:Family Matters

I’m going to try once more. This is the second time that I’m going to record the time I spent, the three years I spent up at the Pendley Ranch. After I’d left the CCC’s when they closed up, a high school friend of mine, Frank Andrews, had suggested that I come up and work for Frank Pendley at his ranch up there, his apple orchard up at Oak Creek. I went up there tentatively with him, like the looks of the situation, and Frank offered me a job, $30 a month, and board and room. Well that’s what I’d been getting the past two years with the CCC’s, so why not? It was a job, anyway, and much better than I could probably expect anywhere else. So I took it, moved up with my friend Frank into to bunk house that they had built there at the side of the alfalfa field, Frank and I and Uncle John. No, Uncle John lived in the house.

Now Uncle John was that native that I’ve spoken about before, he was a native of Sweden, and he’d come hitchhiking down the road one time, looking for a bite to eat and a place to sleep. They put him to work, and he was such a good old worker that they kept him on. They had him there with them several years, he was just a choice old worker. He could hew rocks with the best of them, and he could also lift them around though he was getting on up in years.

I went to work for Frank Pendley that year, Mr. Pendley I’ll call him from now on, and he and Jane Pendley, his wife, had four children, and I don’t think I can remember their names; the oldest boy was named Tom, and the oldest girl was Jessie Lou. And there was Isabel, and the third was Patsy I think, and the next one was Donald. Well, they had those four [sic] and we all got along very well together. Frank was a kind of an easy going man, I’d known him in high school, in fact junior high school. He’d been a champion basketball player in junior High School, because he was a tall boy, and among those juniorites, he was a head way taller than we. So our basketball team had a high percentage of wins that year on account of Frank. I also was on the basketball squad, I don’t think I made the team exactly, but I got to go to all the games and cheer them on. [Break]

The phone rang, and I don’t like to answer it. But when Lucille’s not around, and she’s not around on Monday morning, I thought I’d better answer it. Nothing I could do to answer the questions that they wanted to know.

Well back to my friend Frank Andrews, who was a tall basketball player, and as a result of his height and his abilities the Clemenceau Junior High team won almost all of its basketball games that year. Anyway, he’s the one that invited me up to Pendley’s when he knew that I was looking for work.
Getting acquainted with that ranch and the family; they had a bunkhouse in which the hired hands lived. Mr. John the old native from Sweden lived in the house and had become part of the family; a very reliable old man, who milked the cows and everything that they needed. Except drive the car; he couldn’t drive the car. Well, ok so much for that.

I enjoyed working there. They had of course the big apple orchard, and the younger orchard there coming along, and the alfalfa field in which the younger trees had been planted. I succeeded that first year when I was trying to mow the alfalfa with a scythe, I was mowing it around the trees where you couldn’t get in there with a team mower, and I happened to clip off a tree. Well, Frank Penley, Mr. Penley had told me when I first got in there, he says “Oh my goodness, you be careful now, because those trees are worth at least $10 apiece. They’ve been in there two years now, and I sure don’t want them harmed.” Well the first thing I did swinging that old scythe there in that alfalfa field was to hook a blade over one end of a tree and snap it right off.

Well I felt bad, but to show you what kind of a man Mr. Pendley was, I had to go and confess to him, and offered to have him take $10 out of my $30 a month pay, to pay for the tree. He wouldn’t accept it, he said “Well, you’ve learned a lesson. Be careful, and don’t hook anymore.” I was really careful after that. But that was Mr. Pendley’s characteristic.

He was really a kind of an ingenious man; independent as all get out, married a wife that was younger than he, native there of Oak Creek, by the name of Jane. The story was that she used to run around wild in the Oak Creek area, barefoot and so forth and so on. But Jane was really a nice person too, she cooked the meals for all of us, and we boarded and ate right in the house. Mr. Pendley had built a nice big house a couple of years ahead of that time, in order to move his wife in, to start a family there. Mr. John did the brick work, and it was made out of fancy brick from the area up there. The house had hard oak floors, but practically no furniture in it; one couch on one side of the dining room. The dining room sidled up to the kitchen with a big long table in it, and all of us hired hands got to eat right there at the big table. No tablecloth on it or anything, and Jane Pendley would just set the food on there in big bowls and all of helped ourselves as it went around the table, hoping that there would be something left there for the last guy helping. It was kind of like the dining hall at school.
Well, we picked apples in the summertime and then sorted them out into boxes, and they were lugged off to the markets. The first year, at the end of the three months, I quit Pendley’s and they paid me off. I hadn’t used any money, he gave me my $90, and I went back to school.

How I went to school. My mother had insisted, well, she hadn’t insisted necessarily, but she wished that I would try to enroll in school down at the Tempe university down in Tempe Arizona. Tempe State Teacher’s College, it was called. ASTC, Arizona State Teachers College it later became known by.

The first year I did go down to Tempe, and enrolled in school and had a wonderful time down there at the state teacher college down there at Tempe. I had to work for my board, I did earn half of my living there in a job that they gave me in the dining hall. I enjoyed that job, I got acquainted with all the students that came to eat in the dining hall because I stood behind the counter and served them different platters of food that they wanted to eat. Met plenty of the girls too, and liked it very well. I went out for football that year at Tempe, and made the freshman team. But the football schedule was so heavy, about 3 hours of practice each day after going to school, after class time, and then back to the old grind of getting lessons prepared as well as working part time at the dining hall. So at the end of that year, although I had enjoyed myself very much that first year as a freshman, at the end of the year I didn’t have enough money. I had used up all that I had earned of course, eating and sleeping, so I had to go work that summer.

I’d made some good friends there in East Hall, where I’d stayed that year. Though at the start of the year I had to take a room off campus, where I’d made a friend of mine called Norris Gilbert. He was a big old boy from back east, who got along swell with everybody, so he got along with me. He too went out for football, and made the team, but he got discouraged and quit also at the end of the year.
I decided not to go back for football the next year because it was taking too much of my time, and I wanted to get a better than the C average that I got the first year that I was going to school down in Tempe.

So I had gone back up to Pendley’s, and they had given me a job again at the Pendley ranch. I had to help more that summer selling the fruit, though I’d work a great deal of the time in the apple orchard. They’d built a great big apple house now, and had put the bunkhouse in one corner of the apple house. Frank and I and Uncle Ed, who was a half-brother to Jane, stayed there, and we got along swell, and everybody enjoyed each other. I just learned how to sell apples and sort them out a little, by going along with Mr. Pendley as he took his truck to go to the towns to sell them various places.
In the fall of the year, he would take a truckload off down to Phoenix, Arizona, and John Thompson [sic], my roommate Frank’s brother had the job of driving the truck to sell the apples in Phoenix that year.

Now I’ll get to the next year very fast here, because that’s when I got that job, of driving the truck. After crating up the apples in the summertime, and doing the other things around the farm, I got the job of taking the apple truck down to Phoenix. Mr. Pendley went along with me the first time, the first few trips, to get me acquainted and show me where to go and how to do it. But what I’m getting to is I had a heck of an accident that year with Mr. Pendley’s truck.

Leroy Wells, another high school friend of mine, had come out to work with Mr. Pendley, and Leroy also wanted to help drive that truck. He’d been born with a hand that had only been half formed, so Mr. Pendley was afraid to let him go completely with the truck or drive the truck entirely by his own. So he put him in the truck to go with me. We took turns, of course, driving most of the time, but Mr. Pendley was afraid that Leroy’s hand might bother him just a little going over the Mingus Mountain. So I always had to drive over Mingus Mountain. I didn’t mind it.

You haven’t ever seen Mingus Mountain, you don’t know what it is. Jerome’s sitting up there on the side of that mountain, and you went around one curve on that mountain going upward, and you saw houses sitting on stilts up above you. Pretty quick you’d come up to the front of them and you’d see more houses up above them built the same way, winding around through the town until you got up past the town itself and started up Mingus Mountain. Well, it was really a winding old road, really steep. Though it was considered a good highway, at the time anyway, and I never had any trouble driving it. I always had to drive up Mingus Mountain. We always had to make that trip in low gear, because with that truckload of apples, and with the steepness of those roads, we just couldn’t make it in any other gear. When we got up to the top, you could coast for a little ways, where it was kind of flat – we could shift up to a higher gear, second, which was as high as we could usually go, and we could look back over the Verde Valley, clear out to Pendley Ranch, even, although it was clear up on upper Oak Creek, and couldn’t be seen from where we were there on Mingus Mountain. But going down the other side, we had to shift back into low gear, and take it very easy off down there the side of the mountain, down into Lonesome Valley, which was a connecting link with Prescott Arizona, which was the next town we were passing through.

Well, I just want to mention in passing that sad accident that happened one time driving down through the Lonesome Valley area. I’d just come down Mingus Mountain, and got down almost to the flat of the valley, and had shifted into a higher gear and was rolling along at a pretty good speed. A normal speed, anyway. I’d seen a car, the headlights of a car, far off in Lonesome Valley, there about 2 o’clock in the morning, as I drove down off Mingus into the valley below. When I got down there, I lost sight of it for a minute or two, and then there it was again, coming at me around a little curve around a little wash in the road, that had required a twist in the road to get around. There it was right in front of me.

I tried to dodge it, slammed on the brakes a little, but it wouldn’t do any good to hold that big truck with that load of apples on, and thinking the best thing to do would be to miss it back over on the other side, on the wrong side of the passing car, because it was over on my side of the road. It was the wrong side of the road for him to be on, and I tried pulling over on the other side of the car. All this had taken just a few seconds for me to do, and in the process, I couldn’t make it back. I’d slammed the brakes on at the top of the little hill, making some black marks on the road, which fortunately came in handy later on when they had me up in the arraignment which they had after the accident.

I hit that approaching car, which was just a light vehicle, on the right front fender, and it stopped the truck, along with my brakes, and it threw the apples up over the truck there and sheared the truck cab right off. I was trying to hold the truck on the road and keep it from going out into the gully, and I’d slid off to one side, and fortunately was down in the front seat below the cab where when the apples slid off they would have just sliced me in two. It went ahead and sliced the cab off, and sliced the windshield off, and threw the apples headlong out into the valley below.

Well, so much for that, except that the sad thing that happened was when I walked back to the car that I’d run into. I opened the door, and the driver was sitting there with his head on the front wheel, and I asked him if he was all right. He mumbled that he was alright, but his buddy there, his passenger, had been hurt, he didn’t know how bad. Well, I couldn’t find any signs of life in him. In the meantime I went back to look at what had happened in our truck. Leroy had been sleeping up on top of the truck while we made that first part of the trip. He usually took over later on in the valley when we got into Wickenburg, and he would drive on in to Phoenix. He had made a little spot in the boxes, with his tarp and his sleeping bag, and he had been sleeping very soundly all the way from the ranch when we left down there in the valley. And it had thrown him and the apples off the truck.

I hollered “Leroy, where are you? Are you all right?” And I hear a faint voice holler “Yeah, I’m over here.” I went over to see him, and he was OK, except for where a box of apples had slid by him and hurt the side of his face, or cut an ear lobe and it was bleeding on the side of his face. Well, I looked at it with the flashlight, and found out - he had his hand over it too, though, so it wasn’t bleeding very much, and he began helping me to see what we could find out. And of course, the truck had spilled every apple we had, and turned itself over down in the gutter at the side of the road. Apples scattered all over.

About that time I looked back up Mingus Mountain and saw the lights of an approaching vehicle. So I hurried back up there with flares to stop him before he got down there, because we had the car still sitting there on the wrong side of the road. I flagged down the vehicle, it happened to be a big empty truck, and the truck driver eased back down to throw his lights over the wreckage to see what had happened. He eased his way around the wreckage, and decided he would go on in to town, and send somebody back to help. Leroy got into the truck with him, and I thought he ought to go to the doctor or hospital, I figured he just needed to see the doctor. When he got into town, which was about 20 miles away, almost the whole length of Lonesome Valley, and found that the only place he could get help at 2 o’clock in the morning was at the hospital. Of course the other man, they had to take him in too, he was unconscious.

When I got in later that night, 5 o’clock in the morning in fact, I called Mr. Pendley. Well, first I called my mother – oh how good mothers can be sometimes, when a scared and frightened boy is…

Well we called the hospital to find out what the score was there. And one passenger had only a clipped ear, and they pinned it back together; that was Leroy. And the other passenger was DOA, dead on arrival. Oh my goodness, how sad I felt at that time. I didn’t know what to do. Then I called Mr. Pendley, and told him what the circumstances was at that time and he was there in less than two hours in his car.

So we went through the normal policemen and then went back out to take care of the truck. We found out that there wasn’t anything that we could do with it. We just had to leave it there and go back up to Prescott, where Mr. Pendley went to a dealer and asked him to send a wrecker out there to pull in the truck, and after they decided it was unfixable, they just traded it in on a new International truck. I went back over to Oak Creek, I swore I would never drive the truck.
Mrs. Pendley said, “Ford, you’re going to get in that truck and you’re going to drive it. It wasn’t your fault.” In fact, the committee that met the following morning with Frank there, Mr. Pendley was there, they had an arraignment with the parents of the driver of that car that I had met with him on the wrong side, to find out what had to be done.

The arraignment was the day after the accident, I hadn’t gone back to Oak Creek with Mr. Pendley, and stayed there one night.

The new truck was a same model ton and a half, with sideboards and all, and I said “Well, I’m not ever going to drive it again.” And Mrs. Pendley said “Ford you’re going to get in that truck and drive it!” She couldn’t drive herself, so she couldn’t say I’ll show you how to do it. So I moaned and groaned around there enough for so long and finally they persuaded me to get back in, it would be better for me and everybody concerned if I would just get back in the truck and drive it again. I really didn’t want to, but I did, and I guess it was the best thing.

Anyway, I continued on the rest of that summer, hauling apples down to Phoenix Arizona, getting down to the markets about 4 o’clock in the morning. There we’d get rid of the load, and get back to the Pendley ranch about two o’clock in the afternoon. Well, of course there was always two of us on the truck, Leroy continued working there over the summer, though he had a couple of inches taken off of his head – a couple of stitches taken in his ear where it had cut the lobe off of it, not entirely, but enough so that they could put a couple of stitches in it and make it whole.

So he always went with me on those trips down into the valley. Well, that was a sad, sad experience. At the arraignment, they decided that I was not at fault. They had gone out the day before and looked at the tracks out there that were incurred, and they found out that the guy, his partner and he had just been into town for a good time. They evidently had had just a few too many beers, and there were beer cans over the bottom of the car there, which were confiscated at that time. And anyway, the committee, which included the Sheriff and deputy Sheriff, and the county attorney; I was acquitted of any wrongdoing. At the arraignment, I should say, from any wrongdoing. Didn’t have my driver’s license or anything taken from me, or anything of that sort.

And that was the year I had stayed out of school, and had not gone back at the end of the summer to get a second year of school. But at the end of that year, Mr. Pendley had [end of tape]

No Comments

March 19, 2010

It’s probably time for an update on how we are doing, just in case you might be interested in such. After all that is the most frequently asked question these days when friends and acquaintances greet us. MGH’s stock answer is, “Pretty good for the shape I’m in”. This always draws an appreciative chuckle from those of a similar age who can read between the words and understand what is really being said. Or maybe not. At any rate, it allows the conversation to move on to more interesting things. With that for a starter I shall now tell you about our latest adventure into the tender hands of modern day medicine and please don’t get me wrong as I am very appreciative of the fact that MGH has had his life extended a good fifteen years after the massive heart attack he suffered in 1995 not long after we moved to Utah, I asked the doctor after the open-heart surgery where he received 5 by passes how much time it would buy him. The answer was 10 to 15 years. I can remember thinking, that sounds pretty good to me. Little did I realize how quickly the years would fly by and I find myself thinking now, ” that’s not nearly long enough”. So here is the latest on how MGH is doing.

“Happy Days Are Here Again. . . “ or something of the sort which is just my way of saying this is the month where MGH has his annual trip to see the doctor said trip made necessary because all his prescriptions need to be renewed. Sigh.

This time around the doctor decided that a ’stress test’ was needed to see how MGH’s heart was holding up. This is accomplished by injecting a very expensive drug that stresses his heart as the doctor watches to make sure it doesn’t kill him. While uncomfortable it is not the part MGH dreads. No, that part comes when he is flat out on the X-ray table with his arms above his head, which now, at this time in his life, is an extremely uncomfortable position for him to maintain. It is so painful for him that he screams when he brings his arms down. Needless to say, neither of us were looking forward to the experience. Me, because I hurt for him and MGH because it really, really hurts him.

With my usual worst case senerio where medical tests are concerned I was glumly predicting congestive heart failure being diagnosed as a result of the test. And where, you would be fully justified in asking, did I acquire my medical degree? I will have to admit you have caught me out as I don’t have one. I was just basing my theory on the way he wheezes after walking for a short distance. Just as a side note, my success rate in prophetic utterances ranges in the zero to none range as MGH pointed out to me the other day, after I once again stated my belief that the local furniture store was about to close its doors, with his comment that I had been predicting that event for the last five years. All I have to say on this matter is that one of these days I will be right!

The result of the test was revealed by phone Friday when, ‘the girl whose job it is to call and report on the RESULT of whatever test it was’ informed MGH that is heart looked to be in good shape. The x-rays showed scarring from an old heart attack but other than that he was fine and he was to continue on with his current regimen of medication (Plavix, which makes his blood ’slippery’, Lipitor, which helps regulate cholesterol and something else, which I can’t remember the name of, to keep his blood pressure low. All of these medications have their side effects and while they keep MGH alive they also keep him miserable. Such is life, or at least, life in our RH. These medications also keep us from accumulating much spare cash in our old age, but then, money isn’t much good if you are dead so I am not complaining.

MGSK(My Good Sister Kathy) just celebrated her 61st birthday this week which I find absolutely mind boggling. I remember when she was born. For her birthday I sent her a little book with lots of ‘fun’ quotes on aging. (I figured she’d enjoy the humor even if it tends a little bit toward the macabre. She sent me the following:

Joanne, thanks for the fun little book about aging you gave me for my birthday. Are you trying to tell me something???? Every time I look in the mirror I have a jolting reminder of my advanced years!  And as if that isn’t enough I am always shocked when I think how old my kids are !!! Ha,ha.  Oh well, onward and forward.    Love,Kathy

I know exactly what she means when she says she is shocked when she looks in the mirror, which, truthfully I do as little as possible these days as I find the face I now present to the world completely different than the face I would like to be exhibiting. It seems like it was just the other day when we were all at home together although I fully realize that a lot of water has gone under the bridge since then and we long ago left behind the faces of our girlhood.

Perhaps that is the greatest thing about family. We remember the way we were. . . .

No Comments

This was written by Sylvia and posted on her blog site. It is beautifully written and I hope she won’t mind that I have copied and posted it here for all of us to enjoy.

Sunday, May 24, 2009

Tom, Franklin and I went to Marshfield today to visit Grandpa and Grandma Breu. After dinner we went to see Auntie Vi, who is in a dementia ward of nursing home in the area. Franklin has memorized “A Child’s Prayer,” and will be playing it in church tomorrow. His Dad and I told him he could play it for Auntie Vi at the nursing home and when he got a bit antzy as we were trying to visit, I sent him off to find the organ in one of the side parlors.

His little fingers started in on “Jingle Bells,” the second of his two memorized pieces. Our little group headed on down the hallway and sat down to listen to him play. The sound of the music brought a trickle of visitors. Tom, seeing the hopeful old faces, asked me to play. I hadn’t brought any music, but there was a Lutheran hymnal there and we began looking through for songs people might know.

“How Great Thou Art” is a favorite in many churches, and I began playing it. One of the old ladies began singing when we came to the chorus, and Tom encouraged me then to sing and play, both. He started thumbing through the book looking for songs. He and Franklin passed out song books, and Franklin would help the oldsters look through the pages. I asked if they had any favorites, but since this is the dementia group, they’ve forgotten how to read and search and make any sort of requests for themselves.

We ended up in the Christmas Carol section. The old voices warbled and wavered, but for all that, sang with all that they had. Here they were, this group of forgotten souls, who themselves had forgotten the names of loved ones–children, spouses, siblings. And yet, when the music from their childhood was being played, they could sing along.

I was just about wiped out with “Silent Night,” and turned around to face the little group, tears streaming down my face, suggesting that might be a good place to end. Tom said, “How about ‘How Great Thou Art,’ one more time?” It was a wonderful idea and it about did me in when they started singing the last verse: “When Christ shall come, with shout of acclamation to bring me home, what joy shall fill my heart….”

For they were all them, raised in a time when Jesus Christ meant something to the American people, and they were, all them, waiting so patiently and with great faith, to be called home. It was for me, a sacred time.

No Comments

Ford I. Gano History – Tape 4 Side B
…Left me alone the other morning to try to tape a little by my recorder by myself, and I made a heyday of it by making a mistake from one end to the other. The first mistake I made was I went clear through one side of a tape set on play rather than on recording, so when I got to the end of it, I had nothing there for all my efforts. Well, so much for my dopey mistakes that I make every time I turn around, so it seems.
Well, this is the side that I missed out on, and I’m going back and trying to record some of the things I think I said, or follow up on some of the things was talking about.
I believe I was up at the Pendley ranch at this particular time, describing his family, and John, he was the old Swedish man that worked there for the Pendley’s. They also had an Uncle Ed lived there with them, and he was a carpenter, he did a lot of carpenter work for them, not so much on the house, but on the service station they built, and on the apple house that they had built. I guess he was the primary engineer and supervisor and the carpenter for all that. They had made the apple house one year while I was not present. They had started it before I went back to school, at the end of that summer, and when I got back the next year, they had completed it that winter. It was a very nice apple house that was made in a kind of an arroyo, or canyon, that came down just after it went into their property, between their house and the barn. They had excavated out from that, and made a cement floor, cement walls, and put a two story building that was very efficient as an apple house. The bottom story or walk in part of it, was a place to store the apples, or fruit or whatever, because it was nice and cool there in the summertime, or warm in the wintertime even. Then up on the second floor they had the work area, where all the fruit was separated and made available for the market.
Mr. Pendley had purchased a commercial apple sorter, which previously had been done by individuals, which was very time consuming, dumping out a box of apples and separating them out into their sizes. This apple machine, apple sorter they’d purchased, was very efficient. You dump the apples in at one end, and by gravity they would flow down across the machine, on rollers, and be separated in such a manner that the larger apples were held back, and the smaller apples were dropped through to bins underneath, where they were taken care of by the workers that would sit alongside of it. A very efficient machine. In the fall of the year, or late summer, when we were doing the harvesting, Mr. Pendley hired extra help to operate it and keep it running.
Mr. John was the official boxer. Packing the apples into the box, and nailing the lid on them and stacking them all in the corner of the building. He was a very capable worker although he was way up in years. Lots of these old-timers can outwork a youngster 2-to-1, I think.
Although I did help out on the apple sorter a time or two, most of my time my buddy Frank… by the way, there was one corner of the room that was made off into a bunkhouse, and in this corner we had our beds set up, and lights and tables and one thing or another. Where Frank and I, what I mean by Frank, Frank was a High School, well a schoolmate of mine, from junior high school on up. He was the one who actually got me the job with the Pendleys, when the CCC’s closed down and quit operating. I worked with him quite a bit. We did a lot of apple picking, climbing into the trees with ladders of course, and picking the apples into sacks, which we carried on our shoulders, then carrying them down the ladders, whatever we were using, to dump them into the trays or boxes we had below on the ground. These then were picked up by a tractor/trailer behind us and hauled into the apple house where they were separated into their bins.
Well, so much for that.
As fall came about, and the apple picking was over, I got the job of hauling the apples into market. Mr. Pendley let me drive his truck and haul the apples, either into local markets in Flagstaff or Winslow, or back the other direction into Cottonwood and Clarkdale. We didn’t take too many up through them, because it was quite uphill, to get up there on the old Mingus Mountain road. We did take a few up there though to the UVX store that handled all the trade up there, but our big market was down in Phoenix.
Mr. Pendley went with me the first trip or two that I made, and we would load the truck up in the afternoon, stacking the boxes very securely on both sides, from the front straight back, pulling the tarp over and then tying the tarp down. About 10 o’clock at night we would set out for Phoenix, where the markets were. And that entailed a trip down through the Verde Valley, up through Clarkdale, up the mountainside to Jerome, the little winding streets where houses stood on stilts to keep them upright. You could look back and see the road you just came over, look up and see the road you’re going to be on, a lot of the time. Well, it was all good road as far as pavement was concerned, but very twisted and turning, and very much up grade. We had to usually go up one side of Mingus Mountain in low gear, very seldom able to put it into second gear, especially with a load on the truck.
After we got going down the other side of the mountain, we had to keep it in low gear, in order to keep control of the speed, until we got down on the flats below, and tapered off into Lonesome Valley. Across Lonesome Valley, which was about a 20 mile stretch over into Prescott, and from Prescott we would head off down Arnell Hill Road, which was about 20 miles from Prescott going south towards Phoenix. Arnell Hill was another good little sloping ride, twisty and turning off down into the valley below. From the valley of course, we’d converge on down, we had good straight roads all the way into Phoenix. We would get into Phoenix about 4 o’clock in the morning, still nice and fairly cool. Although lots of times in the summer time, even up into fall, we’d find many people as we’d go through the outskirts of the town, sleeping on the lawns in their bvd’s trying to keep cool.
We would go on into the central part of town where the market was located, this was an open market for wholesalers, who’d come into buy their produce for the day from the various producers who’d brought it in there to sell. Frank, Mr. Pendley I should say, had already set up a more or less of a good contact, to sell his apples through. He was selling his own brand of apples. They were called the [tape switches off]…?nd Orchard. Fruit, highest quality (note 1), and he nice little labels that were pasted on the boxes or whatever fruit he was taking into town himself. He had a good reputation of being able to deliver good quality apples. So he sold to some of the bigger markets, I can’t remember some of the names of the big commercial stores there in Phoenix, and also some of the other towns all over the valley there.
We would back the truck up to the unloading platform, and then untarping the truck, we would open up a few of the boxes to show what our produce was like. We would come out and walk around the edge of the truck, along the side of the truck, they would select the type of apple they wanted which ranged in size from large, which was called a number 80, to the common size 125, we even had a smaller, for some people who preferred that. But the 125s were the average size apple that you bought on the market, then and today too.
We would usually get the truck unloaded by about 1 or 2 o’clock, and then head back for Oak Creek Canyon, back for home, and make the trip in reverse that we had made all the way down there.
Mr. Pendley went with me a time or two, to kind of get me broke in, then he let me take out on my own. I found it to be quite a job, to drive the truck all the way down there by myself, and to be able to sell the apples after I got down there. But a little later on in the fall, a friend of mine who I knew in high school and who I’d had on many a cowboy trip was Leroy Wells. And Leroy was looking for a job, so I recommended Leroy to Mr. Pendley. And Mr. Pendley hired him, and this was in spite of a birth defect that he had on his left hand. He had only a good thumb, and several stubs of fingers for the rest of his hand. But it never seemed to bother him on anything, except where he had to grapple a rope or something like that smaller in size. He had learned to adapt himself to get along very well with his other hand and that stub of a hand on the left side. But he could drive a vehicle very well. And although Mr. Pendley was a little bit shy of having him drive a truck, he would finally agree to let him drive it a part of the way. I would take the truck over the mountain and down the Arnell, but between Leroy could drive the truck.
So on one occasion, Leroy and I were driving the truck, starting the regular routine and made the trip up over the mountain, down the other side. And going down across Lonesome Valley, I was driving the truck. Leroy was asleep, up on top of the load in a nook that he had hollowed out among the boxes on top of the tarp. Curled up in his blanket he always got a good nap there. Whoever was sleeping up there always got a good nap, I would do that too, when I wasn’t driving.
But I was driving this particular trip. Going down across, easing off the mountain you might say, down onto Arnell Hill, you could look clear out on the bottom area, Lonesome Valley it was called, which was about 20, 25 miles there in length as it came into the suburbs of Prescott. While I was easing down that area, usually in a lower gear, you’d get right down at the bottom and you’d put your truck into a higher gear, and let it run by its own momentum down across the valley. And I could see off in the distance a kind of a car light coming from the other direction, and I was kind of aware of that. But after dropping off into a little draw and kind of a curve in the road, I came around that curve, and there was that car right in front of me on my side of the road!
Well, I was going too fast to make a quick stop, and evidently the driver wasn’t able to make a quick stop either. And I just, although I should say the right hand side of the road would have been the best to go off of, to miss the other car, it was a little rough, and draws down in there, and I didn’t think I could get down in there with a truck loaded with apples. I made a, a wrong decision I think now, I tried to pull toward the left side of the car, and go by him on the left, which would have been the wrong side to pass on. I never made it past him.
I hit his right front fender, and tore his vehicle almost right in two, with the truck, its momentum and its weight coming down that slope into Lonesome Valley. Well, it was a sad situation, the old truck went off down the left hand side of the road, and overturned, scattering apples, and Leroy, out across the flat land that was down there, where I hoped I could bring the truck under control. But it got into a side ditch of the road, and I couldn’t control it. Some of it, as I not only, I should add, explain at least, that the hauled out load of apples behind me came right up over the cab of the truck, and sheared the cab of the truck completely off. Had I not leaned over I guess, instinctively or whatever, I think what I was trying to do was to keep the truck from going too far out into the ditch that was over there, and I was pulling on the wheel on that side that I’d leaned over to try to pull it over just as hard as I could. But anyway, when that load of apples slid off over the front of the truck, I was down far enough in the cab so that it missed me completely. I was not hurt in any way. But it went five or six lengths of the truck, and finally turned over on its side, dumping the apples farther off down the road. I guess they went a good fifty, sixty, maybe a hundred yards down that road. It was sure one big old mess.
It was worse when I went back to the car that I’d torn the side off of, and found that it had killed the passenger who was on the other side of the truck. The driver had completely escaped. I opened up the door and looked in, and found them sitting slumped over on their seats. In trying to talk to them to find out what was going on, I could smell beer very strongly, very vividly. They had been into a kind of a night owl in Prescott, to a beer parlor, and I guess that was about all they had been drinking, because there was no sign of liquor there in the car. Anyway, the one man, passenger in the car, had been killed.
Well, boy, was I sick. The next thing that I thought of was Leroy. Where’s Leroy?! I went out hunting around in those boxes of apples out there, and he finally hollered back at me, and says, “I’m over here!” I don’t know whether or not he had been knocked out or not, but I don’t see how he could have helped but to have been knocked out, because he had apple boxes all around him. And all that had happened to him was that one box of apples had nipped one lobe of his ear completely off. He had a little blood on his ear, but outside of that, he wasn’t hurt.
Well, we sized up the situation, got our flares out on the road to stop any traffic that might come along. I took a flare up on the back end, which was on that slopy curve that I’d come around, and sure enough, I could see a truck coming down off of Mingus Mountain there. I got my lights out just as quick as I could, and jumped out in the middle of the road and managed to stop him up there, before he got down there. I explained to the driver what had happened, so he eased his truck off down there to where we were getting lights on the whole situation. To shorten it up, why Leroy, who just didn’t know quite exactly what had happened to his ear, he could feel the blood up there, he got into the truck with the driver of this truck that came down the hill, which by the way was empty so he had been able to stop his truck without any trouble. We put the man who turned out to be dead, I didn’t know whether he was dead or not at the time, but when they got into town later in the morning, I called the hospital and asked if there’d been anybody let in there, and they said yes, one was DOA, and Leroy, which had just a lobe of an ear severed, and was patched up and waiting for me to come to find out what to do.
First thing I did was to get to a phone and call my mother. She was living in Prescott at that time, and I called my mother and explained the situation to her. So then, between the two of us, we called Mr. Pendley, and told him what had happened. We had to make a long distance call from Prescott over to Oak Creek, which I guess took the better part of the rest of the night. But it wasn’t long until Mr. Pendley came driving over in his car, and he had seen apples and the trucks back there on the road. He wanted to know if we were all right. He was very calm about it, just wanted to know for sure if Leroy and I had escaped unscathed.
We decided, or he decided, that we’d go back in his car and get wrecker to try to come out to pick up the truck, and pick up the rest of the apples that there was, but we couldn’t get anybody to pick them up. So there they are out there off the side of the road, just dumped off, big piles of apple boxes. People that came by, that found out about them sure had their fill of apples that particular day. Mr. Pendley and I went back to the Jerome dealer where he had got his truck and well, I got ahead of myself there.
We went back to Prescott, and there he went into the Dodge truck dealer there, wait, it wasn’t a Dodge, it was an International truck dealer, and talking with him made arrangements to have a new truck sent over to his barn, to his ranch. We went on back to the ranch. Of course I was sick to my stomach, sick of life, and everything else, knowing what tragedy I had partially caused, perhaps by pulling over to one side of the road when I shouldn’t have done so. At least I took that to be my only escape at that time.
I had to go back to Prescott the next day for a hearing. A sheriff and a deputy sheriff and the police of the town of Prescott there all made arrangements there, and they had the survivor of the car come, along with his parents, along with parents of the boy, of the man, that was killed, for this hearing. They talked to me about it, to get an explanation of how it happened, and to the best of my ability I told them. They had also investigated the scene of the accident out there, and saw how the situation was, and saw how it could easily have happened. The truck that had picked Leroy and the other man up and took them into Prescott to the hospital…[tape ends]
1 In switching the microphone back on, Grandpa apparently began to speak before the tape resumed recording. What is recorded sounds somewhat different from the name he described on Tape 4 Side A, which was Falls Branch Orchard.

No Comments

Ford I. Gano History – Tape 4 Side A
All mixed up here now. I couldn’t try to turn the tape over, and I can’t find anything on this side, so I guess it doesn’t have anything on it, and I don’t know if I had the other side on record or not. So, that’s me all over. Anyway, I’m going take out on this side from where I left off on the dissertation about the horses I had used from my ranch work, while I was living there at the Bivens’.
To go over that again, I had Dynamite, which was my favorite horse, I had Shorty, which was a smaller horse but he was really spry and fast. He was a good little horse. He belonged to a friend, Jack Freu, who couldn’t keep him because he lived in town, and he boarded him out where he could do that, and I happened to be the lucky one, Lynn and I were the lucky ones. Of course I had the old pony to go across the river to go to high school, and put in the barn up there, where she stayed all day till I got home at night. But I never rode her much for ranch work, she was just a nuisance to keep around. She would bother the other horses quite a bit, because she thought she was the boss of the menagerie there.
Now the third horse I had was a palomino which belonged to Uncle Art and Aunt Edna, he was getting just a little bit old for real hard work, and consequently they didn’t use him too much for their ranch work, so they let me keep him quite a bit, just to get him pastured and taken care of. He was an awful good horse, and really a nice looking animal. Everybody that came along, my brother Frank and my sister Paula when she came to visit once, all wanted their picture taken on Pal, which we called him. But I kept him in my string, and along with my chaps and saddle and blanket – I had a nice saddle blanket which I’d accumulated – spurs and etc., I really thought I was a pretty good cowboy.
[Tape stops here, and resumes in mid-narrative:]
…back from Texas last summer, and taken care of the cattle and branded the calves, and got all that done, why I didn’t have much else to do, so my mother suggested maybe that since my brother Lynn had joined up with the CCC’s (Civilian Conservation Corps) which paid young men to join up with them for $30 a month and their board and room, which $25 of that was sent to the parents, and $5 was given to the enrolled. Well I did that, and though I wasn’t in the same camp as Lynn was, he was over in the Prescott area, and my camp was there in the Verde Valley area. I really enjoyed that time of life. I got to play with, to mix with other boys and made friends with quite a few of them at that time. We were divided up just like the Army divided their troops when they enrolled, into a troop of 10 or 8 I guess it was, in one tent, and then there were a group of about 5 tents that was called a division. Then there was another, the whole camp was called a… well, I’ve forgotten what they did call it.
But anyway, when I enrolled, I was put into a tent with some boys from over there on Oak Creek, and they was all good fellows, all clean boys. I don’t think a one of them smoked, so I enjoyed living with them. I never had taken up the habit of smoking or drinking, and I enjoyed being in with them. I guess that’s the
1
reason they put me in with that group was because that was one group that didn’t like to do those things. I was made patrol leader of that one group of boys in that one camp, and out of it I got an extra $5 for my big heavy job of leadership. I don’t know why they did that, but anyway they did, and I enjoyed having the extra $5. Which I got to keep, they didn’t send that in to my mother, so actually I had $10 at the end there each month to play with. Later on, during my period here in the CCC camp we built roads, we built a lot of fences, we called them drift fences, which they just start out and dig holes and string wire, barbed wire, until one of the valley to the other. The idea was that when cattle were drifting southward always, they’d run up against this drift fence and turn around and go back, usually towards more grazing. Although it was hard work, I didn’t mind doing it at all. I kind of like the money I was getting, and didn’t mind working. I was made the truck driver also, and always got to drive the truck and haul the other boys in the back of the truck, with my supervisor sitting in the front seat with me. So that was, I don’t know why I was made supervisor, but I was, and took the extra $5 with thanks in my heart to my Heavenly Father, whom I never had paid much attention to or thought about after I left my home there in Verde Valley, going to Sunday School with Chris Shayler as my tutor, but that was beside the point.
I had been in the camp maybe for six months, and they offered the division leader, which was leader of the whole camp, for a salary of $75/month. But I didn’t take that, much to my mother’s regrets; she said “Why on earth didn’t you do that?” and I said, “Well, I didn’t want to have the responsibility of that job, you had to be responsible for the whole camp” which was made up of about 150 boys. And I said I just didn’t want to do that, because a lot of them would go out over the weekends, whenever they had time off, and get into some kind of mischief or another, and you had to pick them up and bring them back and get them straightened out. So I turned that down, but I always called it a feather in my cap even to be offered that job.
Well, I stayed on that job until the CCCs were ended there, and I found a job up in Oak Creek Canyon, at the Pendley Ranch, raising fruit. So I, this was the next summer after that first summer in the CCC, I spent the summer up there with the Pendley family. Another boy who I had known in High School, Frank Anders, and I were the two permanent hirees, workers of the apple orchard there, if I leave out Uncle John. Uncle John was a sweet man who’d come there wandering in one time and they took him in just as their own family, and he slept in their house with them, and did washing and cooking sometimes, and always milked the cows, except later on I was given that job, when they found out I knew how to milk a cow. So I had to go out and milk the cows because it was too hard for Uncle John to go out and find them in their pasture, and bring them into the barn to be milked.
Well, I enjoyed that summer there at the Pendley Ranch. They were very good to me. We just consisted at that time of Frank Pendley and his wife Jane, she was
2
quite a bit younger than he was. Frank, he was a middle aged man, and she was a younger girl, you might say, that he had wooed and captured up there in Oak Creek. I was made their chauffeur, and always drove their car to take them into town whenever they wanted to go to town. I don’t know, there’s a lot of things I could talk about the Pendley Ranch. I might mention one thing later on, because after that summer, I went back to school, or I got to school. That was my first year in college. My mother insisted that I go on to school if I possibly could. She offered me, she says, you take the cattle down there, and sell them to the government (who was paying $15 a head for them, and they would take them – you weren’t supposed to have over 10 head of them, anyway) and the young stuff you could sell off to the butchers very conveniently and profitably, and the older stuff they would buy for $15. Well, I did that, and she says, well you take half of that, which was $75 dollars, and I’ll keep the other half, and I want you to go to school at Tempe. So that was at Tempe State Teacher’s College down at Tempe Arizona. So I went down there at the beginning of that school year, and enrolled in Tempe Teacher College. I selected as my major agriculture, with [laughs] horticulture as my minor, because I didn’t know much of anything to select except that.
I might mention along this line, another little feather in my cap, that one of my high school teachers, the physics teacher, physics and science courses, had kind of taken a liking to me. I’d got good grades in his class, and did a good job of studying one thing and another. So when I got through high school, he offered to send me on to college at Tempe, if I would major in Chemistry and Physics. Well, I didn’t hardly want to do that because I didn’t think I knew too much about physics and chemistry, so I didn’t want to do that. So I turned him down on that, passed that deal up.
But mother and I got together and when I enrolled, I enrolled in agriculture, which was a 2-year course there in Tempe, I guess maybe three years there altogether. When I finished at Tempe, I had to change schools and go down to the University of Arizona to get my 4th year of agriculture, which I did, which I’ll tell about as I get along.
Anyway, I enjoyed my freshman year there at Tempe. I got a job with the school, of course part time. They paid me only minimum salary, which I think was $30 a month, for waiting in the dining room: helping in the dining room, doing odd jobs, waiting on tables, etc., etc. That was the biggest job, waiting on tables. Now and then we had to do a few other things also.
I got to be a good friend of a young fellow who’d come down from the east, from Michigan, and was going to school there. It was his first year, as a freshman. And he hitchhiked out from Michigan, and was enrolled in Tempe State Teacher College there, and I’d made friends with him, and he was a good clean young man. Much heavier and bigger than I was, but nevertheless, I found him to be a fine friend. But when we first enrolled in Tempe, you couldn’t get a room in the dormitory, so we both of us had to find a rooming place off campus. We both
3
roomed in a house that rented a spare room in their attic for $30 a month, and provided a little bed and a desk in one corner, which we rented for our school room that year. Well, we stayed in it until a few of the freshman had dropped out about mid-term. We found a room in the dormitory to live, and from then on I lived in East Hall, on the college. It was easier that way. While I was living off campus, I had to buy my meals out in various different places, just little side joints, one thing or another, fix something up myself, but when I got on campus, I bought a ticket for the [microphone switched off]
…mind goes blank sometimes, and I had to turn the tape off and try to remember what the dining hall was called. Anyway, we got a ticket to the dining hall, we ate all three meals there. At the same time, I had that job in there, and was getting a little help from the school, so I kind of enjoyed doing that work there. I got to know about everybody that was enrolled in the school, girls and all! I used to have to serve them the food, and clean up the tables after wards, and so forth and so on. Well,
[Microphone switched off]
Norris and I both enrolled in sports, football that fall. So as freshman there in that college, we were both on the freshman squad. I enjoyed playing football. I was a little older than the boys who came in as green freshmen from high school, and I kind of took advantage of that I think, I cowed them down a little by having been in the CCC camp, and roughing it out in woods and valleys and the mountain area. In other words, I was just a little tougher than most of the freshmen coming in. So I made the freshman football team that year. It was separate from the varsity team, but I enjoyed that. We only played about four games all year long as freshmen, so I didn’t get banged up too much. Nevertheless, it was taking a large part of my time. We had to spend at least four hours after school out there on that football field or in the gymnasium where we were exercising. And if you take four hours out of your day, and then take the time out to earn your $30 a month board and room fee, it didn’t leave much room for studying. Although I made a good, or a B- average, or a good C+ average, my freshman year, I wasn’t satisfied with that. I wanted to do a little better than that if I could. So, when I went back the second year I didn’t go out for football anymore.
But in the mean time, the summer of that freshman year I went back up and went back to work for Pendley again. I was getting a little older, and I guess, I don’t know if I was any smarter or not, but this year he paid me $30 a month, room and board, to help him there in the apple orchard. It didn’t take long for the summer to go by, but at the end of the summer, I didn’t have enough money to enroll back in Tempe without getting help from the school. But the school that year said that because I’d dropped out that I wasn’t eligible for their help any more. So I had to, I decided then that I would stay out that year, and continue to work for Pendley for my $60 a month deal and board and room.
Well, that year he made me a kind of a salesman, and I got to load the truck up
4
and take it around to places to sell the fruit. I got a lot of good experience out of that, going to the various towns and it gave me a little confidence mainly. I never did have much selling ability, but that gave me a little experience in that field of endeavor.
When the year’s fall apple season came on, I would help harvest apples, and I would help sort them. Now Frank had a very big and expensive apple house, he called it, at 2-story deal. The bottom part was for storage and the upper part was where they sorted out the fruit. He had a big machine in there that sorted out the apples instead of having to do it by hand. I’m not going to try to describe it, it simply dumped the apples in one end, and they went out onto a belt, and they’d drop them off according to their size. Then the laborers, the people working along the sorting bench, put them in their right bins in order to accumulate the sizes, the small size, the medium size, and the large size apples. They were boxed in that manner. Uncle John was the official boxer. He made up all the boxes, and he filled them all up, and put them in there in beautiful little layers, and then he would put a lid on the box and nail it up. We’d stack them up in big old piles.
[Microphone switched off. After this point, recording quality is somewhat garbled.]
After the harvest was over, there was always a few things left to do around the ranch there, [unintelligible] had to be taken care of from the late apple trees, the Winesap and the Stalens, and so on and so forth.
But it came selling season, in the cool weather, why Frank would
[Another microphone switch off. Quality continues to worsen]
Mr. Pendley had made a trade name for his apples, and they called them the Falls Branch Orchard. All labels had to be put on by hand on all the boxes, and we’ load them into the truck, and most of them were hauled down to Phoenix. That was my job that year, to haul those apples down to Phoenix. Frank went along down there a time or two, to show me the ropes of how to do it. I should say Mr. Pendley went down along with me, and we’d leave in the evening time, about 11 o’clock, by the Coalingus Mountain, and down through the Lonesome Valley area, down into Prescott. Down from Prescott on down the Arnell hill which was quite a little hill going down into the valleys below. And it sure was a twisty old road. A good paved road, that was all there was, from Prescott down the Arnell hill was all paved and well taken care of, so it was never a big task to drive that distance. From the Arnell Hill down to Phoenix was probably a distance of 50 miles, and then we ‘d get into phoenix about 4:30 in the morning, and go the open market.
Now, this was a place where the wholesalers came in to buy their stuff, buy their goods for the day. And of course, all Frank had was apples. He had made some customers down there, and we’d try to sell the customers as much apples as they could use off of that truckload. Then we’d have to peddle them around to the different other stores that would come to the open market there to buy their produce for the day, smaller markets usually. By the time we’d get through that task, it was mid-day, and we’d load up anything we had left, which was never
5
very much. Frank didn’t like to haul anything back to the orchards, but we’d drive back about mid-day, starting back, and we’d make it in to Oak Creek Farm there just about dusk, at evening. We were always glad for a good home-cooked meal from Jane Pendley. She was a very good cook. She cooked in big batches, because she had to feed the hands that were working in the field, as well as her 5 children and the boarders in the house.
[Microphone switched off again. Recording resumes much improved]
Although there was usually snow in that part of Oak Creek, which was called Upper Oak Creek, from about the first of November until spring of the following year, so we always had snow to put up with there in the winter time. After we got the apples taken care of, we had the job of pruning the trees. We’d start in on that when it got cold enough so there was no sap in the trees. Mister Johns, the old Swede that lived there with them was the chief pruner. He was very, he showed the rest of us, and there was only two of us that worked there in the wintertime, how to prune trees. And we had to prune them and stack up the branches, and haul them off into a pile. And when they got tall enough, we’d manage to burn them. Our winter job then first was pruning the trees, and then later on odds and ends around the place. That was when I was given the job of milking the cow, always had to get up in the morning early, and go find the cows out in the pasture, and bring them in the barn where the hay was kept. I’d milk usually about two cows, which I never did mind doing, particularly, but Mr. Johns, as we always called him, used to resent my milking, because that was a job that he thought he should have. Nevertheless, the Pendley thought that we should [Tape Ends]

6

No Comments

January 3, 2010

It’s about time. That summary seems like an appropriate way to begin the first missive of a New Year doesn’t it? Here we are at the beginning of another year. Considering the alternative I find it delightful to once again reach “GO” even if I don’t get to collect two hundred dollars. The important thing, as far as I am concerned is that I am started on another round.

To my amazement not one year, in my now beginning to be a quite respectful accumulation, has been exactly the same as any other. Oh, of course there are always similarities i.e. the seasons follow one after another, months have the same names and mostly the same holidays, that is if you don’t count rolling the birthdays of two Presidents into one day as they do in February or the addition of MLK day on the 20th of January which MGH with his wry sense of humor tells me is actually in honor of him as it is his birthday whereas MLK was born on the 15th. And while I fail to see the logic that says we need to celebrate birthdays on days that they aren’t (other than Christmas that is)—in this I must say I favor a strict constructionist viewpoint which is entirely in character as I always called my children by their given names even when others didn’t. Case in point, Sylvia is called Syl by HGH (Her Good Husband) and Sherman goes by Sherm to many. Ford has been called ‘Chevy’ by some although I fail to see the connection and is a non-starter IMO (In My Opinion) other than to tease him about being named after a truck which he wasn’t. He was named after my father who was given his name by his mother who also gave him the middle name Iman which seems to have no connection to anything other than she liked it which on thinking about it is probably as good a reason as any. MGSB (My Good Sister Barbara) has posited the theory that she just wanted his initials to spell a word, which they do FIG. But here I am not completely sure that I agree with her reasoning as who really wants that appellation to follow their offspring wherever such a thing should appear as on monogrammed luggage or hand towels for instance which to my knowledge never happened but just the thought that it might makes me wonder why it was done in the first place.

While I am on this topic I feel it only fair to point out that MGSK’s (My Good Sister Kathy’s) initials spell KEG and with the addition of her married name she became KEGS. In her case I think she was named Katherine just because my parents liked that name and the Elberta came from their desire to remember dad’s father’s name which was Paul Elbert and since they had no boys, at least up to that point they just gave her the feminine version by adding an a to the end of Elbert. Neat. huh!

But I digress as I started out intending to write about time. Sylvia, while here on an all too brief visit after Christmas, but hey, I’m not complaining, as something is always better than nothing and time together with one’s children after they leave home is always an event to be treasured—the more so if distance makes them few and far between, pointed out to me that none of the half dozen or so clocks and watches in our RH (Retirement Home) agree. I hadn’t really paid that much attention to this anomaly rather just adjusted my thinking to the particular time piece I happened to be looking at at the moment. For instance if I am in the car I know to add an hour and fifteen minutes if we are on MDLST (Mountain Daylight Savings Time). This is because we rarely correct for the change as we know it will have to be redone—so why bother. The extra minutes are because MGH likes the idea as it insures he gets where he needs to go on time. I think this has something to do with the fact that he is a statistician and doesn’t mind the idea of doing math in his head which involves adding an hour if needed then subtracting the extra minutes that have accumulated which is necessary because the car clock gains a little time. Hmmm, on second thought maybe it would be easier just to make the changes as needed, which will never happen unless a grandchildren should appear on the scene as they know how to ‘tweak’ anything electronic without even reading the instructions.

Then there is the one clock in my sewing room that is only right twice a day as it is stopped for lack of a battery which I keep forgetting to collect from MGS’s dresser which is where they are kept. The other one is only off by a couple of hours but I don’t notice as I know this clock is no where near right and not likely to become so as I must find the instructions for setting it which I seem to have misplaced. This is really no big deal as the clock on the cable box is correct so all I have to do is to get close enough to read it. Not that I mind walking a little as, truth to tell, I need the exercise. That pretty well takes care of the clocks downstairs unless you count my watch which I took off and carefully placed where I could find it and can’t.

Upstairs is the clock Marie’s GHD (Good Husband Dan) brought us from the Philippines when he was serving with the National Guard many years ago. It kept faithful time for years but when Jordan was a baby it would wake him up when it marked the hour and so I stopped winding it always intending to start it up again but haven’t. Since Jordan just turned twelve and hasn’t lived with us since he was a baby I should probably wind it up again but as ‘they’ say, “out of of sound, out of mind”.

As for the clocks on the microwave and stove they never quite agree as I have not yet found a way to set them simultaneously but I figure I can live with it as they are usually within 30 seconds of each other. However that may be they are more ‘timely’ than MGH’s watch as he likes to keep his timepiece a few minutes ahead of everyone else just to make sure he is on time which also explains why the clock in our bedroom runs about 10 minutes faster than the rest of the house. (We got this clock while in Saudi as a reward for collecting ‘points’ on the Al Safi products we purchased. They were trying to increase sales. I don’t know if they sold more product or not but it was fun for us while it lasted.)

It is all about time isn’t it! Here’s to having enough and more each day no matter what our watches’ or clocks may say.

No Comments