The Way West

I woke shortly after sunrise.  The landscape outside had changed during the night.  The undulating prairies had given way to rolling hills and rocky outcroppings as we approached the Rocky Mountains.  I was enthralled.  We were getting into cowboy country. 

I was hungry and feeling the call of nature.  I made my way slowly through the swaying car to the lavatory at the end.  For a country boy fresh from a two-holer outhouse, the train lavatory was opulent.  The sink was marble with gleaming brass fittings and there was a fancy light up beside a gilt-framed mirror.  I wondered where electricity and hot and cold running water came from on the train.  The toilet was flushed by a foot treadle.  I was fascinated by the fact that the treadle simply opened a flapper valve and, peering down, I could see the ties flashing past.  Now I knew the reason for the sign that said “Do Not Flush While Train is in Station.”

I washed my face and combed my unruly mop of hair, then made my way across an open platform into the dining car.  It was a bit overwhelming.  Each table was set with a white linen cloth, heavy silverware, white coffee cups with gold rims, and water glasses that must have been crystal.

There were few passengers in the diner at that early hour.  I took a seat at the nearest empty table.  The white-coated black waiter, flashing his white teeth in a big smile, placed the menu in front of me with a flourish and a “Mawnin’, young suh!”

He waited while I studied the menu.  I was appalled at the prices.  At home in Greenfield a complete breakfast of eggs, bacon, fried potatoes, toast, juice and coffee could be had for 35 cents—twenty-five cents without the juice.  You could also get a hamburger for a dime.  Here on the train, a glass of juice was twenty cents alone and a bacon and egg breakfast was seventy-five cents.  On the lunch part of the menu, a hamburger was fifty-five cents.

I surreptitiously felt of my pocket where, after the movie in Kansas City, I had little more than four dollars to see me to Portland which was still two and a half days away.  I squirmed uncomfortably in my chair.  “We-ell,” I said, “I am not very hungry.  I’ll just have a glass of milk and some toast, I think.”

The waiter never batted an eye but I realized later that he knew the reason for my discomfort.  He smiled, “You sho’ that’s all?”  When I nodded wordlessly, he leaned down before he turned away and said in a low voice, “Tell you what—when we gets the folks from the Pullmans fed, Ah’ll be comin’ through the coach with some sandwiches—they is only two bits apiece.”  Then he turned away to get my milk and toast which was going to total thirty cents here in the dining car.

The black waiter was not only as good as his word, he was better.  About an hour and a half later he did indeed come through the coaches with a tray of ham and beef sandwiches.  When I held up my hand and dug out a quarter, he flashed that big grin again.  Without asking my choice, he pulled a sandwich from the bottom of the pile.  Instead of cold ham or beef, it was a bacon and egg sandwich still warm from the grill.

After that I did not go near that expensive diner but bought sandwiches three times a day and sometimes a bottle if pop when a vendor came through.  A grape NeHi was a dime instead of a nickel that my grandpa charged at his store.

There was not much else during the trip that made a deep enough impression on me for me to remember more than fifty years later.  I recall that there was a boy a couple of years older than me sitting across the aisle.  We struck up an acquaintance and would sometimes get off and stretch our legs when the train was in a station.  I still remembered that other trip when I thought the train was going to leave my mother behind so, even though I now knew that the train would not leave until the whistle blew and the conductor call, “All aboard!”, we never wandered very far from our coach.

I do recall one scene clearly the second day out, probably somewhere in Wyoming.  I knew that I was finally “out west”.  There was a dirt road paralleling the railroad track.  I watched as we passed a man wearing a wide-brimmed cowboy hat and driving a buckboard behind a spirited team of horses.  Behind him loped a young fellow on a pinto rocking along in a silver-mounted saddle.  I was a bit disappointed that he did not seem to be packing a six shooter.

Heading into the Unknown

The plan was that Grandpa would take me to the bus stop over to the north of Fair Play where I could get the bus to Kansas City.  One of my many relatives in Kansas City would meet me, then I would stay for a couple of days with my Aunt Ora and attend the wedding of one of my Kansas City cousins.  Someone up there would put me on the train to Portland, Oregon.

Grandpa was to take me to Fair Play in the green Chevrolet sedan while Grandma tended the store.  I recall that it was a bright and sunny morning when Grandma gave me a big tight hug on the store porch, admonished me to be a good boy and to be careful on the trip by myself, and said that they were going to miss having me around and all the help I had been.

I looked back as we started off down that familiar road north that I had walked to school so many times.  The familiar plump figure in that ankle-length dress stepped down into the red dirt of the road and waved.  I waved back and I guess it must have already been warm out there in the sun as, the last thing I saw of Grandma as we went over the hill, she was wiping at her cheeks with a corner of her apron.

I do not recall that Grandpa and I talked very much during the trip to Fair Play.  I mostly watched the familiar scenes going by that I was not to see for a long, long time.  There was the little white schoolhouse, closed now for the summer.  We went up the hill past the Lindley house, but I did not see anyone around nor did I see anyone around Rollo Lindley’s place where my erstwhile friend Roundtree lived.

We went through the Little Sac River bottomlands where I had plowed Dad’s rented cornfields with that mis-matched team, then across the steel bridge that Dad had helped to build two or three years before.  In a couple of miles, we turned past the Doc Hunt place where our dog Pal had died and where Richard and I had milked all those cows.

At Fair Play we only had a short time to wait until the Kansas City bus came.  I noticed that Grandpa’s kindly voice was a bit gruffer than usual when he said, “We’re going to miss you, boy.  You have been a great help to your Grandma and me.  We are right proud that you did so well in school and we expect you to make us even more proud of you out there in the west.  I don’t expect we will see you for a pretty long time.”

I suddenly felt that I should comfort him somehow, but he was still that tall figure of authority that everyone looked up to—standing there in his striped overalls, black coat, and black Homberg hat above his gold-rimmed spectacles.  I think I just said sort of lamely, “Well, Grandpa, I sure hope I was not too much trouble for you.  I was real glad to get to stay a while with you and Grandma and I reckon it won’t be too long before we can come to visit.”

(I had no inkling, of course, that the next time I would see him would be in Vancouver, Washington and I would be wearing the dress blues of a first class petty officer in the Navy with a row of ribbons and three major battles in the Pacific behind me.)

The bus pulled in before we could talk anymore and Grandpa helped the bus driver stow my box and suitcase.  Then he handed me the sack lunch Grandma had made for me to have on the bus and he pressed a two-dollar bill into my hand.

“Goodbye, boy,” Grandpa said gruffly.  “That is for you to have something a little extra along the way.”

“Gee, thank you, Grandpa!”  I pocketed the money then started to shake hands but he suddenly did something that he had not done since I was little. He put his arms around me in a bear hug then pushed me toward the door of the bus and turned abruptly away.

On the bus I took a seat on the right side then opened the window and leaned out as the bus pulled out.  Grandpa turned back around and waved his black hat.  I guess it was warm out there in the sun in Fair Play for Grandpa, too.  The last thing I saw he was wiping his face with his big red bandanna as his tall, straight figure receded into the distance behind the bus.

Saying Goodbye

During those final days, I made the rounds of my kinfolks and friends to say goodbye.  I stayed a night with Uncle Claud, Aunt Virge, and Mary Catherine and had some of Aunt Virge’s huge lightbread buns slathered with butter and good molasses for breakfast.  I rode to Aldrich with Grandpa in the truck and stayed a couple of days with Uncle Merritt, Aunt Golden, and cousin Charles.

Around Bona I also had final visits with my schoolmates—many of whom were cousins of one sort or another.  Claude and Billy Todd who lived in the old board and batten house just beyond the church.  Harold and Don Griffin (When I saw Don next he would be a U.S. Marine and I a U.S. Navy sailor on Ford Island in Hawaii not long after the attack on December 7^th 1941.)  There was Frank Whiteside, Andy and Lee Asbell, cousin James Lowell Tygart, Clarence Lee King, and Gene and Evelyn Asbell.  I guess I did not make much of an effort to say final goodbye to most of the girls except when they happened to come into Grandpa’s store during those last days.  (Mary Neil was one of those and it was only later that I realized that she did not buy anything, but just looked around and talked to me.)

I believe that it was sometime in May when the time finally came.  My train ticket had come, along with some money for eats along the way.  I carried water from the Bona well and Grandma washed and ironed my small wardrobe.  I still had the cardboard box that my guitar had come in and, since I did not have a guitar case, packed my overalls and the things I had outgrown in around the guitar.  I tied the big package with binder twine.

There was an old suitcase for my “good” clothes and some memorabilia which did not amount to much.  I had given my collection of Indian arrowheads—half a Quaker Oats box of them—which I had picked up in the corn fields along Maze Creek—to Mary Catherine, I think, and the single-shot 12-guage shotgun to James Lowell.

On the day of departure, Grandma had me put on a clean shirt with my one necktie, the grey suit with the zippered jacket, and my black “Sunday-go-to-meeting” oxfords.  I had a black felt hat.  I felt all dressed up but I had outgrown that grey suit so that the pants only came to an inch above the ankle and the sleeves were more than an inch too short.  In retrospect, with that binder wine tied guitar ox and battered suitcase, I must have been the epitome of a country rube that just fell off the turnip truck!

A Love Affair Deepens

1931 Bird Biplane

It was in the spring of 1937 that my interest in aviation increased to a near obsession.  I had always liked airplanes and Charles Lindberg was my idol.  I had a “Lucky Lindy” brown leatherette aviator’s helmet that I almost always wore during the winter.  I read World War Flying Aces pulp magazines avidly and would always stop whatever I might be doing to watch when very infrequent airplanes flew overhead.

One time before he left for Washington, my father dropped Richard and me off at a little silent movie theater on the square in Greenfield to see the original version of Howard Hugh’s film “Hell’s Angels” twice, but not because of Jean Harlow.  We did not think she amounted to much at all.  To us she was just a blonde woman that looked like a grownup version of our cousin Mary Catherine and who had the same kind of high-pitched voice.  We sat through it again just to see those old airplanes dogfighting, the zeppelin getting shot down, and the German bomber episode.

Anyway, in the spring of 1937, Grandpa, Grandma, and I went to Springfield one day.  Grandma had been poorly and she had to have some tests at the hospital as I recall.  They told Grandpa it would take a couple of hours so he asked me if I would like to go to the zoo or something.  I asked if, instead, we could go to the Springfield Airport to look at airplanes up close.

In those days Spring Airport was just a big level grass field with a row of wooden hangars along one side.  There were no airplanes parked outside and, to my disappointment, none were flying.  Grandpa went to a little office and asked a man there if there was an airplane I could look at somewhere.  He directed us to one of the hangars which had the door standing open. 

I got goosebumps on my arms when we walked into that hangar and there sat a beautiful open-cockpit biplane.  It was shiny red and it and the whole hangar had a heady aroma compounded of airplane dope, grease, gasoline, and rubber.

I suspect that my eyes were as big as saucers.  I walked around to the front of the airplane and it had an honest-to-goodness radial engine.  I had read all about that sort of thing.  It seemed like a big airplane and engine to me then but in later years when I was flying myself I concluded that it was a little Bird biplane with a small five-cylinder Kinner engine. 

While I was gaping in awe and reverently stroking the taut fabric of the wing covering, the man from the office came in.  He watched me for a minute then came over and said, “You want to sit in the cockpit, kid?”

I could only grin at him delightedly as he boosted me onto the lower wing then helped me get into the back cockpit.  He pointed out the instruments and controls and let me wiggle the stick so I could see the ailerons move.

I was in seventh heaven and I am sure it plainly showed.  As the man helped me out of the cockpit I asked, “Can you fly this here airplane, mister?”

He nodded.  “Yes, it belongs to me.”

When I was back on the dirt floor of the hangar, I turned back to the man and said emphatically, “I aim to fly one of them airplanes someday!”

He grinned and whacked me on the shoulder.  “By god, boy, I bet you will, too!  You got the right look.”

Heading West

I did not attend the auction at our little farm.  I had no desire to watch our meager and somewhat shabby but familiar possessions dispersed to strangers.  I had said my goodbyes to old Buck, that patient and gentle big buckskin horse, and to Red, the little blazed- face sorrel.  They had served us well and were my friends.

Mother had told me that I could keep one of our two guns—either the slim little twenty-two or the single-barreled breech loader shotgun—for hunting that fall.  I chose the shotgun.  I had only been permitted to carry a shotgun for the past year and some bird hunting wa all that it was likely to do in the fall.  I would be leaving in the spring before squirrel season.

Mother also asked me not to plague Grandpa and Grandma with a dog so, very reluctantly and having to hold back tears, I said goodbye to my good friend Pup and gave him to one of my cousins who I was sure would treat him well and take care of him.

On the day of the sale on a Saturday I simply helped Grandpa around the store and carried buckets of water from the well for Grandma.  I do not know how much money was realized, but hopefully it was sufficient to defray Mother’s expenses on the long trip west.

Departure day for Mother, Richard, Rex, and tiny seven-month-old Sandra arrived.  Mr. Ganaway loaded our old metal trunk and such housewares as mother could take into the truck, then he piled bedding and pillows on top so that Richard and Rex would have room to sit up under the canopy.  There was even a small space for them to hang their feet down at the back.  Mr. Ganaway said, “Well, boys, you won’t see where we are going, but you will sure know where we have been!”  It promised to be a long, long haul on those miles across Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, and Washington.

Our family was never very demonstrative.  My mother’s eyes puddled up a bit when she told Grandma and Grandpa goodbye.  She hugged me and admonished me to write a letter once in a while.  She turned then and climbed into the truck while Richard and Rex scrambled into the back.  Grandma reluctantly handed up Sandra Dean.  I patted Sandra’s tiny hand, then closed the door as the truck engine growled into life.  They pulled away and off down the graveled road toward Dadeville and the highway west beyond.

The last I saw was Richard and Rex waving gaily from the back of the truck until the dust obscured them.  I stood in the road and watched them disappear past the little house where we had lived, then I had to hurry off to school.

Dreaming of Washington, Walter Mitty Style

That day [his father left for the west coast] I was truly walking on air on the way to school.  My imagination ran wild.  During the morning, while the tenth grade was reciting, I got a picture atlas from the library shelves and flipped it open to the Pacific Northwest and the State of Washington.

It was a glorious prospect.  The pictures in the atlas were all in black and white, but my imagination added the colors.  There were green mountains, the snow peak of Mount hood, and vast expanses of evergreen forests of Douglas fir.  There were photographs of logging and one of a tugboat pulling a huge raft of logs down the Columbia River which, to me, looked as big as an ocean.  I could throw a rock across the Little Sac River in most places but the Columbia was more than a mile wide—as wide as the distance from our house to school!

Inevitably, I went off into one of my Fantasies.  This time I was a lumberjack in a red plaid wool jacket and calked boots. I was high off the ground, topping a tall spar tree, when the foreman came and yelled up to me, “Hey, we got us a log jam in the creek and it looks like a real killer.  You will have to come quick!”

I was famous not only for being the best tree topper in the Pacific Northwest, but also for being able to clear any log jam.  I finished topping the spar tree with two mighty swings of my sharp double-bitted axe and came down on the double.  The foreman led me trotting down a shaded forest path until we came to the large creek down which the logs were floated to the Columbia River.

The jam was a bad one.  Logs had wedged between huge boulders and those behind had been piled high in a tangle by the swift current.  My practiced eye quickly spotted the key log at the bottom of the jam.  Get that out and the whole shebang would hurtle down the creek.

I simply said, “Gimme a peavey,” and spit on my hands.

“But when you pop that key log loose, the whole pile is going to come down on you.  You won’t be able to get up out of there in time!”

I had already considered that.  “Never mind,” I said flatly, “when she pops out I’ll ride her down the river—done it before.”

I took the heavy peavey and nimbly hopped from boulder to logs until I had made my way down to the source of the problem.  The huge pile of logs towered over me and creaked ominously from the force of the water dammed upstream of the jam.

The four-foot thick key log was jammed against the edge of a big grey boulder.  Calculating the angle, I got the point of the peavey into the thick red-brown bark, set the hook, and heaved mightily.  There was a groan and a scrape as the end of the log came loose.  It started to move and the pile of logs rumbled as they came loose.  Catlike, I leaped onto the log, my calked boots holding firmly to the shaggy bark.

The log lurched then, a split second ahead of the crashing pile, shot out into the current of a white water rapid.  I balanced the peavey crosswise in front of me and, as we shot out of sight around a bend, the canyon echoed my triumphant “YAHOO!”

I suddenly snapped back to reality there in Bona School.  The room had gone silent and everyone was staring at me.  In my excitement and enthusiasm, I had shouted “Ya-hoo!” out loud!  Mr. Mitchell was looking at me and grinning.  “Beg pardon, Conrad—what was that you said?”

My face was beet red and my ears were burning in embarrassment.  I slowly closed the book and mumbled, “I—well—ah—I was thinking about something else I guess, sir.”

All thirty kids in the room roared with laughter at my discomfort.  Mitchell rapped on his desk for order and said dryly, “Yes, I guess you were and I think I know what it was.  We appreciate your enthusiasm for the great Pacific Northwest under the circumstances but we do have work to do.  I shall call recess five minutes early then we will get back to work on our science project.”

Of course I was razzed unmercifully on the playground, but beneath it all, most of the kids were envious of the prospect that Richard, Rex, and I faced.

Old Fashioned Fourth

A big event each year in our part of the Ozarks was the Fourth of July picnic in Greenfield, the county seat of Dad County.  I do not know why it was called a “picnic” because it was far more than that.  It included carnival rides set up all around the courthouse square, hamburger stands, all the usual carnival booths with prizes, a few sideshow tents, and a fireworks display at dark.

During the first half of the year, we boys tried to save some money to spend on fireworks on the 4^th.  We did not usually save much because the rabbit selling season and possum hinting were on in the fall and winter.  My mother, however, always managed to give us enough for some firecrackers, a cap gun, and a hamburger.  I think she sometimes sold some of the chickens to give us fifty cents apiece.

Our fireworks in those days were not subject to the safety regulations we know have and, consequently, were far more potent and a lot more fun.  We were taught the dangers involved and were then on our own.  I never heard of a serious injury involving fireworks; however, we were all subjected occasionally to minor burns, numb fingers, or temporarily deafened ears once in a while.

We had firecrackers that would blow a Maxwell House coffee can fifty feet into the air.  Our cap guns sounded like real revolvers and the Roman candles would send fireballs a hundred feet into the air.

One of our favorite devices we called a “cherry bomb” but it was not a firecracker with a fuse.  It was an innocuous appearing brown ball about the size of a walnut.  It went off on impact like a miniature hand grenade.  Thrown high in the air so it would come down on pavement or thrown at a boulder, a cherry bomb made a soul-satisfying bang.  I recall one 4^th when we saved some of those cherry bombs and had a “war” the next day before Sunday dinner on a rocky hillside near my Uncle Coy Tygart’s spring on the old home place.  Fortunately, there were no casualties.

We usually arrived in Greenfield on the 4^th before noon and spent the rest of the day.  My mother sometimes took biscuit sandwiches for lunch.  Dinner would be a real hamburger from a stand on the square—a nickel for a small plain one or a dime for a big one with mustard and onion.  No MacDonald’s, Burger King, or Wendy’s can compete with the delicious taste of those 4^th of July hamburgers.

Even though we were old country boys from the hills, we were smart enough to know that most of the game booths for Kewpie dolls and stuffed animals were rigged and were nearly impossible to win so we rarely wasted our money there.  Any one of us could have cleaned out a shooting gallery except that they would not allow anything but BB guns in the town square and they were never accurate.

Sometimes we were a bit more gullible about the sideshow attractions.  One time they had a “Wild Man from Borneo”.  There were lurid signs outside the tent showing a savage with bones in his ears and nose sitting in a snake pit.  Occasional wild screams and unintelligible gibberish came from inside.

My curiosity got the better of me and I paid a nickel and went inside.  There was canvas “pit” in the center of the tent and, sure enough, a wild looking brown man with straggling and stringy long dirty black hair was seated in the dirt among several large snakes.  There were some harmless ground snakes and a couple of big rattlers that I figured out right away had been de-fanged because they did not try to bite the man.

The “wild man” sat in the dirt mouthing gibberish while he fondled the snakes and threw one or two across the enclosure.  I stared at him for a while and he finally looked at me through the dirty stringy hair falling over his face.  I suddenly realized his eyes were as blue as mine and I sure had never seen a blue-eyed Negro.  I grinned at him and one of the blue eyes slowly closed in a wink while a faint smile flitted on his dirty face.  I laughed as I left the tent thinking that I sure did not want to make a living that way.

The fireworks after dark were the usual display of fire fountains, big Roman candles, skyrockets, and aerial bombs that left females covering their ears and dogs scurrying for cover.  One main attraction was the small hot air balloons.  These did not carry people and were only about three or four feet tall.  The balloon part was made of gaily colored Japanese rice paper and the “burner” was simply a large candle suspended on a small platform.

When the balloons were released and soared about the treetops, the candle flames lit up the paper and made a pretty sight as they drifted away in the warm night.  Since everything was dry as tinder in those drought days, I have no idea why those balloons did not start a major fire when they came down.

By the time the fireworks were done, so were we.  Dog tired from the long day and the excitement, a few stray firecrackers and a cap gun in our pockets, we would be bundled into the back seat of the Model T Ford touring car.  We children were usually fast asleep before we got to the Bona turnoff at Tarrytown.

A Visit from Cousin Ray Dean

Chapter 10

Family Departure for Washington

In spite of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s efforts, Hard Times did not seem to get any better in the spring of 1936.  Congress had declared the NRA to be unconstitutional and the WPA faltered.  The drought eased a bit, but the price of eggs remained at ten cents a dozen.  Unemployment had soup lines in the large cities stretching around the block.  I recall seeing a sign in a café window in Greenfield: “BREAKFAST—two eggs, three strips of bacon, fried potatoes, toast, and coffee—25 cents”.  The work on the road through Bona was over and my father could not find a money job anywhere.

We continued to wear our patched overalls and faded shirts but we never went hungry.  There was always food on the table three times a day.  Breakfast might be only biscuits and gravy but it was good and nourishing.  We did not mind that often our syrup pail lunch buckets held only a couple of biscuits and some hog meat—it was good.

One of our favorite dinners was when Mother made macaroni and cheese and cooked a pot of beans.  We would stir the macaroni and beans together on our plates.  With a hunk of cornbread and a glass of milk fresh from the cow, it was delicious.  (It took me a few years to adjust to cold refrigerated milk—I preferred it straight from the cow.)

There was one thing that I really detested—turnips!  I do not know why it was, but besides the weeds, the one thing that seemed to thrive during those drought years was turnips.  We ate turnips fixed every way known to mankind.  Mother even cooked the turnips tops like spinach so we would have some greens.  To this day, I am reluctant to face cooked turnips.

A momentous turning point in our lives occurred in the spring of 1936 a few weeks after Sandra Dean was born.  One afternoon a shiny black new car pulled up to the front of our little house.  It turned out to be our cousin, Ray Dean Lee, from Vancouver, Washington.

As I mentioned before in the first chapter, Uncle Austin had a pretty good job with the city water department in Vancouver and had some money in the bank.  He was tight as the bark on a tree, however, and would never pass up an opportunity to save a dollar.

Uncle Austin wanted a new car.  He had figured out that if he bought a train ticket to Detroit for Ray Dean, Ray could go back there, buy a new car at the factory, and drive in out to Vancouver for a hundred dollars less than Uncle Austin could buy one there.  Ray Dean was on his way back to Vancouver with a brand new 1936 four-door Plymouth sedan.

That new Plymouth was the finest thing in the way of an automobile I had ever seen.  After supper, while everyone else were taking around the table, I sneaked out front to look the car over.  I touched the shiny black paint reverently and finally worked up the courage to slide into the driver’s seat under the steering wheel.

The car had that new smell compounded of newly baked enamel, leather, and fresh grease.  I gripped the steering wheel and fantasized that I was ahead of Barney Oldfield coming down the stretch at Indianapolis.  They found me there later, sound asleep and still clutching the steering wheel.

Ray Dean’s unexpected visit changed our lives.  During that conversation after supper, Ray told Dad that there were jobs to be had in the Pacific Northwest in the lumber business.  We had been there, of course, ten years before so it was not unknown territory to Dad.  Before the evening was over a big decision was made—my father would go with Ray in the car back to Vancouver.  If he got a good job, the rest of us would come later.

We boys were ecstatic when we were informed of the decision at breakfast the next morning.  I reveled and thought gleefully, “Now I will get away from these hot, dry, dusty old hills.!”

My father gave us some sobering words of caution.  “Now don’t get your hopes too high, boys.  First I got to get out there and find a job—something that will pay enough that I can rent a house and send for all of you.  That may not come easy or quick.  We will just have to hope that I don’t have to come crawling home with my tail between my legs.”

He turned to Richard and me.  “Meantime, we got to keep this little farm going.  I am depending on you two boys—especially you Richard, because you are the oldest.  We only are milking four cows so that won’t be a problem.

“I planted twenty acres of corn down in that bottom land I rented and you will have to take care of that with the team.  You know what to do.  When you get it laid by, if everything has worked out and we are moving to Vancouver, we will hope that your mother can sell it in the field to help pay expenses and you won’t have to pick it.”

And so it was arranged on very short notice.  While we were in school the next day, Dad put his affairs in order and packed his meager belongings in a battered old cardboard suitcase.  The morning after that, right after breakfast, he got into the Plymouth with Ray Dean and they headed west.

The Family Increases

Another big event early in 1936 was the birth of my little sister Sandra.  Since it had been ten years since Rex was born, I expect that she may have been a bit of a surprise to Mother and Dad.

“All we children were “spring lambs”.  Richard was born in April of 1920, me on March 3^rd of 1922, Rex in May of 1926, and now Sandra on March 22^nd in 1936.

It seemed like Mother had gone around pregnant for a long time but finally she knew the time had come.  Sandra would be born at home just like the rest of us had been.  On a Saturday they sent us three boys off to Grandma’s house to stay the night.

Early Sunday morning, my Aunt Alice (she was an old maid living at home with Grandma and Grandpa) woke us and told us that we had a little baby sister.  Alice said that we could go home and see our new sister after breakfast.  I slipped away and walked the quarter mile home.

Mother was lying in bed looking pale and tired and the baby was in a basket behind the bed.  I sidled around there, pulled back the blanket, and looked at the little pink face.  Mother said, “Well, Connie, what do you think of her?  Who does she look like?”

Now newborn babies have always looked about the same to me—wizened little red faces and their eyes screwed shut.  This one did not look much different to me so I thought I would sort of make a joke of it.  I said diffidently, “Well—I guess she sort of look like a little monkey!”

Mother seemed a little put out for a second but then she laughed.  Guess I should have said that she looked like a cute little monkey—which she did.  In fact, when I looked close, she looked most like my Grandma Stanley and my mother and she would resemble them even more in later years.  She is short and round like they were and, when she walks she sort of trots like Grandma did.

I was pleased as punch when I got in on naming our new sister.  Dave wanted to call her Dean because one of our cousins was married to a girl named Dean whom Dad admired.  They talked about a lot of names that did not sound right to me.  In some book I had read about a girl named Sandra and I liked that.  I suggested that and they wound up naming her Sandra Dean.

We all adored little Sandra Dean.  We had a little red child’s rocking chair that all of us had used when we were tots.  I recall that the back bow was worn down from our turning it upside down and pushing it around the floor playing “choo-choo” when we were learning to walk.

I never learned to change Sandra’s diapers but when she cried I would sit in that little red chair and rock her while I sang cowboy songs.  It worked because she would stop crying and lie in my arms looking solemnly at me with her blue eyes until she fell asleep.

"I went down in the river to pray, studying about that good old way"

Those years of 1935 and 1936 when I was thirteen and fourteen were very pivotal years in my young life.  Events seemed to occur at an accelerating pace.  With puberty my voice cracked then deepened so that I no long sang boy soprano at church but could handle the baritone and even some of the bass parts.

I moved up into the “big room” at Bona School into the ninth grade.  Under the tutelage of J. B. Mitchell, I was doing very well indeed.  I always liked school and was never tardy.  I was also never absent except for that time in Arcola when I had diphtheria, then a few days early in 1936 when I came down with yellow jaundice.  I guess it was a form of hepatitis.  I still remember how very sick I was.  My skin got yellow and my eyeballs turned brown for a while.  It stayed with me for the rest of my life, too.  In the Navy and afterward, when I listed childhood diseases I had, they would stamp “Yellow Jaundice” on my health record and I still am not allowed to donate blood.

My grades were always good and there was no subject that I disliked or that was hard for me.  Regardless of the subject, I was nearly always at the top of my class.  It may have been partily because Richard was also a top student and I was determined not to allow him to outdo m e.  Whatever the reason, I always felt foolish if I failed to get 100 percent on any examination.

The only other student in my class of seventeen at Bona School that came close to me was a slip of a girl, Mary Neil.  She was one of Cook Neil’s several daughters.  They lived in a shack just down the hill from the church on the west side of Bona.

I did not particularly like Mary Neil.  She had straw colored blonde hair, was not particularly pretty, and could be snippy if not downright nasty at times.  I respected her, however, because she was smart as a whip.

Almost invariably when there was a bell-down it would be Mary and me that were the last two up there.  I felt foolish on the occasions when she spelled me down.  I never heard in later years, but I expect that Mary Neil got a scholarship and went on to be a teacher.

It was in 1935 that I got baptized and joined the Bona Church.  I am not sure to this day why I did that.  I was much too young to make that decision but, at the time, with several of my contemporaries going forward and joining the church, it seemed like the thing to do.

It happened during one of the series of revival meetings held by the gentle minister I described back in Chapter 4.  Since I cannot recall his name I will call him “Brother Thompson” because that could well have been it.

I did not really feel any sudden calling but I was there one evening when Brother Thompson preached a good sermon aimed at we younger people.  There in the soft yellow light of the acetylene fixtures, Thompson’s deep voice was almost hypnotic and he could be very persuasive.  During the invitational hymn at the end, my cousin Mary Catherine, Claude Todd (the two of them later married and he is not an elder in the Bona Church), Clarence Lee King, and some others went forward.  On an impulse, I got up and went with them.

It is regrettable that no one took a picture at our baptizing the following Sunday afternoon.  It is not done in an open stream any more.  These days Bona Church as a baptism tank in the church.  In those days, however, it was done in a river or creek just as Christ was baptized two thousand years ago.  The Church of Christ believed only in total immersion and members criticized Methodists and others that simply sprinkled a little water symbolically.

Our baptizing took place in a deep pool of the branch on my Uncle Claud’s farm.  Fortunately, it was in the summer so the little creek was fairly warm.  All we boys had on clean overalls and the girls wore print dresses.  Brother Thompson was wearing the first set of waders that I ever saw.  I figured that was all right as he was already baptized and he had to be in the water the whole time.  No point in his getting his preaching suit wet either.

There was not much to it.  All the people who had come to observe lined up along the bank and we baptizes got in a line.  One by one we waded out to the preacher who was standing in waist dep water.  He positioned us sidewise in front of him, said in that solemn deep voice, “I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.”  Then he ducked us backward under the water and raised us back up.

When I waded ashore and was congratulated by people, to tell the truth I did not feel any different.  I expect that I went right on committing my little sins and I know that the other boys did also.  About the only difference was that we were now church members and could take communion.  Sometimes we were called upon to serve communion or help take up the collection.

My ideas about religion have gone through a long evolution over the years and I do not attend any church regularly now.  I will not go into that as it could be a whole separate book.  Let it suffice to say that I firmly believe in the Creator and Almighty and I believe I am on good terms with Him.  I sort of facetiously refer to Him as “The Boss” once in a while but I am sincere and He knows that.  Whatever power it is “up” there certainly took care of Richard and me during a shooting war and He hasn’t done bad by us in peace.  I will have more to say about that later.

The Model T and the Washing Machine

Times were hard enough that in the spring of 1935 my father finally had to break down and register for a WPA job.  He was adamant that he would not take any Relief handouts but he did get a job on the road crew.  He and Bill Simmons ran the rock crusher for a while then he got a job with the contractor that was building a new bridge over the Little Sac (pronounced “sock”) River between Bona and Fair Play.  After that he helped build a smaller bridge over Maze Creek between Bona and Dadeville where there had been a shallow ford.

That spring it seemed almost like prosperity to us with some cash money coming in.  Unfortunately, it sort of went to Dad’s head and resulted in one of the rare times that I saw my mother sit down and cry.

Dad got paid one week and went off to Greenfield or maybe Springfield with one of my uncles.  He took Richard along with them.  Prohibition had been repealed not long before and I suspect that Dad had a few beers and his wages were burning a hole in his pocket.  We had not owned a car for two or three years.

Late in the afternoon I was fooling around in the yard with Rex and Mother was, as usual, in the kitchen.  We heard a car coming and a 1927 Model T Ford touring car with Dad driving and Richard whooping in the seat beside him came wheeling into the barnlot.

“It’s ours!” Richard yelled as Dad wheeled the car around in a circle.  “We got a car!”

Mother had come out onto the south back porch facing the barn and Rex and I had raced around to that side of the house.  We boys were dancing in glee but then I caught sight of my mother’s face.  She was not happy.  Her face sort of crumpled and she sank down to sit on the edge of the porch.  Then she dropped her face into her apron over work-roughened hands—freshly red from the scrub board in the galvanized wash tub—and quietly cried.

It was appalling.  One thing I do not like to see is anyone cry, especially a grown woman and especially if it happened to my mother.  I went to her and put my arm around her shaking shoulders.  “What’s the matter, Mama?  Ain’t you happy about the car?”

Even in her grief, she answered automatically, “Don’t say ain’t!”  Then she sobbed, “Oh, Connie, there are so many things that we need.  We don’t need a car!  We need some decent clothes.  I was even hoping that your father would get me one of those washing machines.”

There was a big lump in my throat.  My instinct had been to run and see the car up close and Rex was already on the way to the barn lot, but the joy had gone out of it.  I thought of all the long hours I had seen my mother bent over a scrub board and laundry tub every week, then wringing out the wet clothes by hand and hanging them on the line to dry.  I also thought about all the long hours she spent in that kitchen every day without running water and with only the wood-burning stove to cook on.

Dad did not neglect Mother—he did everything he could for her.  He had installed a sink in the kitchen counter with a drain pipe that went outside so she would not have to carry waste water and throw it out the door.  He had built cupboards for her and a little clothes closet in the corner of the one bedroom.  He had always worked his fingers to the bone for us.

At the age of 39, Dad’s hands were already rough and beginning to be gnarled from hard labor and shucking corn.  He took great pride in an honest day’s work and got great satisfaction from what he accomplished whether there was money in it or not.  He was just an honest old country boy that did not have much in the way of business sense—especially after he had a couple of beers.

I wanted desperately to comfort my mother but I was at a loss what to say or do.  I just patted her shoulder clumsily and, I think, said something like “Don’t cry, Mama—please.  Things will get better, you’ll see!”

She looked up at me gratefully, smiled through her tears and squeezed my hand.  “I know, Con’rd,” she said softly.  “He means well—really he does, and his heart is pure gold.  He takes good care of us.  I should not be selfish.”

She dried her eyes with her apron then quickly got up and went into the house while I trotted down to the barnlot to inspect the Model T.  In a very few days both Richard and I had learned to drive that old car.

I do not know what conversation transpired between my mother and father but she accepted the car.  I do know that after a couple more months of working on the bridge job, Dad came back from Springfield on day with a brand new Maytag gasoline-powered washing machine in the back seat for Mother.  She used it until we left the Ozarks and her hands were not so red and chapped after that, nor did she complain of backaches.  It would be a real museum antique today, but it was pure luxury for my mother.

Making Hay in the Depression

Chapter 9

Baling, Baptizing, and Sister Sandra

It was in the fall of 1934 when they started upgrading the road through Bona from Dadeville from a rocky little country road to a graveled farm-to-market road.  The work was done under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s WPA program.

I knew that “WPA” stood for Works Progress Administration and was financed by the government to help recovery form the Depression, but my father had a different name for it.  He said it stood for “Whistle, Piss, and Argue” because that is what the lazybones who signed up for it mostly did while they leaned on a shovel instead of putting in an honest day’s work.

My father would not sign up for the WPA work at first because it was necessary to sign up for Relief before a man could get a WPA job and Dad was not about to take any charity.  He only wanted what he earned.

Dad was fond of telling a WPA joke about an old lady who wanted someone to come and mow her yard because she was a widow and a cripple.  The man she talked to asked her how many holes there were in her outhouse.  She said it was a two-holer so he sent eight men and two lawn mowers to do the job.  When the old lady asked the foreman that dropped the men off why so many, he said, “Well, you have a two-holer.  I had to bring enough men that we can have two coming, two going, two sitting, and two mowing!”

Hard Times were in full swing with money scarce to non-existent  but Dad held out for quite a while.  We got by the winter fairly well partly because the WPA rented a half acre beside the road by our barnlot on which to park their bulldozer and road grader equipment at night during the time they were working on the stretch of road south of Bona.

The bulldozer was a very primitive diesel machine that had no glow plugs or electric starter.  On cold mornings the operator had a hard time getting it going.  I sometimes would go down there and watch him start it before I left for school as I was always interested in anything in the way of machinery.

What the dozer drive had to do was to keep a blowtorch on hand.  He would heat the cylinder heads of the engine with the blowtorch then he had to crank the engine by inserting a steel bar in a big flywheel to turn the engine over.  Compared to that, starting our pump house putt-putt was a lead pipe cinch.

When that old engine finally started it made a heck of a racket.  I could hear it almost all the way to school—which was a mile and a quarter.

WPA farm-to-market roadwork

Grading, gravelling, and making ditches along the road was a great improvement.  It had been simply a little rocky land bordered by rusty barbed wire fence with overgrown fencerows of weeds and brush and vine-covered stubby poles supporting the single bare telephone wire.  It was dusty during the hot summers and in winter it became a quagmire of mud when it rained—which was not often during the drought years.  It was often full of ruts and pot holes—which we called “chug holes” because a wagon or car wheel would go “ker-chug” in them.

The crews graded new ditches, prepared the roadbed with river gravel, then surfaced it with crushed rock.  We called that “chat” because that was the sound it made when a shovel full was thrown onto the roadbed.  Up until then the road had been sort of maintained by the neighborhood men using an old horse-drawn road grader that sat rusting away on the edge of the ball field on the south edge of Bona.

It was the very depths of Hard Times in the Ozarks by the spring of 1935.  The drought went on seemingly endlessly.  Crops withered and pastures turned brown in the early summer except for the jimson weeds, polkberry, and Canadian thistles.  Wells and springs were low and the creeks and rivers ran slow and sluggish with dingy water that, as the saying went, was “too thick to drink and too thin to plow.”

The price of eggs bottomed out at nine cents a dozen.  Gasoline was ten cents a gallon for low test and twelve cents for high test ethyl.  That sounds ridiculous now but in those days it was enough when the average farm hand made a dollar a day—fi he could find a job.

It was in 1935 that I got my first paying job.  One of the neighbors, Ben Long (father of pretty little Betty Lou), had a tractor-powered hay baler.  At haying time Ben would tour from farm to farm and bale hay for a share.  He had a crew of two for the baler and the farm owner would arrange for a crew to bring the hay to the stationary baler.  Ben was the loader at the baler and he had one man to tie the wires on the bales and one to buck the bales off the tailboard and into stacks for later transportation to the barn.

I had not yet reached my full height by six inches and was not very heavy but my muscles were farm tough.  When I hit Ben up for the job of bucking bales, he looked me over doubtfully and said, “You reckon you could keep up all day?  Timothy bales run sixty or seventy pounds and alfalfa will go seventy or eighty.”

“I can keep up.  I’ve plowed with a walking plow all day more than once.  Give me a change and I’ll show you.  How much you pay the bucker?”

“Fifty cents a day—that’s what I pay.  Some of them black boys  I get from around Dadeville ain’t worth half that.”  He eyed my small frame again and finally said, “All right, I’ll give you a try—but if you give out on me before quittin’ time, I’ll have to get me someone else.”

“Won’t give out—you’ll see.”

The job dang near killed me the first couple of days.  I used a hay hook in each hand to snag the square bales off the chute then had to carry and stack them away from the baling machine.  Between bales, I had to take the bale separation block back up to the loader then, on the way back, push the two wires for the next bale back through to the tier who sat on a stool on the other side.

The first day was the real killer.  I had not gotten into the swing of the routine.  To make matters worse, we were baling alfalfa for my Uncle Claud and I think Ben deliberately screwed the machine down to pack around eighty pounds into each bale.  They also seemed to get heavier as the day went on, especially when the stack got high enough that I had to swing the bales up as high as my head to the top course of the stack.

Ben kept that old rig going at a good clip all day with very few times out for a drink and a breather except for the lunch hour when Aunt Virge fed us a huge fried chicken dinner with all the trimmings and plenty of her fat light bread buns slathered with lots of hand churned butter.

At times during the day I would see Ben looking slyly at me sidewise with a half-smile on his tanned face and that made me more determined than ever to not holler “uncle” and give up.  My back ached and my hands blistered but I kept plugging away.

Ben killed the engine on the tractor just before sunset.  /by then my fanny was dragging so bad that it was wiping my tracks out behind me.  As I hung my hay hooks on the side of the baler, Ben came up and clapped a hand on my sagging shoulder.  “Well, boy—I didn’t think you would last more than an hour but you done it!”

As I was inspecting the blisters on my hands, some of which had broken, Ben handed me two quarters and said, “Better get you a pair of gloves, boy.  The job is yours.  It will be mite easier tomorrow.  We’ll be baling timothy over at Duane King’s place and the bales will be lighter.  See you in the mornin’.”

I drug my sore body the two miles home, aching all over; however, I was one proud young man when I displayed my two quarters at the supper table.  It was nearly the most money that I had ever had at one time.  I noticed that Richard eyed the two quarters then sat staring off into space thinking.

“Well,” Richard said later, “you get fifty cents for grunt work.  How much does the guy get that sits and ties the wires?”

“Seventy-five cents.”

“uh-huh—and he gets to sit down alongside the baler all day, too.”  There was a bemused expression on Richard’s freckled face when I left to go to Grandpa’s store and spend a quarter on a pair of canvas work gloves.

The next day, Richard went along with me when I hiked across the fields to the baler at Duane King’s place.  He spent part of the morning just wandering around watching the wire tier.  During a break, Richard told Ben that he could tie wires if Ben should nee someone.  A day or two later the tier did not show up and Richard had the job.  He had out-smarted me again. 

We spent the rest of the haying season on that baler crew, me bucking all those bales and Richard sitting in the shade of the baler making half again as much as I was getting.  Bending those wires made his hangs strong, but the muscle I put on meant that soon I could hold my own in a fight with him.