the next corner and caught a ride with them. When Susan O'Connell started school her mother drove her past the same corner and the chances of getting a ride doubled.
About the same time Darrel's oldest boy, Dale, started school, so we rode together a lot. Dale & I gave Mom a heart attack once, though. She was driving us someplace, and we were wrestling in the back of dad's 1951 Ford Custom four-door when the door popped open & Dale fell out. I jumped out after him. Mom looked back, door was open, no kids, panic city! Luckily, she drove pretty slowly and no one got hurt.
Poor Dale! A few years later, when we were old enough to work on the hay wagons, we were riding on a wagon-load of hay being pulled by Buck Weaver on his tractor. This was on what is now Twin Acres Drive, but in those days it was gravel, with deep wide ditches. We were riding on the front of the load when I looked down and realized the tractor was moving faster than the wagon it was pulling - the hitch had dropped off and we were heading for a deep ditch.
I yelled "JUMP" and Dale did - and went end over end in the gravel. I saw how hard he hit, so I decided jumping was not one of my better ideas and stayed aboard. The wagon rolled into the ditch, came up on two wheels, teetered, and thumped back down, solidly upright. Moral: Don't listen to me!
About the same time, the school board hired Donal Grant, the teacher's husband, to put indoor plumbing into the school. Two restrooms were built in the south side of the unused school room, and the days of pumping & carry water and trips though the snow to the toilets ended.
TBC
He was also the first kid I ever saw write graffiti on restroom walls.
One classroom protocol required that you raise your hand if you wanted to talk or had a question. Another was that when you had to head out to the toilet, you wrote your name in the corner of the blackboard closest to the door. One at a time was the rule, but once when nature was calling a little too loudly I erased Terry Marshall's name from the board, printed my own, and headed for the boy's toilet. I passed Terry who was on his way back in, and I don't know if he tattled on me or the teacher caught on some other way, but she was waiting for with a switch when I walked back in.
I used to stop at Grandma Ridenour's, where Lower Valley Meats is now located, on my way home so I could grab a cookie from her if she was in a good mood. Once when I was in trouble for something at school the teacher ordered me to ride directly home nonstop. I still stopped for a cookie, but hid my bike behind the house so the teacher couldn't see it if she drove by, then had to concoct a story for Grandma explaining why I didn't put my bike in the driveway as usual. I am pretty sure my reasoning didn't make much sense to her, but I did get the cookies.
I used to get great sport tipping over mail boxes as I rode past on my bike, at least those that weren't attached to post. I got my come-uppance when the owner of one that I had tipped a few dozen times sank the post footings into the ground. When I stiff-armed the box I sliced my hand open and dumped myself off the bike. It didn't move the box at all. That ended box-tipping for me.
Speaking of bike riding, one blustery winter morning I was ordered to walk to school instead of being driven. I didn't feel like a two mile hike in the snow so I grabbed my trusty old bike and rode it. I guess Mom spotted me because when I got to Riedel's, Mary was in the road waiting for me with orders to get my little butt home. I don't remember the punishment for that crime, but I still can't see what the big deal was. Riding a bike was much more efficient than walking, and faster too.
--------------
Transition point. In the mid-fifties Ridenour Brothers stopped raising potatoes and began raising pigs for market. Dad went over there to work every day, so I started riding as far as Darrel's place with him and then walked from there.
When Carol Weaver started school, her mom usually drove her so I just walked up to the next corner and caught a ride with them. When Susan O'Connell started school her mother drove her past the same corner and the chances of getting a ride doubled.
About the same time Darrel's oldest boy, Dale, started school, so we rode together a lot. Dale & I gave Mom a heart attack once, though. She was driving us someplace, and we were wrestling in the back of dad's 1951 Ford Custom four-door when the door popped open & Dale fell out. I jumped out after him. Mom looked back, door was open, no kids, panic city! Luckily, she drove pretty slowly and no one got hurt.
Poor Dale! A few years later, when we were old enough to work on the hay wagons, we were riding on a wagon-load of hay being pulled by Buck Weaver on his tractor. This was on what is now Twin Acres Drive, but in those days it was gravel, with deep wide ditches. We were riding on the front of the load when I looked down and realized the tractor was moving faster than the wagon it was pulling - the hitch had dropped off and we were heading for a deep ditch.
I yelled "JUMP" and Dale did - and went end over end in the gravel. I saw how hard he hit, so I decided jumping was not one of my better ideas and stayed aboard. The wagon rolled into the ditch, came up on two wheels, teetered, and thumped back down, solidly upright. Moral: Don't listen to me!
About the same time, the school board hired Donal Grant, the teacher's husband, to put indoor plumbing into the school. Two restrooms were built in the south side of the unused school room, and the days of pumping & carry water and trips though the snow to the toilets ended.
TBC
Tags: | Edit Tags Friday January 18, 2008 - 03:05pm (MST) Edit | Delete | Permanent Link | 0 Comments
- My Feelings On Adventure
- Better to read it than to live it. BTDT in younger days, and second-hand adventure is always comfier.
Can't Comment!
(Me) (Home)Tags: | Edit Tags Friday January 18, 2008 - 10:35am (MST) Edit | Delete | Permanent Link | 0 Comments - HOM: More Hodgson Memories
- Mixed memories, this time in no order whatsoever.
Jerry Fredericks practicing swings with a softball bat, and Carol Weaver walking up to him and getting a concussion when he didn't see her.
Me throwing a bat at Carol because she wiped her muddy feet on my coat. And yes, I was the one that got in trouble, not her.
Attempting to play baseball with a golf ball. Terry Marshall was the school athlete, and when he hit the ball it cleared the power lines and ended up far out in Danford's field. At least we assume it did since we never found it. Maybe it went into orbit.
Playing in the old stable, jumping down from a stall and landing on a board with nails in it, two of which went into my foot, one through the ball, one in the arch. I remember the odd feeling when I tried to pick up my foot and this old manure covered board came up with it. I also remember lying about where it happened cause I didn't want a tetanus shot. I think that was the first time Mom had to make an emergency run to the doctor with me
Playing in the old woodshed, restacking the wood into little huts and passages.
Playing football, the one game I was good at, and Mrs. Grant making us switch from tackle to flag football. The only reason I was good at football was that I was hard to tackle. Her decision meant the end of having fun at sports for me, because I was probably the slowest runner in the school.
Being slow also meant being the last person chosen when teams were formed. Not too good for the ego but consistent with the image Dad was giving me of myself.
I was slow, but I was persistent. Annually each rural school had a one-day get-together with another rural school, and usually we paired with Demersville. One year another student, who will remain nameless, dumped a dixie cup of melted ice cream over my head and then outran me laughing. A few hours later he had forgotten about it but I hadn't, so I caught up and piled into him. I was doing a pretty good job of wining when I got pulled off. Yep, I was the one that got in trouble, not him.
One cold winter day I tried licking frost off of the steel posts holding up the slide. Bad move - I left a chunk of me attached to the pipe. It is NOT an "urban legend" - if you stick your tongue against icy metal, it WILL freeze to it instantly!
Weapons at school? Probably 90% of the boys carried a pocket knife, but nobody used one on another kid. We played with toy guns constantly, either Allies vs. Axis or Cowboys vs. Indians. Cops and robber were not too popular, then again, this was the heyday of the western movie and TV show.
All the boys had BB guns at home, and most of them had .22 rifles at home. Firearms in those days were considered to be tools as much as anything, a vital necessity on the farm. More on that subject later.
Two things that bugged me then involved east & west. When the weather was good enough most of us rode bikes to school. The other kids lived east of the school, I lived west, and it seemed like the winds in the mornings were out of the east, and out of the west in the afternoons so I was always A: alone, and B: fighting a headwind. I suppose this is a bit like saying I had to walk miles uphill to school - in both directions - but that's the way I remember it.
Bicycles. When I got my first one at Wheaton's, I wanted to ride it home. Huh! I was naive! It took weeks to learn to balance on that dumb thing. What didn't help was Dad, who had never been on a bike before, hopping on it and riding it on the first try.
These were the days of the old fat-tire single speed bikes. Linda Brosten had the first ten-speed and we all kind of laughed at her for trying to navigate gravel roads with those narrow tires. She did okay though, so maybe we were just crying sour grapes.
Those old bikes with the coaster brakes were sure maneuverable, though, turn the handle bars and dynamite the brakes and you had a 180-degreee turn done in a split second.
Okay. Burned out on typing. TBC!Tags: | Edit Tags Thursday January 17, 2008 - 01:20pm (MST) Edit | Delete | Permanent Link | 0 Comments - HOM: Mor Skul, & a CORRECTION!
- Mom died in 2006, not 2005. (Thanks, bec!)
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Hodgson. The schoolroom was rectangular and the rows were set up so that we had our backs to the windows on the long west side and faced the inside (east) wall. That wall had blackboards with pull-down maps above them and the old Palmer Method letters on posters above the maps. The heater was in front towards the left (closer to the little kids), and the teachers desk was centered near it. (In very cold weather, the teacher would let us move all our desks closer to the stove.)
The north wall, like the west wall, was mostly windows with low cabinets beneath them, some low tables for games and activities, the humungous dictionary and the pencil sharpener. In the back left corner was a piano.
When the school had plays, that north end was where the big old wooden stage went.
The cloak room was centered on the right side of the room, the vestibule entrance was in the front right corner and the library in the back right corner. In the front left corner was the entrance to the teacherage.
First graders sat on the left, eighth graders on the right, and the rest of us were distributed by grade in between. The teachers used this to advantage to help the faster and slower students by letting them work & learn with the grades below or above.
The school had a pretty good library so I spent a lot of time reading, but got in trouble for reading the textbook readers for the upper classes - the teachers seemed to think I should wait till I was in the class first.
Some favorite books from those years? Plenty Coups, Dragon Treasure, Moccasin Trail, Billy: His Summer Awakening & Java Ho. Java Ho was probably all-time favorite book as a kid. The full title was Java Ho! The Adventures of Four Boys Amid Fire, Storm, And Shipwreck by J.W. Fabricius. I think I reread that one every year. Edith Grant always said she could tell when I was reading it by my expression and body language.
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Hodgson roll call, 1956, 14 kids, Edith Grant teaching..
Grade 8, Linda Brosten. Grade 7, empty. Grade 6, Terry Marshall & Betty Church. Grade 5, Me. Grade 4, Terry Brosten. Grade 3, Bruce Louden, Allan Louden, Carol Weaver, Bobby Ballenger,. Grade 3, Susan O'Connel, Cheryl Emmert. Grade 1 &2, Darlene Ballenger, Nancy Brosten, & Benny Louden.
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I started in first grade as 1/3 of the class, with Billy Danford & Jeannie Chittim as the other 2/3. From around third grade on I was alone in my grade because they moved away.
Mrs. Siderius. I don't remember much about her. I sure do remember penmanship class, though. She would carry a wooden pointer around, and any student found slouching got a kidney poke with it. She may have done that at other times too. She also whacked miscreant's knuckles with a wooden ruler when riled. I seem to remember getting that treatment when I for got and left a thumbtack on one of the chairs...
All the teachers were quite strict - they had to be to maintain order - but she was the strictest.
I think she met her match with a few of the students though. One day George Wagner got a call from her saying that his son Bobby had turned a mouse loose in the school & she wanted him to do the disciplining. George said he'd take care of it right away, and a few minutes later he walked into the school - carrying a cat...
Bobby, as several of the kids did in those lax old days, rode a motorscooter to school. One day I talked him into letting me ride, so I hid my bike in the ditch and rode to school with him. Unfortunately, Mom saw the bike. She showed up at school for me, bawled me out, and informed me my bike was gone. I ended up walking to school for a while, and I think Bobby got chewed out too as he would never let me ride again. Bob was probably 6-8 years older than I .
(Flashback: George lived just up the road from us, and I remember his kids giving me a jar of honey and a spoon. I ate till I got sick, wouldn't touch honey again till after I was grown. I remember I was sitting in an old truck with a windshield that tilted out at the bottom when I was eating the honey.)
Another Bobby & school memory - we were riding bikes to school and I was behind him when I got this bright idea for an experiment - I ran my front wheel into his rear one to see what would happen, and we both hit the gravel sliding. Unfortunately, there was a car right behind us. Fortunately, it stopped in time. Unfortunately, for some reason Bobby was mad at me and wouldn't ride near me any more.
TBCTags: | Edit Tags Wednesday January 16, 2008 - 01:09pm (MST) Edit | Delete | Permanent Link | 1 Comment - Darkgate forever!
- Tags: | Edit Tags Wednesday January 16, 2008 - 10:44am (MST) Edit | Delete | Permanent Link | 0 Comments
- HOM: Calling It Like It Is!
- Folks that have known Dad for many years have gone over this & talked to me, and they say to call it like I saw it. I guess he had a reputation for being hard to get along with.
I suppose this reaffirms what a classmate told me - nobody really liked Dad, but they tolerated him for Mom's sake. This is actually pretty sad, and I know the loneliness he has gone through since Mom died is most likely a result of reaping a bit of what he sowed.
I wish that our relationship had been different, for both our sakes.Tags: | Edit Tags Tuesday January 15, 2008 - 02:16pm (MST) Edit | Delete | Permanent Link | 0 Comments
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