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A first story . . . The birth of Parley R. Neeley and the Grim Reaper.
I was born "in a little house on top of the hill, just before the road dropped over into the river bottoms, as you go up Chalk Creek from the High School." I was an "unusually large baby", 13 pounds, and for some reason, perhaps because of this large size, the doctor didn't think I would live long. As Dad waited on the porch he noticed a stranger lurking about the barn, and proceeded to investigate. As he approached, the man slid into the barn where dad confronted him.
"What do you want here?" Dad demanded of the man..
"I've come to take the baby, Mr. Neeley," he replied, "he isn't to live." Dad was stunned for a moment as he realized that this was no man that stood before him but an angel -- the Angel of Death.
"It'll kill my wife if you take the baby", Dad argued, "and you won't take him without a fight!"
You see, Angel of Death or not, Dad didn't like the being's intentions and began arguing with him. The argument escalated, became violent, and Dad began wrestling with the angel on the floor of the barn. It was a fierce struggle, but suddenly in the midst of the tussle, the angel quit, stood up, dusted himself off, and said in a thoroughly disgusted voice:
"Well, if you feel -that- way about it Mr. Neeley, you can just keep the baby!"
With that, the angel left the barn and disappeared into thin air.
Snickling along the river . . .
"We used to go up along the river bottoms catching fish. We caught suckers and trout by a method called Snickling." To do this you made a loop of fine copper wire and attached it to the end of a pole. Then "you crawled on your hands and knees up to a hole in the creek". Then carefully, carefully you would slip the loop and pole into the water and gently over the head of an unsuspecting fish and . . . JERK! Up would come the fish ;-)
Playing Robin Hood and his Merry Men . . .
"We played 'Robin Hood' just up the hill. Between us and the schoolhouse was a hill in which some old coal mines had collapsed and left some flat spots. Every Christmas time we would get the Christmas trees and stand them up around these areas as our place of 'refuge'. Mother made us suits like the Robin Hood suits shown in the English books. We had quarter staffs and we had bows and arrows. We made our own bows and arrows and we had a great time chasing each other around with" them "We had enjoyable times together roasting potatoes in the fire and then drawing lions and having actual fights with quarter staffs" -- which were made of bamboo when we could get it -- and "knocking each other out with them." . We'd get 1 1/2 inch to 2 inch thick bamboo and about 6 or 8 feet long. If we couldn't get bamboo, we'd go down to the river bottoms and pick up some good oak or maple for them.
Hunting with bows and arrows . . .
"For arrows to hunt squirrels we 'borrowed' our mother's needles and she wondered many times where her needles went" ;-) "We'd put these in the end of the arrows and we'd use our pigeons to get feathers to put on the arrows." "Of course, at Thanksgiving time we were always able to get turkey feathers." These needle-tipped arrows "were quite wicked. If you could shoot a rabbit or a squirrel with them then you had them!"
"We went swimming in Chalk Creek, when it was high enough, and also down on the Weber River. The holes were, now as I look back on it . . . I would say they were kind of dangerous. It wasn't uncommon for the river to make a cut under the bank and we'd swim under the end of this cut" and often the dropping water level left a 'cave', in which the floor of the cave was higher than the water level , which was a great hiding place. "We would hide there quite frequently and also we had some good lunches in places like that away from everybody else. If was pretty hard to find us" especially if we took our clothes with us. Which was often important to do because "it was well to always have a guard -- if you happened to leave your clothes some other pranksters would come along and play a mean joke on you. "They'd soak your shirt sleeves and your pant legs in the river and then they'd tie them in a knot and pull as hard as they could and then rub them in the sand". Of course we did the same to them when we could ;-)
Rattlesnakes, squirrels, pigeons, and muskrats . . .
"It was always in the early spring, around May and June, we figured it was good sport to take our 22's and go up on the ledges and hunt rattlesnakes. We'd shoot the rattlesnakes and then get the rattlers and hang them up as our trophies.
It was also pretty fun to go down to the pasture" with some buckets of water and pour them in the squirrel holes to see if we could drown them out. Sometimes we could get them out and then catch them to use as pets. "But they didn't last very long; wild squirrels like to be wild I guess.
We all had pigeons and we would cross-breed them and we had 'chalkys', 'whiteys', 'blueys', tumbling pigeons, and all kinds of fancy pigeons. We also raised rabbits for fun or trade too." We traded pigeons and rabbits to the other boys in town.
"We also used to catch muskrats in the late fall or during the winter -- but not in the spring because their hides weren't any good then. But we'd set traps up and down the slews and that's how we would earn some of our extra money. A right-good muskrat hide earned about 75 cents."
Sleigh rides and trains don't mix.
"We used to sleigh ride off of the old hill -- what we called the 'school house hill' -- and of course we came down to the side of our place. There was a railroad track in-between that went to the Old Wasatch mine. Every day, when I was young, there would be a train" chugging up to the mine to bring back a load of coal. "We'd sleigh-ride off the hill and I know we scared the train-men many times as we'd try to beat the train across. One time I remember Aaron Biggs started down even though we all told him he'd better not go and sure enough, he met the train head-on. We couldn't find him! The train stopped , rang its bell, and tooted its whistle, and people came running from all over to try to find Aaron." Luckily, we saw him a couple of blocks down as he grabbed his sleigh and ran home as fast as he could. "What had happened was he'd gone right under the train between the two pairs of wheels and just continued on down the hill." Boy was that lucky!
"I remember when they put the waterline down the school house hill and everyone had forgotten about the old graveyard that used to be there. They had to dig through many graves and we'd go and look and we could see the bones there and the skulls there with hair still on them -- we thought it was great business! There was a Mexican who had been buried there. He had murdered someone and they'd just plainly shot him and buried him and his corduroy clothing was scattered around" where they were digging the trench. It was all great fun for a boy!
No central heat except for old Quail . . .
"We didn't have central heat in those days -- we had a kitchen stove, a stove in the dinning room, and a stove in the living room. The living room stove was a beautiful, ornate coal stove, but it was only used on special occasions and it was almost always closed up. We didn't have any heat in our bedrooms so during the cold months the whole family seemed to 'live' in the dinning room. We had to carry the wood and the coal in to keep those stoves going and also carry the ashes back out. I still have some brown burns on the top of my feet from where we'd put them under the stove to get them warm. What happened was that sometimes the coal ashes grew too high and a live coal would drop off on your feet -- ouch!."
"I can tell you this -- those old blankets and sheets used to be mighty cold in the winter time. There was one form of central heat available though: We'd go upstairs to bed -- no heat up there remember-- but if we could, we'd sneak old Quail (Quail was the family dog) and get him in the bottom of the bed, early in the evening, by the time we came to go to bed we -would- have a warm bed. Now Old Quail knew that if he got caught going upstairs he wouldn't be allowed to go and so we'd wait until mother and dad had gotten out of the way and then we'd let him in the house. He'd put his tail between his legs and he'd crawl and sneak right on by to the stairs and then hurriedly up the stairs and out of the way. He like to sleep up in the bed in our rooms as much as we liked him there -- his kennel was cold out there by the corral."
"I've crawled into old Quail's kennel many a times, and slept all night with him, when I'd been reprimanded or had a good spanking."
Kerosene, honey, mustard, and cigar smoke cures all.
"I used to get the croup quite a bit -- so did the rest of the kids. Of course, when cold weather came around everybody would get a good cough and a cold and it could turn into croup. But there was a dandy cure! You'd get some kerosene and honey and you'd put some on a spoon and eat it. Then they'd heat water just as hot as can be until it was boiling in a big bucket, and add mustard to it until it was a real mustard color. Then they'd grab you and hold your feet down in the hot water, and I want to tell you that until you got used to it it was -really- hot. You couldn't move though, because if you moved it hurt worse than if you held still. Then they'd wrap a blanket around you and kind of steam you out."
"When you got an ear ache they'd call in somebody from around town who smoked cigars and have them blow smoke into your ear. I've had them blow smoke into my ear many times and it's a pretty good cure -- it seemed to soothe the pain anyway."
Fire! and how the old telephone systems really helped.
Before electrical power "came in with the old power plant, we had candles and kerosene lamps and they were always in danger of tipping over and causing a fire. Every winter there were two or three fires in town caused by some careless youngster playing around and tipping the lamp over -- or the chimney falling off. The chimneys seem to be breaking off and falling all the time. We always had chimneys and lanterns but it was always dangerous the way we lived with that type of lighting until, finally, the electric lights came. Even then we only had one light in the middle of the room, but it was on a long cord and we could take it to different places in the room to read or to study by. We nearly always studied, however, around the dining room table."
"One cold night we had a fire raging in the old stove -- it was almost red hot. Dad cried, "We're on Fire I think!" We looked outside and sure enough, the edge of the house was on fire. Dad called up the neighbors and they came running with their buckets and they all crawled up in there and threw water on it and we got it out before if burned the whole house down. It did burn quite a hole in the east side of the house, though, by the side of the corral."
"There was always someone calling up for fires. We had ring telephones that you cranked and cranked and you'd always have ten or so people on a line so all you had to do was to make an outside call and everybody that was home would come to the receivers to hear. Everybody in town knew what everybody else was doing! :-) So, it didn't take much to get a fire call out. You just started ringing different lines and then everybody was on the line, and right away you'd have a group of people there with buckets which they used to carry water from the canals to fight the fire."
The old power plant . . . and a rather dangerous sport.
"The old power plant was up east of us and it had a big steam engine and about 25 or 30 feet of belt. The belt was about 18 or 20 inches wide and ran down to the generator. It was great sport for us to go up there while it was going -- a clugitty, clug, clug - and the belt was slapping -- and we'd jump through the belt. If any of us had been caught in it we surely would have been smashed and carried on down and run around the other wheel, but we didn't and we had a lot of fun doing it. To have the privilege of doing this 'sport' we had to help the operator of the power plant throw coal into the boilers, haul coal in from the outside, and carry the ashes back out."
"They'd start the generator just before dark and they'd run it 'til mid-night, unless it was the night of a play or a dance and then they run it until two o'clock. They only ran it in the daytime on Monday mornings and everybody who had an electric motor was able to use it then -- on the washing machine or whatever they were running with it. We were glad to have that electric motor on the washing machine because we used to have to turn it by hand. That was quite a job! That had been, of course, our Monday morning job until the power plant got going. Even then, sometimes the power plant broke down and we had to still turn the old washing machine by hand."
"When I was young I played the clarinet and I earned a little money during the summer playing at different celebrations. Two friends, Sam Young and Brigg Young, played too. Sam had a stiff neck and played the French horn. Brigg was a very small, rotund fellow and he played the cornet. Several played clarinets and trombones -- many of the older men in town at least -- and we always had a town band."
"We'd be going along main street -- main street wasn't paved of course -- and if Brigg happened to stub his toe he'd almost fall down . We'd get ahead of him a little bit then and he run and catch up to us; but then he'd start playing the music right at the spot in the score where he had fallen. He'd play right fast until he'd caught up to where we were and then he'd go along with the band. It sure sounded eerie to have Brigg catch up to us with the music he hadn't played."
Delivering to the widows at Christmas time . . .
"George, who lived right next door to us, would get a group of us together and we'd go down to the Coalville Co-op on Christmas morning. We could have anything to eat we wanted then -- candy, bananas, oranges -- and I tell you it was a -real- treat," but the reason we were there was to "make up packages of things to take to the widows and we'd spend pretty much the fore part of Christmas day carrying packages that we had made up to the different widows around town. They don't think about the widows anymore but in those days they really took care of them. We really had a lot of fun doing it, particularly at Christmas time, and sometimes in the summer we were called to go chop wood and help the widows clean their yards or whatever little chores there were to do."
"We used to do what was called 'tick-tacking' on Halloween. You'd take a spool and cut notches in it and put in on a stick. Then you'd wrap a string around it, put the spool up against a window, and pull on the string very fast. The old spool would go around and make an terrible noise on the window."
"Also you could take a good needle and put it down between the window pane and the window sash -- with strong thread attached of course (in those days they made good, strong thread). Then you'd rosen-up the thread, run it out quite a ways, and run your fingers up and down it. It would make the most AWFUL screeching sound on the window you ever heard."
"They had fences on all the lots and big trees round towards the road on the opposite side of the sidewalk. The favorite trick was to stretch a rope between a tree and a fence and then get someone chasing you. Then you'd pull up the rope at the right moment and they'd go end over end."
"We had anywhere from one to five cows. Of course, when we were around nine years old we had to take the cows to pasture -- which was about two miles away. It was down over the top of the hill as you cross Chalk Creek going towards Echo. We had five acres of pasture down there and we'd take the cows down there in the morning and go get them back at night. Eventually Lou and I got old enough to have to milk the cows. Some of those old cows were pretty smart. We had old Bossy and we'd stand up at the top of the pasture and we'd holler, "Come Bossy!, Come Bossy!, Suck Bossy!, Suck Bossy!" At hearing this, Bossy would come up and we'd ride her home."
"We had a little cow named Tiny. She could always beat us to wherever she wanted to and we always had complaints from the city people because she liked to run as fast as she could to the city fountain. There she'd put her whole mouth over the fountain and have herself a big drink -- they didn't like that ;-) She could open almost any gate that you had a lock on unless it was a pad-lock on tight. She could turn on the hydrant in her corral -- she did so many tricks."
The long winter evenings . . .
"We used to play games in the evenings -- the long winter evenings. We only had one light in the room -- electricity had come into that little town around 1910 -- and it was on an extension chord and it had some pulleys on it so you could pull the chord over to one end of the room or the other. The light was just one light bulb -- probably only about a 60 watt globe -- but we'd pull that over to where the old couch was , by the coal stove, and we'd play games or sing a few songs together and talk. We had some wonderful times together."
"There was a contractor around town named Johnny Samon and I used to work for him. He poured concrete and built houses and sidewalks and bridges -- some of the old bridges are still there across Chalk Creek. Johnny was a Scotsman straight from Scotland. He was peculiar, but he was very talented. He could take a hammer and a chisel and make most anything out of stone. He could cut the wording on a piece of sandstone just as beautiful as they cut it today with a machines. But you had to watch him -- you had to keep your own time because when you went to get paid he always shorted you. Then you had to argue with him and show him what you knew to be the time and what you did that day and how many hours you worked, etc. He would always pay what you said you had coming, but if you didn't keep track he'd pay you what he thought he ought to pay you instead."
"Johnny was a sneezer. That was my alarm clock in the mornings. You could hear Johnny sneeze from all over town. In that upstairs window in our old place, Johnny would be about four blocks away, I could always tell it was time to go because I could her Johnny sneeze out around his house and the barn as he got the horses ready. When I heard him I knew it was time to get up and get some breakfast and get up there to go to work."
"Originally, we had to shovel the gravel from down near the river, where it had been deposited by the spring run-off, into a wagon, bring it up to the site, shovel it into a box, put cement in, then water, and then mix it by shovel and by hand for a long time. Then you'd dump it in a wheelbarrow, roll it down to the forms, dump it in there, and pound it in, and then go back for more and do it all over again. We mixed many blocks of Coalville sidewalk this way by hand. Finally, Johnny got a concrete mixer that was driven by a steam engine. You could hear it all over town but it was so much better than mixing by hand. We did, however, still have to" haul the gravel and throw it in the mixer, with cement, in the right proportions."
"The time that Johnny was building a school in Rockport, I left early in the morning, way before daylight, with a team to go to Rockport hauling the equipment up there. A day or two later I came back and got the cement mixer. But long about just before Juanship, there was one of these great summer storms along . . . Boy! . . . lightening flashed all over and I had quite a time of it holding the horses. I think I can show you even yet -- I noticed it here not long ago -- there are three or four power poles that have a big sliver right down the pole, which was 100 feet ahead of us where the lightening bolt hit."
Early cars and dirt roads . . . sometimes you just had to get out and push!
"As far as going places in the early cars such as the EMF we had in 1912" it was rough going compared to today. If we went to Salt Lake City it was an all-day trip and during the trip, sure as anything, we'd have to all get out and push the car up and over the summit -- Parley's Canyon summit. All the roads were dirt back then. We'd have to ford the canyon streams going down the other side -- there were very few bridges -- and you always went in the summertime because the river was sure to be too high in the spring. There were also times when we'd have to go to Salt Lake City by way of Ogden -- down Echo Canyon to Ogden and back to Salt Lake. That took more than a day sometimes. We used to start before daylight and it would be way after dark before we got into Salt Lake."
"We used to fish the Provo River in the springtime. That was when the great big lake trout were running up from Utah Lake. There isn't such a trout now; they were a special species all by themselves and during the drought of the 1930's they were cut-off from the river and weren't able to spawn. What you have now, even the big trout you might catch, are not the same as the old lake trout. The old lake trout were very, very big -- so big you couldn't use a basket for them. We didn't have wading boots then so we'd drive hob-nails into the bottoms of an old pair of shoes" -- iron pegs really, somewhat like you stud your tires with now in the wintertime -- and used those instead. "Sometimes the water would be up past Jim and my waists -- often up to our shoulders. We had a special belt with attached loops that Dad had made and Dad would wear that and wade across and Jim and I would grab hold of that belt and just swing around in the river current as we made went" We made our own poles too -- out of cane.
"I went to help Uncle Jay Rhead once in the Chalk Creek area where he was going to make a homestead on the south fork of Chalk Creek. We went up there on horses, of course, and camped. All we had to do was find a section corner -- which we did -- and then start cutting cedar trees to build a fence. One morning we got up and the horses were all gone. So Uncle Jay said "Well, I'll go get the horses if you'll get breakfast going when you see me coming." I thought, "Well, that sounds easy!" I kind of liked rice and raisins so when I saw him coming, about two miles off over a hill, I took a whole pound of rice and put it to boil on the fire. Pretty soon there was more rice than I needed there so I put it in another pan, and then another, and another, and before long, I had four or five pans of rice, plus a dishpan half-full to boot! When Uncle Jay arrived he was quite upset. He said, "You cooked all the rice we were going to have for a whole week!" ;-(
"One luxury we -did- have was ice. Every winter we'd put up ice in a big ice house out in back. We'd would fill that full of blocks of ice and then dad would pour water in on it and let it freeze on cold nights and it would freeze into one, big solid block of ice. The walls of the ice house were about 18 inches thick and they were filled with sawdust. We'd put the ice about a foot from the edge all the way around and then fill that space in with sawdust and over the top with sawdust. On those hot days of summer, when we'd get awfully hot, we'd go into the ice house and pull the saw-dust back and chip off ice to make ice water. We'd make ice cream also, so we had ice cream all summer long."
Operas, sports, and picture shows . . .
"We had many operas -- I was in many operas, and also in the school orchestra and band. We played basketball, Lou and I, and all of our group -- we had a great time in our school days. The only way we could get entertainment was to do it locally with our own sports and productions. Of course, there was a picture show in the old opera house. I remember when they played 'Birth of a Nation' and it was quite a show. Everyone thought it was real bad to show a show like that though. It had a lot of killing in it and all the violence that normally came with an army show."
"We nearly always raised a pig or two and sometimes for Dad's attorney's fee he'd get a sheep or a lamb. During the lambing season, when Lou and I got older, we'd go out to the sheep herds where they were shearing the sheep to work. We'd get up -- Oh, sometimes leave at midnight -- and walk till daylight to the camps we knew scattered around the area. There we'd work by going to gather the sheep in to be sheared and also tromping the wool into big wool sacks. They'd always give us breakfast and then if they had any dogylambs -- that means lambs that the old ewes wouldn't take -- why, they'd give us a dogylamb. So we'd usually have two or three lambs around anyway."
"Once a week was bath day. We had to heat the water on the stove, then we'd put the bath tub in the middle of the kitchen floor. There each of us took our turn taking baths in that bathtub. When our turn was through, we'd get dressed, and then have to empty the bath, one bucket at a time, by carrying it outside. Then you had to fill the bath up again for the next person. Finally, before Saturday was over at least, we'd all have taken our baths."
"Mother used to iron the clothes after we washed them. She heated the irons on the stove -- they were what you called 'sad irons'. You'd have an iron and then a kind of handle and you'd heat the iron and then mother would clamp the handle over it while she used it and at the same time heat another one or two on the stove. So she was always heating irons on the stove and we were always carrying in wood and coal (we got the coal from the local coal mine) to keep the fire going and keep the irons hot."
"On wash day we had to carry the water into the big old coal stove and heat it in boilers. Now when I say boilers: they were made of copper and stood 18 to 20 inches high and were 14 inches wide and had round edges. We heated the water in these and then carried it to the washer. Now the washer in the summertime was out on the porch and Lou and I would have to take turns turning the wheels. Sometimes we had a washer that turned by wheel and at other times we had a washer that you turned with a handle that went back and forth. It was quite a job to stay all day helping mother with the washing -- we'd have to turn that old wheel and get the washer going so we could keep our clothes clean."
"When the Coalville water system was put in (around 1911 or 1912), Dad bought what was called 'a red devil motor'. You could hook it onto the tap and turn the tap on and it would run a little wheel and we finally learned how to get a belt on the wheel and put it on the washer. Then from that point we didn't have to turn the washing machine. We started the little red devil motor up and it turned the washing machine plenty fast."
"Everything, of course, had to be starched. They resisted going without starching collars, cuffs, and different wearing apparel, and to starch those kinds of things, and then to iron them, was not an easy job."
The pantry . . . and good things to eat.
"Dad, every Fall, would buy some great big round cheeses, they'd be about 18 inches in diameter and 6 or 8 inches thick, and put them down in the basement, which was generally called the cellar. It was cool down there. Mother, of course, canned lots and lots of fruit and we had it on the shelves downstairs. They'd also buy crackers in big boxes and sometimes we'd go down and open up the crackers and take a knife with cheese and sit there and open up a bottle of fruit and eat fruit, cheese, and crackers. I tell you -- they don't make cheese like they did then; it was -really-good cheese."
"The pans of milk were also set down in the cellar, excepting two that were kept upstairs in a little cooler that dad had set-up which had some holes drilled into it so the air could come up from the cellar. Right against the cupboard were always two big bins. One bin would have flour in it, and the other would have sugar. They'd hold 100 pounds each and we would get a slice of newly baked bread, that mother had made, and dip it in milk, pull the cream off the top of the pan, and then dip it in sugar. My! We had a great time eating sugar and cream and new bread just out of the oven."
"It seemed there was always something cooking on the stove. It was a coal stove and was naturally slower than the stoves we have now. There would always be a stew on there, or mush, or there were lots of things that mother would make -- we always had rice puddings, other kinds of puddings, pies, cakes, etc. Mother was a really good cook!"
"I know in the early days that dad and mother had a hard time of it. Dad was learning and building up a law practice in a little community. I know that we had shoes in the wintertime but in the summertime we generally went without shoes all summer long."
"One pair of overalls and we'd have to wait until they were washed and dried. No one ever thought of wearing shorts in those days. You'd put on a pair of overalls and a shirt and run around bare-footed and that was it."
"We were always glad when it came time for mother to host the 'Five Hundred' club -- they didn't know what bridge was -- because then she made lots of nice things to eat. She made plenty for us as well in addition to making it for the club party that night. We were always shoved off up to Jammy's and Jampa's to stay the night so that they could have a nice party at the house."
The 'Big City' . . . Saltair, Wandamirror, fire engines, and the Hippodrome.
"My grandpa used to take me, when I was older, at times, out to Great Saltair to go swimming. I think there are two or three photographs in my record that you'll see that shows grandpa and me out to Great Saltair."
"There as a place called Wandamirror. It was a resort place -- out on 9th East -- where they had a merry-go-round and boat rides and a place to picnic. We used to go out there frequently."
"I was quite a sight every time you heard the clang of the bell coming down the street while we were there (in Salt Lake City) because you knew it was the fire department. They were all pulled by horses and they'd have a pumping engine and was fired by coal and smoke would be pouring out of the boiler as they were getting it stoked-up ready for the fire. They used to pump out of ditches -- they didn't have any water lines in the area -- and you could hear them coming from a long ways off."
"We also used to go to the Hippodrome -- that was the place where they had motorcycle races. It was a round track and I would say it was about 75 feet in diameter and then it was sloped up and it had a vertical side on it about six feet high. These guys would race around that track on their motorcycles and sometimes they'd race right around on that vertical side and be right straight out from the side. It was -some- sight to see those fellows going around that track on their motorcycles."
"The Thrashers used to come and travel to each of the farms around the valley and thrash the grain. Now you had to feed the Thrashers when they came. Boy it was great fun for us to go around the valley and follow the Thrashers. At first the Thrasher machines were run with horses walking around in circles, but finally they got steam engines and then they had to rebuild the bridges because the steam engines were too heavy to get around. They were always stuck in a ditch someplace with the steam engine because it would break the bridge down."
"At the beginning of World War I, this old German came around to grandpa and said that he'd like him to keep his dog for him because he had to go to war. He said he was an officer in the German army and he had to go over to Germany and get ready for war. He said everything had been kept for him there -- all he had to do was go to his locker over there, change clothes and put his uniform on, and he was ready for war. Grandpa said he'd keep Old Quail for him -- and that's how we got him. We kept him for many, many years and went on many hunting trips with him and he was a wonderful hunter. He was a beautiful dog -- what they called a blue-point pointer. He had black spots, bluish black really, and he wasn't exactly white but just a little off-white in color. He was a fine beautiful dog with short hair -- Oh but he was a wonderful hunter!"
Tipping the old Opera House floor.
"The Old Opera house was way out in the fields towards the . . . I'd say it would be about 5th North and about 2nd or 3rd East, right against the river. We made money by tipping the old Opera House floor. You'd make it level and block it up -- it was built on railroad springs -- when they'd dance on it. They'd just jump up and down and you could get it going in rhythm and it would just bounce up and down, up and down. It was easy to dance on. For picture shows it had to have the blocks taken out of one end and also jacked-up on the other end and tipped down for the picture shows. When you did that, the stage appeared on one end because the stage was there permanently. Then we'd have to put canvases and chairs in for the picture show. It would take about 2 or 3 hours to tip the floor and we'd get between 50 cents and a dollar for doing it.
"Now I mustn't forget about the Boy Scouts. The Boy Scouts in our day weren't connected to the church; they were a separate organization. We had our own Scout troop and our own uniforms and we had scout meetings and camp-outs with other scouts in different counties and then one big central county camp-out. There we would go and show off our skills in making bridges, making camp, cooking, and signaling. We'd signal both with Morse code and with the double flags. We'd get on one side of the valley and then signal each other on the other side of the valley. We were pretty proficient at signaling with flags -- of course in those days there were no radios."
"We earned our money in devious ways, working around the town and every year we developed a play to put on in the old Opera House -- a scout play -- and the whole town supported us of course. It was 10 to 20 cents a ticket."
"Gerald Bullock was our Scout Master for a long time and we had a lot of fun with him. He wasn't too much older than us. He'd been to college and back -- just about 4 years older than we were. But we built a cabin down in the valley bottoms -- it's now covered by Echo Reservoir. Anyway, we had our own cabin on about 10 acres that a fellow let us use. We'd go down to the cabin to have our Scout meetings, and cook-outs, and a whole heck of a lot of fun."
"You know they didn't have the individual sacrament cups for passing the sacrament as we have today. They had a big cup with two handles on it and a big pitcher all silver. The pitcher would probably hold two quarts and the cup would hold maybe a pint. You'd fill that cup and start it down the row and you'd see people turning it sideways and this way and that way to see if they could find a place where someone hadn't take a drink. It's a wonder we didn't have more diseases than we did. Boy, I'll tell you those old pitchers were mighty heavy!"
"In my day we had to grease our own cars. The cars had cups on them everyplace that could squeak or anyplace there were moving parts underneath and every spring you had to take these cups off, fill them, and then turn them back on. It used to take us all Saturday. We'd lay under there and turn the cups with a pair of pliers and take them out, fill them, and turn them up until finally grease came squirting out of the side. We had to change our own oil and do many of our own repairs. I learned early to be able babbitt the bearings. Now we would burn out bearings quite often -- that was common in those old cars. If you burned out a bearing, you 'd have to take the car down and drain the oil and take off the pan. Then you'd take the bearings off, take off the pistons, and then you form a little mold and pour what was called a 'babbitt'. It wasn't much better than ordinary lead and you'd pour the babbitt in and then you had to scrap the babbitt round. Then you'd put the bearing back in and then you'd put blue on it, what we called 'Prussian blue', and everyplace where there was a high spot it would show blue. Then you'd have to take it off, and scrap off the high spot with some special tools and then you'd put them back in and try it over again. We were always scraping bearings and fixing them. We'd break axles and springs too and we always had to take these down to the the black smith's shop to have them fixed."