:Family Matters

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]

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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]

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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.

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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! 

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March 30, 2010

What a windy day this has been, which makes perfect sense as it was also garbage collection day and we all know that the genie that controls the weather saves the windiest days for just such times as these. Why? Who knows which finds me once more opining. “Guess there are some things we’ll just have to wait until we get on the other side to find the answer for”. AAR (At Any Rate) there they all were, tall over sized black bins lined up like soldiers on review in front of each driveway. Having recently been relieved of their smelly burden they stoically awaited their return to the safety of their awaiting barracks, (garages), content to ’stand down’ until they would be marched out the next week where they once again would find themselves on the front line protecting all and sundry from the dread enemy, that if not properly contained, would soon overwhelm the front ranks of our community.

Earlier that morning, having just glanced out the window and noticing how strongly the wind was gusting I had the distinct impression that I needed to go out and retrieve my faithful guardian before it blew over as I hate, absolutely hate the struggling necessitated on my part to right the upended. This is better appreciated if one understands that the gargantuan container the city requires all it’s homeowners to purchase at sixty dollars a pop (at least that was the price when we moved to Cedar City 15 years ago.) stands almost as tall as I. This makes leveraging it rather dicey especially if one also considers that IAAPOVLS (I Am A Person Of Very Little Strength). This has always been my lot in life, not that I am complaining, well, not very much anyway. My means of survival has always been to divide and conquer which MGH has always been greatly amused by, that is until old age caught up with him and weakened his once strong body to the point where he now finds it an exemplary idea. So, the way this works is that if you are trying to get a 40 pound bag of salt down the stairs to the water softener you open the bag in the garage and place a smaller portion of said contents into a container that allows you to reach the water softener able to move another day. The downside, of course, is that it takes four trips up and down the stairs instead of one. But, hey, whatever works, right?

AAR, because I chose not to heed my impression I found myself ten minutes later and about ten feet away when a particularly strong gust of wind sent every garbage can on the street tipping over like dominoes one after the other which ordinarily I would have found quite an interesting phenomenon had it not been for the fact that I was faced with the challenge of raising my fallen ‘warrior’ before the wind could send it rattling off down Wedgewood Lane. Sigh. With the wind blowing directly into the gaping maw I soon found myself struggling against the forces of nature and like many who have faced similar challenges, beginning to doubt my ability to survive and succeed in my quest for supremacy. I ultimately did accomplish my goal by turning my ‘bow to the wind’, so to speak, and aided by a few ’salty’ words which I began using when my boys were teenagers. ‘Shoot’ is the proper Gano version as we Gano girls were never allowed to think or horror of all horrors say anything that remotely resembled a swear word. This was taught us by the simple expedient of washing our mouths out with soap which fate MGSB experienced when she used a phrase she had learned from one of the neighborhood children, “Son of a gun”. I remember watching the whole process with great interest and later on licking a bar of soap on my own to see what it was like. Believe me, I quickly lost all interest, if indeed, I ever had any, of saying bad words as once having proved their point to us, our parents never had to do more than let us know there was a bar of soap just waiting for one of us to slip up. To their credit, and this probably had more to do with it than the soap, I never heard my Dad swear. My mother, however on occasion would utter a few choice words but they were more on the order of “Shoot fire and damnation” along with “Hells bells” which in today’s world are rather innocent sounding if put alongside what has entered into common usage in today’s world.

I haven’t always been the one to wrestle with the garbage can. MGH has taken care of this humble household chore for most of the years we have lived here. The fact that I am now doing it is more on the order of, “Old soldiers never die, they just fade away” which I first heard when I was still a girl at home in the early 1950’s. It was a phrase taken from an old army ballad used by General Douglas MacArthur in a speech given when he retired from his military career. He continued on, “And like the old soldier in that ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away, an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the sight to see that duty.” (Just as an aside, he was kicked out of the military by then President Harry S. Truman for insubordination because MacArthur wanted to open a two front war attacking China who was supplying North Korea with arms and training and were the real enemy in the conflict. Truman did not agree to the escalation. I have often wondered if we would be having the problems we are now struggling with in that part of the world if we had followed MacArthur’s strategy instead of the one we did which left Korea divided into two countries along the 38th parallel in a virtual stand off that has continued for over 50 years. General MacArthur knew that in war as well as life, doing the ‘right’ thing is not necessarily the easiest.

AAR, this phrase came to mind the other day as I find myself now watching MGH slowly ‘fade’ away. He despairs the condition he finds himself in and worries that he can do so little physically. None want to be a burden. We have all been taught, or least we used to be taught, this little truism, “Service is the rent we pay for the space we occupy”. Could it be that our true character shows in how we care for the very young as well as the very old? We are truly helpless when we arrive and could not survive without the willing hands of those who love us providing for our needs. The same is true for the aged and the infirm. Doing for them what they can no longer do for themselves completes the great circle of life here on earth. What a privilege it is to serve those who will be our future as well as those who have given of their own strength to care for us in our need. Duty requires we care for the helpless no matter what, love says I will because I want to.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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March 19, 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday, May 24, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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