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Note: Conversations with Gail Albert Hopson- Interviewed and recorded by Jesse Thomas Rich, grandson, July, 2007. I started to write my life story and didn´t get too far with it and there´s a lot of things I remembered since that I could add in. But that´s what I was thinking I might do this winter, is just write down ideas, thoughts that I have and try to collate them into a sequential thing in order ( he didn´t get to it since he died a few months later) , but yeah, I remember quite a bit- we lived in Southern Iowa, there, we lived in Southwest Iowa, it was they called it Lapland because it was so close it lapped over into Missouri and the two closest towns of any size were Clarinda, that was in Iowa, that was thirty miles away, and the other was Maryville, in Missouri, and that was uh, they had a normal school there, where they taught teaching, where the girls would go down there and learn to be teachers and they´d go out and teach in those rural schools and stuff. But it was a college town and where we lived, people, if they wanted to buy something they´d go down there to shop because it was so much closer. We lived in Gravity, a little town there close to the other town that was bigger but Bedford, Iowa was incorporated. It was a city. That´s where the farmers would go to retire. You know, they´d have a house in town- give the farm to one of their kids and they´d retire when they were about 55 or so and about three years later they´d all be dead mostly. Quit working, you know, then they´d develop infirmities. But my grandfather lived quite awhile. He retired and Humphrey run the farm and Granddad lived in town where he had a great big garden. He´d sell stuff out of the garden and that´s what he did 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. And he´d sell watermelons, canteloupes, cucumbers- everything! He had eight kids and he had plenty of labor, so he´d raise a lot of hand stuff- you know, where you have to hand weed it. I don´t raise anything like that. But he did, and that´s been back where he used to raise watermelons and sell them for ten cents apiece. But Dad used to tell us stories about how there was a guy who lived in town. The farm about two miles out of town, I think, and this guy would walk out to the farm in the summer with a burlap sack and Grandpa had the, everybody knew it, you could come on the farm and eat all the watermelon you wanted and not pay anything for it. So this guy would come out and Dad said he would eat a whole watermelon. And he was tall and skinny and you never could see where he put it. It just disappeared in him! And then he would buy one and put it in his sack and walk home. It was like getting a watermelon for five cents, you know, instead of ten cents. But he´d do that every Saturday, all summer. And Grandpa had just a pile there of watermelon rinds where people would just toss the rind. But he sold lots and lots of produce, he even took it down into Missouri with a horse and wagon. He raised chickens too. It was really diversified. But the garden was what supplied most of their income. The farm was pretty small, actually. It was only 60 acres, I think, 67 acres, something like that. But his dad, my great grandfather, bought it. He´d been in the Civil War. He was a railroad engineer, hauling Union troops and supplies. When he retired, he bought that farm and moved to Iowa and then he worked as a New York Life agent until he was quite old. Dad used to go with him- he had heart trouble- about all they did back then, you know, they had nitro pills and he´d take a nitro pill for the angina. But he lived to be 91. James Elliott did. But Dad used to go with him in his buggy to make sure that he could get his pill if he had an attack and he couldn´t get to the pill himself, well Dad would get it for him. And he didn´t dare go alone. But Dad was the oldest one in the family. He was the responsible one. He got married young, just 19, Mom and him got married. And he had a pretty tough time. They were doing alright to start with but the Depression didn´t start until about 29 is when the stock market broke, but it started on the farm in 27. He bought- him and Mom and fourteen acres and they lived close to town- close to Bedford- so they set up a little bottling operation of their own. Mom would bottle it while Dad was milking it and while she was cleaning up and everything he´d take his Model T truck and he´d load it up and run around town and deliver it. And they delivered it twice a day in pints. They were doing really well. They had about 10 or 12 registered Jersey cows and Dad decided he wanted to branch out, he wanted to make more money, so he bought 40 acres next door, and he was raising hogs and they don´t require a lot of ground to raise them but it requires quite a bit of feed to feed them. He didn´t have much feed, but he did have some, and he fed it to them and then 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 them and the price dropped a cent or two a pound and he figured it was just a aberration you know, 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 3 ½ cents a pound. He lost everything. He couldn´t hang onto it. A banker come out and wanted them to stay and he said they could stay if they just paid the interest and Dad couldn´t see it. He figured he paid $500.00 an acre for the farm you know, for the 40 acres, and the price had already dropped below $200.00 an acre so he´d have been paying interest on $500.00 an acre land when, if he went broke and managed to get it back, and later it went to $50.00 an acre. So he couldn´t stay and he went into construction. My Grandpa O´Dell, Mom´s dad was a contractor, he built houses, so Dad worked with him for awhile and he had a chance, just before I was born he had a chance to go to Arkansas and work on a bridge. And so he took off and went down there and left Mom in Iowa because I was going to be born pretty quick. She was pretty big pregnant and he didn´t want to move her, so after I was born well he come home and loaded everybody up and took them down to Arkansas. I come awful close to being and Arkie! That´s the way he got started in the construction business. When he come back to Iowa he tried to go in business, but it was a little town- Gravity was just a little place- and dirt streets and it was just a farm center. People come in from the farm and buy things and he had a produce station for Cudahey Packing and that´s where he´d go out and pick up cream or people would bring it in and he´d buy it for the company but the produce station you´d buy ducks and geese and even pigeons and we ate a lot of pigeons- they were cheap! Then when he´d get a load of stuff he´d take it down to St. Joe Missourri to the Cudahey Packing Plant turn it in. He was buying it with their money, you know, then he branched out and started bringing back day old bread and pastries which made a lot of enemies. The Postons were the ones who had the local store there and they didn´t like it a little bit. He was undercutting. They were selling fresh bread for about twice what he was selling day old bread for and so he got a lot of the trade- you know, pastry and bread trade. Then he built an ice box in the back part of the office part of the building and started bringing ice back from St. Joe. He´d bring the ice back and he´d sell ice chunks there were people who would pick it up. I think there was even a vendor in town that he supplied. He made money that way but the company talked him into supplying the local farmers with grain- feed, and he did, and the farmers didn´t pay him. The next year there was a drought and they wouldn´t pay and part of them didn´t have the money and part of them spent it on something else. And the company tried to make Dad pay it and it was them, I mean they were the ones who forced him into selling it. So ended up he had to close up. He left and come out west. Then he lived in California first and he worked on the Golden Gate Bridge for one day. It was during the Depression and they had 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 said, he lasted half a day. If you straightened up too 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 bridge. I guess he worked on the Bonneville Dam, maybe the Hoover Dam, for awhile. I don´t know how long. It must not have been very long. Then they went up to Oregon and got a job in a little slab mill. They were cutting railroad ties for China. And he was piling the slabs and then his younger brother, Oliver, come out to live with us and he was built like a brick house. I mean he was short, he was five foot nine, but he was strong. But they´d take those slabs and pile them alongside the road and the road coming into the mill was a plank road. It rained a lot there and it would be soft so they built these plank roads wherever they moved the mill to they´d put another plank road in you know, to get to the mill. They´d pile these slabs on either side in piles to dry out and then the company would haul in to Portland to sell them to the wood dealers for firewood. They slabbed off a pretty good chunk. You know it was a small mill and they don´t cut them like that anymore. I mean you can take a log like they were cutting and they´d make lumber out of the whole thing, except the bark, but not then they didn´t. But Dad worked at that and because he´d worked in Arkansas he´d made some connections and in Washington they´d started the Grand Coulee Dam and they had this rule that they couldn´t hire any outside help, you know, it had to be ``local talent´´, they called it. They only way you could get on if you were out of state was if you were a supervisory employee. And so this guy got Dad on as a foreman. And so we moved to Grand Coulee and our fortunes increased dramatically after that. We started having some money. He was making $1.37 an hour! That was a lot of money back there in- must have been in 1937. And he worked on that dam, well we went to Southern California, into AZ 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 it was like a mole down there- no light you know he was working in those tunnels. So we went to Yuma, AZ that one winter and he worked on the Imperial Dam and we went to a school in Yuma AZ, and AZ´s got the hardest schools there is, I mean I just uh, they put us back. But anyway, we went to school there and every one of us was set back a grade. We just couldn´t do the work. I was never so glad to leave anyplace in my life. It was mostly Mexicans and I didn´t mind it except at school. They´d gang up you know, at school, and we were white kids and they were Mexicans and they spoke Spanish and we were just outsiders, that´s all you could call it, and the one, my only really good friend down there 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. He said, ``You know, well one 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. Well I believe that one. He said that marbles would melt lopsided on the sidewalk. Well, 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 was there we went down and visited that Yuma prison and seen all the etchings on the rock from the prisoners that had been in there and stuff and I don´t see how anyone could survive a summer in that prison. It was just carved out of solid rock. That thing must have been like a furnace in those cells. We left the next spring- it was in June and it was starting to get hot in June. I wouldn´t want to live in Yuma, AZ. No way! I don´t see how anybody can stand it down there. But that Imperial Dam Dad worked on, that was where they got all the water down there to irrigate that sandy desert with. Then they raised things like dates. I watched them grow those. They put a sack around them to keep the birds and stuff off. All that hand work and it´s way up high. We went out one time and had bought dates at the farm and they sold them just like I do watermelons here right off the ranch. They raised a lot of lettuce at that time too. I don´t know where they grew it out there but it must have been pretty close, because the trucks would come through the stop light there in town and lit on over to the packing shed. But 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- Spokesman Review was what the paper was. 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. But they- I walked up one day- I´d been reading the headlines some and I walked up this one day and it said- big headlines- was German Pansers invade Poland- great big old block letters- I was just a kid but I knew that something really bad was happening. And then, of course, we didn´t get in the war, we didn´t get into it till later, but we started gearing up for it. People don´t realize that, but we started changing over to a war economy. And the job was running out. It hadn´t finished it, they still had to take the trestle down. That dam up there, they poured with a train track on a trestle. And great big concrete kettles. 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 and you could look down in there and the guys down there looked like ants working on it. And when we left it was all done except for taking the trestle down and putting in the turbines and stuff for the electricity. And Dad didn´t have any work, I mean the finish up work wasn´t his stuff, so we moved down to Redding, or Summit City, actually. Pat and Doris had moved down ahead of us and he got ahold of a 20 acre mining claim out there 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. And then I went to school down there. The other kids, when we moved back to Washington, they immediately put them up a grade, and they didn´t do it with me. I wasn´t reading well. Matter of fact, I was having a lot of trouble reading in the fifth grade, and you don´t go very far very fast if you don´t know how to read. And this older woman, she was a teacher, had gray hair, and she taught me how to sound out my words. I learned to read in two weeks. And by the middle of my fifth school year I´d read my fifth grade history book clear through. It was about the Revolutionary War, early colonies and stuff and 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 it 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 sure of. It´s almost funny! But I started doing well after that, and when we moved to Summit City they had two classes there together, it was a seventh and eighth grade with one teacher, Mrs. LaGrone was her name. And I was in there, I´d get all my work done real quick then I´d sit there and read the encyclopedias. They had a shelf of encyclopedias there and I was just fascinated with what was in those so I´d sit there and read those and 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 just going to grade me for a different type work. I didn´t care- it didn´t matter to me, so anyway, they moved me from the seventh to the eighth grade, which put me back where I belonged. Yeah, that was, 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 that year- 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. Dad would, if I had the light on, he´d holler, ``Put that light out!´´ So I´d use the flashlight to read with, yeah, 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 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 have bombed Pearl Harbor´´! Then somebody else took it up and they were hollering it all up and down the street. And so Dad, we moved to, he´d 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, they 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- didn´t hurt him and so 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 forgot the particulars, but he was a construction worker and they´re superstitious, they´re very superstitious and he was had considerable anxiety over 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. He went down to Vallejo and got a job with Kaiser driving piling. It paid well and but he hated the work. See, back then they had the cost plus thing and it was supposed to stimulate more work but what it did was it fixed it so that anything it cost the contractor, he made ten percent on it cost plus ten percent, so anyway, Wayne went down, my older brother went with him and he was working, he was only 15 1/5, 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 and they dump whole box cars of marine plywood into the bay and let the tide take it out. I mean, we were short of everything and do that because they got paid for the plywood plus ten percent, without ever using the plywood and Dad had trouble with that, and so did Wayne. He had a lot of trouble with it. So he quit, finally. Cause on the pile driving rig they had two crews. We were short of workers, we were short of labor and they had two crews- one of them downstairs playing cards and the other one upstairs doing work. And Dad was downstairs playing cards and he got tired of doing it and so he quit and we come back up to Summit City. We´d been down there living in a trailer court- he´d bought a trailer and so he set that up on that 20 acres of Pat´s and he went to work on Keswick Dam and he worked there for four years, all during the war he was a superintendent on the night shift with a think it was the West Side Carpenters. He had a very responsible job and it paid well and he saved enough money working there to buy the farm. And when the dam was finished, well he bought the farm and he moved us down there and 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 and stuff coming that he hadn´t taken, you know, during the war so he had about six months there where he could get by on the money that he´d made, so we lived there. We started out, we started 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 there. They lived right where the highway went up to the dam and so we´d haul them up there, and they had a sign, you know, Tomatoes, a dollar a flat and we sold all that we grew and it was what put us in business. We started buying cows and started milking. Wayne was home then. We were milking by hand. I was milking I think something like 9 or 10, night and morning and Wayne had 7 or 8 and that´s the first dispute we had. He was a lady´s man, but he´d keep wanting me to milk his cows for him, finish up, so he´d be on time for his date and this one night I got mad and I said ``no, I´m not gonna do it´´. We ended up having a fist fight in the barn over it. But he didn´t stay very long. He went into the Navy. He was 17 ½ when he went into the Navy. He didn´t want to be drafted into the Army so he was gone and that left just Ray and I. 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 it. 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. 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, he was a carpenter and a cement finisher and a plumber. He could do electrical too, but he didn´t like it. He didn´t like plumbing, but he worked as an apprentice plumber when he was young, and decided that was for someone else. He didn´t like plumbing! And I understand, crawling in and out under houses and stuff. The new construction would probably be OK, 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 got to talking to him. He wanted to know what I had planned for the future. I told him- I was probably seventeen, and maybe I was probably- no I was a Sophomore, I was probably sixteen- I told him, ``I want a herd of sixty Jersey cows.´´ And I wanted 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 a lot harder to 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 one day 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. Jar and Andy even run milk routes at different times. It helped them go through school. It just 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 and 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 he died and everything changed. I had to change the whole business to make it profitable and it was pretty tough. But I did it. When Ray died, Mom died two weeks later. No, she died two weeks ahead of him and 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. But that field down there by the dairy, down there where the hay field is, the year that 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 tractor our 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 but I leveled that whole field out there. I dug out the stumps first. There were seven great big oak stumps out there and we had a fifteen thirty McCormick Deering with full wheels on it. It must have weighted four or five tons. Then 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, so we were feeding silage and 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. So 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 and 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 remember I sent Ray a picture of Jar when he was three months old and made him look like a six or eight month old baby by holding him up with a hand underneath the towel there. 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. So when he got out of the service the first thing he did was he bought a car when he got home. Those were good years. I enjoyed them! I was married and my wife would, when I was leveling that field, she´d come down and set on a log 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 and 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 10:00, so I was pretty late that day, with the milk, but the others all come early. I mean, 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. But, 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 grandfather, 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, but he had a terrible temper. I remember that. That´s when Dad was working with him. He bought a brand new Stetson hat and 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 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. But I remember all the shavings on the floor- I mean he done everything with the old hand tools and he was just a perfectionist in the way her worked but I didn´t remember the washing thing. All I remember is that when washing day come 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 for her in the wintertime, from the well and it´d be freezing weather and I´d slop it on my pant legs and by the time I got through my pants froze stiff. There are a lot of things to remember from when we were kids. I remember once Grandpa Hopson was visiting. It was not too long before we moved. I think it was getting close to Christmas. But my older brother, Wayne, was really good at making things and 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. You´d have, I think on this one he had about eight notches cut into the barrel of it. Then he had a strap, you know that run up under it and you´d stretch these rubber truck tire bands from the end of the barrel up to each notch and I don´t know whatever possessed Ray to do it. I was smarter than that. I would never have done it but Grandpa was coming around the corner of the house and her pointed that at him and pulled the strap and got him with all eight loads, right in the belly and Grandpa never said a word! He just started after him and 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. The heavier part come from my mom´s side of the family, I think. But anyway, he was fast. He was like grease, and he must have been in his mid-sixties or somewhere along in there when we left. We left on Christmas Day in 1936 and there hadn´t been any snow. The ground was froze solid. We had a sale there at the house and sold everything. We left and went out to the farm and stayed overnight. I remember it really well because I had an earache that night. I used to have an earache with my left ear, yeah it was really painful and my aunt Margie held me on her lap almost all night and 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 sleet the day we left and 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 and we got to Esticata(?) That´s where my Aunt Frankie lived there. It 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 and 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 really friendly with and 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 that winter that same storm dumped snow all over the west coast. Fence posts that went up in the air four feet- he said you could just barely see 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. See that was in 1937- January, after the flood. We stayed in Oregon there 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 out of the farms, 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. I remember once I- 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 when you picked it guys would reach up they picked it by hand and a corn shucker, they´d have corn shucking contests and some of them could shuck a hundred bushels a day. I mean, 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. But anyway, I went out into that cornfield when I was looking for ripe enough corn that I could take a cob of corn 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 mean, 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, and 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, it was right across from the school. I had measles there. I had German measles. I was really sick with them. 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. But 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 just 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 and I hadn´t had my fifth birthday yet and I didn´t want to go to school. I remember I didn´t want to go to school, a- nd she took me over there 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 and 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, and they´re glass, and she took it away from him and put it in the drawer in the desk and so- 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 and I stole that robin´s egg marble. I didn´t get to keep it. She found out that I stole it. But anyway, it just all started off bad and I was angry over the whole thing, and 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 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 tree that 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 it 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. It was, 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 garden- a ten acre garden with a friend of the family, they done it on shares and they grew corn and sweet potatoes and Dad grew some cabbage too and that winter we was living in an old house the woman let us have it for $5.00 a month just to keep it from being empty. There were lots of empty houses around. People just couldn´t afford to pay rent and stuff so they´d move with their relatives or something. But this house had a bunch of bedroom in it and we didn´t need them all and so Dad took this 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 it. 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 and 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 and he fed it to his hogs and Dad burned the coal. We lived on sweet potatoes that winter and coal slaw and we´d walk out after school every night to the farm and we´d get a gallon bucket of milk and I wasn´t starving but I was so hungry for some things that I wasn´t getting I couldn´t hardly stand it. But anyway, 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 them he´d trade them. You know he´d trade them for flour or sugar or something, but they´d only take them when they needed them. You know, if 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, you know, 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, we lived up there, Wayne and Dad and some of the others went on a hunting trip up close to the Canadian border and he 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 there. So we packed it in on a pack horse. We got half of it and the thing dressed out. I think it was two hundred and eighty some pounds of meat, that deer. It was huge, it was a mule tail. And 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. So anyway, she canned it all, and it was really good. She´d make gravy with it, we´d have venison gravy with chunks of venison in it and put it over mashed potatoes and it was good food. But I´ll never forget that. That was the hardest work I ever had anything to do with was getting that deer up on that trail and 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, you know, 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 and so, I learned how to butcher, here on the farm. During the war they had a freeze, you know, on prices and everything. Then they had a terrific black market. You could by anything on the black market in the way of food, so we had, we´d been milking cows for quite awhile, you know, a couple of years and we raised the bull calves. We didn´t sell the calves, they weren´t worth anything, so we raised them and they were dairy stock so they weren´t very beefy. When they were two year olds, getting ready to be butchered, they were grass-fed, which meant that they weren´t unsellable either and 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 and it made Dad angry and 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 it into a locker plant and rent a locker. So 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 every weekend. I got pretty handy with a butcher knife, you know. I never did kill them, I couldn´t do that- Dad did it. But once they were down then I could skin it. I was pretty good. I got to where I could skin them pretty good. But 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. And so we sold every last one of them and we had all the meat that we wanted and as I remember it, they averaged a little over seventy dollars apiece by selling them that way. And 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 you could buy a lot of groceries with a five dollar bill. It´s interesting the way things have changed moneywise, like eggs, when we lived a Summit City I had chickens, Wayne had them first and 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- and they would buy eggs. And then I guess they shipped them off to a packing plant or whatever and packaged them, you know and candle 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 now 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 till you were eighteen, but because the war was on they didn´t have any able-bodied people to do the work and so I went and applied and they hired me. All you had to do was, you had to 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 weighed a hundred and forty pounds, probably, by then. So me and about six or seven other guys were in Camp Ono out here all during the summer and we really didn´t go on a fire except once and I made up my mind then that I never wanted to be in the forest service. They had a big fire down by Oroville and they got desperate enough for people that they sent us kids down there. We was supposedly putting in a fire trail, I mean, 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 and 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 from, 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, you know, they didn´t have chain saws back then but they were using an axe, and they´d start falling those trees and making a firebreak. And they put us kids to carrying sandwiches and water. Yeah, that´s what we did on that fire. When we come home, I was so dirty and black that 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, you know. I never felt so good about anything. They brought their kitchen with them, you know, 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 too hot and too 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.
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