Rabbit traps, Caves, and Cannon

Another thing my father and his brother had in common with Tom Sawyer were the caves that are part of the Missouri landscape.  Like Tom, they explored those what were near where they lived.

The time we were living on Doc Hunt’s place was at the beginning of the Great Depression of the 1930s.  No one in the Ozarks knew much about national economics and such—at least not in our neck of the woods—but we sure knew that times were getting hard and money was mighty scarce.  That is what we called those days—“Hard Times.”

There was practically no way for youngsters to make spending money during Hard Times except for trapping rabbits.  The countryside was full of cottontail rabbits and dealers from the city would buy rabbits in the fall when the weather was cold enough for the carcasses to keep after they were killed.  We could trap rabbits, kill them by breaking their necks, gut them, and sell them at the store for ten or twelves cents apiece.  The city dealers would come by once a week or so and buy the rabbits—the carcass for meat markets and the skin for making cheap fur coat collars.

We used box traps to catch the cottontails.  They were wooden boxes about twenty inches long made from pieces of board six and eight inches wide.  There was a vertically sliding door at the front.  Two holes were drilled on the top; one for a forked stick for a fulcrum and the other at the rear for the trigger.  The trigger was connected to the sliding door by strings and a log stick levered over the fulcrum so that when the trap was set the trigger held up the sliding door.  The trap was baited with an apple core or carrot.  When the rabbit went in after the bait and bumped the trigger the door came down and he was caught.

Author's sketch of the kind of rabbit trap he and his brother made.

Richard and I usually had six or eight box traps.  In thickets and fence rows we would find the little paths where the rabbits travelled and set the traps where they would not miss them.  In rabbit season in the fall, we ran our trap line every morning and each evening—killing those we had caught and re-baiting the traps.  We never worked very hard at it, but we would often have three or four rabbits a week to take to the store.  When we got old enough to carry a 22 squirrel rifle, the rabbit money enabled us to buy shells for the slender little Remington rolling-block single-shot rifle that Dad got for us when I was ten.

Richard and I were to grow up carrying that little squirrel rifle while we roamed the fields and woods.  Dad taught us to handle it safely and how to aim with deadly accuracy.  He taught us never to aim a gun unless we intended to shoot and to shoot straight.  His philosophy was, “if you can see it, you can hit it.”  When we killed a squirrel, for instance, we did not just shoot at the squirrel.  We shot at his eye.  We killed squirrels only for meat for the table and shooting one through the body tended to spoil the meat.  If we could not see the head, we did not shoot.

Once in a while, of course, we would accidentally gut-shoot a squirrel.  When that happened to me (which was not often, I am happy to say) I would bury a badly gut-shot squirrel rather than be embarrassed by taking one home that I had not shot in the head.  I know that Richard occasionally did that also, although he seldom missed.  He was always a shade better than I was.  In fact, I saw him competing successfully in adult turkey shoots when he was only fourteen and I have known him to knock down a quail on the wing with that 22 rifle.  Of course I insisted the latter had to be an accident to be an accident!

That, however, was later on as in 1930 we were still not allowed to carry a rifle.  Instead, we had to be content with trapping rabbits, fishing, and just roaming the countryside exploring.  We found our first cave along the creek north of the Doc Hunt place.  We had been fishing with a neighbor boy who was two or three years older and were moseying along the creek bank under the trees along the base of a limestone cliff when we spied a dark opening about three feet high.  We hiked back across the fields to the neighbor’s house, borrowed a coal oil lantern, then went back to explore the cave.

It was a dandy cave.  The narrow passageways back into the cliff a few feet then widened into a low room maybe eight feet across from which two passageways led off into the limestone.  We could go no farther, however, as the openings were too low to crawl into.  The only thing unusual we found was a small glossy blue and green stalactite to carry home in my pocket.

Our father gave us another lesson about that.  When I proudly showed him the piece of stalactite, he turned it in his hands then explained to us how those stalactites take hundreds of years to form from water dripping through the limestone.  I felt bad then about damaging it and even thought about taking the piece back and gluing it into place but I never got around to it.  The result was that I never again thoughtlessly destroyed any sort of natural wonder.

That was the summer we made a steam cannon and could have gotten badly injured in the process.  We were fooling around with the same older neighbor boy (whose name I cannot recall) and came across an abandoned old broken-down blacksmith shop.  There were some dandy pieces of junk piled out behind the weathered old building and one of them was a piece of iron pipe about ten or twelve feet long.  It was capped at one end.

The neighbor boy proposed that we make a steam cannon and he proceeded to show us how.  The pipe was about three inches in diameter.  We spent about an hour cutting a plug from the end of a tree branch that would fit tightly into the open end of the pipe.  That done we built a fire and got it going good while we carried some water from the creek in an old bucket and filled the pipe about half full with it.  We then drove the wood plug tightly into the pipe, stacked up some rocks and propped the pipe up at an angle with the lower half across the fire.  The idea was to boil the water until steam pressure built up enough to blow out the plug.  Hopefully it would blow out before the pipe exploded.

It is possible the boys had seen an ad like this.

It took quite a while for the steam pressure to build up.  I got tired of just sitting waiting and was wandering around when finally, there was a satisfying BOOM!  The pipe jumped and fell off the rocks, and we could hear the wooden plug screaming off into the distance.  In later years during my engineering courses at the University of Washington I realized that we were lucky that we had not driven that plug into the pipe too tightly because the old rusty pipe could have exploded from the steam pressure and sent shrapnel flying in all directions.  At any rate, it was a very satisfactory experiment, but we never got around to trying it again.

The lessons of the Doc Hunt place would come together in the future when team work, creativity, shooting skill, and a large measure of grace would protect the Frieze boys.

Finding a Vocation in a Cornfield

That summer on the Doc Hunt place, Richard and I were getting big enough to start helping with some of the farm work.  Richard, being nearly two years older, was still a little bit bigger than me, but not by much.  I was growing and catching him fast.  As an adult I would pass him in height and weight.

Richard was developing into a small edition of our father.  He was dark-haired like Dad and we boys all had the Frieze blue eyes.  Richard had a quick, keen mind and, even in those days, he was forever figuring out how to make things come out to his advantage.  He was always and forever trying to take advantage of me—too often succeeding.

I did not start out as if I were going to be very tall.  I was a chubby-faced little fellow with blond hair that tinged with red to a sort of copper as I got older.  I probably looked like a typical Dutch boy, thanks to my Blankenship ancestors. [Later life Richard traced the family history and discovered that the Blankenships were actually from England—descended from a knight no less.]

Both Richard and I had pretty fair tempers, but his was more slow-fused than mine.  When he got mad it would burn inwardly for a bit before he acted.  Not me.  Boy, when something got my dander up I would literally explode.  Of course that meant that oft times I would go off half cocked.

Most of the time I was far more happy-go-lucky than my older brother.  I did not have the devious streak Richard sometimes displayed and, consequently, got taken advantage of regularly.  I tended to take things and people at face value without looking for hidden motives.  I’d have to reckon that I was more than a little naïve.

Like normal brothers, Richard and I grew up fighting fairly frequently—both verbally and physically.  It helped develop some pretty tough muscles—not to speak of vocabulary (not necessarily the kind Mother would approve of!).  We also developed a closeness that made us defend each other, too.  We might be fighting as if we were determined to kill on another, but if someone else interfered we would turn on him and fight side by side.

At times we cooperated fairly well.  I remember when we first started plowing corn with a walking cultivator there on the Doc Hunt place.  Neither of us were big enough to handle the team and control the cultivator handles at the same time.  Dad, however, found a way that we could help.  He took an old metal farm implement seat and nailed it to the tongue of the cultivator at the base.  One of us would sit up there and drive the mules while the other walked behind and held the cultivator handles.

Type of mule drawn cultivator used in the 1920s & '30s

It was a pretty good system except that Richard was forever maneuvering to make it my turn at the handles when we were plowing the cross rows.  No matter how carefully Dad handled the trip wire for the corn planter, the cross rows were seldom nice and straight.  Maneuvering those cultivator handles so as not to plow up some corn sure put muscles into my arms and shoulders.  I suspect that was one reason that it was not too long before I could hold my own in a tussle with Richard—except when he and Rex ganged up on me.

Another chore we got acquainted with that year was replanting corn.  Replanting was the spring bane of every farm boy’s life.  The problem was that quite frequently when the corn came up there would be missing hills.  Since we wanted a full field, the missing hills had to be replanted by hand while the corn plants were small.

It was a deadly monotonous chore.  The equipment was a hoe and a pocketful of corn.  The replanter had to walk every row.  Where there was a missing corn plant you made a hold with the hoe, dropped in two or three grains of corn, and covered them up.  It got to be so mechanical that you could replant corn and think of other things at the time time—such as how you’d rather be fishing or swimming in the creek.  Quite often during those long sessions in a hot cornfield I would think about things I had read.  I was always an avid reader—anything I could get my hands on, but mostly pulp magazines with stories about cowboys and about the flying aces during the World War (later to be called World War I).

I remember one very hot day when I was out in the middle of the cornfield in my blue bib overalls, raggedy straw hat, bare feet, with my hoe.  An airplane came from the direction of Kansas City and flew right overhead.  You did not often see an airplane in those days and especially at fairly low altitude so, of course, I leaned on my hoe to watch.

It was a biplane with bright yellow wings and dark green fuselage.  I pulled off my straw hat and waved it.  By golly, the pilot saw me, waved back, and rocked the wings from side to side.  I was entranced and knew then and there that I had to fly someday—little dreaming that I would spend my entire life in and around airplanes.

WWI French Spad

I never have put much stock in astrology, but I was born on March 3^rd which makes me a Pisces.  There may be something to it because, supposedly, Pisces are great daydreamers.  I used to dream up some pretty good fantasies while I plodded the hot, dusty cornfield rows, replanting corn.  I could literally leave those Ozark hills in my imagination.

Instead of faded blue overalls, bare feet, and a battered old straw hat, I would suddenly be wearing leather boots, coat, helmet and goggles, and with a white scarf fluttering in slipstream while I flew a Spad [French fighter plan of WWI] in a dogfight with a red Fokker triplane over the shot-up fields of France.  Other times I was dressed in black with silver ornaments on my wide-brimmed sombrero while, riding a coal-black stallion, I chased Mexican bandits.  The whole time that hoe would keep up its rhythm—click, plup, swish—click, plup, swish—wherever there was a green corn shoot missing.

My father enjoyed building model airplanes even as an adult.  You would think he got enough helping to design and sell the real thing.  Together we built a bi-plane model that he insisted we paint the colors of the one he’d seen that day in the cornfield. Additionally, my whole life my father loved Charles Schultz’s “Peanuts” comic strip.  I believe that he thought he and Snoopy had something in common.

Lessons on the Farm

Binder similar to the one used on the Doc Hunt place.

Farm children learn early to respect the equipment used on the farm.  While safety has improved over the last hundred years, children (and adults) still get hurt farming.

I learned a very hard lesson about machinery there on the Doc Hunt place and picked up a permanent scar from it.  One day in late summer, Dad was running the mule-drawn binder cutting oats.  A binder was a big machine with a sickle bar in front to cut grain and a big wooden reel that pushed the rain stalks onto the belt.  The belt carried the grain into the clattering machinery where it was automatically tied in bundles to be gathered up into “shocks” until time to haul them to the threshing machine.  (Nowadays the whole process is done with combines so you never see a binder any more outside of a museum.)

Dad had a very mismatched team of mules hooked to that binder.  One was a sorrel we called “Red” and he was fat and lazy.  The other was a tall, raw-boned, hard-working old mule that was sort of black with a bluish tint.  Inevitably, his name was “Old Blue.”

Before modern farm equipment, mules, a cross between horse and donkey, were ubiquitous on the Missouri landscape

Those mules were as different as day and night.  Old Blue would pull his heart out all day, but not that lazy Red.  He would always sag back pulling only what he had to until his end of the doubletree would rest against the front of the binder, plow, wagon, or whatever the team was hooked to.  Dad would get so mad that he would yell words at that red mule that I was not supposed to know (I knew them anyway only never used them around my mother or grandparents else I would get my mouth washed out with a soapy rag).  Dad would whip that red mule wither with the reins or with a whip made out of plaited strips of green elder bark.

You never had to cuss or whip Old Blue.  When you shook the reins and yelled, “Giddup!”, Old Blue would dig in his hooves and pull for all he was worth until you pulled him up again.

Well, anyway, on this particular day Dad was cutting a field of oats with the binder.  The seat on a binder was up real high so the driver could see over the machinery.  I was coming across the field from the creek and decided I would hitch a ride on the back of the binder, which I had done before.

My intention was to run up behind the binder and jump onto a bar down low while I grabbed the curved seat support to hand on.  It would have worked just fine except as I lunged for the seat my food slipped.  My hand missed the seat bracket and went right into one of those big gears, then between it and the chain.

My father pulled up the mules as soon as he heard me yell—and I expect they probably heard me clear over to Polk County—but my hand had already gone in far enough that it threw off that big square-linked chain.  It did not break any bones, but one of the big gear teeth gashed my palm so deep that you could have put a quarter in there—well, a nickel at least.  Of course I was bleeding like a stuck hog.

1925 Model T Ford, similar to the one Ernest Frieze drove from Washington to Missouri

Dad jumped down, wound his red bandana around my hand and hustled me off to the house.  Mother was quite upset, of course.  She bundled me into our old Model T Ford and we went flying down that dusty dirt road to the doctor in Fair Play.  He fixed up my hand and gave me a tetanus shot, which I did not like much.  The hand healed pretty quick, but forever I have had an inch-long scar in the palm of my right hand.