A Conversation with Gail Albert Hopson
Interviewed and recorded by Jesse Thomas Rich, grandson, July, 2007 just one month before Gail passed away. Transcribed by Barbara Rich, Gail’s daughter. Edited by Andy Hopson, his son.(Listen to the interview here.)
“Time went by. It’s unbelievable how fast it went by.”
I started to write my life story and didn’t get to far. There’s a lot of things I remembered since that I could add in. That’s what I was thinking I might do this winter, write down ideas, thoughts that I have and try to collate them into a sequential thing. I remember quite a bit.
We lived in southwestern Iowa. It was Lapland because it was so close it lapped over into Missouri. The two closest towns of any size were Clarinda, Iowa, thirty miles away, and the other was Maryville, Missouri. There was a “normal school” there, where they taught teaching. The girls would learn to be teachers and then teach in rural schools. It was a college town. People would go there to shop because it was so much closer. We lived in Gravity, a little town close to Bedford, an incorporated city that was bigger. That’s where farmers would go to retire. They’d retire when they were 55 or so, give the farm to one of their kids, and get a house in town. Then after they quit working they’d develop infirmities and about three years later they’d be dead.
My grandfather lived quite a while. He retired and my Uncle Humphrey Hopson ran the farm. Granddad lived in town where he had a great big garden. He’d sell stuff out of the garden. That’s what he had done most of his life out there on the farm. They had a truck farm and he milked cows and raised hogs, but the way he made most of his money was off of raising produce. He’d sell watermelons, cantaloupes, cucumbers, everything. With eight kids he had plenty of labor, so he’d raise a lot of stuff you have to hand weed. I don’t raise anything like that, but he did. He used to raise watermelons and sell them for ten cents apiece.
Everyone knew that Grandpa would let anyone who came to the farm eat all the watermelon they wanted and not pay anything for it. Dad used to tell us stories about a guy who would walk the two miles from town to the farm in the summer with a burlap sack. Dad said he would eat a whole watermelon. He was tall and skinny. You never could see where he put it. It just disappeared in him. Then he would buy one and put it in his sack and walk home. It was like getting a watermelon for five cents instead of ten cents. He’d do that every Saturday, all summer. Grandpa had a pile of watermelon rinds. He sold lots and lots of produce. He even took it down into Missouri with a horse and wagon. He raised chickens too. The farm was really diversified, but the garden was what supplied most of their income.
The property was pretty small actually, only 60 acres, 67 acres, something like that. It was bought by James Elliott Hopson, grandpa’s dad, my great grandfather. He’d been in the Civil War working as a railroad engineer hauling Union troops and supplies. When he retired, he bought the farm and moved to Iowa. He also worked as a New York Life Insurance agent until he was quite old. He had heart trouble. He’d take a nitro pill for the angina. That was about all they did back then. But he lived to be 91. Dad used to go with him in his buggy to make sure he could get his pill if he had an attack. He didn’t dare go alone.
Dad was the oldest child in the family. He was the responsible one. He got married young. He was just 19 when mom and him got married. He had a pretty tough time. They were doing alright to start with but the Depression hit the farm in 1927, two years before the stock market broke in 1929. He bought him and Mom fourteen acres and they lived close to town, close to Bedford. They set up a little milk bottling operation of their own. Mom would bottle it while Dad was milking. While she was cleaning up he’d load up his Model T truck and and run around town and deliver it. They delivered it twice a day in pints. They were doing really well. They had about 10 or 12 registered Jersey cows.
Then dad decided he wanted to branch out, he wanted to make more money, so he bought 40 acres next door. He raised hogs. It doesn’t require a lot of ground to raise them but they need quite a bit of feed. He didn’t have much feed so he got a loan at the bank to buy corn in Nebraska. He fed that to them and he was just getting ready to sell when the price dropped a cent or two a pound. He figured it was just an aberration, that it wouldn’t last, that the market would come back, so he held them. And it kept dropping and it dropped so low he ended up selling his hogs for three and one-half cents a pound. He lost everything. He couldn’t hang onto it.
A banker come out. He wanted them to stay. He said they could stay if they just paid the interest. Dad couldn’t see it. He figured he paid $500 an acre for the 40 acre farm. The price had already dropped below $200 an acre so he’d have been paying interest on $500 an acre land. If he went broke and managed to get it back it might be at $50 an acre. He decided he couldn’t stay so he went into construction.
My Grandpa O’Dell, mom’s dad. was a contractor. He built houses, so dad worked with him for a while. Just before I was born he had a chance to go to Arkansas and work on a bridge. He took off leaving mom behind in Iowa because I was going to be born soon. She was pretty big pregnant and he didn’t want to move her. After I was born he came home, loaded everybody up and took us down to Arkansas. I come awful close to being an Arkie. That’s the way dad got started in the construction business.
When he came back to Iowa, he tried to go into business in Gravity. But it was a little town, dirt streets. It was just a farm center. People would come in from the farm and buy things. Dad had a produce station for Cudahy Packing. He’d go out and pick up cream or people would bring it in and he’d buy it for the company. At the produce station you could buy ducks and geese and even pigeons. We ate a lot of pigeons. They were cheap. When he’d get a load of stuff he’d take it down to St. Joe, Missouri to the Cudahey Packing Plant and turn it in. He was buying it with their money. Then he branched out, bringing day-old bread and pastries back to Gravity. That made him a lot of enemies. The Postons were the ones who had the local store there and they didn’t like it a little bit. Dad was undercutting them. They were selling fresh product for about twice what he was selling day old bread for. He got a lot of the pastry and bread trade.
He built an ice box in the back part of the building. Then he started bringing ice back from St. Joe. He’d bring the ice back and he’d sell it in chunks. People would pick it up. I think he even supplied a vendor in town. He made money that way. Cudahey then talked him into supplying the local farmers with grain and feed. The next year there was a drought and they wouldn’t pay; part of them didn’t have the money and others spent it on something else. The company tried to make dad pay. It was them, I mean they were the ones, who forced him into selling it. So he had to close up. He left and come out west.
He lived in California first. He worked on the Golden Gate Bridge for one day. It was during the Depression. There was a hiring hall down at the base of the bridge. They were nailing on decking, getting ready to pour the deck with concrete and there were spikes. Dad lasted half a day. If you straightened up to many times or went to the john more than once or something, you were fired, because they had a string of fresh guys that were willing to work. So he had a little experience on the Golden Gate Bridge. I guess he worked on the Bonneville Dam, maybe the Hoover Dam for a while. I don’t know how long. It must not have been very long.
Then we went up to Oregon where he got a job with a slab mill that was making railroad ties for China. His younger brother, Oliver, come out to live with us. He was built like a brick house. I mean he was short, he was five-foot-nine, but he was strong. They’d take the slabs and pile them alongside the plank road coming into the mill. It rained a lot there and the ground would be soft, so they built plank roads. Whenever they moved the mill they’d put another plank road in to get to the new location. They’d pile the slabs on either side to dry out. The company hauled them to Portland to sell to wood dealers for firewood. They slabbed off a pretty good chunk. It was a small mill. They don’t cut them like that anymore.
Dad worked at that for awhile. Then some connections he made in Arkansas had moved to Washington to work on the Grand Coulee Dam. They had this rule they couldn’t hire any outside help. It had to be what they called “local talent.” The only way you could get on if you were out of state was if you were a supervisory employee. So, this guy got dad on as a foreman. When we moved to Grand Coulee our fortunes increased dramatically. We started having some money. Dad was making $1.37 an hour. That was a lot of money back then. It must have been 1937. He worked on the dam. We went to Arizona one winter. He got the idea he didn’t want to work on that dam in the wintertime because he had to work down in the galleries and he felt like a mole. There was no light in those tunnels.
We went to Yuma, Arizona that one winter where he worked on the Imperial Dam. We went to a school in Yuma. Arizona’s got the hardest schools there is. They put us back; every one of us was set back a grade. We just couldn’t do the work. I was never so glad to leave any place in my life. It was mostly Mexicans. I didn’t mind it except at school. They’d gang up on you at school. We were white kids and they were Mexicans and they spoke Spanish and we were just outsiders, that’s all you could call it. My only really good friend was a Mexican kid who lived next door. I used to go over there and he’d fix tortillas and stuff. His mom was gone most of the time during the day. I don’t remember what she did, but we’d eat whatever he had in the house. We lived right next door and he told me some pretty tall tales. Well he said one that was probably true. He said you could fry eggs on the sidewalk. You could set a skillet out there and it’d get hot enough that you could fry eggs. I believe that one. He said marbles would melt lopsided on the sidewalk. I didn’t really believe it then and now I know he was lying to me. You have to get glass up to almost 2,000 degrees before it will melt. It didn’t get that hot on the sidewalk.
While we were there we visited the Yuma prison and seen all the etchings on the rock from the prisoners that had been in there and stuff. I don’t see how anyone could survive a summer in there. It was carved out of solid rock. It must have been like a furnace in those cells. We left the next spring. It was June and it starting to get hot. I wouldn’t want to live in Yuma, Arizona. No way. I don’t see how anybody can stand it down there.
The Imperial Dam Dad worked on was where they got water to irrigate that sandy desert. They raised dates. I watched how they grow them. They put a sack around them to keep the birds off. All that handwork, and it’s way up high. We went out one time to this farm to buy dates. They sold them just like I do watermelons here at the ranch.
They raised a lot of lettuce at that time too. I don’t know exactly where. It must have been pretty close because the trucks would come through the stop light there in town and on over to the packing shed. We spent that winter there. Weather-wise it was really nice, but school-wise it was horrible. I just hated it.
Then we moved back to Washington and Dad worked on the dam there until it was finished. I had a paper route for the Spokesman Review. I had money then. I made a nickel a customer a week. I had 80 customers. Five times 80 was four bucks a week I was making. I had all the candy, all the books. I was even starting to buy some of my own clothes. I had a bicycle. I was doing very well.
I remember the war when it started in Europe. I was delivering papers. Man, it wasn’t good. I’d been reading the headlines. One day a big headline said, “German Panzers invade Poland,” in great big block letters. I was just a kid but I knew something really bad was happening. And then, of course, we didn’t get in the war until later. But we started gearing up for it. People don’t realize that, but we started changing over to a war economy.
Dad’s job was coming to an end. They poured the dam from great big concrete kettles on trains up on a trestle. It’s just hard to believe. I don’t know just how much was in each one, but it was a lot. I remember when the dam was just being started. You could look down in there and the guys looked like ants working. When we left it was all done except for taking the trestle down and putting in the turbines and stuff for the electricity. Now dad didn’t have any work. I mean the finish up work wasn’t his stuff, so we moved again.
We moved down to Redding, or Summit City, actually. Pat and Doris McMillan had moved ahead of us. (Doris is Dad’s sister.) Pat got ahold of a 20 acre mining claim and put up a little house on it. And we moved there with a trailer house. No, it was a house. It was a house first. Dad built a house.
I went to school. When we moved back to Washington from Yuma they immediately put the other kids up a grade, but not me. I wasn’t reading well. Matter of fact, I was having a lot of trouble reading in the fifth grade. You don’t go very far very fast if you don’t know how to read. My teacher, this older woman, had gray hair, she taught me how to sound out my words. I learned to read in two weeks. By the middle of my fifth school year I could read my fifth grade history book clear through. It was about the Revolutionary War, early colonies and stuff. It just fascinated me, so I read it right through. I’ve been reading ever since. Never could spell very well, you know, because you can’t spell by sound. I can read any word I can find. I can sound it out. But to spell it, you’ve got to know how. At my age, I’ve got to where I can spell pretty good but I still have to hunt around for words I’m not sure of. It’s almost funny. I started doing well after that, and when we moved to Summit City. They had two classes there together, a seventh and eighth grade, with one teacher, Mrs. LaGrone. I’d get all my work done quickly then I’d read the encyclopedias. There was a shelf of encyclopedias and I was just fascinated. I’d sit there and read those. She come down one day and I was sitting there and she said, “Well, you know, I’ve talked it over with the principal and we’ve decided to move you into the eighth grade.” See, it didn’t mean I was going to go anyplace. She was just going to grade me for a different type work. I didn’t care. It didn’t matter to me. So they moved me from the seventh to the eighth grade, which put me back where I belonged. It was still easy. I didn’t have any trouble with school. We had a little library there, in the school, where they donated books and that year, my eighth-grade year, I read eighty-five books, counting the ones I checked out of the Carnegie Library. That don’t count the pulp books I read. I used to read under the blanket with a flashlight. If the light was on, dad would holler, “Put that light out!” So, I’d use the flashlight to read. I read pretty fast, I guess. You can get a real education just reading books, not very structured, but you get information and eventually over time you put it together.
When I was in the eighth grade the war started. We got out of class one afternoon and I heard somebody across the street holler, ”The Japs bombed Pearl Harbor!” Then somebody else took it up and they were hollering it all up and down the street.
Dad had been working on Shasta Dam. He didn’t work there very long and the high line system they were using was pretty dangerous. Those guys in the central tower couldn’t see well enough out there where they were dumping the buckets. They killed quite a few people. They knocked the catwalk out from under dad one day and he dropped on the inside 20 feet. It didn’t hurt him. Just a few days later they done it again and he didn’t fall but they took out the catwalk ahead of him or something like that. I’ve forgotten the particulars but he was a construction worker and they’re superstitious. They are very superstitious. He had considerable anxiety about it. He went over and drew his pay, right on the spot. He just quit. There was no problem with work, it was just that we had to move. He went down first, to Vallejo, and got a job with Kaiser driving piling. It paid well and but he hated the work. Back then they had the cost plus thing. It was supposed to stimulate more work but what it did was fix it so anything it cost the contractor, he made ten percent on it cost plus ten percent. Anyway, Wayne, my older brother went with him and he was working. He was only fifteen and one-half, but he was running a boat, a tugboat, out in the bay moving piling rigs and stuff. He wasn’t the captain, of course, but he was working with the captain. They would dump whole box cars of marine plywood into the bay and let the tide take it out because they got paid for the plywood plus ten percent whether they used it or not. With the war going on we were short of everything. Dad had trouble with that and so did Wayne. He had a lot of trouble with it. On the pile driving rig they had two crews. They were short of work so one crew was downstairs playing cards and the other one upstairs doing work. Dad was downstairs playing cards and he got tired of doing it. So he quit and we come back up to Summit City.
We’d been down there living in a trailer court. Dad bought a trailer. So he set that up on Pat’s 20 acres. He went to work on Keswick Dam where he worked for four years. All during the war he was a superintendent on the night shift with, I think, the West Side Carpenters. He had a very responsible job. It paid well and he saved enough money to buy the farm.
When the dam was finished he bought the farm and moved us down there. He hadn’t really figured on living there. He figured it more for an investment. He was going to go to Cottage Grove with the company. They had a dam up there they were going to build but he had a heart attack. Anyway, he didn’t do much after that. He didn’t do any more construction. He had a whole batch of sick leave and time off coming that he hadn’t taken during the war. So he had about six months where he could get by on the money that he’d made. So we lived there. We started out raising tomatoes. We put in about five acres of tomatoes down by the creek and we’d pick them and pack them and haul them up to Doris and Pat’s place. They lived right where the highway went up to the dam and so we’d haul them up there, and they had a sign,” Tomatoes, a dollar a pound.” We sold all that we grew. It was what put us in business.
We started buying cows and milking. Wayne was still home then. We were milking by hand. I was milking I think something like 9 or 10 at night and morning and Wayne had 7 or 8. That’s the first dispute we had. He was a lady’s man. He’d keep wanting me to milk his cows for him, finish up, so he’d be on time for his date. One night I got mad and said “No. I’m not gonna do it.” We ended up having a fist fight in the barn. But he didn’t stay for very long. He went into the Navy. He was seventeen when he went into the Navy. He didn’t want to be drafted into the Army. So he was gone and that left just me and Ray. So, we done all the work. Not all the work. Dad done what he could.
It’s been a pretty good life. I worked a lot. Everything around here, Ray and I did. I either did it physically, or paid for it with the money I earned on the milk routes. So, we just went from there. Dad knew how to do everything and he’d tell us how to do everything and we done it. He was good at almost anything he wanted to do, even some mechanical work. He could do it.
But basically, Dad was a carpenter and a cement finisher and a plumber. He could do electrical to but he didn’t like it. He didn’t like plumbing. He worked as an apprentice plumber when he was young and decided that was for someone else. He didn’t like plumbing. I understand, crawling in and out under houses and stuff. The new construction would probably be okay, but where you’re taking care of old plumbing it’s the pits. I wouldn’t want to do it.
Along about when I was in high school, I got the idea that I wanted to sell our own milk. I remember old George Tyler was my ag instructor and he come out one day. We’d bought some heifer calves from the coast with our own money and I got to talking to him. He wanted to know what I planned for the future. I was probably sixteen. I told him, “I want a herd of sixty Jersey cows.” And I want to sell their milk in bottles. That’s what I wanted to do. So, I did it. By the time I was twenty-four I was married, had a child, had a milk route. We were in business.
I had a house. It was hard work. Those milk routes were hard work. You just don’t realize how much work it was. It wasn’t so much the physical, it was the worrying about keeping the right kind of employees. You know, you’re dealing with the public. It finally just got bigger than what I could handle. Seven trucks were going out every day, except for Sunday.
I finally told Dad I couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t take care of seven of them. We had to start selling more bulk milk. So, I cut off a route and got it down to six, then after that, as things kind of tightened up it got less and less profitable. I kept cutting out areas that weren’t as profitable. I finally got it down to where I had three routes with Uncle Humphrey running one, me running one, and Ben running one.
Jared and Andy even ran milk routes at different times. It helped them go through school. It kept getting harder and harder and finally by the time Ray died it got down to just me. I was running one great big route. I thoroughly enjoyed it because I didn’t have any hired help problems, nothing, it was just me. I knew I was going to show up for work, you know?
Then Ray died and everything changed. I had to change the whole business to make it profitable. It was pretty tough, but I did it. Ray died. Mom died two weeks later. No, she died two weeks ahead of him. That changed everything, when they both died. Then Dad died, I think it was about three or four years later. So, I’m here alone.
I haven’t told you much about my own life, I guess. There ain’t a lot to tell. I just worked. I worked. That field down there by the dairy, down where the hayfield is, the year Ray was in the service, and I’d been working on it ahead of that, the year I got out of high school we’d got our new Port Ferguson tractor, and we had a hydro-speed scraper. I’ve still got it down there. I wouldn’t sell that thing to anybody just for sentimental reasons. I leveled that whole field out there. I dug out the stumps first. There were seven great big oak stumps. We had a 1530 McCormick Deering with full wheels on it. It must have weighed four or five tons. I’d go out there and I’d dig around those roots and I’d put a cable on them and slam the end of the cable with that tractor and yank them out. I got all the stumps out. I leveled that field. It took me five months with that scraper. It was the only tractor we had. We were feeding silage. I’d have to unhook from everything at night, hook it up to the trailer, and haul the silage out, then hook back up to the scraper. I was getting probably about five and a half, maybe six hours out with the scraper every day. But I got to where I could haul a load every three minutes, on average, and I could keep it up and get almost a yard and a quarter on the scraper, so I was moving a lot of dirt every day. I leveled it so it would irrigate down through the center and both sides. We hadn’t filled the slough in down by the creek, so I sloped it both ways- one to the road and one to the creek and it was a real nice field. We used it that way for several years, raising corn on it. Then while Ray was in the service we had Dick Horr come over with his big RD8 and had him level it from the road to the creek. That filled in the slough and that made about a 23-acre field out of it. It’s a beautiful field. It’s still there- like that.
I sent Ray a picture of Jared when he was three-months-old. I made him look like a six or eight-month old baby by holding him up with a hand underneath the towel. I wanted him to see what the baby looked like. He was sending his money home to me and I was banking it for him. When he got out of the service the first thing he did was he bought a car.
Those were good years. I enjoyed them. I was married and my wife would, when I was leveling that field, come down and bring a picnic lunch and set on the log and watch me work. She was big pregnant and it was good exercise for her. We had a lot of fun and didn’t have any money but it didn’t take any money. You can have the best time of your life without money. It’s the feeling that you’ve got between you that makes the difference.
We had a house. It wasn’t finished yet but it was ours and we weren’t where Mom could watch us all the time. I was up here on the hill, and so it was a pretty good life. And the kids started coming, all of them while I was delivering milk. She was very cooperative. All of them were born early in the morning! I remember Ben, she didn’t start having pains with him till it was almost time for me to go load the truck, and I was pretty worried about that. I took her down to the hospital and she didn’t have him until 10 am, so I was pretty late that day, with the milk, but the others all come early. She’d start having pains along about one or two and then I’d take her to the hospital about five and she’d have the baby about an hour or two later. It was really simple. She was very cooperative. We had a lot of fun. You can work and have a lot of fun. It’s these people that think you’ve got to have a boat, you’ve got to have a utility vehicle, you’ve got to have all this kind of stuff to have fun, they don’t realize it don’t make any difference.
Time went by. It’s unbelievable how fast it went by.
There’s a lot of things, like when I was a kid, I remember what we did. My grandfathers, both of them, I knew both of them. My Grandfather Hopson I knew a lot better than I did my Grandfather O’Dell. He was a good person. He just had a real hot temper and he drank. He drank quite a bit but he was Irish and Welsh, and he had a terrible temper. I remember that. That’s when Dad was working with him. He bought a brand-new Stetson hat. There was something happened that really went against the grain with him and he got so angry he threw his hat down on the ground and stomped it. Brand new Stetson hat. That doesn’t show a lot of control. But he was really a good carpenter. He come and when we lived in Gravity, the house that we lived in before we moved, he put in an addition. Well, I don’t know that he put an addition on it but he put in a door and stuff. Doris said it was a place he made for Mom to do the laundry. But the way I remember it he just put in a back door and some cupboards. I remember all the shavings on the floor. I mean he done everything with the old hand tools and he was a perfectionist in the way he worked.
I remember the washing thing with Grandma O’Dell. When washing day came she’d heat a tub of water on the stove and then she’d use bar soap that she made or somebody else made and gave to her. She’d cut it up and let it melt into the water, then she’d boil the clothes on top of the stove and wash them by hand on a washboard. Women don’t realize how good they got it now. I’d carry water from the well for her in the wintertime. It would d be freezing weather and I’d slop it on my pant legs. By the time I got through my pants were frozen stiff.
There are a lot of things to remember from when we were kids. I remember once Grandpa Hopson was visiting. It was not to long before we moved. I think it was getting close to Christmas. My older brother, Wayne, was really good at making things. He made sling shots and he made darts with needles and match sticks and stuff, I mean he was just really handy. He made this machine gun that used truck rubber on it and it was a machine gun, because it had more than one notch. I think on this one he had about eight notches cut into the barrel. He had a strap that run up under it and you’d stretch these rubber truck tire bands from the end of the barrel up to each notch. I don’t know whatever possessed Ray to do it. I would never have done it. Grandpa was coming around the corner of the house and Ray pointed that at him and pulled the strap and got him with all eight loads, right in the belly. Grandpa never said a word. He just started after him. Ray knew what was coming. He knew what he’d done, and he was trying to run. He was running pretty damn fast too, but Grandpa caught him in about three jumps and caught him and just paddled him good right on the spot. He had it coming. But it was funny. It was really funny. I thought it was funny anyway. I didn’t laugh, but I still thought it was funny. Doris remembered it. She seen it happen. Grandpa was kind of short and slight built compared to the rest of the family. Him and his brother, Uncle Seymour, they were about five foot nine. They were fairly slight built. But anyway, he was fast. He was like grease. He must have been in his mid-sixties when we left.
We left on Christmas Day in 1936. There hadn’t been any snow. The ground was frozen solid. We had a sale there at the house. We sold everything. We left and went out to the farm and stayed overnight. I remember it really well because I had an ear ache that night. I used to have an ear ache with my left ear. It was really painful. My Aunt Margie held me on her lap almost all night. I don’t know whether I slept or not. The next day we left. We had the trailer behind the car. We started out and it started to sleet and snow. It was sleeting the day we left. The storm followed us all the way out. We got over into Idaho and the trailer hitch broke in Boise. It was so damn cold Dad had to rent a room in a hotel for us to stay in while he was fixing the trailer hitch. It was below freezing and the wind was blowing. We took right off. We kept right on driving. He was afraid to stop anywhere, so we drove straight through to Oregon where my Aunt Frankie lived. She was my grandmother’s sister. Her and Alonzo Hopson. No, it was Alonzo Hopson that was her Dad. Harry was my grandmother’s father. Aunt Frankie and Uncle Rob, she was married to. We got there in the middle of the night and we went in and went to bed. The next morning there was sixteen inches of snow on the ground. We just barely got there ahead of the storm.
We had an old friend down here, John Brown, that I was friendly with. I liked him. He helped teach me to pitch hay and do a number of things around the farm. Dad didn’t seem to want to, or didn’t know how, or well, anyway. But he told me that winter the same storm dumped snow all over the west coast. He said you could just barely see the top of the fence posts it stormed so bad here. That was the same storm that trailed us out. Then it flooded. The river down here flooded. That was before the dam was put in. That was in 1937, January, after the flood.
We stayed in Oregon while Dad worked the sawmill and got on at Grand Coulee Dam. We had a pretty good childhood, I think. We done a lot of things that kids just do, you know. We didn’t have much but we didn’t know any better.
I had a pigeon loft when I was in Gravity. I’d catch pigeons in the barns and bring them home in a sack and put them in there and feed them a little bit, then they’d stay. Most of them would stay. There was an old feed mill down the hill from where we lived. I’d go down there and roll up the pant legs on my pants and fill them up with corn. I’d crawl around in the corn bin and fill my pockets and my pants and take it home and put it in a barrel for pigeons. Corn was all over the place. I mean, they just grew it all over and it was the tall stuff, ten or twelve feet in the air. And guys picked it by hand. They’d have corn shucking contests, and some of them could shuck a hundred bushels a day. Dad could never do it, but he was fast. I seen him do it. You’d just reach up there. You’d have a glove with a hook in it and just yank it down and throw it all in one sweep.
I went into that field looking for ripe enough corn that I could take a cob home to feed my pigeons. They’d check all that corn. When they check it, it fixes it so they can cultivate it in any direction. That way they get damn near all the weeds. When you cultivate and check corn, I mean you just get right up in the corn on all sides. And that’s what they done with this, and I got back in off the road a little ways and I couldn’t tell where the road was. I mean I was petrified, scared. I finally found my way out, but that’s the last time I ever did that. I mean, you never go into a corn field. I was little. I was only, I couldn’t have been more than six, and that corn was up there twelve feet, ten and twelve feet in the air. I was just like, I was lost in the jungle till I found my way out of it. I never did that again. It wasn’t worth it.
I remember the places we lived. We lived two different places in Bedford. One house was right across from the school. I had measles there. I had German measles. I was really sick. That’s back when they didn’t do anything much. You just went through it. You didn’t get vaccinated or nothing, it was Rubella. German measles. I was in a front bedroom. Mom had the blinds all drawn because one of the side effects from German measles was it weakens your eyesight, plus a bunch of other things. It can cause you to get hard of hearing and any number of things. So, they try to keep you in a dark room and as cool as possible. You run a hell of a fever with it. But I remember Mom come in and there was just one light bulb in the room. It hung down from the ceiling on a single cord with a pull string on it, and she come in and pulled that and the light come on and it looked to me like it was going around and around and around, so I know I had a fever. I was sicker than a dog. We all had the measles. I don’t remember about the other kids. I just remember about me and how sick I was. That was when I was younger. I must have been four or five.
Mom put me in Kindergarten. We lived close to the school. I hadn’t had my fifth birthday yet. I didn’t want to go to school. I remember I didn’t want to go to school. She took me anyway and put me in Kindergarten. I crawled out the window and run off and hid in the woodshed all day because I didn’t want to be in school. They took me back the next day.
Back then things were valuable that wouldn’t be now. There was a kid there in class playing with a robin’s egg marble. They’re blue, glass. She took it away from him and put it in the drawer in the desk. I don’t know whether she was keeping me after school because I was unruly or what, but I was left in the room while she left and I remember I got into the desk. I stole that robin’s egg marble. I didn’t get to keep it. She found out that I stole it. But anyway, school just all started off bad and I was angry over the whole thing.
I remember they had brand new putty in the windows. They’d just got through re-puttying the windows and when I crawled out the window that last time, I dug the putty out with my finger, on the lower part of the window pane. It was just a mean thing to do, but I was feeling pretty mean. Anyway, I got a bad start in school.
I never done very well in grammar school until I was in the fifth grade, in Washington. I was talking to Doris about it. She said it’s no wonder. She said the Poston’s were teachers as well as merchants in town and because Dad was giving them a bad time (by under-pricing them on bread and pastries), they gave us kids a bad time. Yeah, adults can do a lot of things to hurt little kids. I was glad when we moved from Iowa. I was glad we moved. You couldn’t see- you know, I didn’t know what a hill or a mountain was. I remember my first- grade teacher, she’d taken a trip out to California and she come back and she was showing us all the pictures of the Redwoods and the trees you drive through. She had some pictures of mountains, and I didn’t know what a mountain was. I’d never seen one. All I’d seen was a hill, and when the crops were growing you couldn’t even see the hill! You walked down the road and all you could see was corn on either side and the stuff had an odor to it. I mean it smelled like corn. And you could hear it. In the night time you could hear it growing. Those joints in the corn- they expand and grow at night, I think, more than they do any other time. But when they grow, they jump and make that joint crack, and you can hear them crack at night.
In Iowa it was hard, a hard life. It was the depression. It was just a hard life. It was probably in 1932, I was about five. We didn’t have anything to eat hardly. Dad put in a ten acre garden with a friend of the family, they done it on shares. They grew corn and sweet potatoes. Dad grew some cabbage to. That winter we was living in an old house. The woman let us have it for $5 a month just to keep it from being empty. There were lots of empty houses around. People just couldn’t afford to pay rent, so they’d move in with their relatives or something.
But this house had a bunch of bedrooms in it and we didn’t need them all. So Dad took one bedroom and boarded the doorway up and put all the sweet potatoes in that bedroom. And then the corn he’d figured on burning. Corn makes really good fuel, but it burns pretty fast. Now they’ve got modern stoves that you can burn it in. It burns just like you’d be using coal, oil or something. But back then to use it like coal, it wouldn’t have been as efficient, but it puts out a lot of heat. Dad was figuring on burning the corn in the winter for the heat. Grandpa got wind of it, and couldn’t stand the idea of him burning corn so he traded him a ton of coal for a ton of corn. He fed the corn to his hogs and Dad burned the coal.
That winter we lived on sweet potatoes and coleslaw. We’d walk out after school every night to the farm and get a gallon bucket of milk. I wasn’t starving, but I was so hungry for some things that I wasn’t getting I couldn’t hardly stand it. We got through it. Dad would take sweet potatoes up to the corner store, you know those general stores. They’d take anything and whenever they’d take the sweet potatoes, he’d trade them for flour or sugar or something. But they’d only take them when they needed them to sell. So, we lived mainly on sweet potatoes. Got really tired of sweet potatoes. Sweet potatoes and milk, nobody had any meat. They didn’t have any refrigeration. If you didn’t can it, you couldn’t keep it, unless it was cured like pork. You could cure it in the smokehouse, but if it was beef, what they’d do was, the family would butcher someplace and then everyone would get part of the meat. And that way they didn’t waste any of it. But Mom canned meat quite a bit. Up in Washington, when we lived there, Wayne and Dad and some of the others went on a hunting trip up close to the Canadian border and shot a buck deer with a 22 high power. He got it in the foot, knocked it down, then walked up and shot it between the eyes. I was along, because I remember what we did. We had to get a pole and pack it out to a trail where a horse could get to it. It was down in a ravine. So, we hauled it on a pack horse. I think it was two hundred and eighty some pounds of meat. It was huge, a mule tail. Mom canned all the meat. We didn’t have any refrigeration. I don’t think we had anything but an ice box. I’m not even sure we had an ice box. But she canned it all, and it was really good. She’d make gravy with it. We’d have gravy with chunks of venison in it and put it over mashed potatoes. It was good food.
I’ll never forget that. It was the hardest work I ever had anything to do with, getting that deer up on that trail. I’ve never hunted since. I have absolutely no desire to go out and shoot something. It’s too much work. I’d do it if it was necessary. But, I’ll be damned if I’ll go out there for sport. It’s not a sport. It’s hard work. And to shoot something for the joy of killing it, I just can’t see that, I just can’t see it at all. It’s no fun to kill something. So, I learned how to butcher here on the farm.
During the war they had a freeze on prices and everything. Then they had a terrific black market. You could buy anything on the black market in the way of food. We’d been milking cows for quite a while, a couple of years, and we raised the bull calves. We didn’t sell the calves, they weren’t worth anything. We raised them and they were dairy stock, so they weren’t very beefy. When they were two years old, getting ready to be butchered, they were grass-fed, which meant that they weren’t unsellable either. Dad had this buyer come out and look at them and he offered us a nickel a pound for them. That would have been about twenty dollars apiece. It made Dad angry. They just got through putting in a locker plant in Anderson. They had locker plants all over shortly after that, but it was a new thing that had come in. People didn’t have freezers at home, but you could take the meat into a locker plant and rent a locker. The rule on it was you could butcher and sell three quarters, as long as you kept a quarter, and so every weekend till they were gone, we butchered a steer. I got pretty handy with a butcher knife. I never did kill them. I couldn’t do that. Dad did it. But once they were down, then I could skin them. I was pretty good. I got to where I could skin them pretty good. We’d sell one every week and then when the locker got full — see this is a black market thing — there was a butcher shop out front on the other street and Dad made a deal with the guy in the butcher shop to sell that packaged meat over the counter, without stamps. So we sold every last one of them, and we had all the meat we wanted. As I remember it, they averaged a little over seventy dollars apiece by selling them that way. That don’t sound like much now but back then, seventy bucks was a lot of money, I mean, it could buy a lot. You could go to town with a five-dollar bill and buy a lot of groceries. It’s interesting the way things have changed money-wise, like eggs.
When we lived in Summit City I had chickens. Wayne had them first. He’d sell the eggs. There was a place in town, in Redding…Macy’s, I think it was Macy’s, but anyway, they would buy the eggs. You could take them in there. It was a feed store. They would buy eggs. I guess they shipped them off to a packing plant or whatever and packaged them, and candled them and everything. They were sellable; you could sell them. We was getting about eight cents a dozen for them. And now you can go up to Costco and buy eggs five dozen at a time for eighty-nine cents a dozen. I mean, the egg business has really become that efficient. I made money off of them. I bought chickens.
I was in the forest service the year I got out of the eighth grade. You weren’t supposed to be able to work until you were eighteen, but because the war was on they didn’t have any able-bodied people to do the work. I went and applied and they hired me. All you had to do was run a hundred feet with a ninety -pound sack of cement. And you had to be able to broad jump twelve feet. I passed with flying colors. I probably weighed a hundred and forty pounds by then. So me and about six or seven other guys were in Camp Ono all during the summer. We really didn’t go on a fire except once. I made up my mind then that I never wanted to be in the forest service. There was a big fire down by Oroville, and they got desperate enough for help that they sent us kids down there. We was supposedly putting in a fire trail. All we had was fire hose. It was almost pathetic. It was a timber fire. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life and I don’t want to ever see anything like it again. There was fire in the tops of the trees. It was jumping. I’ll never forget it. We weren’t making any headway, we were just on crew. They had a whole bunch of people there but they were mostly kids like us and it was dangerous as hell. I mean, for kids like us, even with adults overseeing us. They had the airfield out by Oroville and they brought these guys in. They were Army, airfield guys. And when they come in it was just like heaven. I mean those great big strapping guys, and they was starting to fell trees. They didn’t have chainsaws back then. They were using an axes. They started felling those trees and making a firebreak. And they put us kids to carrying sandwiches and water. That’s what we did on that fire.
When we come home I was so dirty and black you wouldn’t have known I was a white person. They wouldn’t let us sleep on clean ground. The guy that was taking care of us made us sleep on a burnt over railroad track bed. Looking back on it, I can see why. He didn’t want to take a chance on us getting burnt up. I never felt so good about anything. They brought their kitchen with them. They set up a kitchen. I mean it was just a wonderful deal. They had all kinds of food there for us, plenty of water, and all we had to do was run up and down the trail supplying these guys with food. They were working like dogs, but that fire really burned a lot of acres. I made up my mind really young that that was something that I was never going to do. It was to hot and to dangerous.
I’ve about talked your ear off, I guess. I’m about to quit on you. There’s a lot of other things to talk about. I could talk about your mom some. That might be interesting.
