:Family Matters

Interview with Barbara Lansingh – 25 March 1991
Kathy: The date is March the 25th, 1991; we’re in Keosauqua, Iowa, Van Buren County. And this is Barbara Lansingh and Ford Iman Gano.
Barbara: And Kathy Schoeni.
Kathy: Yes, I’m here too.
Ford: You mean that thing [the video camera] works automatically now?
K & B: Yes.
Kathy: And we have about 2 hours of battery power. Carol said if we needed any more, we’d be bored, not to mention that you would probably fall off your chair [laughs] in tiredness.
Ford: That is correct.
Barbara: Ok, have you got that going? [hand-held tape recorder].
Ford: It’s going, listening…
Barbara: Ok, good. So, you were born in Sacramento California, and don’t really remember whether it was at home or in the hospital, correct?
Ford: That is correct. I don’t know if my mother gave me birth, gave birth to me, in a hospital or at home, but it was in Sacramento California, on the 8th day of July, about, 1913.
Barbara: [Laughs] There was some confusion about that, wasn’t it the 7th for the longest time?
Ford: Yes, my birth certificate was born on the 7th, but traditionally, I was born on the 8th.
Barbara: Your mom celebrated it on the 8th.
Ford: Yes, we always celebrated my birthday on the 8th. But for some reason or another my birth certificate says the 7th, and I think it was because it was 10 minutes to 12 when I was born, and then the second conception of the difference in dates was that I had a cousin that was born on the 8th, and we celebrated our birthday at the same time.
Kathy: Made it easier? One cake, huh?
Barbara: Ok, can you tell us anything about your brothers and sisters? What kind of a family did you grow up in?
Ford: I had two older half-brothers who were not living with us, with my family at the time I was born. My brother, Lynn, was born I think about 18 months after I was, and named after the doctor that took care of them, named Fenner Lynn Gano. And then my half-brother Frank, who was living with his grandmother, came to live with us, so our folks consisted of my dad and my mother, and after Lynn was born, myself and Lynn. The only thing that I remember specifically about the time in San Francisco [sic] was things that my mother told me, and one of them was that I was such a good looking baby that she took me to a baby show, and I won 1st prize. Now, I assure you that was the only prize I ever won…
Barbara: For being best looking…
Ford: For being best looking, anything. But I do have that little silver mug that was given me on that occasion, with my name and birthday on it.
Barbara: Now, I remember that Darlene has a picture, a little bear, you know, a little bear rug with your little bottom sticking out of it. Did you also have one like that, Dad? Do I remember seeing one of you…
Ford: Yes, we had that picture for a long time, and I presume it’s still around here somewhere, in a collection of pictures. It wasn’t long after that picture was taken, in fact, while I was learning to walk, while I was still creeping, I had an accident in which I was blinded in my right eye. I was carrying a pencil, or some other sharp object, while creeping on the floor, and fell down, and that object, whether it was a pencil, I think it was a fingernail file, that punctured my pupil in my right eye, and I was taken to a doctor immediately. He said there wasn’t anything that could be done about it, which of course in that day and age, the medicinal facilities weren’t as good as we have now, so I’ve always been blind in my right eye, except for side vision in it.
Barbara: I remember you telling that story. Do I understand from somewhere recently that because of this accident your mother may have favored you a little bit?
Ford: I don’t remember whether it was so much my mother as it was my dad. My dad always favored me a little on account of it. I was the proverbial spoiled brat when I was a kid, as far as my older brothers and sisters [sic] were concerned, especially my half-brother, Frank. Now I never did become acquainted with my oldest half-brother, Lewis, because he was living with his grandmother. I never did even meet him until after I was grown, and had gone through school.
But Frank came with us, or Francis as he was called then, came with us on our trip to Arizona, and I have a very memorable story of his early childhood, which includes our life there in the Verde Valley after we arrived there and our trip home over from Sacramento on the narrow gauge railroad into the Clarkdale area, where we were met by horse and buggy, picked up and taken by relatives on our migration to Arizona when I was approximately 2 years old.
Barbara: Did your dad or mom ever tell you why you moved from Sacramento to Arizona?
Ford: Not really. I think it was for my dad’s health. He was of poor health, and I think that the doctor had recommended that he get into a drier climate, and so he came to Arizona for that particular reason from the East. Whether or not he met my mother before or after California, I am not aware of, but he was out there from the East, where he grew up there as a boy, because of a health condition, where the doctor had recommended that they come West.
Barbara: Do you remember what kind of health condition he had?
Ford: Yes, he had a lung problem, which was called consumption…
Barbara: Which is called TB now?
Ford: Which is called TB now, but it was consumption in those days, and my dad was in poor health because of that.
Barbara: OK…
Kathy: I don’t think Barbara has heard the story about the Fig Newtons; I think you were coming up to that story when you said you made this migration when the relatives picked you up, Dad? Wasn’t there a Fig Newton story?
Ford: Oh, yes, that was the story that my brother Frank remembers: In the wagon that they brought to pick us up, and they picked up some of their supplies. Uncle Art, who had come to pick us up, had a week or so of groceries in the back of the wagon. And as we rode from Clarkdale down to Cottonwood, my brother Frank, as is normal for a young man, explored the groceries, and found therein a sack, or a half a keg, of Fig Newtons. Being a youngster of about 5 years old, maybe 6 I guess he was, he was four years older than I, and a lover of candy and sweets and things, he sampled the Fig Newtons. In fact he ate almost half of them before one of the grownups looked around and figured out what was going on. “Oh, those are not for human consumption. Those are Fig Newtons that are spoiled, and we’re taking them home to feed our hogs!” Frank, to this day he claims, has never had the taste for Fig Newtons, because they were infested for little worms.
Barbara: Oh dear!
Ford: And he had eaten half of them.
Barbara: It must have taken him a while to get over that.
Ford: It took him a long time to get any taste back, in fact he says he has never eaten Fig Newtons after that.
Barbara: Tell us about the kind of house you lived in, how many bedrooms?
Ford: Well…
Kathy: Did you have electricity?
Ford: We moved, when we came from California to Arizona, we first lived with my relatives there. We lived with Aunt Edna and Uncle Art…
Kathy: What was their last name, Dad?
Ford: and they were very much typical western people, Uncle Art’s brogue was very cowboyish, and though Aunt Edna was a teacher, had taken training for teaching – both she and my mother were trained to teach school, had gone to normal school for teaching, and both of them had taught prior to this occasion at this time; my Aunt Edna went ahead and taught for many, many years, in fact she was teaching when she died many years later.
Barbara: What was her last name, Dad?
Ford: Her last name at the time she died was Nichols, Aunt Edna Nichols.
Barbara: I remember them, I remember visiting her.
Ford: Yes, they had moved to Verde, over near Prescott, and we used to drive, when you were a youngster, with you and Joanne and Darlene, and I don’t know for sure or whether Kathy had too many trips up there or not.
Kathy: I do remember, she came up once to visit, actually, I think she was, after Elizabeth was born, and she sat and rocked Elizabeth on her knee, I think. Would Aunt Edna still have been alive, am I remembering the right person? She’s kind of wiry, and wore her hair in a bun?
Ford: I don’t think Aunt Edna ever came to visit…
Kathy: Maybe not, that’s who I thought that was.
Ford: I don’t remember. When was that, Kathy?
Kathy: At the farmhouse on highway 2, and I think it may have been after Mother, shortly after Mother had passed away.
Ford: No, Aunt Edna never came back to Iowa. It was some of Mother’s relatives, parents, that came to visit with us there at the farm, and that was Aunt Frieda and Aunt Bessie, but there was someone else that I vaguely remember, and I always thought it was Aunt Edna, but I certainly could have been mistaken. It’s been a lot of years.
Ford: I certainly don’t remember Aunt Edna coming back to Iowa. It’s possible she could have, but I don’t remember
Barbara: You lived with Aunt Edna and…
Ford: Uncle Art down in Clarkdale, south of Cottonwood Arizona. The home that they owned at that time was on the Verde River. One of the particularly interesting things that I remember, there at that stage of my life, was the fact that we woke up one morning and the Verde River was in a high stage of flood. In fact it was one of those 500-year floods that they keep track of, probably one of the highest that have ever been. After it had receded, there was considerable damage that had been done. Most of the farm equipment and outbuildings of the house had been washed away. The house, that was standing on higher ground, had not been bothered. We walked down to survey the damage, and I trailed along with the older boys who went down to see, and all the menfolk, and all the livestock had been washed away, and they had lost all their livestock. But while we were looking around, we heard a funny noise, and looking around, we pursued it, and kept hearing what we were sure sounded like pigs squealing. But we couldn’t find the pig.
Until, finally, we looked up in the tree. The water had been so high that that pig had been lodged in that tree over our heads, high enough in the tree that the men folks had to get ladders up into it to unwedge the pig. It was wedged in the crotch of the tree. It was still alive, very much alive, and not harmed any more, than I guess a good scare. Anyway, the pig lived to a good healthy normal life destiny later in life.
But one of the things that had happened at that time was that my dad, who had been recuperating, trying to recuperate from his health situation, had spent all the winter months that we were there chopping wood, and he had chopped up an enormously large pile of wood, sawed it up and chopped it up, ready for winter use, and all of that had been washed away. For the next few years, that wood was picked up clear on down, south of the Verde home, south of Bridgeport, where we moved to a little later on. It wasn’t long after that that my dad and mother went down to stay with Grandmother Willard, whose home was on the lower Verde south of Bridgeport.
Barbara: Was that Julia Frost Willard?
Ford: That was Julia Frost Willard, who is my grandmother, and she was living in the house by herself at that time, and we moved in with her for a short period of time. Not for long, before my dad purchased a place from one of the relatives back up near Bridgeport. That’s one of the things that I remember that stands out sharply in my mind was that trip we made by team and horses that my grandmother owned, up to Bridgeport from her place, crossing the Verde River again, and getting over on the East side of the Verde, to this Uncle Wallace’s place. My dad had made arrangements with him to buy out the place. He had starved out on it, which was a homestead deal, starved out on it and couldn’t make a living there, so he was very happy to find someone who was interested in looking after or buying it or anything else, so he just turned the house and everything over to us. And that became our home in the Verde Valley, and that is what is called the Bridgeport area, and that was where I lived when I was growing up.
Barbara: So, how big a house was it? Was it a fairly small house?
Ford: It was a fairly small house, it had a kitchen, and then a division, a kind of an entrance porch between the kitchen and the living room, and then a lean-to bedroom on one end of the house where my parents took over as theirs. The rest of us children had our beds scattered around the living room. Of course the smaller children… I should say my sister Mary Jo was born there, and my sister Paula was either born there or in Verde Hospital, which was at Clemenceau at that time. Mary Jo was born in that house, Paula was I think born in a hospital which was located at Clemenceau.
Barbara: Did I understand that you sometimes set up a tent there to sleep in?
Ford: Not there at the Verde Valley home. I think we did have a tent outside there, so that when we had relatives come visit with us, we boys would have a place to stay so that the relatives could sleep in the house.
But we had a tent, when we moved from that place to what we called the China Place, we set up a more permanent kind of a tent, we built a framework with a floor under it, and put a tent over that, plus a dugout that we put into a bank adjoining the tent, and we just called that our home. My mother and dad had their bed in the tent area, and us boys slept in the dugout in the bank. It was a kind of a cellar deal, it was open front.
Barbara: It wasn’t very dry when it rained?
Ford: It was solid dry, it was very dry, we weren’t bothered by rain. I would think the tent would be more likely to seep moisture, although my dad put a good coat of paraffin on the tent, and that was kind of an annual job to re-paraffin that tent so it was always waterproof. My mother always kept that tent, I have very distinct memories of how neat and proper she kept that tent house so it was a very decent place to live and eat. Of course in the winter time, or when it was raining, we’d eat inside the tent. And in the summertime we had our table outside underneath the trees, and we’d cook our dinners on the stove at the end of the tent, and carried it outside.
Barbara: You had lots of picnics.
Ford: Well,
Barbara: You could call them picnics, eating outside under the trees?
Ford: You might call it that in modern terms, but to us, we boys who grew up there, we lived in style. We were having plates on the table, and we ate with knife fork and spoons, and that was something.
Barbara: Did everyone in the area do that?
Ford: Would you say that question again?
Barbara: Did everyone in the area, not your family, other families that grew up around there, did they do the same thing, or did they do it differently?
Ford: I think they all ate inside of houses, with knives, forks, spoons, and plates. We didn’t visit too many other houses; we didn’t have too many neighbors down there.
Barbara: They say to ask you about playmates, but you had to play with your, well you probably didn’t get to play much. Didn’t you have to do a lot of working?
Ford: We had to take care of the farmland there, we had a small acreage of corn and some alfalfa hay, and we took care of all that, and the livestock we had also had to be taken care of.
Barbara: Did you have cows?
Ford: We had a few head of livestock, and at that particular time we didn’t have any more than one milk cow, we might have had one milk cow to supply milk to drink. Neither did we have any chickens. A few years later, when I was about 12 years old, we moved up on to what was called the Woodruff place, which joined us up on the north end of the China place. Now the Woodruff place had a house on it, and it was quite a big move for us, because there we lived like citizens again. Like landowners. We had an acreage of farm to take care of, pasture to take care of, livestock to take care of, and there we did have several milk cows that we milked…
Barbara: Did you have several horses as well? Is that livestock to you, or…
Ford: Well, at the beginning we had only our team of horses which we had to make do for our horseback riding. But later on, we got horses to take care of our livestock on. Because after my dad died, and it was on the Woodruff place that my Dad died, when I was in high school, 16 years old, I wanted to be a cowboy, so I got me a horse. I think I borrowed me a horse, until I had me enough money to get another one, a saddle, I traded a good cow for a saddle. The friends and neighbors who lived across the river from us, that was where my girlfriend lived, was a saddlemaker, and I got a saddle from them.
Barbara: What was her name?
Ford: Annie Bivens was my boyhood sweetheart, whom I had planned to marry when I finished high school and had got a job so I could earn a living and support a family.
Barbara: It didn’t work out. You got sidetracked?
Ford: After my dad died, my mother moved to Prescott. It was too hard to make a living on the farm, and she wanted something better, so she moved to town. My brother Lynn, who was younger than I, and my two sisters, moved up to Clemenceau, and there she set up what you might call a boarding house. She cooked meals, and took in roomers, and did that there in Clemenceau. But I didn’t want to move to town, so I stayed down there on the Woodruff place, and she had made arrangements to rent it out to the Bivens family, who wanted to move from their home over on the other side of the river and have a little place of their own. So they moved over to the Woodruff place, and I boarded with them, by arrangements my mother made. That was part of the agreement, that they would have to take care of the Woodruff farm and pay the rent, and cook my meals for me when I was there. We still had a little group of livestock that we had to take care of there. There was a bunkhouse a few yards away from the house that I used as my sleeping quarters. I lived in the bunkhouse, and their older son JD lived out there in the bunkhouse with me. I ate my meals with the family.
Barbara: Tell me, this is going back a little bit, but what happened about that big thunderstorm, where your dad supposedly was hit by lightning? You’re not sure that he was, but sort of recount that story.
Ford: Well, while we were still living on what I called the Wallace Willard Farmstead, which was on the west side of the Verde, where we first moved to when we came down from the Nichols, and moved from my grandmother’s into a permanent location, in the house that I had described earlier there, and a barn about a 100 yards, about 500 feet from the house. We kept hay and a cow in that barn. The barn was also part of the farmstead there where we kept pigs, and where we had the big fiasco with pigs. One of the things that I had never remembered, and Brother Frank related in his memoirs, was the fact that my Dad wanted to go into the pig business there in that location. And he bought some purebred Hereford hogs, a sow and a boar. And he started in to the purebred hog business. One of the big financial blows that came to us, after he had paid a real big price for the breeding stock, and we’d got a herd of hogs started, they came down with cholera, and all the shoats, all the hogs that we had raised up to that time, which consisted of 18 head of the 2 batches of pigs, came down with cholera and all died.
Barbara: That was a blow.
Ford: That was a real blow financially, just wiped my parents out completely as far as finances were concerned.
We had a piece of farm ground associated with this place, which we irrigated with a little pump, from the river. It looked like a well, because the water from the river was dammed up a little and funneled into a little well or kind of a bank that they built into the farmland there. And then pumped up out of that, if I continue to use that term “well” or reservoir, 15 to 20 feet up from the surface of the ground into the air by a bucket system which was powered by a fairbanks-morse motor, and then carried by a belt down to a power system at the bottom of the well, which turned it over and over and came up to the top and splashed water out, I shouldn’t say splashed, dumped the water into a flume there. And then that carried that down into a ditch that went right by the house into the field to irrigate the field, and they only things that we could grow there was by the water that we pumped out of the Verde River by this system, and then by ditch down into the fields where we used it for little fields, garden spots, watermelons primarily, of course our sweet corn and some field corn, just enough for livestock, and the alfalfa hay that we had. And one time that we were down there, I was just 8 years old at that time, we were, my dad, and my brother Francis and I were cultivating by hand, hoeing in other words, the field of corn that we had. And during this time, a real black cloud came up from the north, and my dad looked at it and said “Kids, I guess we’d better be getting home.” And about that time it started raining. Before we’d gotten very far, the rain was just pouring down, and we had to lean against it in order to make any progress. My dad was holding me by the hand, one hand, and Frank was on the other side helping my dad and me along. My brother Frank at that time was 12 years old, so he was a pretty good sized kid, and just before we got back up to the barn area in this kind of leaned over position, there was kind of a flash of lightning; of course this was a thunderstorm anyway, and the lightning was flashing all around us, and thunder was making all the cracks and roars characteristic of a storm of this nature, and it was what I thought was a kind of a flash, don’t know for sure. My dad thought he was hit by lightning, but I was cut by a piece of tin that had blown off of the roof of the barn which we were approaching, and I think that piece of tin hit my dad right squarely in the face flat-wise, and then turned and went sideways and about cut my arm off, my right arm, and it knocked my dad completely out, and he was lying flat on the ground. My brother Frank looked the situation over, and seeing my dad on the ground, and looked at me, and seeing my arm severely cut, he quickly pulled a hankerchief out of his pocket, wound it around my arm, and said “Ford, head for the house!” And this I did at a dead run, and I got to the house ahead of my Dad and Frank. My mother, knowing that we were out in the field, was standing there in the door, and she saw me running down the path way, and having to cross the irrigation ditch on just a narrow board that we used to cross with, with my arm bandaged up, no hat, clothes blown half-way off, in fact I think I lost my shirt, scared her half to death. So she got me into the house and wrapped a towel around my arm, and wanted to know where my dad and Frank was, and I said “I think they’re coming,” and I followed her back to the door. And there my brother Frank was half-carrying my dad as he stumbled along, and trying to get across that narrow bridge, my brother Frank just had to about carry him across there, and brought him over into the house. He was in very poor condition.
He did come out of there alright, he could figure out what happened, and although he thought he was hit by lightning, I think to this day that it was a big piece of tin, because I think lightning…
Barbara: If he held your hand, then you would have got it too.
Ford: I think we all would have got it had it been lightning. But anyway, I got a vacation out of that, my arm was severely cut, and I had to be taken by the neighbors who lived across the river from us to the hospital, the United Verde Extension Hospital, where they had a doctor. They didn’t have a doctor any closer than that. The doctor that worked in that hospital had to come from Jeromewhich was several miles away up on the side of the mountain over there at the edge of the Verde Valley. I don’t know, I guess both of you remember the Mingus Mountain area.
Barbara: I remember Jerome a little bit, because it was sort of interesting, it was a ghost town
Ford: It was a ghost town when you were little…
Barbara: I know it has blossomed since.
Ford: At that time it was a well populated town, it was the biggest town in the area, and it had a hospital also, and a doctor who stayed there all the time. He came down to Clemenceau and he put stitches in my arm, and then he came out and helped my dad. He was badly bruised and shook up from the force of whatever had hit him. Well, with stitches in my arm, and having to carry it like it was broken, this way, I couldn’t work, and so I kind of got a vacation. My aunt Sadie and uncle, whose name I have forgotten at this time, she was a Mund, Sadie Munds, and her husband, his name was Dan Harper, and Uncle Dan and Aunt Sadie took pity on me, and wanted to take me with them on a vacation, so they took me with them on a vacation up to Mormon Lake. It was the first time I’d been off the farm since we had come to Arizona, I guess. There I got to fish with my left hand, and enjoy the fried fish that others caught and biscuits that they made and on thing or another. I still remember, I really enjoyed that camping trip that we had at that particular time.
But it was after that that we moved down to the China Place. While we were living on the China place we had to go to school in Clemenceau, which was about 3 miles from Bridgeport, the Bridgeport home was another mile or so down the river, and we had to get from the China Place up to the Clemenceau school, and we did that by a bus that the district engaged.
Now I left out that portion of my youth in which I went to the Verde School, good old district #44 which was a one-room schoolhouse, taught by one teacher for a good while, and then a little later on a second teacher came in. It was at this little one room school that we really got acquainted with my Aunt Edna, because she was the principal and the teacher there. Later on they had another teacher come in and help teach. But for 2 years that I was there, they had just the one teacher. Aunt Edna taught my brother Lynn, and he remembers Aunt Edna teaching him.
But I had to walk to that school, from our home, and go down and wade the Verde River, and I can remember very well the first time that I made that crossing to go to school. We didn’t have kindergarten there, but we did start to school when we were 6 years old, and I was 6 years old when my mother took me down to the river, made a lunch for me which I carried along like a big boy would, you know, and helped me roll up my britches, take off my shoes and roll up my britches, and she even waded across the river with me the first time, holding my hand, to get me across the river. Then from there on we followed the trail other kids had made I guess, along the road to the Willard School. I thought it was a mile, but I guess maybe actually it was changed later on. Now, another interesting thing about that was that when the Verde River was flooding, you couldn’t wade it. The only way to get across it was by cable car, that the neighbors had built, a ranch adjoining to us to the south about a half mile, and they had two big boys, and they rigged up a cable stretched from one tree on one side of the river, to a tree on a bank on the other side of the river, and hooked a little boxlike car on pulleys. You pulled yourself along with a rope that they had in the middle to the other side, then you anchored it and got out, and climbed down a little ladder. So there were several times when the Verde River was flooding that I had to go across the river by cable car. I don’t remember going by myself. Always when I went the bigger boys pulled the cable car across, so I was able to do it that way. But it was interesting, I do remember doing that ride across the Verde River.
Kathy: Were you scared?
Ford: I don’t remember being scared.
Kathy: More of an adventure?
Ford: Of course, it wasn’t too high off of the ground, not something that was way up in the air, it was just high enough so that it would miss the water, high enough to take care of the sway of the cable and the weight of the car as it went across. I imagine that it was anchored about 10 feet up the trees on each side, but on each side there was a bank above the river, so we would come down 4 or 5 feet from the river bed itself when you were out in the middle, so you had to force it to make progress.
Barbara: Did you have a favorite horse, dad?
Ford, Oh, yes. After my mother and two sisters Paula and Mary Jo, and Lynn, moved to Clemenceau, I had my two favorite horses there. One of them was a barn horse, but then Aunt Edna and Uncle Art, who were always very kind to me, sympathetic, usually I had one of their horses there also. So, my string of horses usually consisted of one horse and two borrowed horses.
[flipping tape]
Kathy: Do I remember a story about a horse that would pretend it was injured, it would wheeze and whine around, act like it couldn’t run one step farther without falling down dead. Do you remember that story?
Ford: I think you’re talking about a horse that we had out at the farm, aren’t you?
Kathy: Snort? Snort would limp and…
Ford: No, we had an old one-eyed farm out at the farm that I bought at a sale there
Barbara: That wasn’t Ned was it? I thought Ned came from the Flakes,
Ford: Yea, that was Ned
Barbara: I remember Ned. He was an old yellow ugly beast.
Ford: Yeah, he was an old yellow ugly horse.[more about a new tape]
I used to go with him on his trap routes quite a bit, just to have something to do when I wasn’t in school, and lots of times on Saturday when I was in school, and when my mother happened to be in town, and my dad doing something, Old Charlie Mahan, which was the name of this friend, and I were baching, why bread and milk was our favorite food. He liked to have clabbered milk
Barbara: Yuck!
Ford: …and he would drink his milk clabbered. I preferred bread and milk, and I couldn’t eat clabbered milk very much. Nowadays, they call it yogurt, but we just called it clabbered.
Barbara: I remember Aunt Bessie’s farm, they always had a pot of milk clabbering. To me it was just boiling. But different things for different folks. What about holidays, what did you do to celebrate Christmas?
Ford: Oh, goodness. During those days, Christmas was a kind of a time, well, I don’t know. I don’t remember too many Christmases when I was a youngster. I only remember one Christmas particularly, when I was growing up, and we were still living on the Wallace Willard farm. Lynn and I wanted something for Christmas. We wanted .22s for Christmas, but my Dad and Mother couldn’t afford .22s. But when we got up Christmas morning and went to our stockings, and we used stockings in those days, to put our Christmas presents in, which consisted of apples and oranges, and maybe a little hard candy, and things of that nature, we found a special long package under our socks, and we thought “Oh boy, have we got something special here!” We opened them up and thought, sure enough, we each one had a cork pop-gun.
Barbara: Not quite the same as a .22, huh?
Ford: Not quite the same, but I didn’t get my first gun until I was 12 years old, living with my dad out on Oak Creek. Before we had moved down to the China place, my dad this particular summer was taking care of the Oak Creek farm for my Aunt Edna and Uncle Art. My dad and I lived out there during the Summertime. I had my 12 birthday while I was out there, and at that time, my dad gave to me the shotgun that his dad had given to him. It was an old double-barreled Parker, and boy I thought it was a beautiful gun, and it was. My dad could kill anything with the snap of a finger, and he let me go shoot a rabbit with it that morning. He said, “Here son, I’m going to give this gun to you, and it’s going to be yours,” and so I kept it from that time on. Up to then, I had used a single-shot .22 to shoot birds around, and try to keep sparrows from eating all the peaches as they were getting ripe.
One little interesting incident that I remember during that time out there on Oak Creek, going out one morning on my way to the orchard, was hearing a rattlesnake in the bushes, and sure enough, as I poked around with the end of my .22, there was a rattlesnake coiled up inside of a bush, and I jumped back from it and I went and told my dad. He said, “Wait a minute son, I’ll go get my shotgun and put an end to that rattlesnake before anyone gets hurt.” Well, I went out there with little .22 with the birdshot in it, and stuck it down there next to that rattlesnake, and was going to kill it with that. The rattlesnake was laying there all coiled up, with its head right down ready to strike if anything got close enough to be struck at, and I shot at it with that .22. Of course, all that .22 did was make it mad, and it raised its head up like that and getting ready to strike, and my dad came up just at that time, with just a flick of his finger, his gun not raised up to his shoulder, but from his hip, shot the head off of that rattlesnake.
Barbara: Close call, dad.
Ford: I would have gotten bit if he hadn’t done that. Rattlesnake are just awfully fast, and it shows just how fast my dad could shoot.
[There’s approximately 1 more hour of tape… but it is just going to have to wait for some other time for me to transcribe it… it is nearly midnight. It is very much similar to what is in the other 8 tapes.- Liz]
 
 

No Comments

Ford I. Gano History – Tape 8 Side B

We located in a place back here in the Keosauqua area. There had to be a church, an LDS Church, where we could go to church, and we found out that there was a little branch located there in Keosauqua, so that part was taken care of. As far as suitable housing, why, I kind of missed the boat on that. I didn’t find on farm I’d contracted to buy, it didn’t have suitable housing, not according to what Nellie wanted, and the landlady that owned it hadn’t lived up to her part of the agreement, getting it suitably cleaned out so we could move in anyway. So we all three, Grandma Waddington, Nellie and I went out and started looking for a different place to locate.

Well, we looked at quite a few places. We found many of them that were just too high priced, way above our budget we had allowed for settling in. But on Highway 2, which was about 5 – 7 miles, somewhere around there, from Keosauqua we located a house that was vacant and on 110 acres of land, all farmable, at least mostly all farmable. It had a creek running down through the middle of it, which was not farmable, but outside of that there was at least 90 acres of it that could be farmed. It had a nice big Midwest two-story farm home on it. The only trouble was, the owner lived in Nebraska, so before we could make any kind of a deal there, we had to drive back to Nebraska, after we had found out who owned the place. We thought maybe that would be a good place to have, because of the nature of the house; with four big bedrooms upstairs, a big living room, a big kitchen, and a smaller bedroom downstairs which we figured would be a good place for Grandma to live, because she didn’t like to climb stairs anyway. We realized we would have to make a lot of improvements to the house in order to make it in any way comparable to the house we moved out of, as far as the kitchen was concerned, and in general. But we decided that we would see what we could do about it, so we took off to Nebraska and locating the lady that owned it. She was very reluctant. She wanted to sell it, but she didn’t want to sell it at the price we would give it to her. So she was a very reluctant seller. So we went back, and told her to think over our offer there for $13,000 for that 110-acre farm.
[break]

I believe I ended off with while we were trying to buy a farm out here on Highway 2, that belonged to a lady in Nebraska. As I think the last words I had was we had kind of left our offer to her and told her to make up her mind. She decided to go along with it, so we immediately produced the cash to buy it from her.

To sum it up, she did change her mind, after about 4 or 5 months, maybe, she called us up and said she was willing to make a deal. So we did and bought the farm. We’d always called it the Jamison Farm, that wasn’t the name of the lady that owned it when we bought it, that was the name that was on the barn out there. So we always called it the Jamison Farm, three 40’s on one side, south side of Highway 2, split in half, about, by the creek, which took away some of the inconvenience of farming right straight through. Well it made a pretty good little operation to start right out with, and I’m going to just leave that part for a later time, and come back up to the house situation.
We had quite a bit of work to do on the house, in order to make it suitable to live in. Nellie wanted the kitchen, all the cupboards remade in the kitchen, and other things that had to be done to make it a suitable place that she was happy with. So we started working on doing that, we did re-wallpaper the whole house, and I worked in the kitchen cabinet work for, I guess, at least 6 weeks or two months, to get those straightened out and new cabinets on the wall. They weren’t fancy, or anything, but they did have latches on them, and the doors swung open and shut, etc. So we had a good sink in it on one side, and we put in a bathroom. Although it had a full bathroom upstairs, it didn’t have any facilities downstairs for bathing. So I put in a half bath downstairs, and that made it so Grandma Waddington could take care of her cleaning needs right down there on the same level as her bedroom was located.

[Break]
For the first school year and a half, the girls had to go to a country school. I don’t think they thought it was too big a punishment, although Joanne went to the Cantril High School, or central school. The other girls split up to other locations. We never did think the Cantril School was very high quality, so we switched them over to the Keosauqua district as soon as we were able to do that. So we lived there in Iowa on the old Jamison Farm from 1953 through the rest of our school life for the girls. They all graduated from the Keosauqua High School, and I think all had a good time doing that.
[break]

The church facilities in Keosauqua, were not very, you might say, high standard. We met in a rented building downtown, the library building that the church rented, on Sundays only, we had to go in on Sunday morning and clean up, start the furnace in the basement, etc. It wasn’t an ideal place to be having church, but we managed. It was an LDS church. I don’t know just what year I was made Branch President, but I think it was 1955, sometime in there. Merle Fairbourne was called to be on the district presidency. We were in the East Iowa District, with headquarters in Chicago. He was called to be the District President at that time, and when he was called, I was made the Branch President. During those years, several years of time there, all of us were determined that we were going to have a building of our own, and pulled whatever strings we could work to bring that about. The mission president came to visit us two or three times. In fact, we had three different mission presidents during that time, but the third one finally got us permission to start a building, a building of our own. In the meantime, we were having a lot of families that were going to church there, we had about 34 or 40, faithful families, faithful members. We needed the facilities, we needed the building very badly. We were given permission to buy a lot, and we found one up north of Keosauqua, which was priced so that the church was interested in it. With the permission of the District President, we
[break]

With the permission of the Mission President, we purchased there a two-acre plot of land in the location that I mentioned, on the north end of the Keosauqua town itself. Still within the city limits, but we had to provide our own facilities up there, sewer system, because the town did not have a sewer up there that far out of town. But we managed to get the building built, with the hard work of the Relief Society, and all the Brothers. I guess there are many stories written about the Donuts, and all the food manufacturing process the Relief Society went through to get the goods to sell to the local people to get the extra cash to build. So I’m not going to delve much into that.
We finally hired a contractor to start on the building, and it took quite a while. We were allowed to help on it as much as we can. It was 1960 before we moved into our new building. We moved into it before it had been dedicated, in fact before it was completely finished. But it was much more suitable for our use, with classrooms and bathrooms and meeting room available for our use. It was really crowded though, even for the number we had coming here in Keosauqua, so we determined somehow or another to get an addition to our building. And we did, but that’s a later story.
[break]

I had come in to about a farmer-sized dairy system, which I had about 15 or 16 that we’d milk by hand out there at the Jamison farm, with the girls helping me, and I’ll tell you about that later on, too.
[break]

Cash funds were a little short when we first started out. Nellie decided she would try teaching school, so she applied around, and finally got a job down in Missouri, down on the way from Mt. Sterling, where she taught along with another teacher from Keosauqua, she taught a little two-room school in Missouri. Her salary was not real great, but nevertheless it amounted to a little something on the side. She made an exceptionally good teacher, I think, and applied herself 100%, and finally was given a job in the Keosauqua system, where she was teaching the children that needed extra schooling.
[Long break in the recording. Apparently he was speaking without the microphone plugged in, because the narrative abruptly resumes several minutes later on the tape.]

…we cannot take care of her here, you’ll have to take her to the hospital in Iowa City immediately. Do not waste any time at all. So that very afternoon she was loaded into an ambulance and taken into Iowa City for treatment. Well, that entailed me making the trip up there daily, even while I was trying to take care of the farm, milk the cows, etc. The only one, all the rest of the girls had gone off to school, some of them graduated, some of them still going, but Kathy was home to help me, and we did the best we could. She did a wonderful job, you might say, a fourteen or fifteen-year-old girl(note 1). I was really proud of her. The day that Nellie was taken to Iowa City in the ambulance, somebody had to go along with her, and she and I, you might say, pulled straws to see who would go with her, and she got the assignment. She didn’t want to milk the cows. So she got in that ambulance and rode all the way to Iowa City with her mother, and helped get her settled up there in that location. Of course, she came home later on, just as quick as she could get away free to do so.

I made it a point to drive up there every day that Nellie was laying there, in the hospital, with the diagnosis of a very difficult case of leukemia. The doctor told me when he called me in for a special session, “I don’t know whether we can help your wife or not. We’re going to try the best we can, and it’s going to take a lot of endurance and patience on her part.” She did that very well. She was 100% all the way.

But to no avail. Only thirty days after she entered the hospital, I called up early one morning to find out how she was, and the hospital doctor told me “Well, I’m sorry to tell you, but your wife died this morning about 4 o’clock.”

Well, I’d been up there late the day before, and at that time, I talked to the doctor, and he said “We’re going to switch her over to a new medicine right now, to see if it will do any good.” But it didn’t, so we lost her that night.
[break]

…had done several things on the farm, planned to make a little side money while we were living there. She had bought poults one year, I guess it was a hundred of them maybe, and put them up in the top roof loft of our hay barn that we had there on our farm, to raise them up there. Poults, these were chickens that do nothing but just sit down and eat, and drink water, and make very delicious chicken meat at the end of about six weeks. But they had to endure one summer in the heat of the loft of that barn; it turned out to be a very costly proposition. We lost a great many of them. Nellie was very sad about that, because she was striving to do her best to help out at all times. In the meantime, she was still teaching school, taking care of the poults when she’d come home, as far as everything we had done here.

Now in the meantime, I had made arrangements with FHA to build a Grade A milkhouse out there alongside of the road on our farmland, and it adjoined all the farm barns and buildings there. We had put up a pole barn we had to keep hay or keep cows in the wintertime. And then we had to put up a nice brick building to house the milking operation. The milking operation of course, if you know anything about a Grade A setup, was done by herding the cows into a holding corral, and then letting them in one at a time alongside of a working chute, which was 3 or 4 feet lower than the level of the ground. We had facilities for washing them off with hoses, and then attaching milkers to them. The milk was sucked up, pumped by vacuum, up glass tubes into the milk house itself, which contained a big 1000 gallon tank, where the milk was finally deposited and then held until it could be picked up by the truck from St. Louis. We sold our, we had decided to sell our milk down in St. Louis, to a dairy down there, and they had a truck up here about as often as every other day, sometimes every day if the herd was producing well.

Well, the milk house had the facilities that made milking a lot easier. It had the facilities for the holding pen, the cattle corral, and feed overhead, it was just a pretty neat operation. The girls helped me very much. They’d help me quite a bit, in fact they did a lot of the milking in the old horse barn when we first started out, bring cows in to a stall, four cows at a time, and there we washed them off with a bucket of hot water carried out from the kitchen, cleaned them up and got them ready, and then milked them by hand. Dumped the milk out into a 5-gallon can, and then carried the can into a holding tank that was electrical cooled, until they hauled it into town to the Creamery. We sold our product at that time at the Keosauqua Creamery, and got our egg money and everything at that location.
Well, that was the start of our dairy business. We got into that a little more thoroughly. DeVon Andrus, my son-in-law, had gotten into the operation, in 1960, wanted to get started in the operation in 1960, brought his family… well, I shouldn’t say brought his family, he brought himself out here, and left all of his children behind him that first time. He had six children at that time, but his wife had died, and he came out here kind of seeking a new life. He taught in high school; he was a good math teacher, and got a job in the Keosauqua math department, where he taught school, as well as he would come out and help a little on the dairy farm when he could find a bit of time to help milk and one thing or another.

Well, we were in a kind of a partnership deal there. I did most of the milking, and he did most of the managing, working while he was teaching school. He just simply had too many school operations to take care of to do much actual milking out in the milkhouse. He savvyed cows very well, though, and he understood the milking operation very well. But while he was here, he wooed my oldest daughter, and they decided to get married.

Well, that’s a different story, too, and I’ll leave that to another department.
DeVon was here, then, and Nellie and I let DeVon move in with his family, when he took Joanne to wife (note 2) and came back here. They first lived in Utah, where he was teaching school there when he first came out. But they decided that they’d come back here to live, and brought his girls back, or brought his whole family with him, which consisted of the four girls and two boys, all very intelligent kids, girls boys and all. They all went to school in Keosauqua, and did very well there. I have an interesting story to tell, sometime, about Mark, who is DeVon’s second son. Hey, Devon had 3 sons, and Mark was the youngest one. Well, I get mixed up pretty well, all through these things that I’m trying to remember.

When DeVon first came to live here, and bring his family here, Nellie and I decided that we would let them live out in the farm house, and we would move into town. So we came into town, and we couldn’t find a place suitable to live that we could afford, so we decided then to buy a trailer house, so we bought a very nice little two-bedroom trailer house. Kathy was still with us, so we needed to have at least 2 bedrooms in it, and this little trailer house had just that. So we set it up in Keosauqua. But after living in that trailer house for about 6 months, I called it the Dodge house, I got so tired of that, that I said, “We’ve got to find some other place to live.” And then the Shag Place, which just was about a mile north of the Jamison farm came up for sale. So we bought that place from him, when he sold out, and moved into the house that was there on that farm.

Now, I guess the best way to describe the place where it was located was simply just about a mile and a half from the farm house on the way in to Keosauqua along the park route, going in to the Keosauqua Park. At that time, we could cross Indian Creek, and go directly into town from farm, down by the Shag house, on in to Keosauqua, and that’s the way we usually traveled, going into town.
Later on, when Lake Sugema…(note 3)
[end of tape]

1 This note deleted to preserve privacy of living persons. However, the date of this event would have been spring 1965.
2 DeVon and Joanne were married 1 June XXXX, in the Salt Lake Temple.
3 Indian Creek was dammed in the early 1990’s to create Lake Sugema, now one of Iowa’s premier hunting and fishing spots, and a major tourist draw for Van Buren County. The large lake covered the old Park Road, making it necessary to travel first east on Hiway 2 and then north on Hiway 1 to get to town from the Jamison place. The old bridge over Indian Creek was removed, and the point where the

No Comments

Ford I. Gano History – Tape 8 Side A

So, Elizabeth, you asked in your letter, you had the one question there: why did I choose to move back to Iowa, to bring my family back here. Well, some of the reasons of course, I have touched on. But there were many negative factors about it. The house, as I had mentioned, was practically brand new. We had lived in it only two years. It was a beautiful house, not great big or anything like that, but it had four bedrooms and big bay window out facing the side of the house, into the back yard of the neighbor’s yard. But Nellie had planned it, and we were very grateful and very happy with it. Why did we want to leave that?

I mentioned the sickness that I was getting, the dizziness that was bothering me. It did not seem like to me that I was capable of taking care of business like I should at Western Milling Company. On top of that, Mr. Hayward, David E. Hayward, was his name, was having to come over from Phoenix to kind of fill in for my being unable to miss work there. He did not appreciate that. When his son came back off of his mission, he decided that maybe he’d let him learn the milling business, and the selling business of the goods that were milled, the materials that were manufactured there at Western Milling Company. So Dave Jr. went out with me at the office for perhaps 2 months, and I kind of felt that maybe that was the way the apple cart was running anyway, that eventually Dave Jr. would take over there.

On the other hand, I’d always wanted to be a farmer; I’d always wanted to get in to farming. I started out my agricultural training, my schooling, with that idea in mind. I wanted to be in agriculture. After having come through and visited in the Midwest, when we came back with our new car from South Bend, Indiana, we had seen some beautiful cornfields, bean fields, some fairly cheap land there back here in the Midwest. It was practically impossible to get into farming there in the Salt River Valley, because land was going from $2,000 to 5,000 an acre. A beginner, unless he had somebody to finance him, could just not take over and get into it right off the bat.
So, we thought about it a lot, and Nellie and I decided together, that perhaps this was the way to go. She gave up her new home, which was the first new home she had ever lived in, and she really enjoyed it there. However, she did have a health problem, and we didn’t know for sure how that was going to be taken care of back here in the Midwest. But we were trusting on the Lord that maybe things would work out in a positive fashion.

We also had to take the girls out of school. All of them but Kathy were enjoying the schools there in Mesa. They enjoyed their training, their teachers, their circumstances there were all very well. So it was really a lot of negatives attached to this.

One of the other negatives was trying to get enough money out of our new house, even though it was only 2 years old, to pay more than the equity we had in it. Now, Grandma Waddington had helped us with buying the lot our house had set on. We had built the house. We had financed it in order to get it built, constructed. But we decided that if we could make the trip back here to the Midwest, and get a suitable location, that we’d come back into the Midwest and try out farming.

There was also the alternative I had of farming one of, or all of Grandma Waddington’s farms in Nebraska. She had several hundred acres of land there in Nebraska [chuckles]. It was up in the Sand Hills, it was neither very productive, nor very expensive. And the environment, I didn’t think, was very livable, and neither did my wonderful wife Nellie. But I did go back there one summer, while I was still working at Western Milling Company, and I did put in a crop there by borrowing equipment from neighbors, and from other renters of Grandmother Waddington’s, just to see what it was all about and what it was like. Well, there was a great deal of wind all the time, the sand would blow, and I didn’t like the climate. Neither did Nellie like the climate, because she had to dust off the windows every day the time that we were there, and so on and so forth. So at the end of that one summer that I went back there just to see what I could do, I was not very much in favor of staying in Nebraska.
So we decided to head for “Ioway”.

We settled up with Western Milling Company Management Company. And much to my surprise we found out that I had done well enough there at Western Milling Company to have a little equity in the company from my partnership arrangement. They in turn, although they did not have cash to pay me off, they said, “Well, would you settle for some of the equipment we have here? A tractor, a plow, some of things you might need back there?” They also had a ton-and-a-half truck that I thought could be used very well for moving. So with that arrangement, I made a settlement with Western Milling Company, and took out for the new quarters in Iowa.

Now, we could not all come at once. The two girls and I came ahead. I had been back here several times anyway, in the pick-up that I owned, and knew what the roads were like, and knew what the situation was like back here. So we decided that Nellie and her mother… In the meantime, I kind of left out here, in the meantime nanny Waddington, the relative that we’d brought over from England, had found her husband up somewhere up around Logan Utah. And figuring out that she had earned her keep (actually, it was paying for her ticket we’d bought for the steamship and the cost of her moving from England over to the United States), we decided we were about even on that, and she went up with her husband. And we were taking out on our own to come back here.

[recording ends]

No Comments

There is some wrong information on this tape. We lived at 610 E 4th Avenue in Mesa. Our new house was built right behind the small brick home we lived in and faced Hobson and I believe the street number was 351. When he talks about being the ward record keeper I believe he actually meant ward clerk. It was Minier’s disease that caused his dizziness and lead to his leaving Arizona to farm in Iowa.

Ford I. Gano History – Tape 7 Side B
Well, I sure did a miserable job on the other side, side one, Elizabeth, or you can straighten it out the way it should be by simply saying that the Western Milling Company office was located at the main ranch on the Tremaine Farm at the railroad crossing, and was simply an office building in which I was headquartered, plus the working operations, which I tried to describe on the other side. The big grinding mills, seed house, and etcetera, as well as corrals that housed the feeding situation that Western Milling carried on with the animals that were raised to be fattened out. This was simply cattle, it was no other animals raised here. They did not handle sheep, they did not handle chickens, or rabbits or etcetera.

Now, I don’t know whether on one of the other tapes I described the operations of the milling company or not. I simply supervised and managed the four divisions of the company, which included the hay operation, the milling operation, and the cattle operation, the marketing operation, with the help I had there in the office, which included the girls who weighed the products as they were brought in from the fields or the farms, the [break]

The Tremaine office was located on the railroad siding, where cars could be brought in from the main line in Mesa, and placed out there on the siding for the products were shipped out. Sometimes we were shipping cattle, most of the time we were shipping the hay, and the byproducts of the hay were taken to the milling company, were sewed up in sacks, and loaded up on the railroad cars, and shipped to various people who wanted the ground up feed
[break]

My primary responsibility was to market the products that we produced at the milling company. The girls took the phone calls, and passed on the information or hooked me up to clients that needed to talk directly to me as manager of the company, etc., etc. Now, in marketing the products they’re in, I had to travel quite a bit to the West Coast and the East Coast. I think I described it at one of other place along the line, one of the trips the former manager of the milling company had taken me to kind of break me in, to show me how to get along and how to meet the people who bought the products. These of course were very important clientele. So most of this kind of an operation was made by plane. On one operation, Stanley and I had gone by car, traveled around the areas we were marketing in, and made a trip. One operation we had gone out to New York, that was when I was learning to operate the situation, and while in New York, we took in a few sights. It was a big trip, and quite exciting for m
e. I got Stanley, he took me to all the beautiful areas of that big New York City, I think, the Ice Capades, which I can still remember to this day, and the trip down there to the seashore, ocean to New Orleans by boat. We left the upper East Coast by a
[break]

…the Atlantic ocean side, and actually this ocean liner we were riding in, did not get out into the ocean. Most of the time we could see the land, so we always felt safer. I always felt a little safer, riding down there, I never did get over the feelings I felt from the seasickness I got on that trip. But I got over that in a hurry because of the fun I had on that trip.

Well, we came clear on down to New Orleans, and we took the railroad train back in to the other areas we wanted to go to. Well, that was my biggest trip as I got broke in to that business. I never did try to make that trip again by myself, but I took several trips to many of the points back there, which included Chicago, and Boston, clear on down to St. Louis and New Orleans and again back by car. I usually had someone along with me to help do the driving when we went by car.
We had cars that were leased to us by the company for our travel needs.
[break]

… West Coast area that we sold to, I usually traveled by plane, leaving Phoenix and landing at Los Angeles, using that as a sub-headquarters, I would rent an automobile and go to the different locations I needed to go to.
[break]

I really enjoyed the 10 years I spent there at Western Feed and Seed, which was the name of the company we were in, that I was operating. The last year I was there, I had some health problems that had come up. This was on top of Nellie’s tuberculosis problem, which came, was very depreciating to all of us. Her doctor had to put Nellie into a health resort there which was between Mesa and Phoenix, where she spent 3 months of her life. During that time while she was there, well just before she went into that facility. Kathy was born, our last daughter. She was a charming young lady, too. I’ll have to tell you more about her later on. But in the meantime, it was very, oh I had some of the most low feelings, low periods of my life, while Nellie was in the sanatorium.
I was enjoying my time in the church there, and while living Mesa, going to the fourth ward, I was called to be a records clerk. They had a financial clerk that took care of the financial part of the bookkeeping, but I was the records department clerk. I kept track of and care, and met with the bishop once a week to see that this department was going the right way it should. So, it was a very enjoyable time, except for the time that Nellie was in the sanatorium. It was very hard on her. She missed her new little daughter, as well as all the others, very much. Her mother had come up to live with us and of course help take care of the children. Actually, she had built a house, up there adjoining the lots that we were on, so she could be near to the family there, and she took care of the children during the time that Nellie was in the sanatorium. It was a pretty big job though.

After Nellie got out of the sanatorium, we learned that there was a member of the church living in England who was a relative of the Waddington family, who would like to come to America, if they could find a sponsor over here for this sister. So Nellie volunteered for that sponsorship, with the understanding that she would be able to work off the costs of the trip and one thing or another, by helping us in our home while Nellie was recuperating, getting her health back. We did this, and the girls got a real big kick out of having a nanny living right there in the house with us. She was a real interesting character, and we all enjoyed her very much, and she took care of the girls in very good fashion, and so relieved Grandma Waddington and a lot of the work that Nellie was doing at that time.
Nellie and I were both busy with church callings. Of course, we had moved, I should say that at one time, oh I’m getting mixed up here again [break]

I confuse myself sometimes and I don’t know what I’m saying. We were living at about 600 block on 4th street, which was an old brick house when the first Mormons came into Mesa. It was owned by Ralph Fuller, who lived in an adjoining house, and who had sold the old house to us, very cheaply I might add, so we could afford it, and while we were living there, the ward was moved out on 4th avenue. This was a new ward which was put up, called the 9th ward. And while we were getting ready to move into the the 9th ward, we were in the 7th ward which was out there also. So we’d been in 4 different wards while living there in Mesa. And in the 9th ward, the bishopric was the same as it was before, and I was again called in as record keeper in the recordkeeping department [break]
I was an official part of the bishopric, although I didn’t have any say in the operation of the ward. At one time, none of the bishopric could go to the general conference in Salt Lake, so Bishop Allen suggested that I make the trip if I possibly could. Well, I, in fact, he sent me out there as an official representative of the 9th ward, and I really felt important, and I really enjoyed for the first time in my life listening to the President of the Church, and all the officers of the church speak directly to us in that great big house.
[break]

To meet in that big tabernacle with all the other bishoprics and etc of the various wards that came in, it was a tremendous sight and a beautiful experience to wander around that building and see all the flowers and all the tremendous adornments that they had put up for those meetings. David O. McKay was the president at the time that I was out there, and I did get to shake hands with him on one occasion.
[break]

… at home in Mesa. As I said, the last year that I was there in Mesa, and operating Western Milling Company as manager, I had some poor health of my own. I was getting hard of hearing, I couldn’t hear very good, so I went to every doctor, every clinic both in Mesa and in Phoenix, to see if I could get it cured, but they could never do any good for me, although I had some of the best medical services that were available at that time for that situation. I just couldn’t keep myself upright, I wasn’t able to walk straight without falling over or something. I was getting dizzy quite a bit of the time. So the last summer I was there, Brother Heyward, my supervisor from Western Farm Management Company, said, well, maybe you’d better take a vacation for a while. Why don’t you just go up to Snowflake for the summer, and see if you can’t get over this situation. So the family and I did that, we rented a house in Snowflake, and my girls and wife and I really enjoyed that trip up there. Grandma did not go with us on that trip. We rented a house, and went to the ward in Snowflake, and enjoyed our lives very much while living there. We came back and renewed our acquaintances that we had made there prior to our becoming members of the Church. So I always amazed everybody by meeting them, whom they had known as Mr. Gano, by now becoming Brother Gano.

But I enjoyed the situation very much. Much of the time we spent up at the mountains there at Show Low, at the lakeside, up above it, where Nellie’s relatives had a cabin rented, and we would go up there and visit, and I would go fishing. I enjoyed a lot of good trout fishing while up there. Well, so much for that.

In the next to the last year, in other words the 8th year with Western Milling Company, I had a chance to buy a new car direct from the factory, in other words I had to take possession of it back at the factory. This was a cooperative deal where the Western Farm Management company, who bought all their cars from one company, which were Studebakers, by the way, I bought a car from Studebaker in Mesa to be delivered
[break]

So in 1951, I’m not positive about that date, I made arrangements for Nellie and I to go to South Bend Indiana, to pick up a new Chevy touring car. We saved about $500 I think by picking it up back there, the freight we were saving, and some kind of dealer cost that was knocked off. Well, Nellie and I had a nice trip by train from Mesa Arizona back east to the midwest, and at that time, we came in to Kansas City, the place was just about floating in water, the Mississippi river backed clear up into the Missouri river, and the whole midwest was just under water almost. So we just had to creep along with the trains, because many times it was actually traveling in water as we traveled along the banks of rivers. But we made it through all right. We finally reached South Bend, and made arrangements to have that car delivered to us. And boy did we feel free and happy when we took off in that car of our own, brand spanking new. Well, we had had a brand spanking new car earlier, because I had bought a new Ford passenger car after Nellie and I got married. So we had that new, and used it a good deal until it got old enough so we would want a new one. This one really felt good.

Well, to make another long story short, while we were back here picking our car up, we made a trip back home through the Midwest, and remembering the Flake people whom we knew in Snowflake, we thought maybe we might stop by this area, and get acquainted maybe, and re-meet and enjoy some of our old acquaintances. So we made our trip back from South Bend, through Keosauqua.

Here in Keosauqua, we met our old friends that we knew back there in Snowflake. They showed us a good time, and we stayed here a couple of days, and then headed on back home. But while here, I was quite impressed by the farming situation, and I was even thinking quite a bit at that time about getting into farming in some way or another, because of the health condition that I had there at Western Milling Company. I couldn’t stay upright sometimes to take care of my business. But driving on back to Mesa we had a lot of time to think about it, and when we got back to Mesa, after hugging our kids, and loving them and so on and so forth, being back with our family and showing off our new car, we decided at that time, and talking it over with Grandmother Waddington, she decided that she might want to come back with us.

To get back to the straight of things, while living there in Mesa Grandma Waddington had bought two lots right next to our own rented house on 604 4th street, and she wanted a house built, so I made arrangements to have the contractors build a nice little 3 bedroom bungalow type house that would just fit her in good shape. The 3rd bedroom was made into a sewing room, she liked to sew and do things like that. Well, we had that built, and she moved into it. Also, Nellie and I had decided to have a house built back here. This was before thinking about getting into farming, of course, so we contracted and made arrangements to have a house built there in Mesa Arizona, on the lot next to Grandma Waddington’s. Now I say Grandma Waddington had bought two lots, one of which she gave to Nellie, and we had our house built on that.

I also might mention that at this time, this location on south Hibbert Street, about 342,344 South Hibbert Street was only about one block away from the Mesa Temple, and while in Mesa we spent a lot of time in the Temple, doing Temple work there, which we enjoyed because that was so new to us. Well, that wasn’t the only reason we enjoyed it, but we did enjoy it because we didn’t have that privilege down there in Yuma, or in any other place, like Gilbert. Now, our house was located right next to Grandma Waddington’s, and Nellie planned it out room by room, window by window, and went over it with the architects stem to stern, and finally had it set up so the contractors could get it started. We’d only lived in that house…
[tape ends]
1 Kathryn Elberta Gano was born 14 March XXXX, in Mesa Arizona.

No Comments

Ford I. Gano History – Tape 7 Side A
Darlene was born in Yuma Arizona on [May] 31st XXXX [removed for privacy]. She was a sweet little girl, and we really enjoyed having her around. She was one of the best helpers I had on the farm, when we got on our own farm later, and she had quite a few merry incidents in her life, which were kind of important as far as her life was concerned. One of them was, shortly after we moved from Yuma up to Phoenix Arizona, there to Mesa, taking a job with Western Farm Management Company, and were living out on the Emery Ranch south of Mesa. I was put on there as the foreman of that particular ranch while working with WFM. But while there, Darlene wasn’t very old, in fact she was just a small baby yet, we were living in kind of very sordid conditions, the old Emery house was just not much up to par. Nellie hated to use it, to live in it, but we just about had to because that seemed to be part of the bargain with WFM; the operator of that farm had to use the facilities.
[Phone rings – break]

I hope I’m not trying to record this over the first part I started out on this tape. I’m probably making a real mess of it. To continue on from where I thought I was…
The Emery House was a home there on the Emery Ranch there south of Mesa, and the manager of that 400 acre farm was supposed to be living in that house, so that’s where we were living. We didn’t have any modern facilities in that house, we had to go out back to the outside, stool, outside toilet, and we didn’t even have a shower. We had to rig up our own, which Nellie insisted on that we could take a bath without climbing into a tub. I had accepted the job there at WFM whose headquarters were Phoenix. It was just a big management company that had several farms in that area, up in the mountains too, that they oversaw, watched over. It was their responsibility to take care of them. They were paid by the owners for so doing.

But anyway this Emery House was not a very nice place to live in. It was a nice looking house, but it was an old-time house without modern facilities. That’s where I was located at this particular time. Darlene had a very bad illness right at the beginning of her, while she was a baby. Neither Nellie or I knew what to do about it. She was having spasms, and so we called up the hospital in Mesa and made arrangements to bring her in there. So we rushed her in to the Mesa hospital. It was really an awful feeling in my old heart, when I would look over and see Darlene in Nellie’s lap there, as those spasms were prevailing.

Well, we got her into the hospital, and the hospital got the spasms calmed down, got the spasms under control, and they said we’d just have to leave her there that night. We’d have to leave her there for a while so that they could check her out and find out what was causing the trouble. Well, it was very hard for us to go off and leave that little baby there in the hospital, and go back to the farmhouse to live. But of course we found it necessary to do so.

We came back the next day, and the doctor told us, you’d better leave her another day, we’ve got her spasms under control now, and it’s a matter of her diet that brought this about. So we left her there another night, with very tearful eyes, and went back to the farm. We got her the next day, and brought her back to be with the other two girls. Well, so much for that incident in our lives.
I’m going to skip several years now, and bring ‘er up to Mesa Arizona. Well, we’re not far from Mesa now, but I had moved from the farm into Mesa, city of, and was renting a house there for us to live in. Darlene got a bicycle for Christmas, and she just zipped it around town and to school and anywhere she wanted to go. She was a very energetic young lady. But one street she had to cycle on coming home from school had gravel on it. She got going a little too fast, going around a corner, and the wheels slid out from under her, and Darlene went skidding out across the gravel. She was really a kind of a bloody sight for a while until we got that taken care of.

[break]
The first thing that I knew she was a senior in high school, and I guess it was the year after she graduated. She took up debating in her Junior and senior year, she was on the Debating team. She learned through that effort, she was also on the band, etc. etc. etc. she probably got the most good from the school out of the debating exercises.
[break]

…east about 5 or 6 miles. Darlene brought Hollis in, and they were acting very, you might say, kind of coyly, they were holding hands. And Darlene said: “Hollis has something that he wants to say to you.” So Hollis came up then and said, “Well, I would like to marry your daughter. We would like to get married.” So I asked Hollis how he was going to support her, and he said they were going to school. Well, I guess I’ll just sort of jump that story up all together. Hollis was [break]

Hollis had been going to college at Ames, and was majoring in electrical engineering. Darlene had been going to school out at BYU, and while they were home that summer, this event came by, and they decided that they wanted to get married. So when I asked them what they were going to do, Hollis told me what he was doing, that he would graduate that year from the college of engineering there at Ames, and Darlene was going to, I think finish up her education at BYU that year also.
Well, that looked like a good situation. Except for one thing that Darlene knew that I didn’t like, that I didn’t want, and that was that Hollis was not a member of the Church. But she had worked on Hollis, she had converted him, and had told him that if he would convert over to the Mormon Church, that she would be able to marry him, and that she would like to go to the temple for that marriage. Well, believe it or not, Hollis wanted Darlene badly enough, and he was a good man in college engineering, EE was the degree that he obtained there, electrical engineering.1

[break]
Well, forgive me Elizabeth, I’m getting all mixed up here. You could probably tell me more about what I’m talking about than I can myself. My memory is just beginning to fail me something terrible, and I’ve kind of got mixed up there when I was ready to start moving from Yuma, up to the Mesa, up to Phoenix area. I’m going to stop the babble I was going on there, about Hollis, who of course you know, was your dad, and you probably know more about the history of what all I was saying than I do. I can’t remember all the details of what was going on. So I’m just going to quit right there, quit that part of my history right there, and maybe bring it up at a later date after I’ve got some of my facts straightened out.

But I accepted the job with Dave Heywood in Phoenix, while Darlene was being born down in Yuma. That entailed a move from Yuma, from one city to another. Well, so much for that,
We had moved I don’t know how many times now, and I guess Nellie, your grandmother, was willing to move again because that’s what I wanted to do. So up to Phoenix we went. I should say, Mesa, rather than Phoenix, because Western Farm Management, although they had their Headquarters office in Phoenix, had farms scattered about over the valley there, as well as in to other areas of the state, up in the mountains and etc. These farms, they were responsible for their operation, the income that came from them, and the expenses that were involved with them. So it brings me up to the fact that I was assigned as a foreman of a ranch by WFM, which was located just south of Mesa about 7 miles, in between Mesa and Gilbert Arizona. We found out when we moved in to it that the house we had to live in was not modern. There wasn’t any way I could get along at that time except to talk Nellie and family into moving into that old time house. It was a very nice looking house, it just wasn’t modern. So with all the un-modern facilities, we took a whack at it. We were promised by Mr. Heyward and company that we would soon be able to do something about that. So on that promise we moved in. To describe some of the facility, Nellie had to do her washing by hand, with a wringer washing machine, and then take the clothes outside on the washline to get them dry. Well, it wasn’t hard to get them dry, in the Arizona sun. There wasn’t any shower in the house, so we rigged up one of our own, there was a big water tank up overhead not far from the house, which would be filled by a windmill pump, and I rigged up a temporary shower under that tank that the windmill pumped water into, and made us a facility that we could have protection in and take our baths in. Well, it was a lot better than trying to take them in a tub in the kitchen or something, which I had to do of course when I was young, and I suppose Nellie had to, too. But nevertheless, we thought we’d outgrown that kind of life. So it was a real step-back there. Well, we made out the best we could. And I went about my responsibilities and Nellie took care of the girls right there at the farmhouse.
And that was the incident that I first got into with Darlene, in which she became ill one night and we rushed her off to the hospital in Mesa, to find out enroute that she had a spasm; she got stiff, and her arms flailed out and her eyes rolled back, which just scared the daylights out of me. Nellie held her and hugged her, and held her still until we arrived at the hospital and there the nurses took over. Well, we found out that these spasms were caused by some particular item in her diet, or lack of items, or something, but we had to leave her there all night, and that was a real problem for us. To have to go off and leave that little girl there by herself and go back out to the ranch, which we did for a couple of days, until she got to feeling better.
OK, so much for that. Now, [break]

The ranch of which I was foreman was devoted to alfalfa, so my responsibilities there was just simply to get the hay, the alfalfa irrigated and harvested property. It was a new role for me [laughs]. But we hired all the labor that was needed, and which was mainly Mexicans that could come up across the border and were used as cheap labor for farm work. Many of them would come in there without being able to understand English very well, so I had a little problem in that particular area, trying to get the alfalfa cut, mowed down, laid up into big windrows, and then bailed by an enormously big bailer. It laid eggs, the big bails, out behind it, then a trucker would come by and pick them up and haul them in to the milling company or stack them up there on the farm. So that was my primary responsibility. The fun was trying to get Mexican help that did not understand English to do the job that I wanted to have done, and act as a foreman for them, as a boss for them. Boy, I learned some Mexican words there that I had never heard before, which I don’t dare repeat at this particular time. I also enjoyed, you might say, teaching those Mexican laborers how to operate a tractor, how to operate a baler, and how to pick it up and how to stack it. One of the places it was stacked was over at the farm outlet, which was Western Milling Company, which provided an outlet for all the farm products of Western Farm Management’s business. It was about 5 miles away from where I was located. Well, I’m not going to try to describe my motions, it was highly interesting, to keep the driver on the tractor in the right gear, and three or four laborers on the bailer behind, trying to operate the bailer so it would bail the hay up, stringing out bails out behind the machine.

[break]

I did not think that the job was I was having here at the Emery Ranch was a very learning proposition for me, although of course it was a new experience, working there on the flat lands and borders. In the fall of the year when there wasn’t any hay on the ground, we rented out the hay land to sheepherders, and they would bring their sheep down from the mountains and wherever they were running them there in the summertime, and they would bring them in for grazing. Although I never had to do any tending of them, the sheepherders would have to get up early each morning and go along the borders of that alfalfa land, and get any old ewes who had turned over on their back there, the borders of the alfalfa field were so big the ewes couldn’t get back up again. So they’d lay there with their feet stuck straight up in the air, until the herders came along and got them straightened out, and got them turned over and got them going again.

Well, that was another thing I learned there. Well I protested, I was kind of at odds then with the company because I was kind of wanting to do something more than what I seemed I was progressing at there. So they had another idea in mind, and later on when the Western Milling Company manager quit them, or was getting ready to quit, they propositioned me about working with management of the milling company. Now that was purely a different situation there. After I’d sat in the office for a while, and learned all the details from the manager who was a very able young man named Stanley Fagg, we had made several trips back east, and over different parts, and out west too, to the California coast, to the areas where we marketed the farm products that we had there at the Western Milling Company. I decided to take that, and it was offered to me at a little better salary, and a chance to move from the Emery Farm into Mesa itself. We did that, and I tell you, we were a happy family to be able to get back into regular housing again.

I had to drive back out to the Tremaine ranch, which was the name of the area the Western Milling Company was located on. To describe it, it was simply a place where big barns and hay and equipment were stored, cattle corrals, cattle feeding areas, and all that goes with the operation of such farm business. The big barns are just open barns, with a roof over the top with all the equipment in them, where they had grinding mills, and hay from the farms ground up, and put in the sacks, again by Mexican labor, trained this time for this purpose by the former management company and by the Mexican foreman who they had there for this particular situation. I didn’t have to deal with them much except put a mask on in order to go into the milling company, grinders, that were making a lot of dust, etc.

Most of my work was there in the office there at Western Milling Company. Everything from all the farms was weighed there, we sold the gasoline for all the equipment there from the pumps we had, and we had big scales there that did the weighing, and we hired usually two girls in the office, or three girls, and a bookkeeper, to take care of the business there at Western Milling Company. Mine was purely the job of managing it, taking care of the company, to make it a profitable operation. I realized at that time that I was given a chance to own part of the company for part of my salary, still maintaining a part of my salary equal to what I had as a foreman in the ranch. So I was glad to have that incentive there to take up and learn that business. I never did try to learn bookkeeping very much, that is to say the operations of it, because we had a very capable individual doing that in the office. We also had the girls there that took care of all the correspondence, typing, and filing of everything that needed to be done. Well, everything but signing the checks. I signed the checks.

[break]

Stanley and I had made trips both ways at least twice. Most of the time it was by plane; one time it was by a car. We came back east on that particular trip, and ended up in Baltimore. New York and Baltimore, and decided to take a boat, a steamship down the coast in order to get down to New Orleans. All of these were marketing areas that our products [tape ends]
1 Hollis Edward Hervey married Darlene Gano on 3 July 1963 in the Mesa Arizona temple

No Comments

Ford I. Gano History – Tape 6 Side B
So here goes on the second side. Knowing that the boys, I think there were one or two girls along in the Ag class, the FFA department that went along on that trip, all were interested in seeing those bats come in or go out. So we watched them that early morning as we got to the cave, watched them fly about. Believe you me, that was one tremendous sight, to see all those bats swooping out of that tremendous cavern. They of course roosted in just one part of that cavern there, and the trail to the lower area went around the actual home of the bats.

But we also went down to the cavern, took the trail. This time when we went down, we had many electrical lifts that took us down much faster to the location we wanted to go, but still highlighted all the goodies in the cavern as we went along, stopping at different locations. Again, we stopped down there at that tremendously big cavern, and they did the same thing. Now this was some, maybe 6 –8 years later from when I had been there before, and they did the same thing they had done my previous trip. They turned out the lights to give us a taste of complete darkness. But then this time, they had allowed smoking to go on, so the darkness was ruined, all the rangers had told us that if you lighted up a cigarette, it would readily be seen and take away some of the illusion of darkness that we’d get without. But this time in the darkness while the lights were turned out, some of the die hards who couldn’t quit their smoking, had to light up their cigarettes, and as we sat around that big stalagmite, we listened to the same song that had been sung directly by the voices farther back. But this time they had recorded it, and the record had a crack in it, and it wasn’t quite nearly as beautiful as the first time, where it just seemed to get almost in some kind of heavenly location. Nobody else would never be in it again. Well, this time we had the crack in the record the rangers sang, which wasn’t nearly as beautiful as it was the first time, and also around the great stalagmite in the amphitheater, there were those glows of cigarettes. I also used that many times later on as an illustration of what the truth of the gospel was like as compared to the ‘illuminated world’s’ version of it. Nevertheless, all the students that I had along with me really enjoyed the whole session.
I just mention that now because later on, when I accepted the gospel, as part of my new accepting Christ in my life, after my conversion to the True Church of Jesus Christ, I had later on while doing some of my work in various areas of the organization in which I was involved I had opportunity to compare the trueness of that first trip – with out the cigarettes, without the smoky smell of the cavern and with the tremendous vocal addition that the rangers had sang for us (they told us that the rangers that were doing the singing were at least a quarter of a mile back up the trail – the voices were coming through so perfectly clear, you could hear every tone and every voice clearly). The second time it was marred by the crack in the record, and the cigarettes that you could see flicking on and off there in the cavern darkness there.

Back to our Snowflake days, now for a little bit. I guess I stated before that I had received a letter from my brother Frank, when he found out that I was teaching school among the Mormons of Arizona. He sent me a terrific letter telling me what a culprit Joseph Smith was. A religious fanatic, he called him, and that his followers were just followers, they didn’t know any better.

Well, as I lived there with the Snowflake-ites, and became acquainted with the families of the Ag students that I was teaching, and getting acquainted with some of the people themselves in Snowflake and the surrounding towns that all made up the Snowflake district, I could not help but be aware that they did not fit the description my brother Frank had said of them. I found them very educated. I found the people very well informed about the natural things, the general things in life. I found them very interested in all the areas of living. Nellie, on the other hand, was kind of aggravated, or annoyed by the fact that some of the lady missionaries, in their zealous ambition to convert anybody, when they came home off their missions, knowing that Nellie was not a member of the church, visited her once or twice in our little apartment that we were living in and tried to convince her that the gospel was true. Nellie ended that in a hurry by telling them, no, she was not interested, and telling them not to come back any more. Well, she didn’t show that in her life. We had some wonderful acquaintances there in Snowflake. We went to various parties and associations, and had a little group that kind of went together, 8 or 10 couples, and it was just a wonderful group to be around, no smoking, no frivolous joking, and very serious about honoring the principles of the gospel that they belonged to.

I was asked to teach in the church in the High School, I was called to be a member of the Agricultural Welfare committee of the church there, and strangely as it might seem, Nellie was called to be a teacher in the MIA group that was there. She did a good job in that, I know, because Nellie had many compliments. Of course, Nellie was a trained teacher, and she didn’t ever try to bring up her gospel antagonism, or even mix it in with her teaching callings. But I did have some opportunities to mix in with the group there, the priesthood holders in Snowflake. At one time, I was called, along with that committee, to go over to Pima Arizona. Pima was the home of our later President, who at that time was president of the stake over in that area, the Thatcher Stake. I guess you know who I’m talking about, I can’t remember his name right now [Spencer W. Kimball].

I relaxed for a few minutes, and I was listening to my book of Mormon tape when my memory was jogged and I remembered that the home that we met in Pima was Spencer W. Kimball, who later became president of the Church. But that was beside the point, of this meaningful meeting to me, as I sat beside of the chair in which Harold B. Lee, who had been called by the church presidency to revise the church welfare system, down in Arizona. Brother Lee, was a native Arizonan, and was well qualified to take this over. He was not a general authority at that time, I don’t think he was called as one of the apostles at that time, but nevertheless he was well suited for this job. The welfare system at that time had just about pretty well died out. I had been originated, and followed very closely and did a wonderful job in its dimensions over the period of time it was meant to cover. But now, as the Church was progressing and growing, it needed to be revitalized, so Harold B. Lee was given that job to do that down there in the Arizona stakes.

Well, what was interesting to me was that, while that program was discussed there by those leaders of the Northern Arizona stakes, Harold B. Lee happened to just drop his hand over on my leg, and I felt a shock, electrical, if I ever had an electrical shock, I sure felt it at that time. It almost made me jump. That came back into my memory very vividly. I’ve related it on previous occasions, so there’s no use taking time again to do that. My final reasons for moving from Snowflake down to the Salt River Valley schools, at the end of my second year in Snowflake, because in the meantime, while at Snowflake, we had two beautiful daughters born into the Gano Tribe. Joanne first, on June 4th XXXX [removed in online version for privacy]. Barbara was born about 15 months later in Snowflake, in the Snowflake hospital, so called. I will mention that a little more completely, after I get Barbara located here, at August 16th XXXX [removed for privacy]. They were just 15 months apart.

Joanne was a very curly-haired gal, and she was really sweet and adorable. We have some good pictures of her as she was growing up. I guess that’s characteristic of firstborns. Also Barbara came along 15 months later. Nellie’s brother Willie used to always twig her about having her children born 9 months and 15 months later, and he says, “You should have waited longer than that.” And “You’re slipping; what’s the matter?”

Well, enough for that. Anyway, they were both born in Snowflake, Dr. Junius Heyward was our physician, and did a good job, I guess, along with the nurses there in the little two story building, a house that had been converted into a hospital. They didn’t have any extra nurses, they kept it open only when it was necessary, so it wasn’t very much of a hospital. But it was used for burns and emergency situations.

If I remember right, Dixie Flake was the nurse that took care of the birth of both of my first two children. She was the wife of Vernon Flake, who was one of the group that we kind of kicked around with there in Snowflake. So at the end of the second year there in Snowflake, although we were enjoying ourselves very much, and I kind of wanted to learn more about the church, and learn more about Joseph Smith, and in other words, I wanted to go to the Mormon Church. In order to do that, I had to be converted to Joseph Smith. Well, in order to get away from the confusion, and perhaps from the antagonism that was caused by such feelings in our home, I decided to accept a job teaching down in the valley. The first job was at Gilbert Arizona, with the Mormon Church down there. So we moved down to Gilbert, and found a little house to rent, and attended a sectarian church while we were down there. So I kind of forgot what was going on in Mormon-land at that time. I did have one or two of my students, though, who were enrolled there at Gilbert, who were Mormons, and very good ones. One of them was the champion state farmer, the FFA State Farmer, the highest award that could be given to any member of the FFA clubs around the state. Another one was also very high. All of these students were there in Gilbert.

Well, Gilbert wasn’t a very large school. I stayed there just one year, and I had a chance to go down to Yuma Arizona as an Ag teacher down there. Now this was in the high school at Yuma. As I said when I went down before to visit out there, it was out in a suburb, some 16 miles away from Yuma itself, so I wasn’t too thrilled at the proposition. But I was thrilled at the opportunity to go down and teach in Yuma. It was the 3rd largest high school in the state of Arizona, and the 3rd largest Agriculture department, also, out there at Yuma High School. So I was happy to have that opportunity. I accepted a contract down there, and went down there to teach.

When we went in there to Yuma, if I describe the scene of our move down there, it would be just like trying to describe how the Okies felt when they moved from their homes in the midwest or wherever they were, out to the western states. We were truly an Okie group, moving down there. All of our belongings on top of a hay wagon, pulled by a pickup down into the location I had rented to live. As we were unloading our household goods there in Yuma, Nellie decided to go into town to get some groceries so we could have something to eat after going through that move, and she went into town for that purpose, and I continued clearing off the wagons and the trailers that we had to move us down.

When she came back from that trip into town, she had a very big surprise for me, at least it turned out to be a big surprise. She said, “You know who I met up in town?” No, I don’t know who you met. “I met one of the Flake girls.” Now, the Flake girls were the two twins who lived up in Snowflake, I had become acquainted with. They weren’t Ag students, but they were popular girls at Snowflake High School, and I had become well acquainted with them, Laura and Lorna, I think it was. And one of them had found Nellie there shopping and started up a conversation with her and found out what was going on and said, “Listen, if you aren’t going to church anywhere, why don’t you come up and go to church with our Mormon group?”

Nellie was all, you might say, changed quite a bit in her attitude about Mormons after going to a regular church, a sectarian church there in Gilbert for over a year, so she came back and asked me “Would you like to go to a Mormon church down here?” And I kinda reluctantly said, “Yeah; where is it?” and she told me the story then, and we decided that we would try it out. And that was the sum of that story, on how we first got started in the little Yuma branch, there in Yuma Arizona.
It was a small branch, that was for sure, only about 15 members I think, but very desirous of having a place to worship every Sunday morning. We met at the front end of a typewriter shop that was owned by one of the members of the church. In fact it was Laura’s uncle, Sam Flake, and he owned a typewriter shop, and he loaned it to the church as a meeting place, which we had to clean up in the morning and push the stands back out of the way and set up chairs and get ready for the regular church schedule we had in those days. Nellie and I also met the branch president and his wife, and were very impressed with them. We met another family, a returned missionary, and almost as old as we were, in fact I think he was a little older than we were, just youngsters at that time. He was operating the creamery there in Yuma, and he was a very, you might say, very enthused member of the church. He had an excellent testimony, and the branch president had set it up for us to start taking some beginning classes in the Book of Mormon and Doctrine and Covenants from this brother, this returned missionary. I can’t remember the names right now, and I’m not going to try to remember them, but he was sure a good teacher. He could explain any part of the Book of Mormon, get it in a very interesting manner, to where we really became interested in the church. Nellie wanted know every turn and twist of why the church and who the church etc., etc. In other words, she wanted to investigate the church very thoroughly before she began to even think about becoming a member. Of course, I had already decided that I wanted to be a Mormon, wanted to be a member of the Mormon Church; I didn’t use the same enthusiasm that she had, but I was always quite interested. We listened to those lessons quite avidly. Enjoyed them very much. It wasn’t but about 6 months after that, the branch president asked us the question, would you like to join. This was President Shumway, he took us up to Mesa Arizona, and we were baptized in the Mesa Arizona Temple. Since that time, baptisms for the living have been done outside of the temple, and temple baptisms are only for the dead.

At other times I have pretty well reiterated our conversion, our acceptance of the gospel and our baptism there at the Mesa temple, and went back to Yuma, and went back to Yuma to live for a few years. I think we took two, maybe 3 years, I’ve almost forgotten now. But at the end of that time, I was getting itchy feet again, primarily because Brother Heyward from Snowflake, who had a business in Phoenix, had contacted me about becoming part of his organizational group there, Western Farm Management. Knowing that was available, at the end of what I think was my third year of teaching in Yuma, I went up to see him. And the reason I mention this was because while I had an appointment with him on a certain date in the end of the school year there, and went up to see him. Well, while I was up there being interviewed, lo and behold, our next child, Darlene, was born. Well, I wasn’t there and couldn’t help Nellie, and one of the neighbors had to take her to the hospital, and they didn’t have a hospital there in Yuma. She was born on the 31st of [May,XXXX.]
[tape ends]

1 Joanne’s given name is Nellie Joanne Gano. Apparently, she always went by her middle name, perhaps to avoid confusion between mother and daughter.

No Comments

Ford I. Gano History – Tape 6 Side A

My note to you at this time, when I finished that previous tape, trying to tape it off there, some of things that I did while I was in college. I listened to it afterwards, and I was so discouraged because it was such a muddled up mess of words and mispronounced and one thing or another that I couldn’t understand it at all. I felt very bad about it, and I told Grandma about it, and she said she would listen to it, and she did, and she says, well, I could understand that tape, and I don’t think you should do away with it, because you have a lot of information in there covering a good period of time. Now, I don’t know, I’m not going to destroy it, I’m just going to continue on where I left off in that tape.

As a student at ASTC, a group of us had made a bus trip down to Carlsbad Cavern, the Great White Sands, and artesian wells, that area, and otherwise more or less just informed ourselves so that our Geology professor could have something to grade us on perhaps. I’m going to just simply skip anything more about that trip, and come back up to the school days at this time.

As I reflect now over those school days at Tempe, they were about the most happiest days of my life, up to that point. I really enjoyed getting acquainted with the problems of education, and meeting other kids, and being part of their life. That was just simply the greatest pleasure I had ever had up to that time.

I don’t remember whether I ever mentioned that my mother had been the primary influence in getting me off to college. She had suggested that we sell what cattle we had. The government had been buying cattle up to get them off the range. The government had been buying them for $15 a head, and we had about 10 head running down there on the river, the Verde River banks, which grazed off up into the grazing lands, the open lands of the ranchers, and they didn’t like it, so the government was paying $15 a head to anybody that would sell their stock off to them. So she suggested that we do that, get rid of them, and I should take the money and go to school. Well, we go t $150 out of that bunch of stock, and I let her take half of it, and I took half and headed off for Tempe, and that’s how I got my start in education. I really enjoyed that period of life, and I’ll never regret it in any way whatsoever.

Of course, I do not want to do an injustice to my growing up days on the river, the ranch houses there, China Place and all, but after my sweetheart Annie Lee had died, I was kind of looking for other ground to move to, and get away from it all, and this came up about going to school, and I readily agreed to try it. Before that, I had been reluctant because I thought I wanted to get a start on the old China Place, in farming or something, and make a fortune so Annie Lee and I could live happily ever after. But we had never been formally engaged, we had just been sweethearts and had agreed on that as soon as I could make a home for us.

Well, that was done. That was sad.

And then I sold off all the paraphernalia I had from my cowboy days. I didn’t own any of the horses, so I couldn’t sell them, but I owned all the paraphernalia to go along with them, my chaps, my spurs, my bridle, saddle, everything that went with it. I think I kind of weeped a little when I sold them, but I knew that I would be using the money for a good purpose. And I headed for Tempe. That was some of the most beautiful days of my life, as I mentioned before there.

Now I’ve carried myself up through most of the first three college years, and now my fourth year, as I went back up to school that year…

It was not my fourth year, because one year I had completely stayed out, to earn a little money. So in my fourth year at school I was made an assistant in the Biology department. That was a really exciting time, and was a really big feather in my cap. That of course was where I met Nellie, and I mentioned that earlier.

Some of the other things that had come up…

One other thing I want to mention at this time, I don’t think I mentioned it before, or maybe I just hinted at it, but in order to get a degree in agriculture, I had to switch from Tempe to the agricultural college down at Tucson, Arizona.

So in my fourth year of schooling, I switched and went down to the University of Arizona. Norris Gilbert and I were roomed up together in the Aggie department that was available for us at the University of Tucson, and in inquiring I found out I had to sacrifice a lot of credits I had earned at ASTC. The University was just stuck up and didn’t think that ASTC deserved being recognized as a full credit school, so they took away some of my class credits that I had. So I had to take 22 units of class work the first year that I was there at Tucson. That really made me hump quite a bit.

The Aggie students, there were 21 of us there, roomed in a house that we rented off campus. We hired a Chinese cook, and cooperated on the operation of the building and doing the dishes and sweeping and cleaning etc. We had to walk from the Aggie house over to the campus, which wasn’t too far, but it wasn’t like living right on campus. I did manage to, by taking some correspondence courses which the university put out, I was able to work all those 22 units in to my class schedule. That many units in college course kept me mighty mighty busy to get through all of them. Since I had, when I moved to the University, I enrolled in the Ag department then, which was what I went down there for, my specialty was Ag Education. I was talked into that by a professor, or a doctor there, who was the head of the Ag Education department, because they were looking for Ag Education teachers. He thought that might be the way I should go in order to get a job immediately after graduation. Well, in order to do that, I had to go on and take six weeks of courses of classwork in the summer time after my regular classmates, some 1000 of them, had graduated and received their diploma in a special session. I wasn’t able to get my diploma at that time, in other words, and had to wait until July when I finished all my special courses in Ag Education to get my degree. Which I agreed to because I was really anxious to get to work. However, I wasn’t entirely idle all that time, because Dr. Klein got really busy right off the bat, and referred me to several possible jobs that needed an agricultural teacher. One of them was down in Yuma Arizona, which was a down in the Citrus Belt, and I wasn’t exactly anxious to teach down there, because it was more or less for specialized farming: vegetables and lettuce and carrots and other things they grew down there in large farms. So I wasn’t very much thrilled about going down there. But I went down and interviewed with the trustees at the school there, not in Yuma, but in a small school some 15 or 16 miles from Yuma, an area called Roll was the school district there. Those people down there in that area were so anxious to have an Ag Teacher come in and take care of those students there who wanted to get a little extra curricular activity in school, I guess, they gave me a contract, and I was willing to sign it because I was sure anxious to get some money coming in from somewhere.

Well, I took that contract and went back to Tucson, and there Dr. Klein, head of the Ag Education department there at the school, met me at the door so to speak, and said “Did you sign a contract down there?” And I showed it to him. He said “Well, I’ll get you out of that one; I want you to go up and look at a school up in Northern Arizona. I think it’s more in your line of teaching, more in your background, and I think maybe the people up there, you would enjoy them more. They’re special people, and they’re looking for a special teacher.” And he described the teacher then, that didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, didn’t tell dirty jokes, didn’t run around having weekend parties and so forth and so on. He went on: ” You’re the only one in this department that I have that I can recommend to send up there to Snowflake Arizona. They’re a school of all Mormons. They can’t get them a Mormon teacher, so they’re wanting someone who can fill for that, until they can find what they want.” Well, OK, I agreed to go up there. I had to hire a special way to get up there, take a bus so to speak, to get up there to Show Low, where the Principal of the school up there in Snowflake, which was about 15 miles on farther up north, met me. And then he introduced me to all the trustees, and some of the students around at the school, told me what they were like and what they were doing. I did like the look of that situation very much. Also, the climate was much more pleasant up there than it was down in Yuma.

All in all I was anxious to have that job there and try it out, but before I could do it I had to break that contract that I had previously signed. And I had to go back to Tucson and find out if Dr. Klein had made other arrangements for my old teaching assignment. I found out that he had, when I got there, and so I was really happy.

While going to school there in Tucson, Nellie and I had been going together pretty regularly. Nellie had a car; she also had a teaching job up at school near where they lived in Casa Grande, so she would drive down there every now and then. We went to various assorted school functions and other activities that young people like to go to at that time of life. We were both tickled at the fact that I had a chance to go teach up at Snowflake, which she thought she’d like better. She had gone down to Yuma with me, when I had made the trip to make an application – by the way I had purchased a second-hand car, on time, that was the first and only car I ever bought on time. After that I was able to pay cash for every automobile I bought. Well, that was beside the point. But I had to have some way to get around, and look for these situations and take care of life in general. So I got in my old Chevy, and packed in my things, and went up to Snowflake.

There I was made very welcome, rented an apartment that I thought Nellie and I could live in, when we could get married and she could join me there. Of course, she was teaching, and couldn’t come right at that time anyway. She was trying to get her mother’s house fixed up with her salary, and she didn’t have any extra money to speak of, but we did manage to go to a show or two while we were courting there, waiting for that particular time.

I did a lot of driving from Snowflake to Casa Grande, where Nellie lived, on weekends from Snowflake where I was teaching as the school year started that year in September. It was a good little drive from Casa Grande up to Snowflake, about 190 miles to be exact, and so weekends were pretty well covered up by me driving down there. Some of them I had to skip because school activities would take me out of it. But one weekend when I was down visiting in Casa Grande with Nellie, we decided we wanted to get married. So we eloped, and drove up to Flagstaff one night in my old Chevy coupe, and hunted up a minister early in the morning the next day, and got him to marry us. Well, he wanted $5 to marry us, which I came up with. We also had to buy a marriage license from the courthouse up there, get permission to marry. Arizona at that time didn’t have a 3 day waiting period, so we managed to pull that off. Well, there we were married and in Flagstaff, so we took in the sights just for that one day, just one day, and enjoyed each other’s company, and then decided that since she had a year of teaching to finish out, she had a year of teaching and I had to finish mine, that I’d go on back to Snowflake, and live in my apartment alone, and she would go back to Casa Grande. She took a train back that day, and went back down to Casa Grande from that place, from Flagstaff, and I went back to Snowflake. Which was only about 40 miles.

It was kind of a sad situation, a sad way to have a honeymoon, but after that she succeeded in getting her girlfriends to come up to Snowflake for weekend trips, so we got together on weekends then, and we had a great time that way. I could take care of my responsibilities, and she would take care of hers, so we got along all right until she finished her school next spring, which was in May. At that time, she came up to Snowflake, and we moved in as Man and Wife into a little apartment that I had rented there, and lived there for quite a few years happily.

Of course, a few things happened after that that were quite important in our lives. We were going to a Mormon Church. Nellie did not like that. I did like it. I was enjoying the Mormon philosophy, the Mormon teachings, I was enjoying the people very much. They really did not fit the description my brother Frank had given of Mormons, who told me that Joseph Smith was a religious fanatic, and that his people were just quacks to follow him.

[break]

I’m starting on a new tape here Lucille got ready for me to use, and I’ve just about forgotten where I left off. So I’m going to go back a little while, to my school days in Tempe when I made the trip down to White Sands and to Carlsbad Cavern, and reflect on that for just a moment, because it does touch in on some of my later reflections as I was teaching high school up in Snowflake.

Now, we had to hike down the trail into Carlsbad Cavern, that first trip down. The rangers took us on down quite a few steps, and on down to a trail that led us down to the cavern. The trail was lighted with electrical lights, which had been kind of skillfully placed along behind the wall to reflect the beauty of the cavern as we walked down. When we got to the cavern, the mammoth cave at the bottom of the cavern, or at least where our trail was going to end for that particular day, we were set down around a huge stalagmite, a tremendous growth there at the bottom of the cave. The cave, by the way, was some 200 feet from the bottom to the ceiling, and had tremendous acoustics. You could hear a sound almost as far away as you could make it.

We had the opportunity then to sit down in the cave and reflect. The rangers pointed out to us that if they turned the electric lights off that lighted up the cave, that we would be in complete darkness, because there was no way that any sunlight filtered down into that cave. So, to illustrate the point they were making, they turned those lights off for just a minute, or maybe a minute or a half, and we sat there in the depth of that cavern, around that giant stalagmite, and without absolutely being able to see our hand in front of our faces. So we did have a taste of what complete darkness was like. And while they had those lights turned off, a quartet of those rangers back up the trail, about a mile back up the trail they said, and a quartet of those rangers sang “Rock of Ages.” Now it so happened that that particular quartet was very well balanced with deep voices, middle voices, and high voice, and it was a beautiful rendition of “Rock of Ages,” I remember it to this day.

Of course, I suppose at a later time they recorded that, and the next time that I came down there while I was teaching in the Ag Department up at Snowflake that I took a group of the Ag boys by bus down to Carlsbad Cavern. I thought they would enjoy it. None of them in fact had ever been down there before, and we followed the same trail I had gone down on the geological trip in college. Again, and I didn’t mention this at first, there were tremendous amounts of bats roosting in a particular part of that cave. On the first trip down didn’t actually witness the bats. We were told how they went out at night, and how as night proceeded they would come back to the cavern to roost. They made tremendous amounts of guano, a type of fertilizer very rich in nitrates [tape ends]

No Comments

Ford I Gano History – Tape 5

As I finished up that year of driving for Pendley at Oak Creek, I went back to school again. When I got back there that year, I was given another part time job, this time, well for a while I worked in the dining hall, like I had finished up the year, when I’d left the a year before after my freshman year. And roomed in East Hall with my old roomie, Norris, I had a lot more fun that year than I did the first year because I had more or less got acquainted, and I wasn’t afraid of the girls so much. The girls who lived in the new dormitory that they called West Hall (I was in the East Hall – it was for boys only). I guess it was kind of the location of the dorms on the campus there. Anyway, the two dorms would share parties together, and dances and one thing or another. I got acquainted with, I had a few dates that year, dances at the dormitory the girls would hold or the boys would hold, inviting one of the girls from across the hall. So I got acquainted with several of the young ladies there, and also got to meet them in the dining hall there, whenever they came through behind the counter for the their meals. Many of the girls didn’t like eating in the dining hall, they said that the meals were not their kind, so they went off campus to eat sometimes. Usually up to the corner café that was not too far off, and cooked according to the strict regulations of the head residents around the dining hall.
I was a sophomore that year, I was a year behind all my roommates who formerly I had been in the freshman class with. But nevertheless, very glad to be back and enjoying the times there at the school. I worked harder on my studies, and was able to get a B average that year in my class work. I got acquainted with the professors also, learned to like them, learned to enjoy them, learned how to cooperate with them in getting the lesson prepared. That really helps, you know. I didn’t go out for football, so I had time for a few extra-curricular activities that I mentioned.

We went on parties together; usually there was a gang of about four boys and four girls. Well, wait a minute, we couldn’t get everybody in one car; usually a gang that went out and which all got in one car, and we’d all go out for Sunday picnics, and by the way, I went to church every Sunday morning. I wasn’t going to a Mormon church, that was for sure, but I enjoyed my opportunities down there, and met my wife at one of the meetings there at church, one of the youth meetings that they had in the evening. I met Nellie, your grandmother (your great-grandmother, for the kids).
We had several outings that year, several picnics I should say, when East Hall had their dances, they would invite somebody, and Nellie used to always invite me. Then when the West Hall had their dances or parties, then I in turn would invite Nellie. We would do more than just go out there on hills. There were several school activities that we got to travel along on, and enjoy the scenery around that area, and so forth and so on.

I made it through my sophomore year without any further ado. At the end of the sophomore year, my mother had, through my sister Paula who lived in San Diego, had made acquaintances with a politician over there who did lots of traveling and had lots of friends, and he had a person he knew who had a big farm. My mother asked him to try to get me a job over there in San Diego. So he did that. He made arrangements for me to come over there, and I went over there, between my sophomore year and the following year. That year, the reason I did, was that I thought it would be a good experience for me as I was majoring in agriculture, or wanting to, which by the way, they could not (let) me, I could not enroll as a major in Agriculture at Tempe. I had to enroll in another course that they did have, and that was Orcharding. They did have Orcharding, and since I was acquainted with orcharding, I enrolled in horticulture.
Anyway, I worked for this rancher over there at the Harry Empe farm. It was rather a large bean farm, and wheat, up the coast from San Diego, maybe 40 or 50 miles up the coast; Ensenito. There I got a job with Harry Empe for $2.50 an hour, and board and room. My job there was completely different from the one over in Oak Creek, and I got a chance to learn to drive a Caterpillar, pull heavy equipment with a ‘cat’ instead of a team of horses, although Harry had a team of horses also. He assigned me, since I had grown up on a farm, he assigned me the job of hooking up his team each morning, which I did at 6:30. I had to have that team hooked up, harnessed and hooked up and ready to go before breakfast. So that got me up pretty early every morning in the summer.

Now I did not get to go to church, while working out there that summer, because I didn’t have any way of getting to go into town. The Empes did not go to church either, or if they did they went in Ensenito, and my sister lived in San Diego. I never made it into San Diego more than 2 or 3 times all summer long. But I stuck right there with that job, $2.50 an hour, board and room.

They were amazed that they could find anybody who would not go to town to get
soused, and come back and work it off the next week. That’s what my roommate did, that summer that I was working there for Harry Empe. Along with the beans he grew a lot of wheat, and this had to be taken care of. Or cut, and sacked up, piled up I should say, in the summer time when it was time to harvest. It was put up with a binder in little bundles, and then later on when it was combined, they would throw it up on the wagon and take it over to the thresher, which was a stationary threshing machine located at a different place. Now that’s when I got the job of driving the horses. I hooked them up to the wagon, and I always got at least a ride on the wagon, and I didn’t have to go walking along throwing up those bundles, those sheaves of wheat onto the wagon. I had to stack them up as they came up, in order to get as good a load on there as I could.

I didn’t mind doing that, the team had one balky horse, which was a little hard sometimes when I got a heavy load on there, trying to make them start up the side of the rolling coastal farmland there that Harry Empe’s place was located on. But I also got acquainted with driving a Caterpillar tractor, and did some plowing with it, and discing and everything else, which enabled me to avoid the heavy work. Although I did help throw sheaves off of the wagon there on to the threshing machine. The thresher there would gobble up those old sheaves just as fast as you could throw them into it, which kept two of us busy up there on the wagon. Then off to the field they would go to get another load, and them there at the thresher got to rest until we got back.

Now, the heavy work came that I got that summer was when we started trying to bail up those piles of straw that were out there in the field. Of course you’d pile up a big old pile of straw as high as you could get the thresher machine to pile it, and then come along with a bailer and bail it up. When it was bailed up it was stacked up alongside in a pile. In order to get it from the unstacked pile over to the mountain you might call it (I used to think it was a mountain), you had to use a man killer derrick. It had a great big old grab hook on one end of it, and it had to be pulled over to the piles of straw, sunk down into it, piles of sheaves (at that time it had been put into piles of sheaves), then pulled over, raised by the derrick up into the air, and the derrick was operated by a team of horses.
Now I wish that all that I had to do was drive that team of horses around there. But it wasn’t because the team of horses was hitched so that all they had to do was to follow a pole out in front of them, which was attached to a winder-upper that took care of pulling the sheaves up out of the stack as high as you could get them with the derrick, and then swung around and stacked them into big stacks.

I’m anxious to leave this Harry Empe place, so I’m not going to try to recall everything I did there, my memory kind of fails me sometimes and I just can’t bring it back to mind. But I do want to get back to my Junior year in College, which was the one I was headed for when I finished that summer’s work on the coast there. Mr. Empe did pay me a little extra salary though, because I was the only one that ever could do any work. He told me when he paid me off, he said “you did more than any two of these that I find when I go into town to find somebody to help out. So I’m going to pay you a little extra for your work here this summer.” I enjoyed that, and I took it without objecting any at all.

When I got back to school that year, which I did just in time to enroll in my Junior year, I was not much worse for the wear. I’d spent part of my salary from the summer for clothing that I thought I ought to have as an upper class man in school, and most of it went in for books in order to get me back in to the scholastical enterprise. I still had my job in the dining hall, dorm, which I never did mind having because, well, sneak a piece of pie as I was bringing it out of the pantry into the serving tables there. But I had to hide the saucer on which it was placed underneath a saucer that had pie on it. I guess somebody usually wondered how come they got two saucers under their piece of cake or pie or whatever. I enjoyed all that work, and it was work too, but I enjoyed most was that I was given the opportunity to be a tutor, a laboratory assistant to a professor in the science department. Mr. Mortenson was a very, a man that I really admired all the time that I was there. I found out later on that he was a Mormon. It didn’t mean all that much to me at that time, because of course I wasn’t, but as a lab assistant, I had a choice operative procedure of writing up the lab techniques for all the classes that we had.

An interesting note for that year was that I had Nellie in one of my classes. I think she was a junior, but she had neglected to take all of her lab courses when she should have, so she had to take this extra class when she was a junior. So I had the pleasure of tutoring Nellie Waddington in my biology class. I like biology, and I liked to teach it. Professor Mortenson took care of all the lectures of course, in a different area from where the lab was located. But in the lab area, I had a big blackboard, and large desks for the students to sit by, where they could do their extracurricular activities. By that I mean that sometimes they had to draw and list all the names of creatures we were studying, and so forth and so on. Sometimes they had to draw pictures of them. Nellie was not really interested in Biological items, in biological study. So she didn’t get very high grades in that class. In fact, we had to give her a C, Professor Mortenson did [unintelligible for next sentence or two].

She told me, many years after I got married to her, that I had picked on her, using my upper class man rights to not listen to her what she had to say and one thing or another. I didn’t know for sure that I was going to marry Nellie later on. In fact, when we made a scientific study with a bus trip, led by the geology students (I was one of the geology students, and I enjoyed that very much – I enjoyed that bus trip, too) I wasn’t necessarily courting my future wife at that time. So I had the chance to flirt around with some of the other girls on that trip. I think it made Nellie a little bit offended because I did. We saw some very interesting places on that bus trip, with that group of students. I imagine there were at least 30 of them that took the bus down to Carlsbad Cavern.
We studied that part of geology as you saw it from the field, as well as the great sand flats in New Mexico. Those were really something to me! Boy, piles of sand, they looked like a desert, great high mountains of sand! Well, the interesting part of the trip was we got to go into the Carlsbad Cavern cave, and visit all the great things that the science of ages told us there in that cave. The guide that supervised our trip there in that cave was a very capable man in describing, telling all about the way that cave had come about over the millions of years it had been in the process of developing. We went down more than two miles into the earth to see all the stalactites and stalagmites. In the great cavern where we finally stopped for that trip, and there in that cavern was more or less around the giant stalactites…
[end of recording]

No Comments

April 18, 2010

When we were little girls growing up in Mesa, Arizona our bedroom was a sleeping porch that had been added to the house sometime in the past. We gained access to it by climbing through the window in the dining room or by going around to the back screen porch which allowed for a more dignified means of entering, but we much preferred the more direct route of the window. We were young and limber then and thought hopping through windows in order to reach our beds a fun thing to do. I remember there being a double bed, which Barbara and I shared and a single bed where Darlene slept. Thinking about it now after all these years have passed it seemed a large room to me but I suppose it wasn’t really as what seems large when one is small is often different when one is fully grown. As I’ve mentioned before one of the worst things about our shared sleeping arrangement was Barbara’s habit of eating soda crackers in bed where she generated lots of crumbs which were really scratchy. I suppose now that kind of arrangement would be breaking some sort of code and not allowed but we survived and even thrived this challenge with no harm to our innocent psyche’s. No doubt this makeshift ‘room’ would roil the easily disturbed minds of today’s arbiter’s of just how much space is needed for a child in a home so that they will grow up to be successful, fully functioning adults, although just what the correlation is between having lots of space and being successful when one grows up escapes me.

At any rate, one of my responsibilities as ‘first born’ was to get my sisters settled down at night and firmly asleep with as little ruckus and annoyance to our parental units as possible. At least I think that was how it was supposed to work and why it ended up being my responsibility. Perhaps, though it was just my desire to get to sleep myself and in order to do so I would tell my sisters bed time stories. Not that I was creative enough to make up grand adventures like some, who often grow up to be writers, but just your standard garden variety fairy tales such as “Little Red Riding Hood” or “The Three Little Pigs”. “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” was another favorite with once in a while a twist thrown in where it became “The Little Bear and The Three Goldilocks”. (I learned this originally from mother who probably invented the variation because she tired of telling the same story over and over.)

I can still remember being in that darkened room telling one story after another listening as my sister’s breathing slowed and they drifted off into the deep sleep of healthy children although sometimes I was the one who drifted off first but if I chanced to do this their yelps of protest quickly brought me back to my task. Knowing when to stop the stories was always a little dicey, for I had learned that sleepy comments would often lead to full bore awakness if I didn’t resume immediately, which I did as I was loathe to have to start the process all over again. I can remember testing to see if they were asleep by slowly bringing my story telling to a halt and waiting for a reaction to occur. When silence met my efforts and continued I knew I could go to sleep myself.

Even though we grew up together none of us remembers shared events exactly the same. How we each have a slightly different ‘take’ or perspective. Or how Barbara, can ask me “do you remember such and such or so and so?” Sometimes I do and we then have a fun time reminiscing but other times I just shake my head and say, “No I don’t. Tell me about it”. Truthfully, what I tend to remember are ’snippets’. Just odd little bits and pieces rather than grand sagas of the events that made up our life when we were family. For instance, am I the only one who got frustrated when Dad didn’t feel like we had ‘a need to know’ and would answer our queries about where he was going with, “I’m going to see a man about a dog”. Then there was his response to a complaint about what was served at a meal which was, “If you don’t like what is served then you can fix the next meal” which always had the desired effect as none of us ever took him up on his offer and we would return to to our meal with no further comment on our part as we very well knew mother was by far and away the better cook.

I remember Dad’s assessment of me which was that I was sweet tempered and intelligent but not very good looking. What I was supposed to do with this information other than wear a sack on my head I never quite figured out but for a teenage girl, quite unsure of herself in a world where it was all too obvious that physical attractiveness was the number one most desirable attribute needed for success, it was devastating. Perhaps that was the biggest weakness of both mother and dad, they never gave us any validation for things we did right. I believe they were just following the Biblical injunction to chastise and correct those they loved as so beautifully stated in Proverbs 3:11-12, “My son, despise not the chastening of the Lord; neither be weary of his correction: For whom the Lord loveth he correcteth; even as a father the son in whom he delighteth.”

Do you remember how mother used to say on a fairly regular basis, “It’s time to turn over a new leaf”. This always occurred when she was dissatisfied with her daughter’s natural tendency to slip back into the path of least resistance most often where our housekeeping efforts were concerned. To this day I still find myself echoing Mother and saying this to myself when I am not satisfied with what/how I am doing in some area or the other which would have absolutely horrified me if I had known I would be saying it when I left home. Is it possible that we never really leave home? That the things we learned while growing up under our parents guidance become so ingrained in us that we are indelibly marked in subtle ways that we are not even aware of?

The above are things I have found myself thinking about as I wonder if I should continue to send my musings out to family as all these many years later I still find myself telling stories to my sisters only now they take form in the written word as I try to recapture the things I remember about growing up in our parental home as well as the family I married into. In doing so I probably still put them to sleep, but, my consolation is that I don’t have to stay awake.

No Comments

Slippery Slope

Friends,

Now that we have Volcker and Bernanke telling us what is around the corner economically in the USA. consider where we are in parts of the USA such as Detroit, the once home of the Big Three.  I worked for three years with EDS and visited Detroit many times in the late Eighties.  Problems were there but it was still a functional city despite a serious crime problem.  Now, it is a wasteland.  Fox News mentioned tonight that the State of California is considering having the Chinese (PRC) build us a high speed railroad there.  Remember it was Chinese labor that built the Western Pacific that connected to the Union Pacific in the mid 1800s.  Now, it is their expertise that we are paying for.  Read on and worry please.

Chuck

From:
Date: Thu, 8 Apr 2010 22:18:55 +0000
Subject: Fw: Slippery Slide
To:

Detroit — Just the Beginning
By Frosty Wooldridge

For 15 years, from the mid 1970’s to 1990, I worked in Detroit, Michigan.

I watched it descend into the abyss of crime, debauchery, gun play, drugs, school truancy, car-jacking, gangs and human depravity. I watched entire city blocks burned out. I watched graffiti explode on buildings, cars, trucks, buses and school yards. Trash everywhere!  Detroiters walked through it, tossed more into it and ignored it. Tens of thousands and then, hundreds of thousands today exist on federal welfare, free housing and food stamps!

With Aid to Dependent Children, minority women birthed eight to 10 and in one case, one woman birthed 24 kids as reported by the Detroit Free Press-all on American taxpayer dollars.

A new child meant a new car payment, new TV and whatever mom wanted. I saw Lyndon Baines Johnson’s “Great Society” flourish in Detroit. If you give money for doing nothing, you will get more hands out taking money for doing nothing.

Mayor Coleman Young, perhaps the most corrupt mayor in America, outside of Richard Daley in Chicago, rode Detroit down to its knees. He set the benchmark for cronyism, incompetence and arrogance. As a black man, he said, “I am the BMIC.” The IC meant ‘in charge’. You can figure out the rest. Detroit became a majority Black city with 67 percent African-Americans.

As a United Van Lines truck driver for my summer job from teaching math and science, I loaded hundreds of American families into my van for a new life in another city or state.

Detroit plummeted from 1.8 million citizens to 912,000 today. At the same time, legal and illegal immigrants converged on the city, so much so, that Muslims number over 300,000. Mexicans number 400,000 throughout Michigan, but most work in Detroit. As the whites moved out, the Muslims moved in.

As the crimes became more violent, the whites fled. Finally, unlawful Mexicans moved in at a torrid pace. Detroit suffers so much shoplifting that grocery stores no longer operate in many inner city locations.

You could cut the racial tension in the air with a knife. Detroit may be one our best examples of multiculturalism: pure dislike and total separation from America…

Today, you hear Muslim calls to worship over the city like a new American Baghdad with hundreds of Islamic mosques in Michigan, paid for by Saudi Arabia white; black” oil money. High school flunk out rates reached 76 percent last June, according to NBC’s Brian Williams. Classrooms resemble more foreign countries than America. English? Few speak it! The city features a 50 percent illiteracy rate and growing. Unemployment hit 28.9 percent in 2009 as the auto industry vacated the city. In this week’s Time Magazine October 4, 2009, “The Tragedy of Detroit: How a great city fell and how it can rise again,” I choked on the writer’s description of what happened. ”If Detroit had been savaged by a hurricane and submerged by a ravenous flood, we’d know a lot more about it,” said Daniel Okrent. ”If drought and carelessness had spread brush fires across the city, we’d see it on the evening news every night.

Earthquake, tornadoes, you name it-if natural disaster had devastated the city that was once the living proof of American prosperity, the rest of the country might take notice.

But Detroit, once our fourth largest city, now 11th and slipping rapidly, has had no such luck. Its disaster has long been a slow unwinding that seemed to remove it from the rest of the country. Even the death rattle that in the past year emanated from its signature industry brought more attention to the auto executives than to the people of the city, who had for so long been victimized by their dreadful decision-making.”

As Coleman Young’s corruption brought the city to its knees, no amount of federal dollars could save the incredible payoffs, kick backs and illegality permeating his administration. I witnessed the city’s death from the seat of my 18-wheeler tractor trailer because I moved people out of every sector of decaying Detroit. ”By any quantifiable standard, the city is on life support. Detroit’s treasury is $300 million short of the funds needed to provide the barest municipal services,” Okrent said. ”The school system, which six years ago was compelled by the teachers’ union to reject a philanthropist’s offer of $200 million to build 15 small, independent charter high schools, is in receivership. The murder rate is soaring, and 7 out of 10 remain unsolved. Three years after Katrina devastated New Orleans, unemployment in that city hit a peak of 11%. In Detroit, the unemployment rate is 28.9%.

That’s worth spelling out: twenty-eight point nine percent.” At the end of Okrent’s report, and he will write a dozen more about Detroit, he said, “That’s because the story of Detroit is not simply one of a great city’s collapse. It’s also about the erosion of the industries that helped build the country we know today. The ultimate fate of Detroit will reveal much about the character of America in the 21st century. If what was once the most prosperous manufacturing city in the nation has been brought to its knees, what does that say about our recent past? And if it can’t find a way to get up, what does that say about our future?”

As you read in my book review of Chris Steiner’s book, “$20 Per Gallon”, the auto industry won’t come back… Immigration will keep pouring more and more uneducated third world immigrants from the Middle East into Detroit - thus creating a beachhead for Islamic hegemony in America. If 50 percent illiteracy continues, we will see more homegrown terrorists spawned out of the Muslim ghettos of Detroit. Illiteracy  plus  Islam  equals  walking  human  bombs.

You have already seen it in Madrid, Spain; London, England and Paris, France with train bombings, subway bombings and riots. As their numbers grow, so will their power to enact their barbaric Sharia Law that negates republican forms of government, first amendment rights and subjugates women to the lowest rungs on the human ladder. We will see more honor killings by upset husbands, fathers and brothers that demand subjugation by their daughters, sisters and wives. Muslims prefer beheadings of women to scare the hell out of any other members of their sect from straying.  Multiculturalism: what a perfect method to kill our language, culture, country and way of life.

I PRAY EVERYONE THAT READS THIS REALIZES THAT IF WE DON’T ALL STAND UP AND SCREAM!!! AT WASHINGTON AND OUR CITY LEADERS THIS IS WHAT AWAITS AMERICA .

IF YOU FOLLOW THE NEWS AT ALL YOU KNOW THIS HAS HAPPENED IN ENGLAND AND FRANCE AND SPAIN ….

IF YOU THINK THIS IS JUST A BUNCH OF HOOEY AND YOU FEEL NO DUTY TO FIGHT FOR THIS COUNTRY, THEN I’M SORRY. I DON’T KNOW WHAT IT WILL TAKE FOR YOU TO STAND AND FIGHT.

P.S. Again, keep you powder dry and your weapon systems at arms length! 

No Comments