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Narrator: Elwood C. Pugh
OH Number: #0765
Additional Restrictions: none
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ORAL HISTORY PROGfRAi i PERSO^: L DATA RECORD.
,N -me Elwood C. Pugh Address 710 E. Main, Emmett, Idaho
Date of Birth March 14, 1906 Place of Birth Boise, Idaho
Year you or your parents came to Idaho (specify)
1897
Year came to the-,area you °now -live in 1897 ' Place first lived in Idaho Emmett
Place-emigrated from } ' Southwest Missouri E
. k- ... ,
Mode of travel By rail.
Route of travel From Kansas City by Union Pacific and Oregon Short Line to Boise.
.
FAMILY: Spouse Mary E. (Mabee) Pugh Date and place married 10/6/70 Weiser, IdahC
Brothers and sisters (married names) Lois L. Ferris
Father's name Harvey A. Pugh
:e of birth August 6, 1874 Place of birth Olny, Ill.
Date of death September 30, 1969 Place of death Boise, Idaho
Ancestor's homeland England and Netherlands
Major occupation(s) (what, where, when, if known) School teacher at Emmett 1897 -1899.
Publisher of Emmett Index , 1900. Owner and operator of lumber mills on Soldier
Creek near Dry Buck 1901 -1915. Owner and operator of fhour mill at Montour 1915-
192 Dairy man 1926-1936- Operated saw mills at Ketcham and Mountain Home
1939 -1941.
Mother's maiden name Ethel May Clark
Date of birth September 22, 1878 Place of birth Marshall, Missouri.
Date
of death
August 1938
Place
of death
Enroute by train to MaykBros.
Date
married
1902
Place
married
Marshall, Missouri
Ancestor's homeland England and netherlanda
Occupation(s)
children (yours)
School teacher 1897 -1901
Karen L. Landward
Ethel Ann Slater
Date of birth
July 24, 1935
Place of birth
Boise. Idaho
December 22, 1941 Council, Idaho
(over)
`Children (yours) (continued) Gate or birth Place of hirth
H. James Clark December 26, 1944 Boise, Idaho
Your career record
Occupation(s) what, where, and when Idaho State Police, Caldwell, 1928 -1932
Supervision of Construction, U. S. Forest Service, McCall, Idaho 1933-1940 •
Supervision of construction, Morrison - Knudsen, PagoPago, Soma and in western
states 1940 -1943. Organization and Methods Analyst, U. S. Air orce, many places,
1943-19
Schooling Two years of College
Principal activities and interests other than livelihood Photography, Going to the
mountains, Boating, Firearms and local history.
Military service and rank None.
Additional notes:
Pugh, Elwood (June 6, 1985)
TABLE OF CONTENTS 0 H 765
NAME: PUGH, ELWOOD
DATE OF INTERVIEW: June 6, 1985
LOCATION: Emmett, Idaho
INTERVIEWER: Buckendorf, Madeline
SUBJECT: Montour
TAPE MANUSCRIPT
COUNTER PAGE
TAPE ONE
SUMMARY OF CONTENTS
046 1 Mr. Pugh's family moved to Montour so that he and his
sister could attend school, and because the timber
was running out in the Dry Buck area. They moved to
Montour in 1915 and his father built the lumber yard.
098 2 His father came to Emmett from Missouri to teach
school, then bought the Dry Buck sawmill.
126 3 Montour was a fast growing town: a railroad for
shipping sheep and cattle, fifty or so families,
businesses.
202 4 For several months in winter Montour was isolated,
but after 1917 roads were improved. Dewey had
acquired the Marsh farm, which was sold off as lots
for the town.
300 6 Everyone wanted to pick up a homestead. Brownlee
grew acres of very fine wheat. There was an average
of one or two people in each business. Supplies were
freighted through Montour to the mines.
371 8 In 1915 the Morrison Knudsen company began tunnels
for the canal; Mr. Pugh's father sold them coal. The
Black Canyon Canal company lacked money so workers
built canal for scrip. All canals above the present
dam have been discontinued.
436 10 Montour had first water right on the river dating to
the 1860's. Black Canyon Dam is slowly wrecking
Montour. Montour had good soil and lots of orchards
at one time; it also had several big dairy herds.
The train was used to ship cream to Emmett and sheep
and cattle to summer range.
TAPE ONE, SIDE TWO
000 13 Army bought lots of horses in the area for World War
I; stock buyers bought up lots of the fat stock for
shipping; most animals shipped to west coast but some
trainloads went to eastern markets. People lived off
what they raised.
Pugh, Elwood (June 6, 1985)
OH 7 65
135 15 Victor Sheldrew, a carpenter, built most of the busi-
nesses and homes in Montour; Dewey had staked out
lots; the grove; homesteads and timber claims. Black
walnut trees in grove very valuable for timber; sold
to Japanese. Trees planted before Dewey had the
land, but called the Dewey grove.
255 18 Father operated
storage facility
the flour mills.
flour; Boise bal
working at the
packer.
lumber yard; was aware of need for
for grain. In 1918 began building
Wheat from area produced excellent
series used it. Elwood Pugh started
mill when age twelve, as a flour
326 20 Mill was constructed of concrete. Cement was from
Lime, Ore., gravel was local. Reinforced steel was
used throughout. Mr. Pugh describes how concrete was
lifted by means of a horse derrick. Very solid
construction.
395 23 Soil was depleted after continual use so no longer
grew good wheat, thus closed the mill, but warehouse
was still used.
447 24 Mr. Pugh recalls some of his neighbors. Many activi-
ties in the winter, including skating and sleigh -
riding; summertime was for fishing, camping, hunting,
etc.; the Ladies Aid; kids always had chores to do.
TAPE TWO, SIDE ONE
000 27 Montour was isolated; developed own activities; a
unique town in that no one locked their doors; town
meetings. Big picnics were held at Dewey Grove.
095 28 School programs at Christmas; the Chatauquas were big
events each summer. Mr. Pugh left in 1922 to go away
to school. Medical services were at Emmett, but
local women were very capable in helping the sick.
200 30 No police force; Mr. Pugh recalls one murder; every-
one in the area was out looking for the killer.
Killer was picked up at Weiser.
277 33 Woodsmen had a hall; they were a fraternal group
anyone could join.
296 33 Everyone had own well and a septic tank; no power in
the town until 1919. Most homes prior to that did
not have running water. Excellent wells.
359 35 Brownlee and Sweet had Grange halls. Dances at
Brownlee; a tree house the boys built at Dewey Grove.
Pugh, Elwood (June 6, 1985)
UH 765
405 36 Women crocheted, quilted, etc. as a way of life. A
freighter who drove to Pearl.
452 38 Montour residents didn't go to Boise or Emmett as
they do now; essentials were available in the town.
The restaurant.
TAPE TWO, SIDE TWO
000 39 Montour was a marvelous place for kids to grow up;
lots of hunting and fishing, and spending money could
be earned with a trap line.
091 40 South Mountain had a very poor quality coal. Some
gold mined on Cruickshank ranch. Timber ran out but
plenty of water. Climate similar to Boise; bad
winter of 1916. Now no place for ice to go when it
hits the backwater.
184 42 Black Canyon canal started in 1908. Dam started in
1922. Causes of silt build -up in the dam; in time
entire area will be flooded.
230 43 Chinese grew row crops for several years on the
company ranch at the upper end of the valley.
Montour received no real benefits from building of
the dam.
315 45 Various counties in the area; the relationship be-
tween Montour and Sweet. Sweet was a town before the
1900's. It was a big way station for freighters
going to the mines. One livery stable could accomo-
date 100 horses a night. Montour was a railhead.
After railroad came, freighting dropped off. No
rivalry between the two towns.
383 46 School was built when town was started; a four -room
school with two classrooms; had a barn for horses but
most students walked. In 1920 high school was
started; prior to that high school students boarded
at Weiser or Emmett. Some of Mr. Pugh's teachers; a
prank of watermelon stealing.
TAPE THREE
52 Teachers, mostly young people, boarded in homes.
High school was held upstairs in the school house;
school activities were held in the upstairs. They
held ball games for recreation.
54 The 1918 flu epidemic in Montour. Many men enlisted
in World War I. Population reached about 350; the
young people left to find work elsewhere.
58 Changes Mr. Pugh witnessed; the town business
Pugh, Elwood (June 6, 1985)
UH '765
buildings have all been torn down; the homes remain;
beautiful farm land now swamp areas.
60 Many people from Montour went into law enforcement
work in other areas.
END OF TAPE THREE, SIDE ONE. END OF INTERVIEW.
NAME: ELWOOD PUGH
DATE OF INTERVIEW: June 6, 1985
LOCATION: Emmett, Idaho
INTERVIEWER: Madeline Buckendorf
SUBJECT: Montour
Pugh, Elwood (June 6, 1985)
OH 765
INTERVIEWER: This is an interview with Elwood Pugh, conducted on June 6, 1985
at Emmett, Idaho. The interviewer is Madeline Buckendorf of the Idaho
State Historical Society. The subject of the interview is Mr. Pugh's
early life at Montour and his father's businesses at Dry Buck and Mon-
tour. This interview was conducted as part of a cooperative project
between the Idaho State Historical Society and the Bureau of Reclamation.
MB: OK. The first question I wanted to ask you is, I was really curious why
your family moved to Montour. Why did they choose to move there?
EP: Well, I suppose one thing, of course, I and my sister were getting old
enough we needed to go to school. When we moved to Montour I was eight.
We'd had a private tutor on Dry Buck in the sawmill, because there was no
school, so I got my first and second grade, and my sister too, from a
private tutor. That's one.
The area around the sawmill was pretty well logged out. You didn't
haul logs a long ways in those days, because of the cost of hauling, and
horses, and sleighs, and you moved the mill to where the logs were. And
this particular set -up, the logs were pretty -- we would have had to move
the mill to a new location to get a short log haul, and Montour was a
coming business area, and Dad saw the building going there, and he built
a lumber yard at Montour, and hauled lumber down to retail the lumber at
the yard in Montour. And he sold the sawmill to Brown and Hoff in
McCall, and they moved the mill from Dry Buck to McCall in 1915, built
that first mill at McCall, out of that mill. Well, everything, I guess,
evolved. I remember, though, in 1912, Dad driving over the middle of
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Pugh, Elwood (June 6, 1985)
Montour Valley and showing me the lots that he had bought, in anticipa-
ting moving there when the town was built. It hadn't been built, even
the railroad hadn't been built, yet. So it was not a sudden thing.
MB: So your family had come from Dry Buck before that?
EP: Oh, Dad came here in 1897, to teach school in Emmett. Taught three
years, then got a job in a sawmill on Dry Buck for the summer, and liked
the business, and the mill burned, and so he bought the mill and rebuilt
it, on credit. And rebuilt the mill, and that's what started him in
1901, in the sawmill business. He came here from Missouri, to teach, at
Emmett.
MB: Why did he decide to come out to Emmett to teach?
EP: Because they paid him $35 a month to teach in Missouri, and they paid $75
a month in Emmett.
MB: That makes a big difference.
EP: And somebody offered him a job from Emmett, and wrote to him and asked
him to come out, and he did.
MB: When they came from Missouri, how did your family get out here?
EP: Train. Came on the train to Boise, and came on horse -drawn stage from
Boise over to Emmett.
MB: What was their first impression of Montour? Of the drive up, the Montour
area? What did your father and your family, think of it, moving from
Missouri to this area?
EP: I don't know. You're a little ahead of me. I don't know. I didn't come
along until about seven or eight years later. But he stayed here the
rest of his working life, so I guess he liked it.
MB: OK. So how old were you when you carne to Montour?
EP: I was eight.
2
Pugh, Elwood (June 6, 1985)
MB: OK. Do you remember your first impression of that area, what you thought
of it, or what it looked like to you?
EP: Oh, if kids that age have impressions; in those days you just went along
where your parents told you to, you know. But it was a nice little town;
it was a very rapid - growth town. The thing that caused Montour to be
built, was the fact that the railroad was built from Emmett to McCall,
and it became the railhead for the Sweet - Brownlee -Ola area, and there was
a lot of railroad business in those days. Trainload after trainload of
sheep, and trainload after trainload of cattle hauled back and forth on
the train, and a full trainload of logs every day, for years and years
and years, coming to Emmett. There was a lot of activity on the
railroad, and they had a railhead there, and that's why the town was
built, and it grew rapidly from about 1912 'til about 1916. It was a
full -blown town by 1916. Are you interested in what the town consisted
of?
MB: Yes, very much so.
EP: Well, they had about 50 families in the school district. Got up probably
where we had a hundred voters in the voting district, and by 1916, '17,
the school, a good brick four -room school, was built in 1912, and by 1927
we had the four -year high school, and the grade school.
But by 1915 we had a garage -- service station -- that had been a
blacksmith shop. We had two stores for groceries -- one also carried
general merchandise; a bank, a small hotel, a meat market, a restaurant,
a pool hall; a section gang, which kept about five men employed all the
time in maintenance of the railroad. And we had a livery stable, where
you could rent horses and buggies, saddle horses, and they operated a
taxi, by the way, 'cause cars were not numerous, and if people wanted to
go some place in a little style a taxi was all right. They'd run all
3
Pugh, Elwood (June 6, 1985)
over the country. We had a 1914 Cadillac for a taxi. It was a good one.
And they had a lumber yard and a coal yard, and by 1917, a grain
elevator, in '18 a flour mill, a drug store, the town hall, and about oh,
I suppose, 50 families around it.
MB: OK. So from about 1912 to '27 there was continual growth?
EP: Oh, the growth really was from '12 to about '20. But the kids got older,
and so they needed a high school. Before that they had to come down to
Emmett and board out, or something. Because the roads were such in those
days that there were about three or four months of the winter, or at
least in the fall and the spring, that there wasn't any traffic on the
roads. In case of a dire emergency, they might put somebody on a motor
car and bring them down to the doctor, the railroad motor car, but --
all the freighting, early day freighting by wagons into the Long Valley
and High Valley and Round Valley, and even to the remote Thunder Mountain
mining area, all went right through Montour. And that all had to be done
in about five months, six months of the year, because otherwise the roads
were not passable. Roads were not improved very much really, until they
began to slowly improve when cars became more popular, along about '16,
1916, 1917.
MB: OK. You were talking about the downtown area, and some of the business.
When you first came, was there anything, businesses -- ?
EP: I came there in 1914, and the town had gotten established in 1912, when
the railroad come, so I was two years later, and it was pretty well
built.
MB: OK. So they had most of the --
EP: We still had to build a church, and that was about 1914, is when the bank
moved from Sweet to Montour. Actually, Montour becoming the railhead
4
Pugh, Elwood (June 6, 1985)
kind of depleted the other little towns around. They moved into Montour
area more. Like the bank, and the man that had the store at Sweet, moved
his store to Montour. Sweet at one time had a doctor, and the doctor
came over to Montour. And, well, Sweet had five saloons -- we never got
any of those. The people at Montour didn't want any saloons, so they
never did have any.
MB: OK. The people that were in this initial settlement at Montour, where
were they from? Where did most of them come from?
EP: That's a hard question to answer. They just scattered all around.
People came through building on the railroad, and liked the looks, and
they [unintelligible] there, and people around there which were ac-
quainted with the fact that the new town was going to be built moved a
potential business in there because of the new town. And there'd been a
beautiful big old Marsh and Ireton ranch there for the last sixty years
and many people knew of the area. Mr. Dewey, of the old Dewey Palace
Hotel in Nampa, had acquired that farm up there. He subdivided that area
and sold the townsite. And McConnels got ahold of it later, and sold out
the rest of the property for farms, but, I suppose his promotion had a
little bit to do with it, too.
MB: Yeah. He was quite a promoter. Well, what I was curious about in asking
that, were most of the people from other areas in Idaho, or from around
the Midwest like your folks, or did you ever pay any attention to that?
EP: Well, my folks had been here for twenty years, or seventeen years, by the
time they moved there, so they were Idaho natives by that time, 'cause
there wasn't anybody in Idaho had been here much longer than that.
Everybody in Idaho in those days was from someplace else, or he was a
little kid, one of the two. Because there wasn't much settlement in this
country, up to about oh, 1890, you know, just got statehood in 1890.
5
Pugh, Elwood (June 6, 1985)
I know at one time we had about 20 men working at the sawmill in Dry
Buck, and I think there was two men from Idaho. All the rest were from
back east, most of them from Missouri, because one would come out and get
a job, write to his aunts and uncles and cousins and everybody, and
they'd come out and get a job too. I think about 14 of the 20 was from
Missouri. And quite a few of those people that worked up in those mills
moved down to Montour -- I can name about six, moved around Montour that
came up from Dry Buck area. There were a lot of people in the Dry Buck
area when there was work up there, and there used to be quite a few
sawmills and logging up there, and there were a lot of people on Brown-
lee. Well, they continued in Brownlee. I think there was a family on
every 160 acres up in that country in those days. They thought they
could homestead some land and make a living you know, and that dry land
didn't do very good making them a living, though.
MB: Not much irrigation up in that area.
EP: No, no. Although most of it's under cultivation right now. There's an
awful lot of it under hay, one cutting a year of course. But they're
sure working it. We drove up through there a couple of weeks ago, and it
was amazing how much of that land is being farmed right now. But not
grain any more. Mostly hay. 1917 -- there were 66,000 acres of wheat,
brought out of Brownlee.
MB: Good grief.
EP: That's right. That's what caused the elevator to be built, for a grain
elevator at Montour. And it was hard wheat, Turkey Red wheat -- it makes
the best bread flour there is. There was a lot of competition among the
mills around the country to get that wheat. But now -- it's a little bit
like Emmett. We used to have 700 carloads of Italian prunes shipped out
R
Pugh, Elwood (June 6, 1985)
of here every year. Now we don't have seven.
MB: Yeah. Most of it's sold locally.
EP: We don't raise them any more. Prune orchards aren't here, and the big
demand for them in the east is dropped out. The diet changed, for one
thing.
MB: Talking about -- I was curious, you know, people moving in here. What
did they mainly do? What were some of the occupations of people moving
into Montour?
EP: The base payroll in the town was the railroad section gang. That hired
usually about five people. The rest of it -- it was mostly a farming
community. And the third, was the little bit of employment it took to
maintain the business operations. Dad's mill and elevator and lumberyard
usually had two men. And the store would have the owner and two, the
post office one, and the blacksmith shop one, and another store one, and
two or three in the restaurant and hotel. Course there were lots of
children in those days. You always had about three or four school teach-
ers. And the banker, and one other. Otherwise -- farming. About the
only other work there was around really was -- other than farming, har-
vesting the crops, putting them in at the right times -- was road work,
for the counties.
MB: OK. You were talking about shipping and freighting there. Was Montour
ever a supply center for the mines, or is that where people would go to
get supplies?
EP: Not much. It was freighted through there, but from supply stores -- no,
Montour's business was not that big. And you could go to Boise Valley,
get volume purchases for less money to take up to places like that.
MB: OK. How about for the lumbering business too?
EP: Well, after about 1915, there were little sawmills built in Dry Buck, but
7
Pugh, Elwood (June 6, 1985)
there was not much sawmill industry on Dry Buck. The mill at Emmett, the
big mill at Emmett, was built in 1917, and it supplied lumber for most of
the building industry up to that.
MB: OK. But your folks had a lumberyard in Montour?
EP: Yes, yes. We got real well stocked in that lumberyard about 1914 or 115
from the mill on Dry Buck, and then purchased it wherever we could get it
from then after. The lumberyard was discontinued about 1920 because the
building in Montour was pretty well over in 1920.
MB: OK. So did your father's lumberyard supply any other place besides
Montour?
EP: Not really. The sawmill, of course, in Dry Buck, supplied lumber to all
over this country down here. They were freighting all summer long out of
there, but Montour lumberyard was a local thing. There was quite a lot
of irrigation work, canal work, oh, all the way from 1908 through to
1920. The canal that irrigated the Emmett Bench flowed by Montour.
There was a little dam, a diversion dam, about four miles up above
Montour, which took the water out of the river and there was a lot of
maintenance work on that canal. 1915 -- Morrison Knudsen company got
their first sizeable job opening up tunnels on that canal, believe it or
not. Daylighting them, they called it. 1915 -- they brought in a steam
shovel and two little steam trains, and worked all summer long, day -
lighting a couple of tunnels over there, and I know that Dad sold them
fifty carloads of coal that summer, just to run that steam shovel.
MB: Where did your dad get the coal?
EP: Oh, Utah. Shipped in by rail.
MB: Talking about the irrigation and canal work: before M -K came in, who had
built the canals and -- ?
Pugh, Elwood (June 6, 1985)
EP: The old Black Canyon Canal Company, I think it was called, was formed --
I don't know much about it really. It started that canal in 1908, and it
was built with horses and scrapers and fresnoes, by hand almost, by local
men. They were having a hard time getting money to pay them, and they
paid them with what they called "warrants," script, really. And took
liens against the property that would be underneath the irrigation. At
one time there was much as $40 -$50 an acre against this property on the
Bench when it wasn't worth over $10, because of the liens of this canal,
and an old man by the name of John McNish, well, he wasn't old in those
days --
MB: John Mc -- ?
EP: John McNish operated a store here in Emmett, and he would accept those
warrants in trade in his store, so people could work on the canal, and
then buy from him what they needed. Banks wouldn't take them, they
really didn't think they were good. And John took them, John McNish. He
had the first sawmill in Emmett, by the way. He was a fine old Scotch -
man, I guess, Scotchman, yeah.
MB: OK. Who was paying the warrants when you said they were taking out the
warrants, who -- ?
EP: Nobody was paying them. That's the catch! They were liens against
future income off of this land --
MB: I guess the farmers --
EP: There weren't any farmers there: It was all sagebrush. You had to sell
the land, and get some farmer to start paying on it. But actually, you
couldn't turn your payment, your payment was a warrant, you couldn't turn
it for cash. So you'd take it down to John McNish and trade him for what
you needed.
MB: Then what would he do with that warrant?
9
Pugh, Elwood (June 6, 1985)
EP: I guess he had a lot of money, and laid them away some place. He was the
life of that job, old John McNish, was the one that kept it going.
MB: Now, when you talked about MK coming in, and daylighting, opening up the
tunnels, I'm confused. You have to explain to me the tunnel system, or
what was happening there.
EP: Well, they built tunnels for this canal to go through, through some of
the hills up in that country.
MB: Who did that work? I mean, who was backing it?
EP: The Black Canyon Canal Company. There wasn't any backing except these
warrants I'm telling you about. People just needed water so bad, they'd
do anything to try to get it down here. But they wouldn't buy that land
out there because the lien against it for this canal was so heavy that it
was hard to sell that land. Actually, it was a fine deal, but they
couldn't see the future that well. 1924 -- all of the canal above the
present dam was discontinued, because the present dam pumps that water up
to that old canal and still irrigates the bench with it.
. see. How about water for Montour?
'hat's the first water right on the Payette River. I don't know who got
:hat but along about 1860- something when they first settled in there,
apparently filed and built a ditch around there to irrigate Montour. I
:kink that's the number one right on the Payette River.
Tow, did that continue to be the case?
till is.
;o, as far as anything from Black Canyon Dam --
To, no. Black Canyon Dam is wrecking Montour. Backwater's just silt,
'illing up the backwaters of the dam, is slowly saturating the soil of
[ontour so that it's not going to be usable many more years. The lower
10
Pugh, Elwood (June 6, 1985)
end of the valley isn't now.
MB: So by the time you got there, and your folks, there was already a good
irrigation system set up?
EP: Oh, it had been there 50 years.
MB: OK. So they were all taken care of as far as that's concerned.
EP: Yeah, it had been there irrigating that beautiful big ranch for years and
years and years and years.
MB: OK. When you moved there, do you know what kind of crops they were
growing, and could you describe the soil?
EP: Oh, good rich loam soil. It was mostly hay, corn. The valley was about
half filled with orchards, when we first moved there.
MB: What kind of orchards?
EP: Prunes and apples, prunes and apples. Just about half the valley was
orchards, and the rest of it was hay and corn, for silage for stock feed.
MB: OK. What would you say was the major crop out at that area? Did they
ship anything?
EP: Oh, no. I never knew of them making much of the fruit. As a result --
they'd sell the fruit locally, but I never knew much sold out of there,
fruit -- and as a result the trees got pulled as they got older. And
most everything was raised to feed stock. A lot of dairy operations in
the valley.
MB: Oh, there were?
EP: Oh yeah, not fresh milk, selling cream to the creameries, and they raised
hay and corn. That's what McConnels operated on for years. And every-
body in the valley had a little bunch of land and a few cows.
MB: OK. Where were the dairies, what creameries would the dairies take their
milk to?
EP: Gem Co -op, Gem County Cooperative Creamery in Emmett. Come down on the
11
Pugh, Elwood (June 6, 1985)
train every day.
MB: Were there any other creameries close by?
EP: Did you ever know of one over here, Mary? I never knew of any other.
MARY PUGH: Over at Caldwell.
EP: Yeah, but they didn't ship from Montour to Caldwell.
MP: No.
EP: I think that was primarily the one -- Gem Co -op Creamery.
MB: OK. Talking about livestock, you had mentioned that the railroad was
involved, so some of the cattle and sheep were shipped?
EP: Oh, that was shipped from this lower country to summer range and back.
Train load after train load after train load of sheep and cattle both
would go up in the spring and back in the fall. I mean full length, full
train loads.
MB: So they would just use that for changing pasture?
EP: Right.
MB: Did they ever ship out from here?
EP: Yes. A lot of fat stock shipped out of Montour. Didn't have trucks in
those days -- didn't have roads to handle the trucks. And every little
town like Montour, Horseshoe Bend and all the rest of them had big
stockyards beside the railroad. And stock buyers would cover the coun-
try, buy the stock, and take them to the railroad and ship them. Car
load after car load. Primarily to Portland area from --
MB: Oh, they'd ship them to Portland.
EP: Primarily. The stock buyers would. The big packers, they had to buy
their stock up here and -- oh, some shipped back east if the market was
better, but not as much around Montour. Like the Circle C Ranch at New
Meadows would ship a train load sometimes, of cattle to market. They'd
12
Pugh, Elwood (June 6, 1985)
take the Chicago market, or the Kansas City, or the Omaha market, de-
pending on where the market was the best.
MB: OK. I need to flip over my tape here.
TAPE 1, SIDE 2
EP: I remember in 1917, the military, United States Army, came around looking
for horses and mules and they rounded up a lot of them up in that
country. We had two young men, Clark Cox and Bert Cox, that were in the
stock business, horse business, quite a bit, and they rounded up hundreds
and hundreds of them.
MB: Now, from local ranchers that were raising them?
EP: Yes, yes, primarily. And brought them down to one ranch and they took
them down to the stockyards and shipped them out for the Army.
MB: OK. Where were the stockyards located in Montour?
EP: You know where the depot was?
MB: Aprroximately, yeah.
EP: Oh, just about three hundred yards west of there, right on the track, on
the north side of the track.
MB: So when they shipped, mostly they shipped to Portland, was that both
cattle and sheep they'd ship?
EP: And hogs.
MB: And hogs. OK. And not too much back east to Kansas City or Chicago?
EP: Not much, not much. Cargoed lots, usually cargoed lots, one car at a
time and stuff.
MB: OK. Who all shipped from Montour? What area?
EP: The stock buyers primarily.
MB: OK. And they were from where?
EP: Oh, they'd come up from Boise or Caldwell or Nampa and buy a car load,
from the farmers around and have them bring them down to the stock yards
13
Pugh, Elwood (June 6, 1985)
and load them up and ship them. Individuals around there -- oh, once in
a while, an individual would ship a car load. If you shipped a car load
of hogs or a car load of cattle on the railroad to market in Portland,
why you got free transportation along with it, you know. And sometimes
they'd ship their own stock.
MB: When the stock buyers would come up what area would they serve to bring
-- you know, when they shipped from Montour -- where would they go to - -?
EP: All over Ola, Brownlee, Sweet, and the farms all around Montour too, of
course. There were farms all around there too. But that was primarily
the railhead for Ola, Brownlee, Sweet and Montour areas.
MB: OK. Any other small towns? What ever happened to Waverly?
EP: I don't know where Waverly was.
MB: OK. That must have died out real early.
EP: I haven't got that. Was it in this area?
MB: Yeah, but it went quickly. It must have died out before you even came to
Montour.
EP: Well, I was there within a year, two years after Montour was established,
so I was in it early.
MB: During that time, what was the peak for the stockyard shipping and the
agriculture, would you say?
EP: Oh, I'd say from 19 -, oh, 1915 to 1922 or -3, -4.
MB: OK. Did the twenties agricultural depression have much of an effect in
Montour?
EP: No, wouldn't notice it much. Had an effect on Dad.
MB: What happened?
EP: He was in the grain business. Of course in his elevator and flour mill,
he stocked up heavy on grain one fall, and the next spring the price
14
Pugh, Elwood (June 6, 1985)
didn't come up any, so he lost money on that. Yes, but actually, no.
People raised everything they needed. We didn't have cars eating up a
lot of expense in those days, and a grocery bill of ten dollars a month
was quite adequate when you raised everything, and canned everything, and
had cows and chickens and pigs, and you ate like a king but probably had
patches on your overall knees.
MB: That twenties agricultural depression that was happening in other areas,
did that have any effect on any other business besides your father's, in
Montour?
EP: I don't know, not that I know of.
MB: OK. Let's go back to talking about your father's, both the lumberyard
and the mill, a little bit. He had the lumberyard here. Where was that
located in town?
EP: Right beside the mill.
MB: The flour mill?
EP: Yeah.
MB: OK. Did he build it?
EP: Had it built, yes.
MB: OK. Who did he get to do building for him, do you know?
EP: Man by the name of Victor Sheldrew did most of the building in the
valley. Very excellent, fast, competent carpenter, who happened to move
into the valley along with the rest of the folks up there. And he built
darn near every building in that valley -- including the flour mill, and
the elevator and the lumberyard and all the stores and buildings and
commercial buildings, and the whole works. He did it all. I just can't
hardly name a building that he didn't build, if it was built after 1912
or '13.
MB: Now, did he build your home also?
15
Pugh, Elwood (June 6, 1985)
EP: Yes, yes, Dad had three homes there and he built all three of them.
MB: Three homes -- you better explain that to me.
EP: Well, we built one first, Dad built first one over by the schoolhouse,
which was later Harry Sweet's home. And then he decided maybe that he
should have his house closer to his place of business. So he sold that
one and had another one built over by -- he never did live in that house
-- had another one built over by the flour mill, and then later he was in
the farming business, and he had a third home built where that farm was.
MB: Now where was the farm?
EP: Straight north to the river, straight north all the way to the river from
where the mill was. You'd go just as far as you could, straight north.
Dad's place was right on the river. Later it became Bill Cox's place,
and then Dad sold that out in 1939, I guess.
MB: OK. So which place did you live on for the longest in Montour?
EP: Oh, the only place I lived on in Montour was there by the flour mill.
MB: When you bought the property, though, there wasn't anything there, right?
EP: Nothing. There wasn't a building in the valley, wasn't hardly a fence.
There was a few stakes, locating around where Mr. Dewey had staked his
lots when I first went out there, but nothing else in the valley, except
that beautiful big grove that they used to have there.
MB: The grove, I'm not sure what you mean.
EP: Well, did you know where the church was?
MB: Mm -hmm.
EP: Well, there was about a solid grove of hardwood maple, elm, black walnut,
all kinds of trees, about two acres, about two city blocks, about five
acres solid grove when we first moved there.
MB: Who planted that?
16
Pugh, Elwood (June 6, 1985)
EP: Well, in the early days, you could only homestead 160 acres. But you
could take a timber claim out on quite a lot of land, if it had timbers.
So they planted the timber and took the claim.
MB: Who was "they ?"
EP: Oh, the early day on that old Marsh and Ireton ranch, somebody pulled
that. They were all full grown beautiful trees by the time I came there
in 1914. Beautiful . . . maybe an acre of that was in black walnut. And
many, many, many years later, back in the 1960's, '65, a man bought 20
acres up there that included the grove -- a man named Nelson Maybe,
bought 20 acres which included the grove, and he sold the black walnut to
a Japanese that came over here from Japan after it, for enough money to
pay for the whole 20 acres.
MB: My gosh. What did they do?
EP: No, no, no, cut them down, took the timber, make things out of that black
walnut. That's very valuable furniture wood.
MB: Now is that grove gone?
EP: Just about . you know, it's still there but, the remains of it are
still there, but the trees are old and a lot of it is gone, and it looks
pretty tough.
MB: That wasn't -- I've been reading in the newspapers about Dewey Grove --
that isn't -- ?
EP: That's it.
MB: That's the same thing?
EP: Sure.
MB: OK.
EP: But it was founded for a long time before Dewey ever got a hold of it.
MB: Now that makes sense to me. When Dewey was up there, did he live up
there for a while?
17
Pugh, Elwood (June 6, 1985)
EP: No, I don't think so, ever. No, he was much too involved in the Nampa
area, I think that was a business speculation. Doctor Platt had it
before Dewey got it, Dewey got it from Platt. I never heard of Dewey
living up there. He always had a sharecropper running it, or leased it
to somebody or something. Dewey was operating the Dewey Palace in those
years, and had a railroad going to Murphy and a railroad running to
Emmett, which he sold, a year or so later. He even built the railroad
from Payette to Emmett.
MB: So he was pretty well out of there by the time your folks came.
EP: Yes, Dewey was definitely out of there by the time my folks came. He had
gotten rid of all of it.
MB: OK. Going back to the flour mill, I didn't quite understand how your
father went from the lumber and milling business into the flour mill.
Can you explain that a little bit to me, how that took place?
EP: Well, he was operating the lumberyard at Montour as a retail outlet, and
there was an awful lot of grain being shipped out of Montour, and Gar-
dena, and Horseshoe Bend, and any place they could get to the railroad.
So Dad saw a need for a grain storage facility, so in 1915 he built the
grain elevator, which was really a storage facility for grain, and I
think he had in mind that potentially it could be a flour mill. And I
think it was flour mill by 1918, he started building the flour mill, to
utilize that good grain up in that country. Just terminating one busi-
ness venture and starting another one is all I can tell you. I don't
know.
MB: Did he have any experience with milling flour? How did he -- ?
EP: No, no, he hired a -- we hired a fully qualified miller all the time we
were on that mill.
18
Pugh, Elwood (June 6, 1985)
MB: Who was that? Do you remember?
EP: We had two, and I don't remember their names, no.
MB: Where did they come from? Do you know?
EP: I don't know, I don't know. I knew the old guys, they were good flour
millers, boy. They had good flour. We had most of the bakeries in the
Boise valley using our flour.
MB: OK. That was my next question, really, where -- ?
EP: Oh, all the -- for example, Golden Rule stores, or C. C. Anderson stores,
stocked Dad's flour in all their . all the other local stores
throughout the country stocked his flour as a regular flour, and the
bakeries in Boise.
MB: Did he ever ship it out of state?
EP: Not that I know of. If we had any excess grain, that would go to any
place where we could get the best market. We shipped many carloads of
grain out.
MB: What was the rate of production within the mill, you know, how many
sacks? If you can give me an idea of the volume --
EP: Oh, yes, I can. I should know exactly how many barrels a day that mill
would produce, but it's slipped me. Oh, nuts.
MB: That's OK.
EP: I don't believe I can handle it right now. It was not a large mill, not
small. I know I had the -- I had to fill about 30 or 40 sacks an hour,
to keep up with the stream, fill them, 50 -pound sacks, sew them up and
take them out. But I could, I don't know, I shouldn't say.
MB: OK. That's fine. So you worked at the mill too?
EP: Oh, yes.
MB: How old were you when you were doing this?
EP: Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen.
19
Pugh, Elwood (June 6, 1985)
MB: OK. What was your job there?
EP: Oh, move anything that needed moved in the warehouse. Actually, when I
was twelve years old I ran the elevator deal that lifted all the cement
up for the building of the flour mill and the elevators. I worked all
summer doing that. They did it by horsepower, so I operated the horse
that lifted the hoist, that lifted the cement up to build those buildings
with. And then I learned to be what they call a flour packer. You fill,
and weigh, and sew up the sacks of flour, and grain and bran, and so
forth, and as a result of that I worked for Pillsbury for a couple years,
later years.
MB: Where?
EP: Astoria, Oregon.
MB: You mentioned the building of the mill, helping with that. Can you
describe that a little bit, how they did that?
EP: Well, it was cement, reinforced cement, reinforced concrete construction.
MB: Who did the building?
EP: Victor Sheldrew, the same guy that did all the rest of the building in
Montour.
MB: And he had a team?
EP: No, no, we hired other people -- he was the boss, he run the operation,
planned and supervised and was the foreman on the job, but we hired the
other help as needed. So there was about six other guys worked in the
building with those structures. I can name them all [unintelligible]
right now.
MB: Did your father have plans for the mill or how did he -- ?
EP: Oh yes, sure.
MB: Who drew those up?
20
Pugh, Elwood (June 6, 1985)
EP: I can't answer that. I don't know whether he did, or Vic Sheldrew, or
probably joint effort, and maybe -- had to be tied up with a knowledge of
what the building would require, and the milling equipment that was going
to be put into it.
MB: Where did they get the cement for -- ?
EP: Shipped it in by the carload from Lime, Oregon.
MB: How about gravel for it? Where would you -- ?
EP: Got it out of the river.
MB: Where in the river? Do you know?
EP: Yeah. Over near the bridge. Washed it and washed it and washed it, and
we still had too much mica in it, but we had so much steel in that
concrete that it couldn't fall down. Matter of fact they couldn't hardly
even shoot it down.
MB: That's right. You were showing me pictures of that. How much dynamite
did it take?
EP: Well, they put 400 pounds in the building, the first shot, that didn't do
it, so they put 800 down and they did pretty good that time.
MB: So it was reinforced with steel?
EP: Tremendous reinforcement of that thing, I should say. Carload after
carload of reinforcement steel in that building.
MB: When you say reinforcement steel, were they like girders, small girders,
or pieces, or -- ?
EP: Well, reinforcement steel is a certain kind of steel you put in cement.
It is made for the purpose. Rods go up and rods go around, and also
there was a lot of fencing in this, regular old woven fencing, all around
in that cement, and then the cement poured right in around it in the
forms.
MB: I was wondering, 'cause when I went out there, from what was left I could
21
Pugh, Elwood (June 6, 1985)
see sort of a mesh there.
EP: Oh, yes, there was quite a lot of fencing in that building, as well as
these rods that went up and went round. Reinforced concrete always has
those in it.
MB: You know it's really quite an art to be able to work with cement, to
build a building that tall. Sheldrew had experience in that or -- ?
EP: Oh, he was competent. He was a competent construction man, you bet. He
was good and fast.
MB: Do you know about how long it took to build the mill?
EP: Oh, it was kind of a slow process with the processes we use. I say that
cement was all lifted up by a horse derrick in wheel barrows.
MB: Now when you say a derrick, what kind of a -- ?
EP: Well, you build a big elevator, and it had two platforms, when one goes
up the other comes down, balanced platforms, and a cement mixer at the
bottom, wheelbarrows setting in those platforms. You'd mix a batch of
cement and run it into the wheelbarrows, and run it up, and then the
other one's down and you fill it, and run back, and they'd wheel it
around on top of the building til they got it to the right place and pour
it in the form. That old horse would just keep going back and forth all
day long every day -- wheel barrow up, wheel barrow up, wheel barrow up.
Never tipped. That was my job. Worked very effectively.
MB: So how long did it take? Over a year?
EP: Oh, no, we didn't work in that building that long. That building was
done in a month or two, couple months. Then in the inside finishing work
took a little longer, but I mean this main structure was in oh, two
months, maybe.
MB: You mentioned the Depression affected the closing of the mill. Can you
22
Pugh, Elwood (June 6, 1985)
expand on that a little bit, on what was going on?
EP: Ah. I suspect, the main thing that covers the closing of the mill -- he
didn't close the mill in 19 -, I say he lost some money, but he didn't
close that mill in '22. I think the thing that caused the mill to close
probably was that the farmers probably on Brownlee had pretty well de-
pleted their soil after about ten or fifteen years of raising wheat
without any replenishment on the soil, and they found they could perhaps
do better going to pasture and hay.' And that good old Turkey Red wheat
didn't come out of Brownlee like it had before. That was one thing.
Another thing was, that what did come out, the mills all around the
country would pay five cents a hundred higher in competition to Dad, than
they would any place else, and they'd sell their flour at five cents a
sack cheaper, in competition to Dad, than they would any place else, and
I think he got kind of discouraged. Didn't make much money at it. I
know the old flour miller at Caldwell, told Dad it'd cost him a hundred
thousand dollars to close his business, but he'd finally did it.
MB: Oh, that's really hard. Now did your dad sell the mill before it closed
down?
EP: No, just closed it up.
MB: That's too bad. Then it was utilized after that though, wasn't it?
EP: Never.
MB: Oh, not for anything.
EP: Oh, not as a mill. The warehouse was used continuously. Dad closed that
out about 1927. It was never used after that. Then there was land in
connection with the mill there, I guess 15 acres or so, and a man by the
named of Curtis bought it. And he bought the land and the mill along
with it. And somebody came in and bought the machinery from the mill and
moved it out to another place. Otherwise they'd just set there and it
23
Pugh, Elwood (June 6, 1985)
was never utilized. I think the elevator was used for grain storage some
and the warehouse was always used for storage. Curtis mostly was a
farmer and he farmed a lot of land.
MB: When the mill was at its peak, how many people did it employ?
EP: Three. Maybe four, but -- the miller, and me, and -- yeah, four at the
most. One man could run that mill.
MB: Hmm, that's interesting.
EP: But you got to have somebody to pack the flour, and fill the sacks, and
fill the sacks of bran and flour, and haul them out into the warehouse.
But as far as running the mill's concerned, one -- and he'd sit there and
watched it run.
MB: Did the millers live in Montour also?
EP: Oh yeah, yeah, we'd hire them, they'd move there. Sure.
MB: Did they leave when the mill closed down?
EP: Yes, yes.
MB: I was curious about other people in the town. Who were your neighbors
right around you?
EP: Oh, across the track, section foreman, Frank Palmer, and on down across
the road was the Talleys, and Lloyd Cox of the livery stable. One block
north was Walter Day the depot agent. The town was pretty small; about
four, five city blocks, you might say, but that was our closest neigh-
bors. The McRoberts lived right across the road from our house, a family
of mother and father and three boys, about my age. The oldest one was
about my age. He went to Alaska in 1935, became United States marshal up
there, for years and years and years, and now still lives in Fairbanks.
He comes down to see me every year, you know.
MB: Oh, great.
24
EP: He's 81, this year.
MB: So, with your neighbors, did you ever hav,
with them? Did they ever help out in the
EP: Not much. Buford Swearingen was always a
lived a block down the track. He bought
he lived there all the time that we ever
Pugh, Elwood (June 6, 1985)
a any sort of work relationships
lumber yard, or -- ?
steady employee of ours, and he
an acreage and home there, and
run the lumberyard or the mill
or the elevator-or anything up there. He worked there. Then we closed
that down, he came down and ran the Citizen's Lumber Company here in
Emmett for years and years.
MB: What kind of social activities? Would you get together with the neigh-
bors?
EP: Oh, my goodness sakes, I guess so! That was a busy place. Wintertime,
mostly. School parties, and sleigh rides and get out in the hills -- and
skating, oh my goodness, we'd get a month or two of good skating every
winter on those little lakes round the valley. And sleigh rides with
teams and sleighs at night, and parties. And every week something like
that going on. And of course their school activities and school plays
and so forth. But summertime was hunting and fishing, and swimming and
hiking, and going out camping, and everything else that the kids can
figure out.
MB: How about the families? Did they ever get together and do things?
EP: Oh, yes, a lot of social activity. Visit each other. Not formal
parties, I don't remember very much, but there was a Ladies Aid that had
to meet every week and do all their gossiping, and sewing for anybody
that might need -- I never heard of anybody getting on any welfare around
that area. They were all taken care of locally, if there was any needs.
And the church was quite active, the resident minister, Methodist -
Episcopal church, and of course they had their activities that about
25
Pugh, Elwood (June 6, 1985)
half of the people in the town attended regularly to church, Sunday
school, Epworth League and all the rest of those things. And -- I don't
know, we never seemed to lack for something to do. Of course all the
kids had chores, too. That took the place of a lot of social activity.
That takes the place of TV real good. They were quite extensive.
MB: For any sort of community social activities -- you only had one church?
EP: Yes.
MB: So most of the community activities revolved around the church?
EP: Oh, we had a town hall, and we had basketball games in that, when we
wanted to, and there were athletic events with other towns, always,
Sweet, Horseshoe Bend, and even Emmett sometimes, season permitting.
Baseball outside, and basketball inside.
MB: I'm ready for another . . .
END OF TAPE ONE.
OR
Pugh, Elwood (June 6, 1985)
TAPE TWO, SIDE ONE
EP: Well, actually, a group like that, with what we would call now a
lot of isolation, particularly for three -four months of the winter, when
you couldn't get out, had to develop its own activities and recreational
activities and get together to break the monotony. And it was a con-
genial town. And it was an unusual town, as congenial as it was, in
fact. One man came in and was going to build a saloon there, early in
the development of the town, and a group of the people got together and
told him they'd prefer not to have a saloon in the town, so he just built
a pool hall instead. He had come down from the old mining district of
Pearl, saw the town building up, and he was going to build a saloon, but
he built a pool hall instead, and a restaurant next to it. He was a good
citizen of the town.
But it was a rather unique town, to me. I don't know how unique it
was in those days, but I never knew of anybody ever having a key to their
house up there. And they'd go away for a week at a time, and never lock
the door. And never, I never heard of anybody ever missing anything. I
never heard of anybody going into anybody else's house, even. So there
wasn't much of the problems that we seem to have now.
MB: So, in there, say if you got together, it was pretty well the whole town
getting together?
EP: Oh, yes. Pretty much, yeah, depending on what the activity was. About
half of them went to church, about half of them didn't, but for other
town meetings of things of town interest, yes, they'd be pretty well
represented.
MB: Would you have town meetings, over any issues, or anything, or -- ?
EP: Oh, sometimes. I can't remember what, but -- didn't take very many
27
Pugh, Elwood (June 6, 1985)
people to have a town meeting, you know. But school problems, make up
their mind whether they're going to sponsor an addition to the school,
whether they want to start trying to have a high school, what we're going
to do this year on the roads around the area, and so forth. Things like
that.
MB: How about any picnics or anything like that? Were there any town pic-
nics?
EP: Oh, we had a little, oh, families' would have their -- yes, there were
picnics in that big Dewey Grove you were speaking of fairly frequently,
but maybe the boys' group would have a kind of a, what you might call a
Boy Scout outfit without official sanction of Boy Scouts, but we had a
group of about eight or ten boys, and somebody would take them up in the
hills on their camping trips and so forth, or family groups would have
their picnics, or church groups would have their picnics, sure. Lots of
times we'd go up on Dry Buck for those kind of things, or up in the hills
some place. Or later, up the Payette River when the road was built. The
road wasn't built up the Payette River until 1921, '22, and it wasn't a
very good road then.
MB: For some of the activities, that people had, was there any celebrations
like Christmas, or Fourth of July, that involved the whole town?
EP: Oh, practically, when you have all the school plays at Christmas, sure,
all the people had to come to see the kids perform. And the church would
have its group for special events. We used to have a Chatauqua come in
there, that was -- and that was a very talented group, that put up a big
tent in these small towns, and sell tickets in advance for the season
tickets, you know, and boy, you'd get everybody in town on those things.
They were pretty good.
MB: Hmm. So they came clear to Montour.
28
Pugh, Elwood (June 6, 1985)
EP: Oh, yes, there was enough community around there to support the Chatau-
qua, you betcha! Had it most every summer.
MB: That's great. Would people come from other towns for that?
EP: I suppose some of them came over from Sweet, some of them, after we got a
few cars. That's a long ways to travel when you have to hook up your
horses and go.
MB: I was going to ask you, did families ever go any place else for enter-
tainment? Would they go to Emmett, or any place to do any activities?
EP: Not prior to 1925. Roads weren't good enough, and transportation wasn't
good enough. No, when you left the town, you went out for a full day, or
two or three days, rather than just running out for an evening. Wasn't
any of that in those days. Roads weren't good enough, transportation
wasn't good enough.
MB: Once the cars came, I realize you left in '38, but in between that time,
did you see that change?
EP: I wasn't there until '38, but Dad was.
MB: Oh, OK.
EP: But I left there, actually, '22, really, and then I was away to school,
and then formally got away from there to work in '28, myself. But that
was slow. This growth of automobiles was -- I suppose it was fairly fast
-- but then by 1915, there was only two cars in the valley, and probably
by 1925 there was eight or ten. So it didn't come real fast when you had
cars. And by 1930, everything was dependent on them.
MB: Talking about other community services, I guess, what would people -- you
said there was a doctor, early on in Montour?
EP: For a while, yes.
MB: How long was one there? The whole time your were there?
?W
Pugh, Elwood (June 6, 1985)
EP: Oh, I suppose a year and a half. He moved to Portland. No, our medical
services were from Emmett, mostly. Summertimes they could get up there
-- by car, or by horse in the early days, and by car later -- and in a
dire emergency in the winter time why, off the records, the section
foreman would bring the patient down [unintelligible] into Emmett valley.
Or in a real emergency, come down and get the doctor and take him up.
But otherwise our medical service was primarily -- we had a drugstore,
for a while there, in Montour.
MB: When was that, approximately?
EP: Oh, 1915 to '18, I suppose.
MB: Mm -hmm. So did you have any nurses or anybody?
EP: No, no.
MB: Nothing there. All depended on Emmett.
EP: Some of those women were pretty competent around there, though. They
didn't let anybody be sick, without being there taking care of them, I'll
tell you.
MB: Was that part of the role of the Ladies Aid Society?
EP: No, it was as informal as could be. They just did it. Any time anybody
needed you, there was somebody there.
MB: Good. What about dental care, too?
EP: Emmett, mostly.
MB: How about for -- sounds like you didn't need any police protection.
EP: No, we never did have any. Never did have any form of it. I never even
heard of anybody deputized, in case it was needed. I never heard of any
policeman. Of course, once in a while. I knew of a murder up there, in
1917. The sheriff's responsibility.
MB: The county sheriff.
EP: Oh, yes.
30
Pugh, Elwood (June 6, 1985)
zat murder was this?
i, a guy by the name of Nick St. Clair, was married to a gal up there by
ze name of Myrtle Schilling [Effie Skillings]. And they had one child,
id they'd separated, and Myrtle [Effie] had left him, and she was back
there with her father, and Nick was a kind of fiery Italian, I guess,
decided he was going to do her in, so he came to Emmett, hired a car,
id went up there looking for her. And she was riding in the wagon from
)ntour to Sweet with her father, that day. He had this guy, he'd hired
_m to take him up there, and he got out of the car, walked over to the
igon, shot her five times, and left.
The car didn't bring him back, whoever he'd rented, and he took out
rer Squaw Butte, some direction. Everybody in the country, everybody up
there, out with their rifle, looking for Nick St. Clair. You didn't need
any posse, the whole country was a posse. I don't know of anybody wasn't
out of Montour with a rifle, looking for him. And he had a gun. He got
down over the other side of Squaw Butte over there some place and was
walking down a road, and somebody come along and picked him up, wanting
to know who he was, and he said he was so- and -so, out looking for that
guy Nick St. Clair! (laughter) That's true. They hauled him all the way
to Weiser, to have dinner with him in the restaurant, not knowing who he
was at all, that he was the murderer. And they were searching the whole
country. And one of the Talley boys, who had the store at Montour, was
out doing the searching along with the rest of them, and he happened to
be down at Weiser, in his searching, and walked into this restaurant, and
saw Nick. And so they picked him up right there. He knew him.
And he was put up for life, I guess, and I think he was paroled out
35 years later, and came to work for me, on my job for Morrison - Knudsen.
31
Pugh, Elwood (June 6, 1985)
He was a good powder man, good dynamite man, and I was running a big
dynamite operation. The union sent me a man one morning named St. Clair.
So I went down to find out who he was, and it was old Nick St. Clair,
just got out of the pen.
MB: Good grief. When you were working with M.K., that was when you were --
where were you?
EP: I was over at Eden, building that Jap relocation center over there, then,
on that job.
MB: Oh, that's interesting. So he worked well for you?
EP: Oh, yes, he was a good powder man, sure. Yeah, he was a good dynamite
man.
MB: Were there any other cases in Montour of -- ?
EP: I don't know if I ever heard of any other case of violence around there.
Had a bootlegger or two. Don't know whether they ever got caught or not.
MB: Well, I was wondering, when you were describing that there were no sa-
loons. Did the pool hall have any liquor there?
EP: Well, most of this time was during Prohibition, you know.
MB: That's right.
EP: It was from 1917 to 133 was Prohibition, and they sold what they called
"near beer ". Did you ever hear of near beer? It wasn't very near.
MB: Before that time was there ever any liquor in the town?
EP: No, no, as I say, the town decided they'd rather not have a saloon, so we
never did have one.
MB: Were there any other problems with robberies or anything, in the town
itself?
EP: Never heard of one.
MB: OK. Were there any other sort of community service organizations? You
talked about the Ladies Aid, but --
32
Pugh, Elwood (June 6, 1985)
EP: No, I don't think so.
MB: Mostly all.
EP: It was quite active, but that was -- as a service organization, the only
one I ever heard of.
MB: OK.
EP: Oh, the Woodsmen had a hall there for a while.
MB: Oh, yeah, that's right. Now were they more a union or were they just
fraternal?
EP: Oh, it was just a fraternal organization. And one of their primary
purposes was -- well, one of their main features is good insurance, I
think.
MB: Yeah. Were the people who belonged to that mostly lumber people?
EP: No, no. Everybody wanted to join it. Just a fraternal organization.
MB: I see. What about problems -- or maybe there weren't any problems --
what about sanitation for a small town like that?
EP: Everything was on septic tanks. Everybody had their own water supply.
There was no city services of any kind.
MB: So even the businesses, everything, was on -- ?
EP: Own supply.
MB: OK.
EP: There was no power, no electricity in there, until 1919. And then an old
power plant, about five miles up toward Horseshoe Bend, that was
operating in 1919 -- incidentally, that power plant up the river, had
been built to supply electricity for the electric interurban that circled
Boise Valley. And that was the power that supplied it. And by 1919
Idaho Power had bought that interurban, and also the power plant along
with it.
33
Pugh, Elwood (June 6, 1985)
So in 1919, we got a power line ran from that power plant down to
Montour to power the flour mill and elevator with. And that then powered
the city. But prior to that, there were a few little light plants,
individual home light plants -- I guess Dad was the only one that had
one. We had little -- had electric lights in our house, but otherwise
everything was kerosene, or Aladdin lanterns, or lamps.
MB: You had a little generator then?
EP: Yeah.
MB: How did he run the generator?
EP: Gasoline motor, and a whole flock of batteries. Charge it up and -- We
had electric lights and a few little power units around. Until this
power came in in 1919, and that provided electric power for the city.
MB: What about the other small towns, Sweet and Ola?
EP: None of them had electricity.
MB: When -- did they get it after that?
EP: They got electricity to come into that -- I suspect, I'm not sure, but I
susupect -- rural electrification, early in the Roosevelt administration,
put electricity all over the country. Horseshoe Bend had electricity
before Montour, because they had a wire ran up from this little plant up
to Horseshoe Bend, too.
MB: Well that makes sense. When you talk about the septic tanks, was that
early on too? ,
EP: Well, it was the only way of disposal of dredge. Course understand that
a sizeable portion of houses never even had a sink in those days. When
you wanted to throw the dishwater, you threw it out in the back yard.
Although most of the houses in Montour did have a sink and did have -- I
don't know what proportion of them had running water. I suspect most of
them never had running water until we got electricity, cause there's no
34
Pugh, Elwood (June 6, 1985)
way to pump it.
MB: There isn't any real ground water in the valley?
EP: Oh, yes, the fine wells there. You'd drill a well down to 80 or 100 feet
and you went through a couple of real hard pans and got a flow of water
that was fine water, up there. And the water would come within a few
feet of the surface, and you could put an electric pump on it and have
water. But I'm sure that everybody had wells with a hand pump, in their
back yard, up until electricity came there.
MB: OK. So there was never a problem with good water supply.
EP: Never was. Matter of fact we had three artesian flows in town there.
Good cold water, good tasting fresh cold water.
MB: I was going to ask you about the Grange. Where was it located?
EP: Sweet. The Grange organization was over to Sweet. And during the years
I was there, Grange was not very active. There was a Grange activity at
Brownlee and a Grange hall, and in the wintertime, we used to -- with
snow on the ground, we'd hook up a team of horses, with a sleigh, and go
up to Brownlee to the Grange dances once in a while, and that was quite
a trip. That was about 12, 14 miles up that mountain, and they usually
danced til daylight.
MB: Sounds like fun. Would people just stay overnight there then?
EP: No, no, they'd load up about daylight and head for home.
MB: What would they do with their kids all that time?
EP: Put them under the bench. Most of them were young people, didn't have
kids.
MB: So did many of the people in Montour belong to the Grange?
EP: No, I don't know, I don't know about that. I never heard of much Grange
activity at Montour in early years. There's been quite a little bit in
35
Pugh, Elwood (June 6, 1985)
later years, in the last 20, 30, I know people around there that belong
to the Grange, but the organization's primarily at Sweet.
MB: OK. I was also going to ask you -- I read a couple of times about Fourth
of July picnics up at Montour. Do you know much about that or remember?
EP: No, I don't, not really. I expect they had some good ones. Had a fine
grove to have them in. Lots of picnics out in that grove over the years.
Like a city park deal. Course kids, we had to build a tree house out
there, when I was a kid. Nobody paid much attention to us, until they
found the floor of that tree house was 42 feet off the ground. Then we
got in a little trouble.
MB: You built it all by yourselves?
EP: Well, four of us.
MB: Who was that? You and -- ?
EP: Oh, I and Ted McRoberts, and Merton Blackford and I think Johnny Joines.
When they found it, it was 42 feet off the ground. We had big spikes
driven in the tree, which made our steps to go up it. It was quite a
project. Almost so high I was afraid to get in it.
MB: I can see why. That sounds like fun. We've been talking about some of
the people in town. I'd be curious -- some of the people who were really
good -- do you remember any that were good craftsman, or had special
crafts, that stand out in your mind? Or artists?
EP: Of course, Vic Sheldrew was a carpenter. And sewing crafts, crocheting,
quilting, all those, of course, all the women did. People made their own
things in those days. They knew how to sew and patch, and handiwork, but
I don't know much about it really, except that was an activity, of
course, the Ladies Aid did some of it. In later years, I've known of
some. Boy, that Dorothy Clark is a crocheting machine. Do you know of
-- well, we're on tape, so we won't get on that.
36
Pugh, Elwood (June 6, 1985)
MB: Oh, that's OK.
EP: I can't remember any women up there that weren't somewhat gifted in such
things. Gifted -- they did it, you know. But it was a way of life.
MB: I wondered if anybody stuck in your mind that were leatherworkers, or
worked with anything like that. Or wood, woodcarvers, or anybody like
that.
EP: No, not really.
MB: OK. How about, were there any sort of town characters that you could
describe?
EP: No. I guess not.
MB: Seems like about every town has someone that stood out in --
EP: Well, they were around in the area. One old guy I can remember -- I
can't remember his name. But he was, lived in Pearl and he freighted out
of Pearl and he drove four horses, two wagons, freighted up to Sweet. He
freighted all around the country, wherever he could get a freighting job,
and he only had one hand. But he could handle those four lines and that
brake, and the brake rope, and the whole dang thing. I don't know how he
did it, only had one hand. It was interesting to see him, every time he
come around. Course he had some -- I'm sure he devised some gadgets to
help him do the job.
MB: Yeah, that'd be interesting.
EP: And then old Jake Ewes, old Joe Jake Ewes, was a character at Sweet in
the early days, he was also a freighter, an old Frenchman. I was pretty
small. I don't remember any real honest -to- goodness characters much
around there, that would be identified as such.
MB: I was curious, also, you know, when you talk now, I kind of get the
picture that it was more individual homes, not really a town, and people
37
Pugh, Elwood (June 6, 1985)
got together more informally. You know, was it the business that made
the town, really, or -- ?
EP: Well, 50 families around, and the railhead supported what little business
there was, but you didn't run to town, like Emmett or Boise, in those
days like you do now, and they had to provide for the necessities, but
not much of the luxuries. The necessities were provided for in those
stores. You couldn't buy any furniture, you couldn't buy a suit of
clothes. You could go to town and get those sort of things. There might
be a few dresses on the racks for the women, cheaper hats maybe for them,
but -- and a few heavy mackinaws, and hats and boots for the men. That
was about it. But all the necessities you could get. Not fresh
vegetables -- you raised those and put them up yourself.
But the town took care of the 50 families around, that's all. And
the people that came to the railhead, because of it being a railhead --
Actually, it was a little larger than 50 families, because Brownlee had
no town at all, and they come down to Montour and then they might do a
little shopping there. And Ola was the same way. Ola had one store,
really. So they come to town, they'd maybe eat in a restaurant, might
get some things in the store they couldn't get at home, not much.
MB: Mm -hmm. What was the restaurant? What was the name of that?
EP: Well I don't know. It was Crawford's, Mrs. Crawford ran it. Served good
meals.
MB: And it was just a straight restaurant?
EP: Yes, dining room, served meals morning, noon and evening, not all day
long. Actually, this man who moved down from Pearl to build the pool
hall, built the restaurant beside the pool hall, and he had gas lighting
in his pool hall and then his restaurant, which was fueled by carbide, do
you know what I mean?
38
Pugh, Elwood (June 6, 1985)
MB: Mm -hmm.
EP: Along about 1915, he was out in the backyard servicing that thing, and it
blew up. Killed him deader than a mackerel. I was on my way to school
by there, saw that can go up in the air. Blowed it way up in the air,
and killed him deader than dead. So his wife continued to run the
restaurant. Later she married a man by the name of Johnson. In later
years they moved away and sold their business to other people.
MB: That's amazing. I know that carbide can be really dangerous.
EP: You bet.
MB: I'm going to flip over the tape here.
TAPE 2, SIDE 2
EP:
Montour, really, was an excellent place to
grow up kids, because of the
outside influences were not -- peer pressures
on kids was nothing like it
is now. And there was so much for them to
do, from the standpoint of
hunting and fishing, and tramping around the
hills and swimming, a nice
influence on the --
There were a lot of game around there,
ducks and geese and [unin-
telligible] in the fall, and lots of rabbits
in the hills, and oh, my --
and trapping, if they wanted a little bit of
spending money, lay out a
row of traps. And muskrats, and coyotes, and
skunks, and a few mink, and
by golly, they'd get a lot of spending money,
trapping.
MB:
Who would they sell those to?
EP:
Oh, you'd sell them to fur - buyers, all over the country.
MB:
Would they come through to Montour?
EP:
No, no, usually you got a catalogue listing
of how much they'll pay for
what grades and you ship them to them. But
Ted McRoberts, and Johnny
Joines and a half a dozen other guys made their spending money trapping
39
Pugh, Elwood (June 6, 1985)
there. Matter of fact Freddy Clark is still doing it.
MB: I was wondering, so that was kind of one of the resources around there.
How would you describe other natural resources around there?
EP: I don't know of any.
MB: You were telling me a little bit about the coal.
EP: Oh, there is a lignite up on the mountain south of Montour. It's a coal,
it has not age or pressure sufficient to develop it into full -blown coal,
and it's really not satisfactory to'burn. A few people tried it, hauled
a few wagonloads down, and get a lot of ash out of it, and not much fire.
And there was an area up on the old Cruickshank ranch, which originally
was the Church place, which was mined during the thirties, gold- mined,
and they got a sizeable amount of gold out of that, I guess. I really
didn't know how much they did on that. Other than that I can't think of
any resources.
MB: OK. There weren't any other kind of minerals? And no lumber close by?
EP: No, nothing closer than about 18 miles.
MB: And then they had plenty of water too then?
EP: Plenty of water, you bet. First right on the Payette River.
MB: Now what about the climate? Do you remember, growing up, what it was
like there?
EP: Well, climate is somewhat related to altitude, and the altitude of Mon-
tour is oh, a couple hundred feet, 250 feet less than Boise. And it's
pretty well protected from the standpoint of wind. It probably is very
similar to Boise's climate, except that we got a little less wind, it's a
little more protected from it.
MB: Do you remember any bad winters?
EP: 1916 was a dilly. We had about two and a half feet of snow in Montour,
and about that much here in Emmett, too. And we got what's called a
40
Pugh, Elwood (June 6, 1985)
chinook wind, a warm wind came in along with a little bit of rain, and it
went off in a hurry, and it was a lot of water in the valley. Had to go
around in a wagon to take the kids to school, for a day or so.
MB: Do you remember, did you have any problems during the winters with
flooding or with ice flows or any problem?
EP: No, no, no, no. That ice flow problem has been a result of this dam, and
the backwater. Course we had them, we had ice flows every year, but they
floated on down the river. They didn't jam up. But with the loss of the
current in the river, the ice stops moving, and it jams up, and that's
the problem they're having now. And it's a real serious problem. It has
covered half that valley with ice, a time or two. Ice four and five feet
thick, big chunks, and it's going to get worse as the dam builds up more
silt. What you do is get a big thaw, and that thick ice out of the south
fork of the Payette, up through Lowman, or the north fork of the Payette
up toward Cascade, and you get a thaw and that ice all breaks loose and
starts floating down the river, and no place for it to go when it hits
this backwater. It's a real serious problem.
MB: So you don't remember any sort of flooding problems when you were there?
EP: Oh, there was no flooding problems then. That ice just kept on going
[own the river.
[ow about any run -off from the hills or anything like that?
fell, yes, that 1916 was run -off from the hills.
Lnd that was the only time you can remember?
)h, we'd sometimes get a little -- that was, that didn't do people's
souses any damage. We had a lot of water around, but it was not serious
:nough to do damage. And later, there was a little more drainage put
!own through the valley, and so it didn't bother later.
41
Pugh, Elwood (June 6, 1985)
MB: Now, when you were there, were they working on Black Canyon at all, when
you were there, or since you've gone on?
EP: Oh, sure. It was built in 1908, started in 1908, Black Canyon Canal, you
MB: Was there any row crop irrigation right there in the valley?
42
mean.
MB:
Well, I was thinking the dam.
EP:
Oh, the dam. The dam started about 1922,
and was built, pretty well
finished, I think it was finished in 1924.
Sure.
MB:
OK. What do you remember about that? What were the townspeople talking
about when they were building the dam?
EP:
Oh, not much comment. It didn't affect us very much. I suppose two or
three might have went down there and went
to work, but it didn't have
much impact. We didn't realize it was
going to do what it did, of
course. The water there at the McConnel
place, the lower end of the
valley, the bottom of the river, right now, must be at least 15 feet
above what it was then. Because of the
silt that was piled in there.
And it's taken a combination of a lot
of things to put that silt in
that river. First, is the railroad up the
north fork of the Payette; the
highway up the north fork of the Payette;
the highway up the south fork;
the highway, or the road, up the middle
fork. All these roads have
broken that ground loose, and when you get
any rain, then silt, gravel,
fine sand, from all these breaks, washes
down into the river. And that
comes on down the river when the current is
high, and stops right here in
Black Canyon. Now without all those roads
being built, there probably
would never have been any silt come down.
But being as the roads were
built, and the dam was built, it has filled
up the backwaters and is
going to flood the town out, [unintelligible]
in time will flood that
whole town site out.
MB: Was there any row crop irrigation right there in the valley?
42
Pugh, Elwood (June 6, 1985)
EP: Yes, for many years. We called the old ranch the upper end of the
valley, that was -- we called it the company ranch, it was owned by the
Dewey interests I think, or somebody else, the upper end of the valley --
and for many, many years they had about 20 Chinese hired there doing row
crops. And I don't know where they brought them in, they didn't
participate in any town activities or anything, they just had a bunkhouse
there, they came there, they worked, you didn't see much of them, but
they did row -- raised row crops, and what they were I don't know. Don't
know much about what they did with that.
MB: Hmm, that's interesting. But they never came into town, or shopped or
anything?
EP: Never see them, never see them.
MB: About how long were they there?
EP: Oh, I suppose, in the planting and care and harvesting season, and prob-
ably for four years, maybe.
MB: OK. Now that was starting, when did you say?
EP: Oh, about 1915, '16.
MB: That's interesting. You don't know what kind of crops or anything?
EP: I really don't know. Undoubtedly they were planting row crops. I don't
know, I never was up there. I don't know.
MB: OK. You called it the company ranch. It was still owned by Dewey at
that time?
EP: I'm not sure. There was the McConnel ranch, the town, and the company
ranch, three different spreads, and the one I'm talking about is at the
upper end of the valley.
MB: Was there any problem with soil washing from the farmlands?
EP: Not enough grade to that valley to do that.
43
Pugh, Elwood (June 6, 1985)
MB: Yeah, it's pretty flat right there. With the dam coming in, did Montour
at that time period get any benefit from that?
EP: No, no.
MB: As far as supplies being bought there or anything like that?
EP: No, no. There was a rumor going around, which I've had a tendency to
discredit, but this mill at Emmett, this 19- mill, was planned a couple
years before that, it was a big operation, Boise - Payette it was called
then, Boise - Cascade now. And the story was around Montour that they were
going to locate that mill at Montour. If Montour could be the county
seat, which was a county just being organized, and this may have all been
chatter around Montour that had no meaning at all, because it didn't make
sense. Emmett was the center for activity in the county, and where the
mill belonged. But there was some chatter to that effect, along about
1914 or -15 and I doubt that it had any true basis.
The county was organized in 1915, and the county seat was located in
Emmett. And the mill was built in '17. But those things -- no, that dam
didn't have any impact on Montour, really.
MB: And no irrigation was really supplied at all?
EP: Oh, no, no. That's down the river eight or ten miles from Montour.
Didn't affect our irrigation at all.
MB: You were talking about county seats. Were you around at all when Montour
was trying to be the county seat, when it was in Boise County? There was
a race between --
EP: Can't be. There wasn't any Montour then. There couldn't have been a
race between Montour and somebody, because there wasn't any Montour.
MB: Idaho City.
EP: When that area was in Boise County, was before it was in Ada, before it
was in Canyon, and before it was in Gem, so it was a long time ago. And
44
Pugh, Elwood (June 6, 1985)
I don't know who was in a race for the county seat of Boise county.
There'd been always a continual race in Boise County between Horseshoe
Bend and Idaho City.
MB: I guess there were some sort of rumors about, even before the town was
developed, trying to make it the county seat for Boise County.
EP: Montour?
MB: Yeah, but --
EP: Well, maybe there were, but that was far before my time.
MB: Right. You know we've talked about Sweet, too, and I still get a little
confused about the relationship of Montour to Sweet. Now, it seems like
all the other towns kind of keep --
EP: Well, this covered a little bit. Sweet was an early town. Sweet filled
the need of a town, to support the residents in that area and Brownlee
and Ola in early days. And it was about the same kind of a town as
Montour, except of course it wasn't a railhead, but it certainly was a
freighting center. And I don't know how soon Sweet was organized but it
was a going city by 1900. And it was a -- been there a long time then.
It just supplied the needs for the people of Ola, Brownlee and Sweet, and
the freighters going through to Long Valley, High Valley and so forth for
five months of the years when they could get through.
And all these roads in those days had way stations where you could
feed your horses and stay all night, frequently, because a heavy loaded
wagon, a real heavy- loaded outfit, wouldn't make over 10, 12, 14 miles a
day and the average load maybe 20. So those meant frequent places to
stop. Now there was a stopping place at Emmett, and there was a stopping
place at Marsh and Ireton ranch, and stopping place at Sweet, and
Brownlee, and Ola, and Dry Buck, all those places, had places where you
45
Pugh, Elwood (June 6, 1985)
could stop and have your horses fed, pay for the feeding, and have a
place where you could eat and sleep all night. Of course, during the
good weather months of the year, many of these freighters carried a
bedroll, and a bale of hay and a sack of oats, and slept out. They
didn't use these accomodations. But nevertheless these accomodations
were all along.
And that was big business in Sweet during freighting days. They had
two hotels, two livery stables, two blacksmith shops. One of those
livery stables could sometimes accommodate as many as 100 freighting
horses in a night -- not regularly that many, but that many sometimes.
And that was part of Sweet's purpose, as well as serving as a business
community for the area. Montour didn't get into that part of business
much. They were the railhead, not the service for the freighters so
much. And cars and trucks were beginning to come along a little bit.
MB: Was there much of a rivalry between Sweet and Montour?
EP: No. The business tended to move to Montour after it got established, but
Sweet remained. Sweet's business dried off pretty fast after 1915, for
lack of the freighting business. There wasn't any freighting; went up
with the railroad, after 1912. And at least half of the business came to
Montour, from the stores, and the bank moved from Sweet to Montour, the
drugstore moved from Sweet to Montour. Sweet had a newspaper, I think a
weekly probably. It didn't move, but it just quit. But Sweet was an
early town, and Montour was a better town later. But no, there wasn't
much rivalry, except in school baseball, or something like that.
MB: How about with other towns in the area? Was there any?
EP: Not much rivalry. We didn't have much contact with them.
MB: Yeah. Now I was also trying to figure out with the schools, there in
Montour, when you first started out in school, they had grades one
46
Pugh, Elwood (June 6, 1985)
through eight in Montour?
EP: Yes ma'am. Yeah, they had one through eight in two rooms, four grades in
each room. Just about enough students to fill up the two rooms, I
suppose about 25 to 30 students in each room, probably.
MB: Now, they didn't have the brick schoolhouse when you first came there?
EP: Yes, yes.
MB: They did, already.
EP: Built that immediately when the town was built.
MB: OK. Where did kids come to school, I mean, where were they, what area
did they cover?
EP: Just Montour area. Some of them, maybe were three miles away and would
ride horse, and they had a barn out back to store the horse in during the
day.
MB: Behind the school?
EP: Yes, out back of the school. Maybe three or four rode horses. The rest
of them walked in or hiked in. They came from as far away as three
miles, though, regularly.
MB: OK. Now where would they go to high school, then?
EP: Well, their first year of high school, two years of high school in 1921,
and it stayed a two -year high school until 1927, then they had four years
of high school.
MB: Where were those schools, where would they go to high school?
EP: Same building. Same building.
MB: When did they get the upper grades? They got the upper grades, but
before that where would kids go to high school?
EP: Oh, Emmett. Quite a few went to that Weiser Intermountain Institute
which was a boarding high school at Weiser, a fine school, there isn't
47
Pugh, Elwood (June 6, 1985)
any better school than that was. And quite a few came to Emmett, board
out, and go to high school here. That was about it.
MB: So you did have a four -year school.
EP: After '27, starting in '27.
MB: Now when did -- were you around or know about, when Sweet and Montour
combined?
EP: Oh, that's recent.
MB: Oh, OK, that was real recent.
EP: Yeah, that was in recent years.
MB: OK. What do you remember about your school days in Montour? What stands
out in your memory?
EP: Oh, I don't know. I don't know that I have anything standing out par-
ticularly well. I enjoyed school.
MB: Do any of the teachers stand out in your mind?
EP: Oh, sure, I remember them all, oh, yes. Mrs. Blackler, I suppose, most,
and Elmer Roberts. Mrs. Blackler was our tutor at the school before I
went to a school. Then I came down there and she taught me in eighth
grade and ninth grade at Montour. Then she became county superintendent.
Tenth grade, Elmer Roberts taught there his first year, came down to
Emmett as principal the next year, and became state superintendent of
schools a couple years thereafter. Made quite a record for himself.
MB: OK. You said she was your tutor. Up at Dry Buck?
EP: Yes. She was a good teacher, excellent. Became friends all our lives.
I don't remember. I made lifelong friends in that little old school, for
sure. My tenth grade school class, you've got a picture of it I think,
right there --
MB: Yeah.
EP: Every one of those guys -- I retired and moved here in 1970 -- every one
48
Pugh, Elwood (June 6, 1985)
of those guys that's still alive has been here to see me, since I
retired here. Some of them had to come half way around the world, but --
MB: Could you describe a little bit the school activities to me, like -- or
even just a school day. When would you start school?
EP: Nine o'clock, til four. We had school at nine o'clock, hour at lunch,
'til four, and it was pretty regular. There weren't much of these field
trips, and trips for athletics and trips for this and that. It was sit
at a desk studying most of the time. There weren't much interfering
activities really.
MB: You had that animal husbandry class --
EP: Oh, that was a regular class, and that was a field class in that, yeah.
That was Elmer Roberts' specialty. He'd been taught as a county agent
instead of a school teacher. But he couldn't get a job as a county
agent, so he became a school teacher. But that was his specialty. And
it was a good course, under him.
MB: When you went at nine, would they ring the bell? How would your day
start out?
EP: Oh, yes. I think the bell rang at 8 :30, to warn the people all around
the valley that it was time to get ready to go to school. Yeah, I think
it did, it rang at 8:30, and then maybe somebody would blow the whistle
or a local bell or something at nine o'clock when you came in.
MB: You said you had two rooms. How would the kids divide up?
EP: First, second, third and fourth in one room, and fifth, sixth, seventh,
and eighth in the other room, heated by coal, no electric lights, of
course, in those early years. And the coal was in the basement. And
some boy got two dollars and a half a month for carrying that coal
upstairs and keeping the fire going.
49
Pugh, Elwood (June 6, 1985)
MB: Now, did you have two teachers then?
EP: Yes.
MB: More than that, or -- ?
EP: Not when we had grade school.
MB: OK. Do you remember who your teachers were in the elementary?
EP: Yes, Miss Crole, Miss Graham, Miss Skinner, Mrs. Stoddard, Mrs. Blackler,
sure, sure.
MB: I bet you weren't involved in any school pranks, were you?
EP: Oh sure, sure. You always get involved in things.
MB: Do you remember anything happening at school, that stands out?
EP: Well, the most startling thing I remember at school was -- one night, Ted
McIvers and I heard about four boys that were going out and steal water-
melons across the road from the school, they were going to steal a bunch
of watermelons that night. So Ted and I decided that we would sneak out
there beside the watermelon patch and start shooting our shotguns about
the time they got to stealing watermelons -- so we did. And just
literally scared those four kids to death. I tell you, they took off
down through that corn patch beside that watermelon patch like a bunch of
jack rabbits.
Come to school the next day with great big scratches up and down
their arms and all over their faces. If you run through a corn field,
those leaves just cut you to pieces. And we didn't dare tell them what
we'd done, or they would have beat us to death, even to this day. Took
us all day to find out how they got all those scratches. We kept asking
them, how they got all those scratches, and finally it came out; they'd
been out in Mr. Noland's watermelon patch and the old so- and -so had
started shooting at them. Yes, sir, we don't dare tell them to this day.
That's the guy that became United States marshal of Alaska.
50
Pugh, Elwood (June 6, 1985)
And tales like that happened of course. One of the interesting
things might be all the fights they had.
MB: OK. Hold on.
END OF TAPE TWO.
51
Pugh, Elwood (June 6, 1985)
TAPE THREE, SIDE ONE
MB: OK. You were mentioning some other incidents that happened at school?
EP: Oh, I'm not going to tell you about any kids' fights. All kids have to
fight some.
MB: Do you remember any incidents with the teachers or anything like that?
Were there any problems?
EP: Oh, some people are very popular in the community as teachers, and some
aren't, and that's typical of any community, and that's -- nothing unu-
sual about it. No, not particularly.
Most teachers came up there and lived in somebody's home, of course.
Occasionally a teacher might rent a house, if he had a family. If the
teacher was single, they'd usually rent a room in somebody's home, board
out. And first it was one home, and then another.
MB: Did your folks ever put up a teacher?
EP: Yes, we had three teachers stay there one year, three girls, all single
girls, all from Emmett. They were girls from Emmett. You didn't have to
go to college to teach school in those days. Matter of fact, some of
those teachers came up there to teach to the grade schools, only
seventeen years old, soon to be eighteen, and all they had to do was
graduate from high school and take a summer course, a special course in
summer, each year, and they'd teach. And I don't know how we were lucky
to get as good of ones as we got.
MB: Did that seem strange to you, to have the teacher staying in the same
house you were?
EP: No, they were good looking teachers. Still stay in touch with them, any
of them that are still alive. One of them became the librarian at the
University of California, Berkeley. She's never married to this day,
that little gal, one of them that stayed at our place. Another was --
52
Pugh, Elwood (June 6, 1985)
MARY PUGH: We saw the results of the marriage, that was (unintelligible).
EP: Ma, you're on tape, now. Ruth Peterson's another, lived right back here
behind us, another one that died. I don't think there's anything very
unique about Montour, in those respects.
MB: Where did they hold high school, once they started to have high school?
EP: Upstairs in the same building.
MB: They did! Now you said it was two rooms that they built up?
EP: Upstairs? No, it was always a two -story building, but we only used the
upstairs for our school plays, and parties and business activities of
that kind, until the high school was built, and then they -- I don't
know. I wasn't there, so I don't know how big the high school was. I
know it was four years, starting in 1927. But how big it was, and so
forth, I don't know. And, then when school buses got to be used so much,
why, all the kids come to Emmett, commute back and forth on school buses.
This didn't start until after 1940 or so, but I wasn't around, I don't
know.
MB: You talked about the plays, and stuff like that. Did you ever get
involved in any of the plays?
EP: Oh, sure. All the kids got to participate.
MB: Do you remember anything?
EP: Oh, I'm not much gifted for such things. I didn't play any lead parts,
if that's what you mean. Singing -- always had our glee clubs and our
quartets, stuff like that, and I got into the singing business quite a
bit with them, but not much in plays.
MB: Now, did they do that as part of the school?
EP: Oh, yes, school activities. You bet if the teacher doesn't make a good
showing of such activities, she's in trouble.
53
Pugh, Elwood (June 6, 1985)
MB: So, it was an important part of the activities.
EP: Oh, yes, that's how everybody used to go up there and be so proud of
their little kids, you know. That's a part of the rural life.
MB: Now, you mentioned before about the games, the basketball games and so
forth. Who did Montour play in those sorts of things?
EP: Oh, Sweet and Emmett, mostly, and two teams locally.
MB: Two teams locally.
EP: Yeah, they'd have to get that competition --
MB: Right in Montour?
EP: Sure, sure, that's what made your regular games. Oh, there was plenty of
young bucks around there for two teams.
MB: Did you ever play like Horseshoe Bend, or -- ?
EP: Yes, Sweet, Montour, we played Sweet every year two or three times,
baseball, primarily baseball.
MB: Was that the main sport?
EP: Yes, I expect baseball was more than basketball, although basketball --
if our warehouse was pretty low on stock, in the winter time, why we'd
play basketball in Dad's warehouse. Worked pretty good. You had to kind
of have a place you could warm up a little bit, in the winter time, you
know.
MB: During that time, you know, the 1918 flu epidemic hit pretty hard. Did
it affect Montour much?
EP: Yes. Hardly any families didn't lose somebody, if they were large fami-
lies. You bet. A lot of people died in that thing. And oh, my
goodness, there were a lot of people sick. My mother was busy night and
day taking care of people, all over the area. That was her primary
mission in life, was to care for people who --
Yeah, I lost an aunt and uncle, left two little orphans, within a
54
Pugh, Elwood (June 6, 1985)
day of each other in 1918. Mary's . . mother lost her husband, her
first husband. Yes, it had its impact. The war in 1917, had a terrific
impact in the little community, because there were a lot of young bucks
and they were all in a hurry to join, couldn't wait, had to go enlist,
couldn't wait for any draft. It just about cleaned out the young fellows
in the town. The first one to join couldn't wait for the army to get
organized to take him, so he even joined the National Guard -- so they
sent him down to New Orleans and he sit there on a wharf the whole war.
MB: Who was that?
EP: Dean Palmer, Esther's husband. And we were lucky, most of them come
back.
MB: What would the town do to keep going during the war?
EP: Oh, it just took the men from twenty to twenty -five to thirty, that were
single, seventeen to twenty- eight, probably, that were single. But that
was quite a few of them.
MB: Yeah. How about with the flu, did that take -- ?
EP: I can't remember very many dying in the Montour area. My, there was a
lot of sick people.
MB: Now, do you remember when you said your mom went around and took care of
a lot of people, was there a central place?
EP: No. They came to their home.
MB: That was pretty much it. So during your time there, when was Montour at
its peak, would you say?
EP: Oh, from 1915 to '23, '22 or -3.
MB: How large did the population get, do you know?
EP: I know that there was 100 -- about 100 registered voters was about as
large as it ever got, which would probably mean a population in the area
55
Pugh, Elwood (June 6, 1985)
of 350.
MB: When you came back in 1970, about how big was it?
EP: About the same size, except for the business people.
MB: OK, that was pretty much gone.
EP: Every residence was full, that had been built as a residence. There
wasn't any vacancies. They still were farming the same land. The only
thing, there wasn't any banker, there wasn't any store operator, there
wasn't any depot agent, there wasn "t even a section gang any more, just
the farmers. But all the houses were full. There wasn't any flour mill
or elevator operating, but there were people living in the house at the
flour mill, see. All the houses were full, and the population was about
the same, but if [there was] anything they needed, they just got in the
car and went to Emmett, Boise. Didn't need the business town. Automo-
biles have killed the little towns.
And good roads. The need for them was so great, you can't imagine it
in 1915. There was two and a half, three months, you couldn't even get
over the road unless you walked or horseback. So if you wanted to
purchase anything, you purchased it locally. You had to have some kind
of support, you know.
MB: How would those businesses get their food in, and supplies?
EP: On the railroad.
MB: Oh, the railroad, OK.
EP: Yup. And the railroad, after the railroad was built, and before that,
they got it in in the summer, and stocked it up, or they didn't get it.
MB: You were probably gone, but when did Montour start to decline as a
railhead? Do you know?
EP: No, I don't. I have an idea, that, just as soon as this road was built,
and trucks could get on it, the rail business dropped off tremendously.
56
Pugh, Elwood (June 6, 1985)
This particular railroad to Montour has been a high - paying railroad,
v
always. It's been one of the most profitable branches for the Union
Pacific, all because of the sawmill and the log haul. But other types of
rail transportation -- and coal haul [unintelligible] -- other types of
transportation have gone to trucks, since the trucks have been built,
stock and freight and so forth. So this highway was built in 1935, up
the river, and right then is when you can sure bet that business began to
deteriorate up there.
MB: OK. But the population didn't, it stayed pretty much the same.
EP: No, the population didn't. Except for the business group, and -- the man
who run the store, had another man living in his house who was retired,
when he moved out, and the whole area was that way. The houses all
stayed full.
MB: When you came back in 1970, were there any other ways you found Montour
changed?
EP: Oh, sure. Completely different. It is not a town any more at all, it's
a group of residences, that's all. Only a town in name.
MB: How about the relationships between the people who lived there? Did they
still seem to associate with -- ?
EP: Oh, they were just -- I can see no change in that respect.
MB: Were most of the people you knew as a kid still out there in Montour?
EP: No, no. The ones I grew up with are all over the world. Not all over
the world, but they're scattered all over the United States, for sure. I
can't think of one person in my class who stayed there. Other classes
later -- Alva McConnel went to school there; he stayed there. There's
been a few stayed there, who had a potential for wanting to stay in
farming. But otherwise, there was nothing to stay there for. You go out
57
Pugh, Elwood (June 6, 1985)
and get a litle bit of education, if you were going to use it, you had to
go someplace else. And one of them's a millionaire, and lives in Las
Vegas. Ted McRoberts, he became United States Marshal of Alaska. I fol-
lowed construction for years, Morrison - Knudsen. Ben Newell went into law
enforcement work, and all his kids in law enforcement work. Oh, they
just scattered all over. Oliver Powell, Klamath Falls construction work.
Earl Gifford, logging. Harry Warr, education, Boise valley, music pri-
marily. Nope, I can't remember any of them staying, that group.
MB: When you came back, did you associate with those people out there again?
EP: Oh, sure, sure, I'd go see them, all that I knew. Probably -- now I was
gone away from this area from 1930 to 1970 -- that's 40 years. I
associated with the people I knew, but at least two thirds of those
people I didn't know. The houses sold to somebody else. But the ones I
did know, kept me busy going to funerals. That's the age they've
reached. Goodness sakes, we've -- funeral after funeral after funeral
after funeral. I think we went to three in two days once.
MB: You know, something that's interesting to me when you say that it's
changed -- it doesn't seem like the buildings have changed -- well, they
hadn't changed at all, when you --
EP: That's right.
MB: Why do you think that was?
EP: Well, the buildings had changed. When I come back, the pool hall build-
ing was not there, the restaurant building was not there, the hotel
building was not there, the store buildings had been torn down and
rebuilt into a house, the old section foreman's building had been moved,
and became a residence elsewhere. The depot was gone -- there'd been a
lot of change in business buildings. They disappeared. The garage,
service station was gone, the town hall had been torn down and built into
58
Pugh, Elwood (June 6, 1985)
the triangle up here.
MB: Oh, OK. You were saying one of the stores was converted into a house?
Which one was that?
EP: Well, it belonged to a guy named Albert Dudenbostel.
MB: That's almost as good as Buckendorf.
EP: And he left there in 1921 or -2 and went to Boise, and went into the
grocery business in Boise. But in later years -- and somebody else had
his store for a while, I don't know who it was -- but later it was
changed into a residence. It was one of the two grocery stores; they set
side by side right there on Main Street.
MB: Which residence was that? Do you know?
EP: May Gifford lived there in recent years.
MB: OK. That's what I wanted to know.
EP: Do you know where she lived?
MB: No, I have a map that shows where everybody lived.
EP: OK. May Gifford lived there in recent years. I don't know whether the
house is still there -- no, of course, no house is there now. But I
don't know -- I guess it probably was torn down when the Corps of Engi-
neers [Bureau of Reclamation] tore everything down.
MB: What's your impression of Montour now?
EP: Esther Palmer. That's my impression of it. That's all that's left,
Esther and Frances. It's a sorry looking place. It was a beautiful farm
valley, before any town was built, but it doesn't look like that any
more. It's got swamp areas and cat tule areas, and fences and roads all
over the place.
MB: Now, the swampy area, that wasn't there when you were growing up?
EP: No, that lower end of the valley is a swamp area, and it was a beautiful
59
Pugh, Elwood (June 6, 1985)
pasture and hay field then. You bet. It's changed a great deal in that
people, are now living in Emmett.
MB: Try to stay around the area at least.
EP: There was one unique thing about that area. I don't know why it hap-
pened, over the years, but that area has put out more law enforcement
people than any area of like size I ever heard of, and that's sort of
./
respect, and the lower area is going to get worse in time. Even cat
tules in the ditches right near Esther's place right now -- you notice
them? There wasn't anything like that in those years. The water table
has raised so much, the dampness in the ground is different. She says
she can see it; Esther says that she can see the water level just raise a
little bit in the ground each year, right now. Gets a little higher all
the time. In her gardening.
MB:
Well, I've asked you a lot of things, but I'm sure there's fifty million
things I didn't ask you. Are there some things you'd like to cover that
I haven't thought of, to ask you?
EP:
Can't think of any.
MB:
Anything else you'd like to say about Montour as you look back on it?
EP:
No. It was a very pleasing time, as I remember it, for a boy to grow up
in. I've always been glad I had the opportunity to grow up in a nice
little town like that. I've always had most all pleasant memories of it.
And I think that's true of all the gang I grew up with. They seem to
keep ties to the community that are somewhat unusual.
MB:
What do you mean?
EP:
Oh, they want to come back and go see whoever's at Montour. This guy
that comes down from Fairbanks, Alaska, every winter to see me -- I
always have to take him up to Montour. He has to go up and see Esther.
But of course most of the Montour people that are still alive, older
people, are now living in Emmett.
MB: Try to stay around the area at least.
EP: There was one unique thing about that area. I don't know why it hap-
pened, over the years, but that area has put out more law enforcement
people than any area of like size I ever heard of, and that's sort of
./
Pugh, Elwood (June 6, 1985)
unusual. And I don't know why.
Lynn Noland became sheriff of Gem County, to start it with, I guess,
and then I was on the State Police for four years, in Idaho, and this Ted
McRoberts spent his life with the law enforcement in Alaska when it was a
territory -- United States Marshall's office. And Tony Scorro, who has
been sheriff here half a dozen times, and now is in the prison board or
something in Boise. And Mike McRoberts, Ted's little brother, is in
Alaska, Alaska State Police. Ben Newell became interested in police work
at Kuna, and Parma and New Plymouth, and has four boys who went into
police work. Vance Joines, Esther's brother, sheriff here for three or
four terms.
MB: Hmm, that is interesting.
EP: There's another -- oh, Frank York, that's Avis York's son, is in federal
law enforcement in the highway business in Boise. He was in the State
Police for a while. And as I said, Ben Newell, there's Don Newell, and
Manny Newell, and another one of the Newells, and even right here in
Emmett, Brad Newell, a grandson, all of them in law enforcement work.
Dangest thing.
MB: That is unusual.
EP: Yes, it is, yeah, it's very unusual.
MB: And you can't think of anything that might have precipitated that?
EP: No, I can't. I don't know.
MB: Well, I tell you, if you think of anything else we should add on, we'll
do it.
END OF TAPE THREE. END OF INTERVIEW.
Transcribed October 22, 1985 by Kathy Hodges.
61
RESTRICTIONS ON THE USE ORAL OF HISTORY MATERIALS
The Idaho Oral History Center collection is the product of more than fifteen years of
interviewing. The nature of oral history and the age of some interviews mean that special
care must be taken to insure that the collection is used to its fullest potential but protected
from abuse.
Researchers are urged to listen to tapes of interviews instead of relying on transcripts.
Transcripts should contain all of the information given in an interview, but characteristic
expressions, voice inflection, and the personality of the narrator - -all important elements of an
interview - -do not appear in a transcript. In addition, some transcripts in this collection have
been typed in rough draft and edited, but the final copy has not yet been prepared. These
rough drafts have been stamped "Rough Draft - -Use With Tape."
Researchers should also be aware that transcripts are typed from the recorded interview with
only minor editorial changes to improve readability. It is the responsibility of the researcher
to verify information and dates against other oral and written sources.
Oral history interviews are protected by the 1976 copyright law. Both interviewer and
narrator must sign a release before the interview may be used by anyone; however, the
signing of a legal release does not open an interview to unrestricted use. Legal releases
obtained by interviewers for this collection stipulate that the information in the interviews
may not be published or used in a public presentation without the written permission of the
Idaho Oral History Center, 210 Main Street, Boise, ID 83702, or the copyright holder, as
listed below. When quoting from an interview, the following bibliographic form is
recommended: John Grey, Interviewed by Mary Hall. Boise: Idaho Oral History Center,
January 11, 1994.
This copy of the interview is not for resale, nor should the researcher allow others to
reproduce either the tape recording or the transcript.
Narrator: Elwood Pugh
OH Number: # 1218
Additional Restrictions: None
Copyright held by: Idaho State Historical Society
IDAHO ORAL HISTORY CENTER
IDAHO STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY
210 Main Street
Boise, Idaho 83702
RELEASE OF TAPES TO THE IDAHO STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY'S ORAL
HISTORY PROGRAM.
Date of recording 199
We,
Elwood Pugh n/a
(Narrator) (Interviewer)
hereby give, grant and donate this (these) tape recording(s) and subsequent transcripts made
by us, along with any and all rights therein to the IDAHO STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY
and n/a as a gift for such scholarly and
educational purposes, as at their sole discretion they shall determine, subject to any
restrictions listed below.
Restrictions:
Narrator
Address
n/a
Interviewer
Address
8 Cassettes
Side *Count
1 A 10
1 A 83
1 B 179
2 B 505
3 A 48o
3 B 475
4 A 76
4 A 154
4 A 300
4 A 475
4 B 282
4 B 317
5 A 178
5 A 465
5 B 58
5 B 386
6 A 22
6 B 114
6 B 288
7 A 0
7 A 90
7 A 230
7 B 64
7 B 244
7 B 361
INDEX TO AUDIO TAPES
The Life and Times of Elwood Pugh.
Index
Foreword.
Pre - School Years 1906 - 114,1
Grade School 1914 - 120.
High School 1920 - 124.
College etc. 1925 - 128.
Idaho State Police 1928 - 131•
The Year 1932.
Civilian Conversation Corp 1933.
Brown Tie & Lumber - McCall 1934•
US Forest Service 1934 - '40-
Council, Idaho 1940 - 141 -
Samoa and Morrison - Knudsen 1941 - 142.
Army Air Force 1943 -147.
The Years 1947 - 149 -
US Air Force 1949 - '66.
Retired 1967 - 170.
More Details about 1928 - 166.
E=_ett, Idaho 1970 - 192.
Lucky Breaks.
My Mother.
My Father,
My Mother and Father together.
My Sister Lois.
My Travels.
My Motor Vehicles.
- 1 -
Sides
:Count
8
A
30
8
B
175
8
B
284
8
B
325
8
B
356
8
B
440
1 B
3B
4A
4A
4B
5A
5A
5B
8A
128
70
291
338
293
15
494
219
571
The Life and Times of Elwood Pugh.
Index - Cont'd
My Hobbies.
My Philosophy of Life.
Religion.
Primary Purpose and Limitations.
Correction of Errors.
The End.
z� Counts were made on "D up" cassettes with a CTR -69
Realistic Recorder, which uses a supply real counter.
The A sides zero at the front end of the tape.
The B sides zero on the first recorded word.
Errors
Should 'be white fir rather than white pine.
Should be 5 tubes r/t 4 tubes.
Most received %5.00 r/t a few.
Weiser r/t Council.
Bertha's sister r/t Mary's sister.
weeks r/t 2 weeks.
20 feet r/t 18 feet.
1956 r/t 1957.
165 cc r/t 165 cu. in.
- 2 -
THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ELWOOD PUGH
BY ELWOOD C. PUGH
FIFTH DAY OF JULY, 1992
INDEX
FOREWORD
PAGE
4
DEDICATION
PAGE
6
CHAPTER
ONE
PRE - SCHOOL YEARS - 1906 -1914
PAGE
7
CHAPTER
TWO
GRADE SCHOOL 1914 -1920
PAGE
18
CHAPTER
THREE
HIGH SCHOOL - 1920 -1924
PAGE
39
CHAPTER
FOUR
COLLEGE ETC. 1925 -1928
PAGE
48
CHAPTER
FIVE
IDAHO STATE POLICE - 1928 -1931
PAGE
55
CHAPTER
SIX
THE YEAR 1932
PAGE
59
CHAPTER
SEVEN
CCC's - CIVILIAN CONSERVATION CORPS
PAGE
61
CHAPTER
EIGHT
BROWN TIE & LUMBER - McCALL 1934
PAGE
64
CHAPTER
NINE
U. S. FOREST SERVICE - 1934 -1940
PAGE
67
CHAPTER
TEN
COUNCIL, IDAHO - 1940 -1941
PAGE
74
CHAPTER
ELEVEN
SAMOA AND MORRISON - KNUDSEN - 1941 -1942
PAGE
75
CHAPTER
TWELVE
ARMY AIR FORCE - 1943 -1947
PAGE
82
CHAPTER
THIRTEEN
THE YEARS 1947 -1949
PAGE
87
CHAPTER
FOURTEEN
U. S. AIR FORCE - 1949 -1966
PAGE
89
CHAPTER
FIFTEEN
RETIRED - 1967 -1970
PAGE
95
CHAPTER
SIXTEEN
MORE DETAILS ABOUT 1928 -1966
PAGE
98
CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN
EMMETT, IDAHO - 1970 -1992
PAGE
108
CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN
LUCKY BREAKS
PAGE
111
0
INDEX (CONT.)
CHAPTER NINETEEN
MY
MOTHER
PAGE
115
CHAPTER TWENTY
MY
FATHER
PAGE
117
CHAPTER TWENTY -ONE
MY
MOTHER AND FATHER TOGETHER
PAGE
120
CHAPTER TWENTY -TWO
MY
SISTER LOIS
PAGE
126
CHAPTER TWENTY -THREE
MY
TRAVELS
PAGE
130
CHAPTER TWENTY -FOUR
MY
MOTOR VEHICLES
PAGE
132
CHAPTER TWENTY -FIVE
MY
HOBBIES
PAGE
136
CHAPTER TWENTY -SIX
MY
PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE
PAGE
147
CHAPTER TWENTY -SEVEN
RELIGION
PAGE
149
CHAPTER TWENTY -EIGHT
PRIMARY PURPOSE AND LIMITATIONS
PAGE
150
3
CHAPTER 1
PRE - SCHOOL YEARS - 1906 -1914
Well, for the first part of this book, we will cover my life from 1906 to 1914,
the first eight years of my life. That is the period prior to me going to
school. I was born very, very early in the morning on a very cold day on March
14, 1906. So cold, in fact, that from the 13th of March through the 15th of
March in 1906, set a cold temperature record that still holds today. Well, so
much for that. I was born, let's see, right across Main Street in Boise, Idaho,
right across Main Street from the Idanha Hotel. At that time, there were some
apartments upstairs on the South side of Main Street, 10th and Main, and my folks
had come down from the hills to be in Boise for a while prior to my birth so that
they would be handy to the medical profession. We did not have any good doctors
back in the hills where we lived then. So they were staying in that apartment
for two or three weeks before I was born. The doctor was a Dr. John Beck who was
probably the leading baby doctor in Boise at the time and for many years before
and after. Matter of fact, he was the baby doctor when my first daughter was
born about thirty years later. I do not know very much about the circumstances
of my birth. Mother said I weighed about ten pounds, so I guess I was a pretty
husky baby. Far as I know, I was pretty well, nothing wrong, everything went
alright.
I don't remember much of anything, of course, until after I was about four years
old. Course, I know from hearing people talk about it, and the things we did
later, I know just what my folks did. After a few days, things got calmed a
little bit after a new baby arrives, why they bundled me up and got on the
electric interurban train that travelled from around the loop in Boise Valley and
they went down to Eagle where we had left the horses and buggy when they came
down and hooked up and headed across the hills toward the Payette River, going
straight North out of Eagle. Twas about twenty -two miles over to the Payette
River to a little valley that later became known as Montour. It was then called
the Marsha Ireton Ranch. Then they went on over to Sweet which was a going,
going town in 1906. Then they started up to Brownl ey, up to the Dry Buck country
where Dad's sawmill was. That was fifteen miles on up to Sweet, and the trip
would have taken about seven or eight hours, probably.
By March, the roads were not very good, might have even been necessary to
transfer from a buggy to a sleigh. I'm not sure how much snow there was that
Spring. Some Springs there is quite a lot of snow by the middle of March and
sometimes it was all gone. I don't know, I don't remember anybody ever saying.
Dad's mill was about, about fifty miles North of Boise where the timber begins
to get pretty thick, near Dry Buck. Actually, the mill was on the middle fork
of Soldier Creek, which was about three miles from the Dry Buck drainage. To
locate the general area, it was a way up on the mountain above what is now known
7
as Banks, on the Payette River. You go to Banks and then climb the mountain on
the West side of Banks up to about 8 miles and that is the general area where
Dad's mill was.
As I said, I don't begin to remember much around the mill until I was about four
years old, but I can describe the area at the mill and living circumstances and
all that sort of thing when I was a baby very, very well. The mill was
relatively new. It had burned out in 1905 and had been rebuilt and there was a
typical mountain sawmill camp around. Quite a few buildings, all of them built
of a somewhat temporary nature, they were built for about fifteen years of use.
The mill was located in a pretty canyon on the edge of the timbered country. The
timber was all virgin timber then, it had never been cut over, so there was lot's
of Pine and Red Fir that was three and four feet in diameter, sometimes up to
five feet in diameter, big ones. Beautiful stands of timber and pretty thick,
and the mill was located in the edge of such a stand. The little canyon was a
pretty canyon. The sides standing up perhaps six or seven hundred feet.
There were probably ten, twelve buildings in the area, part of the sawmill
installation. First, there was our equipment sheds which housed about three big
logging wagons and about three big logging sleighs and then, of course, our
bobsleds for passengers and our buggy and our road construction equipment.
Everything horse drawn, that is all there was in those days. There was no
trucks, no cars, no motor vehicles, none of that type.
Then there was the barn where we kept our horses. Dad had about twelve big
beautiful Persian horses. I suppose they run an average of about eighteen
hundred pounds. For logging, primarily, they were for logging. Most of the
lumber was hauled to the lower country by the people that came up and bought it,
so we didn't have much of that. Our horses were mostly for logging. He also had
a buggy team that we used on a bobsled in the Winter time and on a buggy in the
Summer. We also had a saddle horse. Old Baldy, an ornery old saddle horse. I
guess he was an easy riding horse though, that was what Dad liked.
Then we had two bunk houses where the sawmill men lived if they wanted. There
was a chicken house, a blacksmith shop which, of course, was a very active
activity around supporting a sawmill and all those horses. We had what we called
a cookhouse. It was the dining hall and the kitchen and a big cellar back in the
hill to store root vegetables and things of that type. There was a commissary
where you supplied the needs of the men that they wanted, tobacco and shaving
gear and a few little clothes that they could buy if they wanted. There was our
food storage facilities to feed the crew, and a great big wood shed because that
is all we had was wood to burn for fuel. Then there was our residence about a
hundred feet away up on the hill, and on around the hill was two residences that
men could have that wanted to move their families in there when they worked.
There was what we called the dry shed, that is where you put the finished lumber,
that is the plain lumber that had been dried.
The sawmill and the boilers had a roof over the top of them, otherwise they were
all open on the sides. The sawmill consisted of a carriage and twin circle saws,
one above the other, and could handle about four and half foot logs. Above that
we had to notch in for the hub of one of the saws. Five rolls that would carry
the boards up the edger and then an edger where you run the boards through to cut
the edges off. Then it went to a trimmer that trimmed the ends even to the right
length on each board and then, of course, there were conveyors that hauled all
the slabs and the edgings and the trimmings off the ends, and all the sawdust out
to where the boilers were, because the sawdust and the edgings and slabs and
trims and so forth, was what was used for fuel to fire the boilers to keep the
steam up. The steam system was a relatively low pressure system. Normal
operating pressures of about 90 pounds psi. There was also a second engine under
the mill that powered the plainer and the molding machines. It didn't run as
much as the others did and you could run one without the other. Of course it was
a smaller engine, but that constituted most of the sawmill.
There was a pond out ahead of the mill where they had dammed up the creek and
built a little lake there where you could, oh it would handle about fifty or
sixty logs. They would roll the logs into that pond from the decks and wash the
logs off before they put them onto the carriage and through the saw because the
dirt that would get into the bark would dull the saws so bad if you did not get
that dirt washed out first.
Normally, the mill would operate about seven months of the year. Winter times
you could not operate in that country, too much snow and too cold. You could run
the mill between six and seven months of the year. The capacity of the mill was
about twenty -five thousand board feet per day, that is normally a nine hour day.
I think they normally worked from about seven in the morning till five at night.
Might of even been ten hours in the early parts of the operation and became nine
hours in later years. Far as I know, our mill always was a five and one -half day
per week operation. The crews always had Saturday afternoon off for big baseball
games that were held around the country. We had a good team there at the mill,
Pugh's Sawmill Team was a pretty well known team. Normally it took about twelve
men to operate the mill and run the spread. That included the blacksmith and the
retail lumber salesman, the man that handled retail sales, and the mill crew.
Then, if logging operations were going on there would normally be another eight
or nine men. So it made a total of twenty to twenty -five men usually running the
mill and the logging.
Transportation of the logs was always a tough problem in early days when all of
it was handled by horse power. No trucks, no tractors, nothing of that kind to
use. Everything was horse power and man power so getting the logs to the mill
was always a problem. Usually, there was only one of two ways. You either put
the logs on a wagon or on a sleigh if it was Winter time, and you hauled them to
the mill, or you were located on a river where you could float the logs to the
mill. Of course, there were no rivers that you could do that on up around the
Dry Buck country, so it meant hauling the logs and that usually necessitated
locating the mill in the timber where the haul would be short. I don't think Dad
ever hauled logs over three miles, three and a half maybe, at the most, but that
was not all that was involved. You tried usually to locate the mill where you
would not have an uphill haul of the logs. If possible, a little downhill would
be ideal because it was so much easier to get a heavy load of logs into the mill
if you didn't have to haul them up the hill. Even so, it usually took four horse
on one of those heavy logging wagons. Our mill was located so all of the haul
was downhill. Most of it was on level or a little downhill to get the logs to
the mill. Certainly made it easier. I know Dad ran that mill for fifteen years
from that one location and never did run out of timber. However, he had pretty
well depleted the timber in the three mile limit above the mill at the time he
sold the mill. Usually, there was some logging going on all Summer and then in
E
the late Fall we would do some logging after the mill shut down, do some logging
after the snow came on.
Back in the higher hills, they built chutes and chute the logs down to a yarding
area where they could then load them on to the sleighs and haul them on to the
mill. Boy, some of those chutes were a quarter of a mile long and those big logs
would come down those chutes like bullets. Once in a while something would
happen that one of those logs would leave the chute at high speeds. I remember
one time we had a team of horses standing off to the side away from the chute.
One log left the chute and sailed over a team of horses and one horse throwed his
head in the air and took the top of his head off, so we had a dead horse there.
Dad ran a pretty safe operation though really, because he ran that mill and that
logging operation for fifteen years and never had anyone seriously injured.
Oh, I forgot to mention, we did have a big water storage tank up on the hill,
maybe 150 -200 feet above the mill. We pumped water from the creek up there and
that big tank provided fire protection. After Dad had had the mill burn in about
1907, he built that big tank up on the hill and that provided fire protection in
case of any fire in the future.
Most of the men who worked at the mill were young, single men. A few of them
married, and those that were married mostly had homesteads around the country not
too far away. They didn't bring their families to the mill, their families
stayed on the homestead they were trying to prove up on. They would come to the
mill and stay in the bunkhouse for the five nights they were there, then go home
for the weekend, and then come back and work for the next week. So we didn't
have many families around, but we were usually feeding fifteen to twenty -five men
for the crew and we always had some company. I mean there were people coming in
hauling, buying lumber and hauling it to the lower country all Summer long with
their four and six horse teams, and usually with two wagons, one in the front and
a trailer behind. Those men would come up and stay a night and then load out and
leave the next day, so we usually had three or four of them most every day
staying there. So really, the mess hall was a sizeable operation.
The pay for common labor in the mill there, and most of it was that. There was
only about two or three jobs that were higher paid. The labor was paid about
$55.00 a month, and their board and room, such as the bunkhouse was. Then, if
they stayed the full season, they would get a $10.00 a month bonus for the
season, so that really made them $65.00 a month and their board. Then the
sawyer, the man that determined how the boards were to be cut and ran the
carriage and the saw, he got another $10.00 a month because he was special.
After we got old China Sam there as a cook, he got another $10.00 a month too,
he got $75.00 a month. I think those two were the highest paid in the operation.
There might have been another $5.00 a month paid to the engineer that ran the
engines and the boilers and stuff, I don't know for sure about that.
Most of the men that worked for us were from out of state. They'd moved from
Missouri as young men to try to find and get employment, get a start some place.
I remember one time they checked up, oh I don't know, 1910 or so, I heard them
talk about checking up and 75% of the men that were working there were from
Missouri, and most of them ultimately settled in this country and never did go
back to Missouri. Course Dad and Mother had come from Missouri and they'd be
writing letters back to their relatives there, and the word would get around that
10
there was work out here if they'd come out, so people would come out and try it.
Dad's mill was not the only mill on Dry Buck. There was another mill, just as
big as his, over about five miles away at Dry Buck, and over the years, there has
been a half dozen mills operating on Dry Buck in different places at different
times. I don't think there has been any sizeable operations up there though that
were really doing much business in the last forty years. Big mills had been
established in the lower country and the trucks came into use and the railroad
was built and they hauled the logs into Emmett by railroad, and into Boise by
railroad. Those little mills up there couldn't get people to come up and buy
their lumber any more.
By modern standards, the conditions under which we lived in those days, at the
mill would be considered pretty primitive, but we didn't think of them that way
at the time, we were doing alright. We were living the way everyone else lived,
and the way it was supposed to be done, but it would be considered pretty
primitive now. For example, we had no electricity, we had no telephone, of
course, no radios, no T.V.'s, those sort of things were many years before they
developed. Many times nowadays, we forget how dependent we are upon an
electrical power source, and we forget how many of our conveniences are dependent
upon it. There were no vacuum cleaners, there were no refrigeration units, there
were no freezers, there were no fans, there were no electric lights. Everything
we used were kerosene lamps or kerosene lanterns. No air conditioning, no
automatic furnaces, no power circulation of air throughout a house, no water
pumps, no water pressure, no flowing water in pipes. Oh. I could go on all day
on the things we didn't have that are now considered essential to a modern living
situation. But we didn't think anything of it, you just thought that's the way
it was.
A check of our cook house, the place where we were feeding twenty -five men a day
most all Summer long, and eight or ten for half the Winter. The kitchen had a
nice big range, wood, used wood, of course, but there was no running water in the
kitchen, either hot or cold, and there was no pump even in there. If you wanted
any water, you went out to the well, which was near the back door, and threw the
bucket down about ten feet into the well and pulled it up with a rope. That's
how you got your water. You washed the dishes on a table in the kitchen, and you
threw the water outside and it drained away. Now those two things were sort of
stupid, because we could have had those things without electricity. We could
have had a pump in the house, so all you had to do was pump the pump, and you
could have had a sink in there with a drain that would have taken the water away.
But they just didn't, I don't know, they didn't think about those conveniences
and it made a lot of difference to those poor people that were doing that cooking
for that gang.
Cooking was quite a problem with no power equipment of any kind, and no refriger-
ation. I don't know whether people now would know how to do it. Most of them
wouldn't. Of course, we had very few fresh vegetables. Once in a while somebody
would bring a load in, and they'd buy them in the Summer time from them and get
what we could for fresh vegetables, but most of our vegetables were canned. Some
fruits were canned, some were dried. We regularly butchered beef and hogs at the
mill to provide the meat necessary for the table. Of course, did all of our own
baking, pies and cakes and bread, bread baked almost every day. Twenty -five men
can eat a lot of bread when they are working hard. And it all had to be made and
11
baked right there, without any modern mixing. For example, we bought all our
coffee even in whole kernels, whole coffee beans, and had a big grinder and you
ran that grinder by hand to grind that coffee to make the coffee even. Just
simply everything was manpower and horsepower. There was not a building in the
whole camp that had running water in it. All of the toilets were chick sales
deals, you know, outside. They'd get pretty chilly sometimes in the Winter time,
I can tell you.
Dad and Mother and I and my little sister, always ate in the mess hall where the
crews ate, usually, after the crews had eaten. Our little house, about 150 feet
away up on the hill, did not even have a kitchen in it. It consisted of a front
room and office combination. Dad had his roll top desk and about a thousand
pound safe in the front room, and had two bedrooms and a small sleeping porch and
a little porch around in the front. That was the size of it. There was no
running water or toilet facilities or cooking facilities or anything of that type
in the house.
As I say he had ultimately landed at Pugh's Mill and, of course, we were shut
down every Winter for two or three months, and he'd always take his vacations in
Boise at that time, except every third Winter he would go back to China. During
the fifteen years he was in the United States he made five trips back to China,
on a boat, by stage, chuckle, sort of tough. He'd stay there his vacation time
and then come back. As. I say he made five trips back to China, so after fifteen
years he had five children in China, three boys and two girls. I remember one
time when I was a little boy, he got a letter that told him one of his little
girls had died. It sure broke him up, broke him up. You always heard that
Chinese people didn't like girls very well, but China Sam seemed to like his
girls alright.
I can remember, he was quite an item in my early years. I remember he had a what
they called a pigtail, you know, a long braided hair. Oh my, it must have been
four feet long. Typical Chinese, fine braid about the size of your finger all
the way down his back. Course, when he was working he wrapped it round and round
his head. Think he was pretty proud of that que, they called it. But in 1910,
the Emperor of China dictated that all Chinamen were going to cut their ques off.
So Old China Sam, along with the rest of the people of his nation, cut off his
que, and that was the end of the que. Mother tried her darndest to get that que
from him, but I don't know where it went. She didn't get it.
Travelling was kind of a tough deal. We didn't know it, but it was. Everything
you travelled in was an open vehicle, there was nothing closed in. Sleighs in
the Wi nter - you'd put some straw in the bottom of the bed, and a bunch of
blankets, and maybe some hot rocks to keep your feet warm, and travel across the
country in the sleighs. In the Summer time you were in a buggy that was not
enclosed. It was dusty and dirty and hot, and cool, and you put on clothes to
try to compensate, that was it. So, we didn't do a lot of traveling, really.
Dad maybe would go out once a month to take care of his business contacts, but
I expect we averaged going out to the lower country about, oh twice a year was
all. Go out and stay a few days in Boise a couple times a year, and that was it.
It was quite an event if any of us made a trip as much as four miles away from
the mill.
Well, so much for our living situation and circumstances. Getting back to my
12
experiences during my early years, I began to remember things that occurred when
I was about four years old. Not too many when I was four, but some. I became
four years old in 1910. I have memory of a couple items before 1910 when I got
scared about something, but mostly that's about when I began to remember things.
I remember one night in 1910 we were traveling across from over Dry Buck at
night. The stars were out and brilliantly bright and the sky was clear. The air
was clear and the moon was dark, and Halley's comet was straight overhead, and
I can certainly remember how that looked. It was big and it was bright. The
tail of the comet was just about as long as the length of the handle on the big
dipper, and the width of that brilliant tail was perhaps one -eight as wide as it
was long, so it was quite a sight and it was just right overhead.
I also remember that in 1910 a man came up to the mill with a movie machine.
Movies were just getting well started. He had a little gasoline engine in the
back of a buggy, and he had a projector, and he set that projector up in our
dining hall at night and set the buggy out beside the dining hall and run an
electric wire from his generator into the projector and put on a movie for the
crews, and that was quite a show, really was a flicker. But the thing that
intrigued me, and I've remembered more than the movie, was that gasoline engine.
Boy that was something. Little old putt - putt -putt out there was running that
electric light that the projector operated on. It was a very primitive outfit,
but it was the first time we had ever seen anything like that, and I guess the
first time most of the men in the mill had ever seen anything like that.
Actually, when I was a little fellow I didn't have very many toys, as such. I
remember I had a tricycle, but there wasn't any place I could ride it hardly.
There wasn't much level ground around there. Certainly, no pavement. And I
remember one Winter that China Sam went to Boise and when he come back, he
brought me a pair of roller skates, and there wasn't any place to use them
either. I did have a kind of a water gun that one of the crew had made me out
of a piece of pipe and I had a lot of fun with that, but about all I could do was
get in trouble with it. I remember one time I squirted it through the screen
into the kitchen where Sam was working, and boy, I got in trouble. I didn't get
to go down to the dining hall anymore for about four days after that. I'm not
sure how I got anything to eat during that time, maybe they let me in long enough
to eat and then kicked me out, I don't know, but I sure had to stay away from the
cook house. My name was "mud ". And every Winter, somebody in that crew would
make me a pair of skis, course we did lots of skiing in the Winter time. Lots
of fun on skis. Beautiful big slopes up there with snow on them to ski on.
Every once in awhile, they'd make me a whistle out of a willow branch. And I
think I had a slate that I could draw pictures on. You know, I can't remember
any other toys I ever had. I didn't get toys for Christmas, I got things that
I needed. I remember one time, one Christmas, I got a pair of gloves with
gauntlets on them, had beads on the gauntlets. Boy I slept with those things
under my pillow for a month. Another time I got a heavy pair of what they called
German socks, heavy wool socks that came clear up to my knees that I could wear
inside my overshoes when I was out in the snow. Another time I got a real good
heavy Winter coat, but those were the types of things that I got for Christmas.
Wasn't toys, but I don't know as I needed toys very much.
I didn't have hardly any playmates. Maybe that was the thing that was a little
different for me that was for most young kids. There weren't any kids around to
play with except my little sister who was two years younger than I. She had been
13
born in Boise on March 21st, 1908. She was born in a hospital, so she was a
little better than I. Anyway, she was named Lois Lucille, and she was a good
little playmate, but she was about the only one. One Summer, one family moved
up there that had two children and we had them to play with some. Otherwise,
there weren't very many children around to play with, just a lot of grown people
working.
But there were so many interesting things there, that I didn't need to have very
many toys. I had the free run of the place, I ran all over the hills and all
over the area where the camp was. Every day those big lumber wagons and teams
would come to pick up all Summer long and that was interesting of course.
Beautiful, big great wagons and teams and, of course, the mill itself in opera-
tion was an interesting thing. And that pond was a wonderful place to play if
I had somebody around so I didn't get into trouble in it. Otherwise, you had to
stay away from it pretty much. And the blacksmith shop was a very intriguing
place. Boy that big old forge throwing all that fire out, and the blacksmith
shaping his metal and hammering on it. The big horses in there getting their
shoes put on. Also, we had a couple of cows that wandered the hills to get their
feed and I had to bring them in every once in a while. I had a little dog that
would help bring them in with me. We had a chicken house full of chickens, that
is where we got our fresh eggs. As I said, we didn't have much of a garden.
But, it certainly was an interesting place for a little boy to live I can tell
you. Things going on all the time. I didn't much need play things.
About 1910, my folks, I think that was about when it happened, they got a girl
out of the Children's Home in Boise who had been an orphan and needed a home to
live. She was about seven years older than I. I think they brought her to the
mill to keep an eye, perhaps, on me and my little sister so as to give Mother a
little more freedom. Her name was Lillian Hillbert and she stayed with us at the
mill until she got married in 1915. She married a farmer from Brownley, by the
name of Albert Beckman who lived down on Brownley. I am sure her arrival gave
Mother a little more freedom because Mother was busy.
Mother was a very capable woman. She helped Sam in the cookhouse a heck of a lot
because it was just too much work for one man. But, even after most every day's
work, she had a little time to read to me and my sister after she got through at
night. Mother was a strong person, physically and mentally, and she had a very
strong religious conviction and she sort of saw to it that people around her
complied with her religious convictions. I think she had in mind someday of
making a preacher out of me. Matter of fact, I kind of think she kept that idea
until I was grown.
I guess I didn't tell you about how I got my name. My name is Elwood Clark and
the Elwood came from an Elwood Moody who was a well known, nationally know,
evangelistic preacher from the Chicago area. That indicated a little bit where
her interest was. The Clark came from her maiden name. Her name had been Ethyl
Clark, Ethyl May Clark. She saw to it that we grew up in somewhat of a religious
environment. So, there was quite a little bit of bible story reading and bible
story telling to us at evenings and nights and we had to say our little prayers
every night before we went to bed you know, and every Sunday we had to dress up.
There was nothing going on around that sawmill like work on Sundays. No sir, not
with her there. She had a Sunday School every Sunday for us. We were all
14
dressed up and fixed up to go to whatever church service there could be. Some
of those men at the mill would come to those Sunday School meetings and the Pugh
Mill was a little bit unusual in that respect.
She was going to have her own way in these matters and there was no liquor at the
Pugh mill, no sir. Anybody that wanted to do any drinking would have to go get
his job some place else. No liquor allowed, not even for snake bites far as I
know. But, it didn't seem to make a problem. I only know of one man that ever
got in trouble on that. Most of the men were a pretty steady group, and not much
drinking type among young fellows trying to get started in the world. I expect
that our sawmill crew was a little unique in that respect perhaps.
Mother carried her religious zeal into the way she lived and she tried to help
everyone that was around her. If anybody was sick and she could help, she was
right there helping them. They always had some needy children, or others, living
with us when we were at the mill and then in later life also. And of course
Mother was a sucker for any of the ne're -do -well preachers around the country.
They could come in and stay quite a while sometimes, just on the strength of the
fact that they were just preachers you know.
Along about 1907 or 08 Dad's half brother, James Ware, came and stayed with us
then until he got married. He worked at the mill and he went one year down to
the Weiser Institute, I think about 1909, and then he came out of that qualified
to teach school and he started teaching school around the country. He home-
steaded 160 acres about a mile and a half away from the mill, and finally he
married a girl from over at Ola, but during those years from 1907, '08, '09, and
'10, he was staying with us at the mill. So that enlarged our family group a
little bit there.
We did get a break away from the mill occasionally. Usually once each Summer we
would take a camping trip of two or three days about fifteen miles away over into
a place called High Valley We would pick huckleberries, and we would bring a lot
of huckleberries home and can them so that give us about a two or three day
vacation for that. Then, of course, there was the short trips on Saturday
afternoons to where the baseball games were. Then there would usually be a
couple trips out to Boise Valley, one in the late Fall and maybe one in the early
Spring. After the mill had stopped and before it started the next Spring and we
would stay out there a few days in Boise Valley. That was about the only time,
about twice a year, was as often as we would get out there.
I remember one big vacation we made in 1912. The folks decided to take a two
weeks vacation up to Payette Lakes. So they hooked up four horses to a big old
prairie schooner type wagon bed, put all our camping and cooking and sleeping
gear into that. Then hooked the buggy team up to the buggy for our passengers,
the rest of the family to ride in. One of the hired men drove the prairie
schooner type and we headed for McCall. McCall was about 75 miles further North.
We went up over the hills and over to Long Valley. Well the route actually took
us to what is called High Valley, then to Smith's Ferry, which is now Cougar
Mountain Lodge, then over the mountain to Round Valley and North to Long Valley
and we first came to then a little town known as Thunder City, which, at that
time, was about five or six miles South of where Cascade is now. There was no
Cascade then, it had not been started. Then we went on a little further and came
to a little town called Crawford, maybe three or four hundred people in the town.
15
Then on over the hill to where the Cascade Lake is now, there was a town of Van
Wyck. It would have been right in the bottom of where the lake is now. Then on
North to a place called Roseberry, which was about two miles due east of the
present Donnelly, then on up to McCall. It was not called McCall then, it was
called Lake Port. I remember even then, the Long Valley was all settled, pretty
wel 1 settl ed and they were mostl y Fi nni sh peopl a that had come over from Fi nl and.
All the fences were rail fences, there weren't any barb wire fences in that
country at that time, and they had quite few cattle running.
They had some ditches running around through the valley where they had dug for
irrigation purposes and you could catch trout, oh my, sixteen inches long right
out of those irrigation ditches. Really a lot of game in the country. I
remember they went on up to McCall, they had a steam launch, passenger launch,
running around McCall and Dad took us a ride all around the lake. That was in
1912. While we were there, we took the camp outfit and went over to New Meadows
and stayed there a couple of nights. A bear got into the camp and messed up some
of our food during one of the nights we were over in New Meadows. We came back
up to Payette Lakes again and they caught a big fish, oh it was over two feet
long. Nice, big trout of some kind. They decided to salt him down and take him
home with us. After we got home, we found they had sugared him down instead of
salting him, so they had ruined our big fish, chuckle.
That was a fabulous trip. I was only six years old, but I can still almost
remember every bend there was in that road. All the way up there and those
little towns, Thunder City and Crawford and Van Wyck and Roseberry, all gone now,
but I can remember them so well. It surprises me how well. Course, I grew up
in the mountains in that country and I developed a love for the mountains that
I have kept all my life. It was beautiful country up there then. None of that
country had been logged, there was no sawmills up there. All the houses that had
been built were log houses. And the timber all over the country was virgin
timber. Big, beautiful Pines and Red Fir. Few Spruce in the higher elevations,
some Tamarack or Western Larch, and a few White Fir, but mostly Ponderosa Pine
and Red Fir, big, beautiful virgin timbers. It doesn't look anything like it
used to look anymore since it has all been logged off. Course one thing about
it, they did not do any clear cut logging up in that country ever. They have
still got small timber stands over that country that has been logged.
In the Summer, during the Summer that I was seven years old, I know Dad hired a
lady to come and teach Lois and I for the Summer that I was seven. She returned
again for the Summer that I was eight, so that gave me about three months of
schooling when I was seven and three months when I was eight. She had a son just
a year younger than I. and she taught Lois and I, she conducted school for the
three of us. So that was the only schooling 1 had up till time for me to go to
school in 1914, the Fall that I was eight years old.
In 1912, the Union Pacific Railroad Company decided to build a railroad from
Emmett to McCall. The railroad had already been built from Nampa to Emmett, that
was built in 1902, but in 1912, they decided to put it on up from Emmett to
McCall, right up the Payette River. Along with the building of that railroad,
there was going to be a little town twelve miles up the river from Emmett, built
where the Marshan Ireton Ranch was. That was going to be a railhead for the
upper country at Sweet, Ola, and Brownley to bring their stock and bring their
produce and everything to ship it on the railroad because that was the major
[:
method then. Well, Dad was looking to the future and he could see that they were
going to build a town, a settlement, in the Marshan Iretan Ranch area there, and
that there would be quite a lot of lumber needed to build their houses, barns,
and so forth in the area. So, he decided to put a lumber yard at Montour. Well,
it was not called Montour yet, but that is the name they decided to name it after
they studied it a while. Montour - somebody thought that that was a French word
meaning "journey over the mountains" - Montour. And that is what that little
town was, you had to journey over the mountains to get to it one way or another.
Anyway, Dad decided he would build a lumber yard down there so he would be ready
for the building boom that would happen in that area. I remember in 1911, he
drove out in the middle of that beautiful valley. About two thousand acres of
level pasture land and hay land and there wasn't a fence hardly in it or a
building in it. He took me over and showed me where they had staked out where
he was going to buy.
17
w
CHAPTER 2
GRADE SHCOOL - 1914 -1920
By 1913, he had his lumber yard operating and they were building the area up from
that. Along with that, he decided to move us down to the town of Montour in the
Fall of 1914, where he had his lumber yard, and then I could start school. I
would be eight years old starting, and my little sister would be six, so we could
both go to school at the new school at Montour. So, really, I guess this winds
up the story of my first eight years of living at Pugh's Mill in Soldier Creek,
and starts another part of this book dealing with my years in grade school from
1914 through 1920.
But, before I get into my early experiences in school or my experiences in the
grade school there, I want to talk a little bit about our living situation and
the new town of Montour. As I said, Dad had the lumber yard in operation and he
had a man hired there to take care of it and retail the lumber for him. Had an
office built there and they were selling lumber and coal and shingles and cement
and whatever was necessary to the building trade. Had all the materials stored
in buildings made for the purpose, pretty good set -up. And, on the backside of
the lot, maybe a 100 feet back from the lumber yard, he was building a new house
for us. A nice house, not one of the shacks like had been at the mill. This was
one built, it was a frame house, but built to last. In fact, the house that he
was building was quite similar to the house that I am now living in in Emmett.
The same type of construction, a similar arrangement. Two -story house with three
bedrooms upstairs and big walk -in closets and somewhat of a similar arrangement
to the dining area and the front room. Back porch and front porch and all those
sort of things. It was quite similar to many respects to this house I am living
in Emmett at the present time, and they were both built along about the same
time, this house was built in 1917 that I am living in now, except the house at
Montour did not have a basement. It was a little difficult to have a basement
up there because the water table was so high in that valley that there was a
problem of waterproofing a basement. I don't know of any basement in town, the
school had a basement, and later Dad built a basement in the flour mill. Other-
wise, there was not a basement in the whole town.
That new home that Dad was building for us was just getting well started, and it
was not completed by the Fall of 1914 when we moved to Montour. So we parti-
tioned off a part of the office building to the lumber yard and set up a residen-
tial situation for Mother and my sister Lois, and me, and the gal, Lillian
Hillbert, that they had gotten from the orphanage in Boise. She also came with
us to go to school at Montour. As I said before, she was about seven years older
than I. So for the first four or five months in Montour, we lived in half of the
office building of the lumberyard. I don't think my Dad was there much of the
time. He stayed up at the mill and finished the season out and then came down
along toward Christmas and was with us then for the rest of that Winter.
is
Now some details about the little town of Montour. By September, 1914, it was
a complete little town, a brand new town. Two years before there had not been
a building in the area. The railroad had come through town and built all their
necessary facilities. Most of the town, that was going to be built, was either
finished or was in the process. I guess there was probably fifty families in the
district school, or voting district, that was within a mile and a half or two
miles of the town and in the town. There was perhaps two thousand acres of
bottom land in the valley and maybe another 1,800 acres on the bench. All of
that had been taken up. People had purchased portions of it for building homes
on it. A new Methodist Church was in process. We had a four room brick school,
only two of which was needed for awhile, but it was a nice, big two -story school
with a basement. A brick bank building had been built and was in operation.
There was a large blacksmith shop, with a solid cement floor which later was
converted over to a combination blacksmith shop, service station and automotive
repair shop. But in 1914, they did not need a service station and automotive
repair shop, there was only one car in town. There were two stores, one grocery
store and one combination grocery and general merchandise. As I said, the bank
was in operation. We had a hotel with about eight, maybe ten rooms in it, a meat
market, a post office, Montour Post Office had been established in the larger of
the two stores. We had a going restaurant and a pool hall with a pool table or
two, and a card table or two, and you could buy beer. They had made an arrange-
ment with the old guy that had it - well, he was not an old guy, he was a young
guy that had it - that he would never sell any hard liquor in the town. The
people requested that of him and so he agreed and never did.
The railroad had completed all of their installation for the town. They had a
large stockyard and it was used a lot. In later years they loaded, not carloads
of stock, but trainloads of stock out of there from the upper country. Particu-
larly, cattle and sheep and three or four carloads of hogs every Fall. When
World War I got started, they even shipped out a few loads of horses to the Army,
a few carloads of horses to the Army. Pretty good sized stockyard. There was
a livery stable where you could rent a saddle horse, a team of horses and a wagon
or a team of horses and a buggy. Or you could even hire a taxi. The man that
had the livery stable also owned a new 1914 seven passenger cadillac that he used
for taxi service. It was used a whole lot because he was the only car in the
area. Wait, let me back up, I didn't finish the railroad business. Had a nice
depot with a passenger lobby and a back room for freight and express that came
in and then the office, main office of the depot. A side track ran up beside the
depot so that they could unload carloads of stuff that were local freight type.
The railroad had put in two long passing tracks - one where one train could pass
another train and a second side track for people to get cars set in so they could
load them or unload them in carload lots.
Dad had a little spur put over to the lumberyard where we could get carloads of
coal put in at a time, and later that spur was used for a lot of things besides
coal. Flour, and grain and so forth after he expanded the business to those sort
of things. And the railroad had a section house for the section foreman. They
established a maintenance crew at Montour to maintain the railroad. And there
was a section foreman with the necessary out buildings and a little tool house
and the motor car and things like that that the railroad maintained to haul the
crew up and down the track to work. Then there was a house for crew members,
that was for any one of them that wanted to come there and live in the bunkhouse,
they called it, but actually they had some cooking facilities in it too. A lot
19
of times there was three or four old guys living in there working on the section
gang. The section gang for the railroad was the largest single payroll in the
town, usually involved about six people. I think that section gang had about
forty miles of railroad to maintain. We also had a drug store and a meat market
and a town hall and all the residences in the town necessary for the people to
live in it that operated the businesses, and some of them worked for the railroad
and worked for the businesses you know.
We had one fortunate, very fortunate, circumstance at Montour, in that one man
who had moved there by the name of Vic Shel drew, I guess he had moved there about
1913, '14. A very excellent, very competent, very fast, carpenter and construc-
tion man. He had built practically every building there was in the town, except
the old ranch house at the end of the valley, the old one. He just built every-
thing. Houses, barns, store buildings, school, church, hotel, everything. He
built Dad's flour mill, he built Dad's elevator, he built his lumberyard, he
built his warehouse, and later a big barn. He built everything there was around
there. We were very lucky to have had him in the town. He married a girl there
in the town and raised two boys. He was an extremely hard worker, and he died
relatively young.
In many respects, Montour was a rather unique, very unusual town. I didn't know
it at the time, I had never lived in any other town. I didn't recognize it as
being unique, but it was. For one thing, it was a sudden growth town. It had
grown from nothing to an operating town in two years. And it was not temporary
construction, it was all good, permanent construction. People built there to
stay. Another thing that was unique was that there were hardly any old people
in town. It was young people moving there because they saw an opportunity to
live in a new little place getting located. Maybe a good place to raise their
families. I expect the oldest man in the town was a man that had started one of
the stores, a German by the name of Baukner. He had brought his son, a young
man, with him, and the son before long was operating the store.
The town had one other thing that was a real boost for it. It had a beautiful
grove that would have covered about, oh it covered probably five acres of ground.
What had happened is that many years before, maybe as much as forty years before,
people had come in to homestead that area, that beautiful big flat valley and
they had taken up all the land they could with a homestead. I think each person
could get a homestead on a 160 acres then, maybe more under certain circum-
stances, I'm not sure. But, anyway, there was a provision in the law where you
could make a timber claim and get a whole lot more land that you could lay claim
to. The only trouble was, there wasn't any timber in the valley, it was clear.
Just pasture and hay land. So they planted a lot of trees and made a beautiful
grove. Mostly hardwoods, Black Walnut, Maple, Birch, and I don't know what else,
with a nice cleared area in the middle. It made a beautiful park for the city.
By the time I came along in 1914, those trees were pretty big. As I say, they
were probably forty years old at that time, maybe thirty, I don't know. But, it
was a beautiful grove for picnics and things like that, and for us fellows to
build tree houses and things like that. The grove was close, almost a park. It
was within one block of the city center, if you could call it a city center, twas
right behind where we built the church.
The little church, of course, was new, everything in the town was new. The
little church was a Methodist /Episcopal because that was about the only
20
organization really active around there at the time and they had a Methodist -
Episcopal church in Sweet, only four miles away. They had a parsonage over there
for the preacher, and the same preacher then was able to serve both churches
which neither one by itself was hardly enough to support a preacher, so that
helped. I know my Mother loved to get down to the town, where she could really
go to work in the church, church work, welfare work, Ladies Aid Society and all
the rest of the things that women love to do you know. She was active, she was
a leader, a leader in the town, along those lines. Course, like all little
towns, there was one group that was the church group and the other group was not
the church group and they didn't mix very much for some reason.
But us kids, we mixed with everybody, that didn't count. That was all new to me
because I hadn't had much experience playing with other children and now there
were children all over the place. I guess the school had probably forty -five,
fifty kids in the first eight grades. Had them all in two rooms - first through
fourth in one room and fifth through eighth in the other room - and had two
teachers. Right across the road from the lumberyard, was a family that had three
little boys about my age, the McRoberts family. Ted, he was a little older than
I, and Dallas was just a little younger, and then Mike. They, of course, all
became my closest associates as I played with them. There were little kids all
over town. Lifelong friends many of them became. Well, by the time school
started in September, we were moved into our little apartment in the office in
the lumberyard, and we were on our way to school. I entered the second grade
because I had gotten enough basic training from the tutoring up at the mill so
they let me enter the second grade. My Sister Lois entered the first grade. I
don't remember what grade Lillian went into. She was about seven years older
than I so she might have went into the seventh or eighth grade, I don't know.
My first teacher was a gal named Mary Graham. She was the daughter of the
Methodist preacher and they lived in the parsonage over in Sweet and she came
over the four miles with a horse and buggy every day to teach school there at the
Montour school. I thought a lot of her, I thought she was just about right. I
don't remember much else about those first years in school. I don't even
remember who else was with me in the class. My next door neighbor, Ted
McRoberts, was a class or two ahead of me and his little younger brother was not
in school yet. I think maybe one friend I had by the name of Earl Gifford might
have been in school with me, but I am not sure, I just don't remember.
I know that I lived about four blocks from the school, that was all, but I know
that I would take my lunch each day and eat it at the school rather than walk
home for lunch. Maybe, Mother wanted to get rid of us, I don't know, but that
is the way we all did. Course, there were not any meals served in the schools
in those days. And you furnished your own school supplies like tablets and
pencils and whatever else you needed. I think the school did furnish the books.
The main thing I remember about that school year is that it was a happy year.
I enjoyed going to school at Montour. I enjoyed all the new experiences I was
having, all the kids around. Course every Sunday was a pretty definite ritual.
We got up and we got dressed up and cleaned up and we went to Sunday School, and
we stayed for church, and we went to prayer meetings on Thursday nights. Also,
we went to Epworth League on Sunday night, and we were there just as regular as
a clock. I have a little pin that says that I never missed Sunday School for
seven years, chuckle, so I guess it was pretty regular.
21
Two big things happened to me during that school year that I can still remember
very plainly. One is that I was trying to get a saw horse to buck with me one
time. I kind of had a saddle on it and had feet on each side of it and was
bucking and I fell off of it and broke my arm, chuckle. I remember that all
right, broke both bones in my right arm. Doctor came up from Emmett, set it and
put me in a splint and I had to write in school with my left hand for the next
six weeks or so. The other big thing that happened to me was that I bought a
bicycle. The fact that it was a girl's bicycle did not worry me a bit. I now
had a bicycle and I was so proud of that bicycle, I can still remember it. Oh,
that was a marvelous thing and it cost me all of two dollars. You couldn't
hardly keep any air in the tires but, otherwise, it did pretty good, it was an
old bike. I bought it from Helen Talley, the family that had the Livery Stable.
Course, I did not know how to ride a bicycle. I had to learn on it and maybe it
was a good thing it was a girl's bike, I don't'know, because I was not so very
big when I was eight years old, and it was a full size bicycle, but I learned to
ride it. I didn't get another bike for three years after that either.
Montour was a good place for a kid to grow. A beautiful river travelling through
the valley, the Payette River there, and there was plenty of fishing in it.
There were a lot of muskrats in the valley and some of the boys - trapped them, got -
spending money selling the hides. There were a lot of ducks, some geese,
pheasants, lot of rabbits in the hills. Course I didn't get to chasing those
much till a little bit later. You could go swimming, you could go swimming in
the slews away from the river where it was safe and you would not get drowned.
And you could go tramping all over those hills. Oh my. We did, we explored them
pretty well.
The most I remember though was that it was a happy year. About the middle of the
year or so, I think, we got to move over to our new home, and then went on to
finish the school year, and that was 1915. When school was out in 1915, we moved
back up to the sawmill on Soldier Creek for the Summer of 1915. That Summer, Ted
McRoberts, the boy next door, that lived next door, came up to the sawmill and
stayed with me for about three weeks. That was the first time I had ever really
had company at the mill.
In the Fall of 1915, we moved back to Montour to our new home, and started my
second year of school there with me in the third grade. Had a new teacher that
year. I think her name was Miss Crowell, I don't remember too much about her.
But, it was about the same thing over again, except I was a little older. I know
that she put me through the third and fourth grades in one year. That set me up
so that I was ready to enter the fifth grade after only two years of school. So
that got me into the age group with the kids that had started first grade when
they were six years old. The fifth year, of course, that was the upper room.
That was quite a progressive step to get out of the little room into the big room
as they called it. But you know, I can't remember who my teacher was in the
fifth grade. Wish I could, but I can't.
Dad bought his first new car in 1915. I think it was some time in the late
Summer of 1915. He had bought a new Maxwell touring car and he didn't like it
very well, and within two weeks, he took it in and traded it in on a new Buick.
A Buick, five passenger, touring car, is what they called them in those days.
It was a car that you could take the top down and fold it up like a convertible.
Only it was not a convertible, it was an open car, you know. Boy, that really
22
freed up our travel requirements.
Car operation was not simple in those days though. I know there wasn't any
service station in town, no place to buy gasoline. We had a fifty gallon barrel
sitting in the garage where we stored the car. We constructed a garage for the
car in a part of the lumber shed area. And we kept a barrel of gasoline close
to it so we could put gasoline in the tank. Freezing weather, we didn't have any
antifreeze to put in the radiator, so whenever you got home you'd drain all the
water out of the block and out of the radiator if it was cold weather. Then you
would get ready to go someplace again, you would put a lot of water on the stove
and get it all hot and pour it in the radiator and that would make the car start
easier. It had a self starter on it. The first car with a self starter was the
Cadillac, Lloyd Cox had bought, a 1914 Cadillac, so most of the other cars were,
all except the Model T Ford were copying it and had starters by 1915. The Buick
was a good car. Dad's car was the second one in the town. Before long, there
was a third. A family by the name of Snead, bought a five passenger touring car,
Studebaker. So then there were three cars in town, and it was a year or so
before there were any more.
These old cars ran more like a truck than anything like a car, and they were kind
of expensive in some respects. I think that first car that Dad bought cost about
$1,500.00. The tires were about eighty dollars apiece and you had about eighty
pounds of air in each one of them. They were high pressure tires, and they were
only good for about five or six thousand miles to each tire on those old dirt
roads, so they were not a cheap item.
By 1916, the year I was ten years old, Dad was letting me drive that car quite
a bit. Not by myself yet, but with him. During that year I even got so I could
drive the car over the road to Emmett which was a mountain road, if he was along,
that is, of course. There were no requirements in those days on who could drive
a car, there wasn't even any driver's licensing system. I think really I was
about 13 or 14 before he let me take the car by myself.
Even though we now had a car, there was two or three months of every year when
we could not use it. As I said, the roads were dirt roads, there wasn't any
gravel on them. They got wet and muddy and they just could not get over the
roads. Continuing with the discussion of the condition of the roads in Idaho in
1915. Actually, we were not as isolated as it sounds by not being able to get
over the roads for approximately three months of the year with an automobile and
certainly we were not as isolated as we had been in the Winters up at the mill
on Soldier Creek. The fact was, that the railroad provided passenger service on
the train from Nampa to McCall and on another train from McCall back to Nampa
every day except Sunday. The train came in from Nampa a little before noon
usually with the mail - some freight, the mail and the passengers. And a little
after lunch the train would come from McCall back to Nampa and another train, a
little after lunch going to Nampa.
Actually I'm getting ahead of my story here. I want to complete the discussion
about that year of 1915, that was when I was 9 years old. I didn't quite tell
all that I should of told about the town. The depot had an apartment upstairs
for the family of the Depot Agent. That was something I hadn't mentioned. Also,
the railroad company had a big ice house, and they put up ice every Winter and
used that ice to ice down the refrigeration cars or, I guess they were iced cars
23
for all fruit and stuff around the country. That pretty well covers the town,
but still it was a nice, pretty, new town.
It was still a town in the country in 1915. That meant a lot of things that are
sort of strange to us nowadays. The town was never incorporated so we never had
a police system, we never had a water system, or a sewer system or any other
services of that kind. Everybody had their own wells, most of them drilled
wells. Matter of fact, two of them in town had drilled wells and struck artisan
wells by their houses. We had a good well right behind our house, drilled over
a 100 feet deep with a hand pump and that's where we got our water. There was
no pressure. There was no electricity in town. No sewer system in the town.
All the toilets were chick sales type outside, but because there wasn't water
systems in any house, everybody used wells and most of them didn't even have a
drainage system, not even a septic tank. There wasn't much need for it unless
you had water pressure.
Many of the houses in the town had their own little ice houses because that was
the only way to keep food cool, was in an icebox. We had a nice big ice house
in the back of our house, where we had ice to keep in a ice box and to make ice
cream with all Summer long. Put the ice up from the river every Winter, packed
it in sawdust, and it would last all Summer. I suppose the dimensions of that
ice house were probably about 15, no 12 feet by 12 feet, and the ice was piled
about 8 feet deep and then surrounded by sawdust. Heck, we had plenty of ice all
Summer long.
There was one telephone in the town, in the larger store. One of the kind that
hangs on the wall and you cranked like the dickens when you wanted to ring you
know. You'd crank and crank and crank and make it ring. I think there was a
Central down at Emmett. Anyway, when they answered, you had to shout pert near
loud enough for them to hear you without the phone. You didn't have a slot for
coins, you asked them how much the call was afterwards and then you paid the man
at the store.
Well, I guess that provides a pretty fair description of the little town, and now
I might go a little further into my experiences there. I had some problems, of
course, with Mother and her extreme, somewhat extreme, attitude on the religious
standpoint. There were quite a few things that I was not allowed to do. Kind
of put a kink in me compared with some of the other kids around. For example,
neither Lois or I could ever go to any school parties because there might be some
danger that the kids would dance at the school and certainly my Mother wouldn't
ever let me get that close to any gal if she could help it. Also, they might
play cards and that was a terribly evil thing. I don't think I was even allowed
to mention the words of playing cards. Huh, twas pretty strict, and on Sundays
we couldn't play. We had fun doing things, but not on Sundays. I don't think
there was supposed to be any playing on Sunday. I came to the conclusion that
if it was any fun, it was evil if you tried to do it on Sunday. I couldn't even
shoot my little air rifle on Sunday. It was like I say, I came to the conclusion
that if it was any fun on Sunday, it was evil, it was something real bad. I
still think maybe she carried it a little to the extreme, but that was the way
she saw it. Goodness knows, she was a loving Mother and she did her dangdest for
us.
Quite a few things happened to our relatives in 1915. My uncle, James Ware, my
24
Father's half brother, had gone to teaching school. He taught over at Ola and,
one of the students, a sweet little gal named Ester Cousins, was one of his
students in his school. As soon as he started teaching school, she made up her
mind that she was going to marry him. Well, he wouldn't have anything to do with
that until she finished school. So, she finished school at Emmett and then went
further enough in school to get qualified to teach school, and I think they were
married along about 1912. Then they both started teaching school together. They
taught school first at Dry Buck. I don't know what year that was, might have
been 1911. Then they taught school at Brownley for a year, and then various
schools and I think that maybe both of them finally got their Master's Degree and
spent their life teaching, ending in Sacramento, California. Raised five
children, an excellent family. Three of them are dentists - two boys are
dentists and one girl married a dentist in Mill Valley in California and she's
a dental assistant. They are quite a family, good family. One girl died while
they were teaching in Pocatello. I don't remember what year that was, probably
some time around 1925 to '30. And another girl was killed in Sacramento in a
automobile accident, three of them are still living.
The girl that lived with us, Lillian Hillbert, she got married in 1915 while we
were at the sawmill, that Summer, while we were at the sawmill. She married,
like I said, a man, a farmer from Brownley, by the name of Albert Beckman and she
ultimately had ten children. They are now living all around the country here in
Idaho. Three of them finished college and are teachers, school teachers, major-
ing in agricultural. Her kids have done real well. The oldest one, Henry, was
killed in World War II, but the rest of them spent their lives living around
here.
And, about 1912 or '13 my Father's Mother and his youngest sister, half- sister,
moved to Idaho. Called her Grandma Ware and her daughter, Aunt Fanny. In about
1914, '15, I don't know which, Aunt Fanny was about right to go to high school.
Dad built a nice little home here in Emmett, for Grandma and Fanny so Fanny could
go to high school here. She did go awhile, don't know just how long, but then
she decided she wanted to get married. I think she got married before she
finished high school, perhaps. Married a man by the name of Alanthis Moore, of
Dry Buck, good looking man, and they've lived around here all their lives.
Raised eight children, and they are most of them around here. One in California,
one in Sand Point, Idaho, the rest of them around here.
Then there was another event that had quite an impact on our lives really, in the
Fall of, I think it was the Fall of 1915. It could have been '16, I don't know
which, but Mother got very sick. I mean she was deathly sick. We called the
doctor from Emmett and he come up to see her. His name was Clark, a Doctor
Clark. She was in a great deal of pain in her stomach. He was having trouble
figuring out what might be wrong with her, but he did come to the conclusion that
she immediately needed an operation, to be opened up to see what was going on
there. He was suspecting a tubular pregnancy that had ruptured the tube. Well,
as it turned out, he was right. He called a doctor from Boise, a surgeon. He
came over to Montour examined Mother. He decided that an operation immediately
was the only answer. So Dr. Stewart and Dr. Clark put Mother on the dining
table, right in our dining room in our home in Montour, and they performed major
surgery on her and that was what had happened. It was a tubular pregnancy and
the tube had ruptured and she had almost bled to death. I don't know what, and
the doctors didn't know what kept her from bleeding to death. All I knew was
25
that my Mother was awful sick. Well Mother was only 37, 38 years old at that
time, but they removed her tubes and her ovaries and of course that had a big
impact on Mother. Started her early into the change of life and changed things
quite a bit for her. But, basically, Mother was pretty healthy and she got over
it, she got over it.
Then another very significant thing happened that Fall of 1915, also. I think
Dad saw that there was a business potential that he wanted to follow up on in
Montour and he decided he was going to sell the mill. So in the Fall of 1915,
he sold it to a couple of partners in McCall , Idaho, Mr. Carl Brown and Mr.
Theodore Hoff. They came down and moved all the equipment in the mill and hauled
it down to Montour and put it on the railroad and hauled it up to McCall and that
then became the first mill that was built in McCall. Same equipment Dad had,
same engines, same carriage, same trimmer, same edgers and all. And that mill
ran there in McCall from 1916, they got it going, up through 1938 when it burned
again. Yeah, it burned.
So by the Fall of 1915, this is Winter of 1915, '16, we were thoroughly committed
to moving to Montour. Permanently. Dad had built a pretty good sized warehouse
along side his spur track and he was selling stock feed, buying grains, and
buying wheat, shipping it out, adding that to his building material business.
And I am sure he began to see the potential of that business in that area. 1916,
in the newspaper, Sweet printed the fact that there 66,000 bushels of wheat
raised on Brownley that year. Dad bought a lot of it, and sold it to the flour
mills in the lower countries. He could see how anxious they were for that wheat.
That was good, what they called Turkey Red, hard wheat which made the best flour
there was in the country. How anxious those mills in the lower country were to
get the wheat, they paid a premium for that wheat from that country. 66,000
bushels meant that there was at least 1,200 wagon loads of wheat hauled down
there to Montour and put through Dad's warehouse or loaded directly on to cars
and shipped out. So, Dad begin to plan for a grain elevator there to handle all
that. You could buy it in the Fall when the price was down a little bit, and
sell it in the Spring and make money. Matter of fact, that was about the only
way you could make a profit on the stuff. He had his grain elevator pretty well
along in construction in 1916.
1916, I was in the fifth grade - I was ten years old. I mean the Fall of 1916,
I was in the fifth grade. There was a dam, about a ten foot high dam, about four
miles up the Payette River from Montour, and it fed the water from the river into
a canal that went all the way down to the Emmett bench and that's how they
irrigated the Emmett bench. It was called the Canyon Canal, and it had been
built in 1908 and there's some tunnels in that canal. They were having trouble
with some cave -ins in the tunnels, stuff like that, so they decided to daylight
it. Take the tops off the tunnels, that's what they call daylighting the
tunnels. So Morrison Knudsen got a contract in 1916, their first sizable job.
All their works before that had been with horses, fresnos and slips. They had
been building railroad grade up in Long Valley for the Boise Payette Lumber
Company and that's about all Morrison Knudsen had done up to that time. But they
put a bid in on daylighting this quarter mile tunnel on the canal that was there
in Montour. So, in 1916, they brought a steam powered shovel in to Montour and
some little narrow gauge steam powered engines and dump cars and a bunch of
railroad track. I don't suppose that track was over 2 -112 to 3 feet wide, it was
narrow gauge stuff, small little dump cars. They took that steam shovel off the
26
train and took it over across the river to where they had to daylight that
tunnel, and started it up. Pretty good sized operation, took them until 1916.
And, I know that Dad sold them over 50 cars of coal that Summer just to power the
shovel and those steam engines on the little railroad. That kind of put him in
the coal business alright. And you know how that coal got unloaded? Those guys
Dad had working for him, all shoveled out of those gondolas with shovels. There
wasn't any dumping out of the bottom of the car or anything, it was just all
shoveled over the sides and then hauled up there to where the steam shovel and
the little steam trains could use it. Of course, the chance to sell 50 railroad
carloads of coal in one Summer was a pretty good break for Dad's business in
1916.
Well, another significant thing happened in 1916. When Dad had built our house
in 1915, he had it wired for electricity, although we had no promise of
electricity coming anytime soon. Still, it was wired between the walls
throughout the house for electricity, and in 1916 he put in what was called a
Delco lighting system. It was a thirty -two volt system. Built on 16 large lead
acid batteries and a little gasoline engine running a generator that kept the
batteries charged. Whenever the batteries got low, why there was a little
starter hooked on to the gasoline engine that would crank itself up and start and
would charge the batteries and then it would shut itself off. Didn't always work
quite as good as it should, but that was the way it was supposed to work. So we
had electric lights throughout the house. That's all. We didn't have enough
electricity from those batteries to do much else, just for lights. No electric
appliances of any kind otherwise, except that we did put in an electric motor to
pump water. Also, when the house had been built, it had been completely plumbed.
We didn't have any water pressure but it had been plumbed for it. It was a
little unique in that respect.
We had one little room for our bathroom and we had another little room where the
wash basin was where we could wash and clean up. And we had another little room
where the toilet was. They were all installed and all plumbed and no running
water. Chuckle. So now, we had a pressure system. There was a water tank in
the bathroom that kept the bathroom nice and warm all the time and the water in
the hot water tank was heated from a coil in the coal range that was in the
kitchen. They did not have any electric hot water tank but that was adequate.
It did a good job. So, by the end of 1916, we were modern. We had electric
lights, and hot and cold running water. The only one in the whole city. That
was pretty nice.
But there was a bad thing happened in 1916 too. I think in 1913 a family by the
name of Handley had moved into a place, started homesteading a place about 314
mile from our sawmill on down the creek. They had moved here from back in North
Carolina or South Carolina someplace. A man and his wife with 7 children. I
think the youngest one was about a year old and the oldest was about 15 years
old. Their name was Handley, and Mr. Handley worked at Dad's mill that last year
that we were up there. Well, after we tore down the mill and sold the equipment
out and sold the mill, Dad just let anybody come and get whatever they wanted of
the building materials. They tore the old buildings down, people did, and took
the lumber home with them and built things and Mr. Handley got his share of it
too, whatever he wanted he could have. That big water tank upon the hill, he
decided to tear that big water tank down up on the hill. He took some of the
27
rods out of it, unbolted it so he could get it apart, then a part of it fell over
on him and killed Mr. Handley. Well, Mr. Handley's wife had just died six months
before giving childbirth, so there was Mr. Handley with eight children and no
wife. Then Mr. Handley got killed, so, they were all orphans.
Well, people around the country just started trying to help them get along. I
know Mother and Dad took two of the children. The second from the youngest was
one named Johnny, Johnny Handley. He was maybe three years old, so we got him,
four years old maybe. Then the little sister older than him was named Birdie,
Birdie Handley, she was perhaps nine years old, maybe eight, I'm not sure. But
anyway, they both moved in with us in 1916 there at Montour. Lilly Beckman now,
had left us in '15, now we had two more. Johnny stayed with us, and went to
school after he got old enough to go to school. Stayed with us until one of his
older brothers got married and then Johnny went to live with his older brother.
Birdie, the little girl, she stayed with us and went to school until she was old
enough to get married.
Well, another thing, another of my interests in those years. Dad had purchased
me a thing called an erector set, and I had lots of fun playing with that at
home. Oh, you could make all kinds of things out of little girders, and little
things you bolted together, and a little electric motor. Oh my, I never did
really have anything else. I never had any toy trains or things like that, but
that erector set was a good device.
And, my interest during my early years from then on, always, was a lot of
reading. Read quite a lot of books in my youth. Zane Grey books, Jack London
books, that sort of thing, and of course, I had a pretty good smattering of what
Mother considered to be good books too. Yeah, they were good books, I enjoyed
them. I remember one good one, The Virginian, I read that one during those
years.
Of course, all of them became life long friends. They are all dead now, except
Johnny. Even his little younger sister that was born when his Mother died, she
is gone, they are all gone but Johnny. I think Johnny is now about 80 -81 years
old, and he lives about two miles from me here in Emmett. Good guy, nice guy.
Everybody calls him Jack, Jack Handley now. He comes over to see me every month
or so.
Dad and Mother took us on one vacation, I remember, along in 1915 or '16, I'm not
sure which, but, anyway, we took a train down to Portland. We were going to take
about a two week's vacation. Went down to Boise, got on the train and went to
Portland. Then we got on a river boat, an old sidewheeler river boat called the
J. T. Potter, I can remember. We went from Portland down to Astoria, about 125
miles down the Columbia River, then went across on to the Washington side and got
on a train. I think it was a narrow gauge train that travelled up the Washington
Coast maybe 15 or 20, 30 miles to a little town called Ocean Park. We stayed
there for about a week, and tramped up and down the beaches and went out and
caught clams. I mean you could really catch them, there wasn't a limit on them
like there is nowadays. They rented a taxi for a day and travelled all up and
down the beach and saw all the sights. Then we came back the same route on the
J. T. Potter from Astoria back up to Portland and from Portland back home on the
railroad. T'was a nice trip, nice experience. I have well remembered it all my
life. I don't know exactly when that occurred, but it occurred sometime when
only Lois and I were living at home, there weren't any other kiddies. So, okay,;
that's when it was. I don't think it was in school time, but I'm not just sure
when.
Of course, with all these things, Dad was busy, busy, building up his business
and Mother was busy, busy, running the town and running the church and running
us kids. I think, if I remember right, Dad was on the school board. Then 1917
come along, and we got into World War I. And that cleaned all the young men out
of the valley. I think there must have been at least ten that were drafted or
enlisted, and most of them enlisted. So, we lost our good Montour baseball team
and lost a lot of the excitement that was going on around town with all those
young bucks around there.
I know that in the later Fall of 1916, we trade the most extensive trip with my
folks that I ever made. It was in the later part of October fore it started so
it interfered with my going to school in the fifth grade. Dad decided to buy a
new car. He traded the old Buick in in Boise and traded it in on a new Buick,
a new seven passenger touring car, that he wanted to take delivery on in Detroit
and then drive it back to Idaho, which was quite a trick in 1916. So, he loaded
us all on the train, Mother, Dad, Sis and I. And we went back as far as Kansas
City, little further, went to a little town sixty miles the other side of Kansas
City, called Marshall, Missouri. That was where Mother had been raised, and we
stayed there whi 1 e Dad went on up to Detroi t - took del i very of hi s new Bui ck car
and then he drove back to Marshall.
Then we visited around there for, oh I don't know, a week or two. Visited all
of Mother's brothers and sisters. Her Mother and Dad had been gone for a long
time. Mother had five brothers and four sisters. She was the youngest of the
bunch, and all but four of them were living right around Marshall, Missouri. The
five brothers were named, let's see, James Clark, Irving, Sam, Price, and
Earnest. Then she had four sisters, Aunt Ella, Aunt Suni (Aunt Susan) Aunt
Minnie, and Aunt Mollie. Aunt Ella had married a man named Boatwright and lived
right there at Marshall, Missouri. Aunt Suni had married a man named Higgins and
lived about four miles out of Marshall, Missouri, on a ranch. Aunt Mollie lived
in St. Louis and she'd married a man named Higgenbothem and he wouldn't let her
have anything to do with the Clark family for some reason, so we didn't get to
see her. Aunt Minnie lived out of Topeka, Kansas, and we went over on to
Marshall coming out West and saw her. James Clark lived near Marshall on a
ranch, a farm, and Price and Earnest lived in the area also with their families.
Uncle Sam was in North Dakota and Uncle Irving lived in Salem, Oregon. So, we
spent our time visiting around there. That's the only time I ever saw Mother's
relatives. I was just ten years old, and, boy, that was a big deal for me. Then
we drove on out through Kansas, and saw Minnie Guyer, she had married a man named
Guyer. Then we came on to Pueblo and over the Rocky Mountains on the Monarch
Pass. It was getting along to the middle or late - November when we got over that
pass. Then on across to Grand Junction, Colorado, and on across Utah to Provo
and up to Salt Lake. We went through the Morman Tabernacle that Fall in Salt
Lake and then came on home.
There wasn't a hard surface road on the whole trip, and it was an open car with-
out a heater and we camped out for the whole trip. We had a little tent we set
up over the car, and we had cots to put in it and we had our cooking outfit -
that's the way we travelled. I think maybe it was almost December when we got
29
home, but that was the longest, extensive trip that we ever made, and we had a
new car when we came home.
Then I got back into the fifth grade. I don't know if that affected me any or
not, I guess not. I seemed to never get very good grades anyway. My sister Lois
was the one that always got the good grades. But, after all, she studied hard.
I didn't study much, I didn't have time, I was too busy doing other things.
Besides, I was always in a little bit of trouble and she was always the good
little girl. I kind of got a complex that maybe she was doing a little tattling
on me, but then I guess that's how it is in this world.
As I think of it, I think it was that Fall of 1916 that Mr. Handley got killed
and after we came back I think maybe Bertie and Johnny Handley came to live with
us in Montour. They stayed with us pretty much during the school year, but they
would visit around with some of their other folks. The older brothers had gotten
married and Bertie would go back and stay with them. One of them was back in
North Carolina and I think Johnny went back and stayed with him awhile. The
other one was up on Dry Buck and married one of the church girls. I think
Bertie was up with them during the Summer some, and then she'd come back and go
to school.
Now, in 1916, some about our old Chinese cook, Old China Sam Chinese cook, Old
China Sam. He had come to the United States, I guess, sometime early in the
Century, I'm not sure when. He came to work for us some time before I was born,
around 1904, '05, or '06, along in there, and he'd worked for us all those years
at the sawmill. After that he had worked for us in Montour some when Mother was
sick or needed extra help or something. Then he worked some in, he went to work
for a logging contractor in Boise Basin and cooked for his logging camp. But to
double back on China Sam, he had come to the United States from Canton, China,
I think when he was perhaps about thirty five years old. He had married in
Canton. He left his wife there, pregnant, and he had come to the United States
to try to get ahead some.
Well, by 1916, we were living in Montour. China Sam had been working some up in
Boise Basin for that logger, and he had gone to Boise for his Winter vacation.
One day we got word that he was pretty sick, so my folks immediately went to
Boise. It was late enough in the Fall that we could not drive the car over, so
we got a team and buggy and headed across the hills to Eagle. Left the team and
buggy there at Eagle at the livery stable and got on the urban and went up to
Boise. That was a hurry up trip. We went up to Saint Luke's Hospital and Sam
was a very, very sick man. He had pneumonia. I think Sam died the day we got
there, or the day after, I'm not sure which. Mother and Dad and Lois and I were
all in the room at the hospital when he died. It was a sad time for us. I think
that was the first time I ever saw a man die. So, the folks then had the job of
taking care of the funeral arrangements and I can well remember that funeral.
The funeral was down town, I think maybe where Summer's Funeral Parlor is.
Anyway, he was buried on Morris Hill in the Morris Hill Cemetery. There was the
white people's part of the funeral, and there was the Chinaman's part of the
funeral. There were a lot of Chinese people in Boise at that time, and I can
remember the procession going out to the graveyard.
The Chinese were scattering little pieces of tissue paper all along the route.
Oh, they were about maybe two inches by four inches in size, tissue paper
30
scattered all along the route. They had hundreds and hundreds of them and when
they got out to the end, they had three or four little holes poked through all
these tissue papers. They got out to the grave and they had some of the papers
left so they started a fire and lit them and burned them there beside the grave.
So, I found out from one of the Chinese there what the significance of all that
was. They had taken this pile of tissue papers into the josh house and they'd
had their priest or Buddha or whatever he was, bless it in a certain way and the
story was that the devil had to go through all these little holes, through these
pieces of paper all the way out to the graveyard, trying to chase Sam before he
could catch Sam's soul, and then they burned up the ones that was left and that
would make it harder than ever for the devil to catch up with Sam. Chuckle.
Well, they had the graveside services and they buried him. I noticed some of the
Chinese throwing a few coins in on the casket and after the grave was covered,
they put some food on top of it. I remember one Chinese roast chicken on a plate
sitting right on top of it. The money and the chicken was to provide Sam with
whatever he needed while he was traveling through paradise to get on to heaven.
So, we got China Sam buried at Morris Hill.
We gathered up all his few personal possessions, like his watch and his bible,
in Chinese, he could read, he had been educated in China and he could read.
Mother, of course, had been working real good on him trying to make a good
Christian out of him, and she had gotten him that bible. There was a big write -
up in the paper about China Sam's death. I think I still have copies of it
around here. Not an obituary, an article about the old boy. Well, about three
months later we got word that there was a Chinaman coming to see us from New
York. Come to find out he was China Sam's cousin and he lived in New York and
he was a medical doctor in New York. A Chinese trained medical doctor, with all
the herbs and stuff you know. But anyway, this Chinese doctor from New York
arrived at Montour and he had an interpreter with him because he did not speak
English. He was working with Chinese people only in New York and had never
learned to speak English. They stayed at our place in Montour for a couple,
three days. Got all of China Sam's personal belongings, then went over to Boise,
dug up his grave, dug him up, and shipped his body back to China for burial. So,
I guess that winds up my China Sam story. I have had a little bit of a soft
place in my heart for Chinese ever since my experiences with China Sam. He was
a good old, he was a good man. He had saved enough money on his seventy -five
dollars a month working here in the States, which was big money in China. He had
set up his oldest son in a book store in Canton, China. I don't know what
happened to the rest of the children, maybe he helped them some, maybe not. I
don't know about the rest of them. That is about all I know about China Sam.
The new car models came out in, about the first of October in those days. So we
bought that Buick, got delivery in, about the first of November, so we got it in
1916, and it was a 1917 model. So I'm pretty sure about the time on this one.
By the Summer of 1918, I was twelve years old - getting ready to enter, I think,
the sixth grade. I knew things weren't quite right around home. I think there
was some emotional problems, I don't know, with my folks. What I really think
the score was that Mother was going through a change of life because of that
operation she'd had with that tubular pregnancy, and I think it had her in a real
honest - to- goodness emotional stew. Course, I never saw anything like that around
my folks. Never. I never in my life ever saw one cross word between either of
my parents. I don't know whether that's a healthy situation or not, but there
never was any argument or a cross words or anything of that kind between them.
31
f If they had any problems, we weren't permitted to know about it. I know many
homes are not that way, but that's the way ours was. Never - the -less, I have that
feeling that Mother was having emotional problems because of that operation and
the change of life that was coming. I wasn't aware of those things at that time
but, as I think of it later, that was probably the situation.
In the late Summer, they decided to move her for a month or two up to a little
town in Oregon called Flora, Oregon, because there was a preacher there that
Mother had a lot of confidence in. It was right in the Northeast corner of
Oregon, where you could almost look over and see the State of Washington, or look
east and see the State of Idaho, right up in the corner of Oregon. Dr. Lyons was
preaching, a methodist preacher, up there at Flora, and if there was ever any
problems with Mother, religion was the answer. So, she was looking to a preacher
for the answer, and anything that would have made her happier, more stable, and
so forth, would have been satisfactory to Dad, I know that. So, I think this is
why we went to Flora. That late Summer he took us up there. We went up through
Baker and LaGrande and Enterprise and up to Flora, drove us up there in the car.
We rented a cabin back there in that little primitive, little logging village,
of Flora, Oregon, oh maybe a block away from this Dr. Lyons and his family, his
wife and two children. I like him, I liked Dr. Lyons. He was a fine guy, even
if he was a preacher.
We stayed up there oh two and one -half months, I guess, and I entered the sixth
grade there. Went to school in that little town of Flora. T'was high up in the
mountains, pretty high up. We went there before school started, I know, and I
know that I was there still in school, when the Armistice was signed on the 11th
of November, 1918. Not too long after the Armistice was signed, Dad came up and
got us and brought us back home. I don't know whether it did Mother any good or
not. I think she got more stabilized emotionally, but I don't know. The change
of life was hard on her at her young age, and I think they didn't have some of
the drugs they have to compensate for that sort of thing that they have nowadays.
I remember in 1918 when I was twelve years old, I think perhaps that was just
before we had made our trip up to Flora, Oregon, to stay for a few months in the
Fall of 1918. I think Dad decided to go deer hunting, and he decided to take me
along. He had bought me a second hand twenty -two that Summer and I had practiced
some with it. I never did get very good with it, but I'd gotten so I could do
a little shooting, so he decided he would take me deer hunting. We went up to
Long Valley, up to Cascade, and then about 10 miles East of Cascade into a little
valley called Scott Valley. We had taken along with us an old hard bitten
sourdough that was supposed to be a good mountain man you know. He'd gone along
with us, an old man by the name of Bert Sams. So we camped out on the Scott
Valley. I had borrowed a gun from Ted McRoberts, a 303 Savage, Model 99 rifle,
a caliber about equal to what the old 30 -30 caliber was, a good gun. The next
morning we got up and went out and started climbing the mountain. Within an hour
I came to a deer about fifteen yards away I guess, and I shot him and killed him
with the first shot. Dead - he didn't move five feet. Beautiful two point fat
buck. Then I got buck fever and I could not really hit the side of a barn with
a bullet, but anyway, I got my first deer. I don't think I enjoyed it very much,
I know I never shot any deer after that. One maybe many, many years later. They
were beautiful animals running in the mountains, and I don't know, I don't people
ought to go out and shoot them, unless there gets to be too many of them,
perhaps.
32
Another thing happened in 1918. Dad had, I guess, Grandma Ware had had ten
children. Dad was the oldest. Only five of them had grown to adulthood, and
they had all come to Idaho but one, in the years up to that time. In 1918, the
fifth one came to Idaho. That was Aunt Pearl, Pearl Ware, Dad's half - sister.
She had married a man in New Mexico, name was Jeff Brummett and they had two
small children, Thelma and Henry and they'd come to Idaho in 1918 and were living
in Boise. Well the 1918 flu epidemic was a severe thing. It killed an awful lot
of people, and my Aunt Pearl and Uncle Jeff got the flu in Boise and they both
died. In fact, they died within twenty -four hours of each other, and left two
little orphans. I expect Thelma was maybe about four, no she was about six, and
Henry about four at the time. So, they were around for awhile, but before very
long they had been taken back to New Mexico, where Jeff Brummett's Father and
Mother raised them. After they became adults, they moved back to Idaho. Thelma
is now living in Prineville, Oregon. She married and has a family down in
Prineville and Henry lives North of Vancouver, Washington, in a little town over
there. They are about my age, you know, no, they are a little bit younger, not
much. I have stopped over there to see them a time or two, don't see them very
much.
Anyway, that Summer of 1918, good ofd Democratic politicians in Gem County talked
Dad into running for the Legislature. Gem County was a new county, it was never
formed until 1915. Then in the Summer of 1918, the Democratic County Committee
wanted Dad to run for the Legislature. Well, Dad was always a good Democrat, so
he told them he'd run, but he wouldn't do any electioneering. If they wanted him
to run, he'd run, do the best he could, but he wasn't going to do any election-
eering. If the people wanted him, alright - if they didn't want him, alright.
So that's the way it was. Well, Gem County has always been a Republican County,
but danged if he didn't get elected anyway. So, by the middle of the Winter
1919, when the Legislature was going to meet, we had the job of moving to Boise.
So the folks rented a house. It was on the corner, it was on Franklin Street,
just about one house from 19th, no, one house from 18th Street. I've seen the
little house we rented, its still sitting there.
Then we moved to Boise and I entered Park School in the sixth grade. Park School
was then located on the corner of 16th and Main in Boise. My Sister entered the
fourth grade in another school. I don't know where it was, I don't know what the
name of it was. It was a different school, but not very far away. So I expect
I spent about, oh, two and one /half months, I'm guessing, two and one /half months
in the sixth grade in Park School in Boise that year. Boy, did I learn to roller
skate, every place I went was on roller skates. Oh, about half way through our
stay there Dad bought me a new bicycle. Oh boy. It was a Harley Davidson
bicycle. Harley Davidson made motorcycles and bicycles both then. He bought me
a light weight easy to pump Harley Davidson, and I could out run all the boys
around.
Well, let's see, we had to have stayed in Boise longer than that because we went
there in January, I think, and I got a job mowing lawns to help pay for that
bicycle and that probably was in May. So, maybe we were there for four months,
five months, I don't know. Also, that year, I joined the Boy Scouts in Boise.
I'd never been around where there was a troop of Boy Scouts before, so that was
a new experience too. The Scout Troop was of course affiliated with a church and
had a good Scout Master, and we'd go out camping and on hikes and this and that,
and earned our merit badges and so forth. I had a little bad luck on that too,
33
cause I know we took a hike one day up there. It was called Rock Canyon, up
behind Table Rock and we were all hiking along up the canyon. There was some of
the Troop up on the hill above me and they were tramping around up there and got
some rocks loose that were rolling down the hill toward us. I looked up in the
air and there was some rocks coming right down toward me, and they were pretty
good sized rocks, maybe five inches through, you know, four or five inches
through. Kind of round rocks, they weren't cobblestones. They were rough rocks,
but they were rocks that could be pretty heavy, and they were close. I ducked
down and throwed my hands up behind my head. I didn't know whether I was going
to get hit or not, but one of them hit right on my hand on the back of my head
and broke the major bone finger in the back of my hand in my big finger. Oh boy.
So back to town and back to the doctor and back with a splint. Back to Dr. Beck
again this time. He made a splint my hand and, I went to school writing with my
left hand again for about four, five, six weeks. And, I've had a nice big real
husky knuckle right in the middle of my right hand ever since. Its just about
twice as thick as the knuckle is on my other hand.
I know that Dad didn't like the Legislature very well. Those Legislatures didn't
vote the way they thought it would be best for the State necessarily.__ He said
they would vote for your Bill if you'd vote for their Bill, and that was just
about the way it was. It wasn't whether it was a good or a bad or indifferent
Bill, whether it benefitted or didn't benefit. It was you vote for my Bill and
I'll vote for your Bill. Well that wasn't quite all of it. Another problem was
which party you belonged to. Most of the Legislatures were Republicans and,
therefore, Democrats had a hard time getting any Bill in, good, bad, or indif-
ferent. I know Dad was very much interested in getting a road built from Emmett
up to Long Valley. It would be a water grade so as to get rid of all those
hills, and ups and downs, and one that wouldn't have so much snow in the Winter
time.
Continuing with my Father's work in the Idaho Legislature in 1919. The way that
Dad put in the Bill to authorize that highway, originally, the way he put it in
was to have the road come from Emmett up to Montour to Horseshoe Bend to Gardena
to Banks and right on up the Payette River the same way the railroad goes. That
would have made a good water grade without any steep hills and without any more
snow than necessary. In order to get his Bill through, he got Cecil Weeks to put
in because Dad was a Democrat, and he was afraid they wouldn't pass it. So he
got Cecil Weeks, who was a friend of his and who was a Republican in the
Legislature, to propose the Bill and it did pass. It went right through.
However, in later years, later sessions of the legislature, it was changed to
authorize that Highway 55 over Horseshoe Bend Hill which put Horseshoe Bend
within twenty -five miles of Boise, instead of being fifty -five miles if they
would have had to come through Emmett. Emmett had some advantages, of course,
but it was a lot further to Boise. And that Horseshoe Bend Hill has certainly
caused them a lot of grief. They have never gotten a good road over that
Horseshoe Bend Hill until the last two years. It's just been opened in the last
two, three months, the last four or five million dollars they spent trying to get
a good road over that hill. I don't know whether they've got it yet or not. I
haven't been over the new road yet, but it has been a tussle all these years.
Certainly would have been a lot better road if it had been down the river, except
for the distance, and it would have put Emmett on the map, which is some of what
Dad had in mind. Course, we got a good highway from Horseshoe Bend down to
34
Emmett now, but it is not up to the standard of Highway 55 by quite a bit. Has.,
a lot of traffic, it should be improved between Horseshoe Bend and Emmett, think
maybe it will some of these times.
But by 1921 the road up the river was in use. It was built all the way from
Boise, well, from Horseshoe Bend on up the Payette River to Long Valley and
certainly simplified the travel. The road was not to the standard it is today,
it's a pretty good highway today and the traffic load wasn't anything like it is
now. It was a dirt road then, now its a good hard surface road, but there is so
much traffic now on weekends you better stay off of it.
Well, getting on to 1919, by the Summer of 1919, there were six of the men that
had come from Missouri to work at Dad's sawmill that were now living around
Montour. They had come out as young single men, most of them, now all of them
were married. One of them, his boyhood sweetheart had come out from Missouri and
married him, and the other five married local girls. They were all building
homes around Montour and living there. Three of them were working on the section
gang at the railroad, and I think they became section foremen ultimately, and had
to move away to work at other places where the railroad wanted them. I think
they ultimately all retired with a pension from the railroad.
One of them, one that had come to the sawmill in 1907 when he was seventeen years
old from Missouri, had come to Montour to work for Dad and he was probably Dad's
key man at the Montour operation with the flour mill thing. Maybe I should name
that bunch of men for the purpose of the record here. The six that had been
living around Montour that had come down from the mill were Ford Bostick, Lou
Idle, Lloyd Cox, Howard Jones, Bluford Sweringen, and his Father, Tom Sweringen.
Bluford Sweringen was the one that continued to work for Dad at the mill there
in Montour. Very fine man, very competent man. He had become our key sawyer,
the key man in any sawmill, by 1911. After we quit the flour mill in Montour,
he continued to saw in mills around the country. All of these men became
lifelong friends with me, and I have rather intimate knowledge of their lives
throughout, as long as they lived.
In 1919, the Summer of 1919, I was thirteen years old, and I think my playing all
Summer was beginning to end, and I was beginning to be expected do some work.
Course, I had always had my chores to do, I had to get in the wood and get in the
coal, mow the lawn and feed the chickens and work in the garden some, but not a
great deal of work otherwise than that, up til when I was thirteen. But, the
year I was thirteen, 1919, Summer of 1919, Dad was well into the building of the
flour mill. Vic Sheldrew, of course, again, was heading up the job, and three
or four other men helping him build that mill. It was all cement construction,
four stories high with a full basement, a good sized flour mill. All the
building was constructed out of reinforced concrete. Vic Sheldrew had fixed an
arrangement whereby the cement was mixed at ground level beside the building in
cement mixers, then it was, after it was mixed, it was poured into a wheelbarrow
which was setting on an elevator arrangement that Vic Sheldrew had built when,
a double elevator, when one went up, the other one came back down and they
counterbalanced each other. Hauled the wheelbarrow full of cement up to where
it was dumped into the forms around the building. Well, my job for that Summer
was to take care of the horse that worked the elevator of those wheelbarrows of
cement up and down. Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. I supposr
the job took me about four hours a day, perhaps for an average for that Summer.
35
First time that I had held a steady work. I suppose thirteen is early enough to
start doing that sort of thing. We would have a run of cement and that would
take a few hours to put it up and fill up the forms, then we would have to wait
a day or such a matter to let the cement set up, then they would raise the forms
and we would have another session of running the cement into the forms. I
suppose the forms were raised about two, two and one -half feet each time. Didn't
take all of the Summer, but it took a sizeable amount of it. I also had one
other job that Summer running a hay derrick. Leading the horse back and forth
running a hay derrick for a family by the name of Gatfield there in the valley.
That was the first job for pay that I'd had ever had. It only lasted about a
week, but, chuckle, it was quite an experience. I can't remember how they paid
me, I suppose a dollar, a couple dollars a day, and they boarded me while I was
there. As it was about two miles away, I couldn't come home at night, so I took
a couple of blankets and slept in their barn in the hay mounds. Heh, so my first
experience out at work was a little rough. We were out there about a week I
guess, putting up that hay. That was my first job. Then my next one was that
job raising the cement in the flour mill building. Well, I don't know as I got
any pay for that.
As I said, the Summer of 1919 I was thirteen years old, so in the Fall, Septem-
ber, I was ready to enter the eighth grade. The new teacher that had been
employed to teach the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grades at the Montour
school that year was a lady by the name of Mrs. Blackler. I suppose she was
probably thirty -two, thirty -three years old, something like that. She had a son,
one year younger than I, his name was Myrton. She was a divorcee or a widow, I'm
not sure. We had known her before, because she was the teacher who had come up
and tutored me and Lois and Myrton when I was seven years old and eight years
old, the Summer months at the sawmill. She was a good teacher, and with her
teaching the class, my eighth year, my eighth grade was a good year. Can't
remember very much about who was in class with me, I know one young man about my
age, he was thirteen, his name was Earl Gifford. A very good friend of mine.
And there was a girl named Pearl Montgomery, and there were four or five others,
but I'm just not sure. I think, perhaps Lyda Henry was in my class also. Mrs.
Blackler took a lot of interest in her children in school and out of school, and
we had parties at her place and I was allowed to go to those parties because we
knew there would not be any dancing, and there would not be any card playing, so
that was alright, I could go to those.
All in all it was a happy year. I remember one circumstance that was sort of
interesting that happened that year, and it happened at Mrs. Blackler's place.
They were having a party one evening there, the gang that was in school was there
at the party. By that time, we had telephones around various houses. They were
all party lines, quite a few people on one line you know. I think the ring on
our house was two long rings and one short ring. The phone was mounted on the
wall and you cranked like the dickens to make it ring. Maybe as many as eight
or ten people on a party line, and, of course, they could listen to each other
talk and they did. But I am telling about the telephone because a part of that,
chuckle, thing I remember at that party that night. We were at Mrs. Blackler's
for the party and she had the lights turned low and she was telling us ghost
stories, real scary ghost stories, and she was pretty good at it. The wind was
blowing outside, and it was a stormy, stormy night and it was a real good night
for ghost stories. And then, right in the middle of the ghost story, one of
those stand up telephones that you have with a little bale on the side that you
tral
hang the earpiece on, sitting on the table there, it started right up the wall,
the whole telephone. Well, right in the middle of a ghost story, in a rather'`
darkened room and then have the telephone start right up the wall is a very scary
circumstance. Well, nevertheless, we had to get calmed down after a bit and see
what caused it. Chuckle, an old cow out in the yard got tangled up in the wire
and pulled on the telephone wire and it had pulled the telephone right up the
wall. Laughter. Oh yes, I'll always remembered that.
But, again, maybe I am a little bit ahead of myself here in this story. The late
Summer of 1919, just before school started, we brought electricity into Montour
so we woul d have power to power the fl our mi 11. That was 1 ong before the Federal
Program of Rural Electrification, and it was quite a deal to have a small town
with electricity. There was a small electric power plant about four miles up the
river from Montour. It had been built in 1889 so actually it had been in
operation for thirty years. That plant had been built there on the Payette River
for the sole purpose of powering the electric interurban lines that ran up and
down Boise Valley. In 1890 they started operation, running from Boise to Eagle
to Star to Middleton and on to Caldwell, and then back from Caldwell to Nampa to
Meridian to Boise. Made a complete loop of the Boise Valley and they had an
electric car running each direction every hour on that train, Winter and Summer,
from about 5:00 o'clock in the morning until 11:00 o'clock at night. It made
fabul ous servi ce from Boi se Val l ey and thi s power pl ant up the ri ver from Montour
was the one that had been built to power those electric cars. They had little
stations all along, about every two miles along the track. You could get out and
stand on those stations and when the car come along, you would flag it down, and
they would stop and pick you up and take you on to wherever you wanted to go.
Well, the Idaho Power Company, the one that furnishes electricity here now, was
formed about 1916. One of the first things they did was buy that power plant up
above Montour there on the river, and they had bought the interurban lines around
Boise at the same time. The Idaho Power Company ran that interurban line in
Boise for the next, oh they bought it in '16 and they phased it out about eleven
years later. There were so many cars by that time there wasn't much use for the
electric service, so they phased it out, but they continued to operate their
power plant at Horseshoe Bend. So, in order to get electricity for the flour
mill at Montour we built the power line. We had the Idaho Power come in and
supervise and we built a power line from that power plant down to Montour, a
distance of four miles. Well, as a result of that, electricity was provided to
all the people in the town. So, Montour was about twenty -five years ahead, at
least twenty -five years ahead of any of the other little towns around the country
with electric service.
Well, getting back to my eighth grade in school, starting in the Fall of 1919,
t'was a good year. I got good grades because Mrs. Blackler knew what to teach,
and she made it interesting. I graduated from the State Examinations with flying
colors. I have one little story I like to tell about those Examinations. The
State Examinations spelling, the eighth grade examination in spelling, had fifty
words in the examination. When I took the Exam, I missed forty, and I still got
a grade of 98, which was pretty good. So people always have to ask me, how could
that be? So then, I have to tell them that I spelled it "fourty ". Well anyway,
certainly Mrs. Blackler knew what to teach you so that you would pass those Exams
good.
37
By the Summer of 1920, when I was fourteen years old, the flour mill was in full
operation, and I had a steady job. I was a big husky kid and chuckle, Dad really
utilized me in the warehouse and in the flour mill. My primary job in the flour
mill became one of filling the flour sacks and sewing them, sewing them shut on
top and taking them out and putting them out in the warehouse. We made three
grades of flour. One they called Pep, that was primarily a soft wheat flour made
for pastries. Then we had another flour called Ideal, it was a general purpose
flour about 50% soft wheat and 50% hard wheat, Turkey Red wheat they call it.
Then we had a flour that was an 80% hard wheat, and that was our special flour
for bread. I swear it made the best bread I ever tasted. And Mother was cooking
that regularly. She ran a, you might say, a laboratory, testing the quality of
the bread. She was baking bread regularly from that flour and boy it was some-
thing. And, it was being recognized around as the top quality flour. Dad had
gotten all of the Golden Rule Stores, the C. C. Anderson Stores, to handle his
flour in their grocery stores. He had three bakeries in Boise using his flour
exclusively, and many other stores around the country. He was making good flour
so we were busy.
The flour mill was not all of the operation either and, of course, there were
other products. We had quite a bit of bran come from making the flour. We had
set up some hog pens where we were feeding our surplus to them, so we had about
a carload of hogs to sell once every six months. Raising little ones and selling
them. The warehouse was handling the commercial business of storage and things
coming through the warehouse and going into railroad cars. I remember every Fall
there would be four or five railroad cars of turkeys shipped out of Montour
through the warehouse. People would bring them in and the buyers would come and
load them into their crates and put them into those cars that were iced down from
the ice house on the railroad. Oh, there would usually be five, six cars of
turkeys, nothing but turkeys going out sometime before Thanksgiving. In the
Spring of the year, the warehouse would be packed full of wool sacks, the sheep
men bringing their wool down until we got carload lots. Finally, we'd get maybe
six or eight carload lots in the warehouse at once and then they'd store them for
a while until the price went up. Then into the railroad cars they would go and
ship them out to the people that bought the wool. Quite a lot of commercial
activity in our warehouse besides handling our grain and flour.
I can't remember much of significance during that Summer of 1920, except work.
The Fall of 1920, I was fourteen years old, and I was ready to start my first
year of high school. So, I guess this winds up the story of my grade school
years, and starts a new phase of this book - my high school years.
_1
CHAPTER 3
HIGH SCHOOL - 1920 -1924
Up to that year, there had not been any high school in Montour, but in the Summer
of 1920, the school board decided to establish a high school and course for the
first year, they just had one year of high school. 1921, they had two years of
high school and that was all they had then until 1927, when they made it a four
year high school. But, back to 1920 - they established the one year of high
school at Montour, and employed Mrs. Blackler to teach the year of high school.
So now, we began to use the upstairs rooms of the beautiful big brick school
building. We had about sixteen students in the first year of high school. Due
to the fact there had been no high school available around there, some of the
boys had not gone to high school so the ones that came the first year was kids
that had been out of school for up to three years. Now that the high school was
available, they decided to go to high school. I think there were ten boys in the
class and five girls, if I remember right. Perhaps, I should name that gang for
purposes of a record here. I'm not sure who all the girls were. I think Martha
Henry and Lyda Henry, and I think maybe Florence Malstrom was in that class and
a couple other girls, I've forgotten who they were, but the boys, I can remember
them well. One was Harry War from Sweet, Charlie Schuller, Ted McRoberts, Willis
Deaton, Earl Gifford, Edward Adkins, Ray McConnell, Ben Newell, Oliver Powell
(later known as Rick Powell) and Elwood Pugh. I think maybe all of them were a
little older than I except Ray McConnell. He might have been a little bit
younger, but Ben and Rick Powell and Ted McRoberts were up to as much as three
years older than I. Two and a half years perhaps, and then on down to Ray who
was two or three months younger than I.
1920 -21 was a good school year. All the students loved the teacher, and she had
the ability to develop real honest to goodness interest in their studies. I
think perhaps my interests and characteristics began to show up more in the
seventh, eighth and ninth grades than they had before. Mathematics was always
a strong suit, mathematics was always easy, arithmetic and algebra, always easy
subjects for me. And geography, the study about the world, learn about the
different places in the world and to make maps. Oh, those were two of my strong
subjects I think at that time. I know in that first year of high school, one of
the subjects I took was Latin. Well, that was not a very good subject, I don't
know why I took it. That was one of Mother's ideas that, chuckle, it was a good
subject for culture, whatever that is.
Continuing with the subjects that I took in my first year of high school in
Montour in 1920. At first, when I was taking Latin, I couldn't see much reason
why I should or what good it might do for me, but later it seemed to work out
alright. I never had been a very good English student, my composition, wording,
phrasing and so forth was not very good. But, after one year of that Latin
study, I had no more problem with that. When I went on to college in 1925, I
passed the English entrance examinations without any problem. Most of the
39
college entries were having, not most of them, maybe two /thirds, of the new
college students, were having to take Remedial English before they could enter
college, or along with entering college, and I didn't have to do that. I think
it was largely because I had taken that Latin course. The rest of the subjects
that I took that first year in high school were of the usual. I guess, I
probably did about the way I did usually in school. I did not get outstanding
grades, I got average grades, except in math. I did alright in mathematics, did
alright in geography but, other than that, I was just an average student.
I was pretty busy, I didn't have time to do a lot of studying and that stuff
anyway, chuckle. I remember that year we had a pretty good baseball team and a
pretty good basketball team. I was a good baseball player. I played third base
most of the time, and I had a pretty good batting average. We played baseball
with, hardball it was, it was not softball, we played regular hardball. We
played with a team in Horseshoe Bend and played with Sweet and Emmett, and that
was about the size of our competition. We usually beat the ones in Horseshoe
Bend and Sweet because I guess our students were a little older. And, usually,
when we went to Emmett, we got beat, because I guess they had a wider selection
of students to pick a team from. Our basketball court was outside so we were a
little limited on how much of the year we could play that. I know one Winter we
had the warehouse, Dad's warehouse pretty low, not much in it. Put it down on
one end and set up a basketball court in there and then we could play basketball
even in the cold weather then, but that was only for one Winter. I don't remem-
ber anything very special about that first year of high school at Montour.
Usually, when I got home I had some work to do in the mill and always, of course,
had my regular chores to take care of like milking the cow and things like that.
Getting the wood and the coal in. Most things were pretty routine, I guess. I
think after school was out that Spring that Mrs. Blackler went down to Emmett
where she had some relatives, and I think she ran for County Superintendent of
Schools and I think she was elected. So she didn't not come back to Montour for
our second year of high school there.
The School Board employed a new teacher for our high school. His name was Elmer
Roberts. He had just graduated from the University of Idaho, his major was in
education and in agriculture, and he turned out to be an excellent teacher. I
had spent the Summer of 1921 just working for Dad around the flour mill and in
the warehouse doing the usual tasks of handling all the freight that I could
through the warehouse and packing flour in the sacks in the flour mill. So in
the Fall, 1921, September, on my way to school again in my second year of high
school. Mr. Roberts taught the usual high school courses and I was outstanding
in my mathematics course, my algebra and geometry, got good grades. Had no
problems with it at all. Other subjects, I suppose I did about average on, that
was my usual pattern. Mr. Roberts had put on a special course for us, because,
as I said, his college major was in agriculture, and he put on a special course
in what we called animal husbandry. That gave us lot of study of the
characteristics of good stock, horses, cattle, sheep, hogs, and necessitated
quite a few field trips to the various farms around the area to study and learn
how to evaluate and determine what kind of stock, what kind of characteristics
make the best stock for farm produce. It was a good course, it was particularly
good for that gang of boys around Montour because, at the time, most of them were
farm boys. Most of them left the farms in the long run, I will have to grant
you, but most of them were farm boys then.
40
Another thing began to happen that Fall of 1921. I was fifteen years old and I
began to get a little interested in the girls around the place. I had a couple
of gal friends. I never had any dates with any of them, I never took any of them
anyplace. They were just sort of chums, I guess, in connection with the school.
One of them was Lida Henry, another was Irene Idle, another one was Mary Harrick.
She was a girl that had come down from Long Valley to stay with her uncle and go
to high school at Montour. I guess she was supposed to be about the prettiest
girl in the group. She was older, she was in my class, but she was about two
years older than I. She had been out of school a year or two and now was catch-
ing up, and I fell for her pretty hard for a fifteen year old kid. She was
seventeen, probably knew her way around a little more that what I did. Never had
any dates with her either. I went down to her place to see her a few times where
she lived with her uncle. I know that my folks were aware that I was getting a
little interested in that gal down there. But, along a little before Christmas,
Mary decided to quit school, so she left Montour and went back up to Long Valley
and I didn't see her any more. Wrote a letter to her a time or two, but as I
told you a while ago, chuckle, my composition was not very good. I don't suppose
I wrote very good letters. I heard from her two or three times and we didn't
have any basis to continue so we kind of let it drop. So my development of a
little bit of interest in the girls didn't come of anything at all, really.
I think the rest of the year was pretty much routine, as high school could be.
We did the usual things. Mr. Roberts was really a good teacher for us though,
we all enjoyed him. He went to Emmett the following year and became Superinten-
dent of the Schools in Emmett and, in just a matter of a very few years, he was
State Superintendent of Schools, so he was an outstanding one.
We just went ahead, completed the year and got out of school early in June and
that year I talked my Dad into letting me go to work for the section gang. Mr.
Palmer, the Foreman of the section crew lived right across the track from us and
he was a fine old Irishman, and he told me that he would give me a job. Well I
couldn't get much money out of Dad when I worked for him. Oh he would buy me the
things I wanted alright, but, what I needed at least, but I could not get any
salary out of him, so I thought maybe if I could get to work on the section gang,
I could make a lot of money you know. My folks had to sign a release so that I
could work on the section gang. I was sixteen years old, but that was not quite
old enough to be on my own. My friend from across the road, Ted McRoberts, also
worked on a section gang with me that year and also Myrten Blackler, that was
Mrs. Blackler's son, a year younger than I. He got a job and worked on the
railroad and all three of us worked on a section gang all Summer long. It was
a hard job. Putting ties under the track on the railroad, raising the track and
lining the track and cutting the weeds all off of them, and all of the things
necessary to maintain a railroad.
Incidently, that railroad was pretty busy. As I told you before, there was a
freight /passenger train combination came up from Nampa to McCall every day and
another from McCall back down to Nampa every day, and they both passed through
Montour about noon. Then there was about a thirty car train of logs came down
every day and, of course, every day a train of empty cars going back into the
mountains after the logs. Fairly frequently there were trainloads of stock,
particularly, in the Spring going up to the Summer's feed in the mountains and
in the Fall coming back down from the mountains. They didn't haul stock on the
trucks. There weren't any trucks to haul the stocks and there weren't any roads
41
that would have supported it anyway. So, actually, there was a lot of stock
hauled on the trains.
There was another little gadget that was pretty nice on that train. In 1917 they
had developed a diesel powered car, the front half of which had the engine and
the mail and the express compartments, and the back half of the car was for
passenger service. And, for six days a week, all but Sunday, that car would
leave Nampa and go up to Cascade in the morning and then come back in the
afternoon from Cascade back to Nampa. That made pretty good service. If
somebody was in a hurry to go to Boise, they could jump on that car in the
afternoon and go down to Middleton and then get off of the car and get on the
electric interurban line that went up to Boise and they could be in Boise in an
hour and half, two hours. It was a nice clean comfortable and rapid transit, a
nice machine. They run that car in the Summer for about four years there. And,
as it all worked out, that line of the railroad, called the Idaho Northern from
Nampa to McCall, was the best paying branch line that the Oregon Short Line had
in its whole stretch. The Oregon Short Line led from, the main line at Green
River, Wyoming, and on over to Portland.
Well, that was my first job of any size really, at least for wages, for a salary.
I made thirty -eight cents an hour. Made me around eighteen dollars a week. We
worked eight hours a day and I swear, I do not remember now whether we worked on
Saturdays or not. Lot's of people did work on Saturdays in those years, but I
don't know.
We worked throughout the Summer on the railroad and Fall came. In September it
was time for me to start my third year in high school, and that was a bit of a
problem because there wasn't any third year in high school at Montour at that
time. They didn't start the third and fourth year until 1927, and Mother had to
decide where it was alright for me to go school. She was not about to let me go
to some public high school in some other town where I wouldn't have the proper
influences on me and where I wouldn't be under pretty tight control. So they did
quite a bit of investigating to find out where the best place would be. I still
think that she had in mind that some day she was going to make a preacher out of
me and I think that had something to do with her selection of the schools that
I could go to. So, finally they decided that I was going to go to a school at
McMinville, Oregon. It was a college called Linfield College, and they had a
Preparatory Department they called it. What it was was a high school in
connection with the college. Four years of high school and four years of college
in the same organization. Of course, all I was ready for was the third year of
high school. It was not a very large school, I think Linfield was perhaps 500
students altogether, and was probably a pretty good school. It was a Baptist
school, sponsored by the Baptist Church. I expect their primary objective of the
school was teachers and preachers, they didn'y put out very many professional
courses that I know of other than that, and no graduate courses at all.
So, we headed for McMinville. They got me all registered into Linfield, located
in a dormitory where there was a dining hall that I could eat at. Everything all
set up and left me there. I was all alone. For the first time I was away from
home. I guess I went to school there for a couple of months and everything was
alright except that I was too short of money. Dad was not giving me very much,
not enough really. So I went out and got a job about a half a mile outside of
McMinville at a dairy. I had been around cows enough, milking cows at home and
42
things, that I could do that sort thing. We would get up in the dairy and milk
the cows about 5:00 o'clock in the morning, maybe a little before. Then put the
milk into quart jars, hook the old horse up to the milk truck, the milk buggy,
and then I would drive that all over town and deliver, oh I suppose about 100 to
125 quarts of milk different places throughout the town. Come back, then go to
college all day, go to high school all day, then milk the cows that night again.
It was a little bit too full a day, and I didn't get along very good. Had a
little more money than I had before though.
It was quite an experience. There was quite a route throughout that town, up and
down the streets, up and down the alleys, here and there, all around, to get to
all of our customers. Three times in the route, why we had a U -turn right in the
middle of the road with our milk rig, and that old horse knew that whole route
better than I did even. He knew exactly what turn to take at every place. He
even knew when it was time to turn around and come back, but he didn't hardly
know how to do that. I had to help him on the turnarounds, but otherwise, I
hardly ever needed to touch a line. He would trot right a long until it come
time for me to get off and deliver a milk and then he would slow down to a walk
and I would deliver the milk to the place and run back and jump back on the buggy
that carried the milk. Then he would start trotting a little faster and go to
the next place. It was amazing what that horse could do. Of course, it was
pretty easy, there wasn't very many cars on the road, particularly early in the
morning like that, and there weren't very many cars in 1922 anyway.
I remember the boss at the dairy had a nephew who lived in Portland, Oregon and
he came out to visit. He was about twelve years old I guess, maybe eleven. He
come out to visit us there for a few days at the dairy. He went out with me on
that milk route a time or two, and I started to deliver the milk at one of the
places and told him to turn the horse around. That was one of the places for the
U -turn, and here was this kid twelve years old and didn't know how to do it.
When I got back, he had not done it and he didn't know what to do. He didn't
know that you said giddup to the horse, he didn't know how you used the lines,
he didn't know anything about it. Surprised the heck out me. Well, he surprised
me more than that really. A night or two after that I was milking the cows. In
the same barn with the cows, we had a couple horses, good old draft horses. And
the boss told the boy, he said, you better speak to that horse before you walk
behind him because he might kick you if you surprised him, if he didn't know you
were there. You speak to him and he'll be alright. Well the kid looked funny
at him. I was sitting there milking the cow, not paying much attention. The kid
looked at the horse and he looked around, and pretty quick he started down the
aisle and he was almost to get the horse and he said "How do you do ? ", and
(laughter), on down the aisle he went. Boy, I damned near fell off that stool.
That the funniest thing I think I ever saw was that kid saying "How do you do ?"
to that horse. Course, what you say to a horse, maybe you don't know, until you
listen to me, "Whoa boy, whoa boy, It'll be alright, whoa boy ", something like
that, then the horse would know what the score was. But to come up and say "How
do you do ?" to him, that was something else.
Well anyway, Christmas came along and the boss let me lay off long enough for me
to go home for Christmas vacation. I suppose I was gone about ten days. While
I was there, Mother learned that these people that had the dairy that I was work-
ing for were Catholics. Oh boy, that ended that, no more work in that dairy.
Boy, Mother was a Protestant, she was tolerant of the Protestants, most any
43
Protestant denomination, but Catholics and Mormons were, chuckle, I sometimes
wondered if maybe they were even worse than infidels. Chuckle. She was radical,
she was strictly a Protestant. Well, anyway, when I went back to McMinville, I
had to quit and go back to the school. Dad sent me a little more money after
that so I got along a little bit better.
I think there was a boy in that school that was probably a distant cousin of mine
from Northern Idaho. His name was Lawrence Pugh, and he had a motorcycle. A
1918 61 cubic inch, in other words, a 1,000 cc, two cylinder motorcycle. It was
called the Indian Standard, spring frame front and rear. It was a nice old
machine and it was about four years old. It wasn't too bad, but anyway, we made
a deal. I gave my bicycle and fifteen dollars, for his motorcycle. Well, that
didn't have a very good effect on my going to school either. That motorcycle
took too much time to take care of it, and there were places to go around there.
Oh, I studied some, but I did not enjoy Linfield, t'wasn't much fun being in the
Preparatory Department of a college. I got passing grades and I got my credits
for the year but that was about all there was to it. I didn't learn very much
and I didn't enjoy it very much, and I hadn't told my folks that 1 had the
motorcycle. They didn't not know about it until school was out in June and I
went back home up to Idaho.
That Summer of 1923. I was seventeen years old. I, again, worked all Sumner on
the section gang on the railroad. As I remember it, it was just a routine
Summer, the Summer's work. And the Fall of 1923, it was time to go back to
school again. Well, they decided maybe McMinnville was not too good a place
after all. They had had good reports about a school down at Weiser called the
Intermountain Institute, which was a boarding high school. A private school, a
somewhat church sponsored school. I think the Congregational Church sponsored
that school some. The school had been established about thirty years before by
a preacher, a Dr. Paddock, and it had been established there for the sole purpose
of providing a boarding school for children who lived in towns where there wasn't
any high school so they could go on and have high school. There were a lot of
smaller towns at that time and they did not bus kids around the country, there
wasn't any school buses in those days. So, Fall came - Intermountain Institute
was it. It turned out to be an excellent choice. It turned out to be the best
school that I ever went to anyplace, ever. It was not expensive, it had good
facilities, it had an excellent faculty, and only had about 250 -275 students in
the school. It was well managed, the students were pretty tightly controlled but
it was alright, I mean, it was fine. I thoroughly enjoyed that school. The
school had in connection with it two thousand acres of farm land and a great big
dairy of purebred Holstein cows. All the buildings were stone or cement. One
big three story building for the boy's dormitory, a four story administration
building where the classrooms and assembly hall and school administration was all
located. Then, a girl's dormitory that had the dining facilities in the base-
ment, and we had a small Carnegie Library, a music hall, a central heating plant
that was separate from the buildings. They heated all the buildings by steam
heat, with coal from the central heating plant. Good athletic field, football
field and track.
So, come September, I was into the school at Weiser. The school was located
about a mile and half North of Weiser. I know that I learned more that year than
any other year that I ever went to school, college or anyplace else. They had
an excellent manual training in cabinet making course and department there. And
44
then I took mechanical drawing there and I have used that off and on most of my
life. Good course, put on by a man by the name of Camp. Course, I had my motor-
cycle that I had gotten the year before, and I think I was the only one in the
school that had a motorcycle, so that was pretty fancy. Chuckle, I could go home
once every six weeks or so and see the folks, t'was only about fifty miles to
home. Actually, quite a few of the kids going to school at Weiser worked part
of their expenses. It was not an expensive school, but a lot of them worked it.
The buildings that had been built there had been built by student labor mostly.
They would hire a superintendent and then the students would work building the
buildings. The nicest building of the bunch had just been finished the year
before I went there, Hooker Hall. Beautiful, big administration building. Looks
like it had been built out of stone, but it hadn't, it was a cement building, had
concrete cement structure.
Well to deviate here a little bit, I might tell you what happened to the school
later. I, of course, graduated in 1924. I was eighteen years old and got my
certificate of graduation. The school continued then until 1933, '33 the school
closed. Dr. Paddock had died, he was the main push for the school, but really
the school closed because it was not needed so much anymore. More of the little
towns had their high schools around, and the Depression was right in its heaviest
in 1933 and it affected it, of course. Very much. So finally, the directors
decided to close the school and they did. I think maybe it was turned over to
the Weiser School District, I don't know. I know that they used the main facili-
ties for a Weiser high school for a while. And later the Construction Men's
Association of this country set up a Equipment Operator's School there for awhile
and trained heavy equipment operators. The buildings then set vacant for a good
many years, but all these years, the Alumni from the school have always had a
picnic someplace every Summer. For a few years they used to have that picnic in
Boise, but for the last thirty years they've always had it back there at Weiser
at the school. They will meet again next, well let's see, the second Sunday in
September, and I'll try to go this year, this year, 1992. Fifty -nine years since
that school closed and there will probably be 100 of the Alumni there at that
picnic at that time. I never saw a like situation to that. Most of them, of
course, are within a hundred miles of the school, but they come further. There's
some from California, one comes from Alaska, three or four from Seattle, two or
three from Portland, one down in Owyhee County, one from Florida. In fact, I
have only missed one year of being at the picnics in the last twenty -two years.
I had to miss last year because of a conflict, but I'm going to try to be there
again this year. Year before last, I was the oldest student there. Class of
'24, the older ones are dying off. But I expect there will be near a hundred
there this Summer. Of course, we have a kind of a Student's Alumni's Associa-
tion, that kind of maintains a little organization and a secretary and a circula-
tion of information. Three or four years ago I took my son Harvey and his wife
Charlynn down to one of their picnics. Made quite an impression on them that I
had been able to go to such a nice high school. Sure was a good one.
There was one bad thing happened to me while I was at Weiser at the Institute,
the Fall of 1923. Something happened to my eyes, I don't know what. Never been
able to find out exactly what caused it. But anyway, I lost the center vision
in my left eye, and I lost pert near all the center vision in my right eye, for
a pretty sizeable area. An area about 20 degrees across was almost totally blind
in my left eye and blind in my right eye except for a little area in the center.
Took about two, two and half weeks for my eyes to get that way. They knew what
45
caused it, arteries broke on the retina and caused a little tiny hemorrhage on
the retina and killed the optic nerve. It was not difficult, I guess, for the
doctors to determine what happened. The thing they could not figure out was why
it happened. As soon as I noticed my eyes going a little haywire, I think
perhaps that was in November of '23, I headed for Montour and got up there and
told them what was going on and they took me to Boise. Took me to the best eye
specialist they could find at the time and they kept me in Boise under close
observation for, oh a couple of weeks at least. They thought possibly it might
be some kind of an infection in my body that caused it. They took out my tonsils
and pulled a couple of teeth. They gave me a set of horn rimmed glasses that
didn't fit very good, but never did make up their mind for sure what caused the
ruptured arteries on the retina. Of course, the little hemorrhage killed the
optic nerve.
I was done, that was a serious handicap to me. I had to learn to do a lot of
looking with the peripheral vision in my eyes, but I had that little spot,
luckily I had that little spot. Wasn't over two degrees wide in the center of
my right eye that I could see any detail with. Well, that meant that all my
games of baseball and basketball or any other kind of thing like that was all
done. I could never go hunt birds on the wing and shoot a shotgun, and I could
never catch moving objects, things like that, ever again, really. I have learned
to use peripheral vision. You learn that after awhile, but you don't get close
detail that way. But, I have learned to get along and most people have never
realized how much deterioration there was in my vision. Most kinds of jobs,
Particularly common labor, I could do. And I could even do desk work with that
little area in my right eye if I didn't try to hurry. Twas always sort of slow,
but that little center vision gave me enough so I could pass driver's licenses
and things like that and I was smart enough to use my peripheral vision so as to
not get in trouble on it. So after about three weeks I returned to Intermountain
Institute and finished the year.
It has had a major effect in my life, and I thought it was a real unlucky break,
but I don't know whether it was unlucky or not, it might have been lucky.
Because if I had been able to see like I had up to the time I was seventeen, I
could very well have ended up to be a aircraft pilot and spent my life at it
because I had such a tremendous interest in that stuff. I suspect that would
have happened to me. As it was, I couldn't tackle it at all, it was out of the
question. So it did definitely affect what types of work I could do. And I
think my life has been fuller, more fun, and a broader experience than if I'd
followed something like aircraft pilot. So I don't know whether it was bad luck
or not, so far as professions I have followed through my life.
And another event occurred that was significant to me. The year I was in the
Intermountain Institute at Weiser, graduated in 1924, I had developed a quite a
little bit of interest in radio. There weren't any radios around the country to
amount to anything. I had one roommate that had a little interest in it. There
were a few broadcasting stations starting. I think there was one, one commercial
broadcasting station trying to get started in Boise. It was in connection with
the high school. Matter of fact, the high school boys were trying to build it,
they had a teacher interested in such things. There were a few stations over the
nation by 1924, but not very many, and hardly any radio receivers. Well, when
I got home from graduation in 1924, the folks had a magazine they took there
called The Country Gentleman, and in that magazine was an article on how to build
46
a radio in pretty good detail. How to build a good radio, a five tube radio.
Well, I read the article pretty carefully and finally talked Dad into going and
buying me some parts so that I could try to build that radio. Took three
condensers and three radio frequency coils and a couple of audio transformers and
five tubes. I know they were all the old tubes, 201A tubes, all five of them.
The circuit that was described in the article was called the Hazeltene Nutridyne
Circuit. It was a specialized form of what was called the radio frequency
amplification circuit. In other words, it was not what was known as the Super
Hetradyne Circuit. So, the first time we were in Boise, we got to a store that
sold parts for radios, Dad bought them for me. It was to be a battery set, took
a six volt battery, wet cell battery like a car used, and then it took two banks
of 45 volts each of dry cell, they called B cells. The six volt was the A
battery and the dry cells was the B battery. The whole outfit, parts, A batter,
B battery, and the whole works cost, and a big speaker, and a pair of earphones,
cost Dad up towards a hundred dollars. That was quite a big expenditure for a
kid to start playing with that had had no prior experience with radios. But he
did it, so we tackled the job. Well, I worked and worked and worked. Got a
Bakalite Panel and laid the whole thing all out and wired it all up and soldered
it. I think I also learned how to solder wire connections, I don't think I'd
ever known how to do that before.
That was a pretty good sized project, but the darn thing worked when I was done.
Took me about three or four weeks to get it built, but it worked, it worked fine.
It had a tendency to feed back and squeal and howl quite a little bit, unless you
got it tuned just right, but I could get stations all over the United States on
those five tubes. There were two radio frequency amplification tubes, then a
detector tube, and then two audio amplification tubes. All of them the same kind
of tube, 201A, and I think those five tubes cost Dad about twenty -five dollars.
But that radio worked fine. I got stuff all over the United States that Summer.
I'd had a long antennae from the top of Dad's elevator down to the house. Must
have had about a hundred feet of antennae out, and there was a station in
Hastings, Nebraska, KDKA, that came a roaring in. And, I could get Schenectady,
New York, and Springfield, Massachusetts, and stations in Chicago, and there was
one in Denver and one in Salt Lake that I could get. And, my radio was the
marvel of the town. Boy, I will tell you, people were coming from all over town
to hear my radio. Even got my name in the paper. You could get the Index out
for the Summer of 1924, and you wi 11 f nd that Montour had a geni us who had bui 1 t
a radio. Chuckle. Yeah, quite a long article. Chuckle. I don't know who got
ahold of that tale and wrote up that article, but there sure was some exagger-
ation in it.
Well, back to 1924 when I had just graduated from the Intermountain Institute.
I went back to Montour and worked for Dad all that Summer at the flour mill and
in the warehouse. His business was getting kind of tough, wasn't going very
good, and I didn't go to school in the Fall of '24.
47
CHAPTER 4
COLLEGE, ETC. - 1925 -1928
I stayed there and worked at Montour, stayed there and worked all through the
balance of 1924 and up til about June of 1925. Then I decided I was going out
and get a job someplace and see if I couldn't save some money and get enough
ahead to go to college. I wanted to go to college, I wanted to go to college and
learn a profession. But if I had, it would have been along some line of engi-
neering I'm sure because certainly my interest along that line had become obvious
by that time and my affinity for mathematical things and science things was
obvious. And, Mother had been so insistent on the religious aspect that she'd
built some resistance in me up to that. I knew very well that that was not the
right work and right profession for me.
Well, I went to Emmett and got a job at the sawmill in Emmett and I worked the
Summer at Emmett. Forty -five cents an hour and saved what I could, and in the
process, got me a new girlfriend in Emmett too. And that was away from home so
I had a little bit better luck having a girlfriend when I was away from home.
Her name was Margaret Cummings. She was the leading doctor's daughter in Emmett.
A beautiful girl about oh year, year and a half, younger than I. She had just
graduated from high school that year, and I don't know where I got acquainted
with her. We had a lot of mutual friends and my sister knew her very well.
Myrten, I guess I got acquainted with her through Myrten Blackler. I guess she
was sort of his girl and I took her away from him. Chuckle, yeah. So Margaret
was sort of my girl for the Summer of 1925. I liked her. She was a beautiful
gal and she was smart.
Fall came and I had saved up maybe a hundred dollars from the Summer's work, so
I was on my way to the College of Idaho at Caldwell. I couldn't get any support
from my folks to go to anything other than a church school. Couldn't get any
help a'tall from them unless it was a church school. The College of Idaho was
alright. It was a good little school, except it did not have a professional
capability that I would have been better off with. Most of the students became
preachers or teachers. They didn't have a graduate capability at the College of
Idaho. Margaret, my galfriend in Emmett, was going off to school too. She went
to some girl's school back East called Sweet Briar, wherever the heck that is.
Incidently, Margaret's home was this house where I am now living in in 1992.
This house that I bought in Emmett was the old Cummings home and Margaret lived
in this house early, as her Father built this house.
Well, I got over to college, the College of Idaho, got registered, got into the
dormitory and set up for the board facilities and so forth. I went to school for
awhile, and again, I was short of money, dang it. So, I got a job downtown cook-
ing hamburgers in a hamburger joint, trying to go to school at the same time.
That didn't last long. I didn't stay with that more than about two -three weeks,
I didn't like that very well. But then, I got a job in a service station and I
W.
worked evenings, afternoon and evenings, after school in that service station.
It was a Conoco station on Kimball Street in Caldwell, and that helped quite a `
bit. Then I got another gal, and she was as cute as she could be. She passed
by that service station where I was working every evening. Her name was Margaret
Stevens. She was a little Scottish girl, blond girl, that came over here from
Scotland two or three years before. Her folks lived up the street just a little
ways from the service station. Chuckle, I thoroughly enjoyed her, she was a
doll. I know one Sunday my folks came down and we had a picnic in the park.
Some friend of my Mother's came along with them, and I asked Margaret Stevens to
come over to join us in our little picnic in the park. This friend of Mother's
took a look at her and said you do not need to worry, there is nothing wrong with
Elwood's eyes. Chuckle. Boy she was a beauty.
School went along alright, but I didn't get along very well, I don't know, I
don't know what it was. Sometimes, I think it was too much work, and not quite
enough interest. I did make some awfully good friends, with that bunch of boys
that were in the dormitory. I remember Joe Albertson was one of the boys that
was in school with me there. The one that is now the grocery store king, you
know, he was one in that class too. He and Phil Albertson, his younger brother.
But, it didn't work out very good, I finished the semester and then went back
home. The shortage of money, the trouble with my eyes, working a little too
much, possibly lack of the right kind of interest. I went back up to Montour and
went to work again for Dad.
Continuing with the end of my first semester at the College of Idaho, in January,
1926 Well, at this point, I am going to deviate from my chronological sequence
in my life and go back to some of the things that I have missed in this story so
far that I think are significant. I have listened to quite a bit of the tape
that I've already recorded and I don't know whether I am putting too much detail
in this story or not. I note that I have missed a few things that were signifi-
cant and I expect I have missed a whole lot of things that were significant,
because of the time, it's been so long since they happened.
Well, now back to our current chronological sequence in this story. I had just
come back from the College of Idaho at the end of my first semester, January,
1926. Dad's business at the mill was definitely not going very good. What was
wrong with the business, I will outline a little bit when I get into some of
Dad's history, but it was not going good and I know the folks had started
boarding a couple of the school teachers to help supplement their income because
the mill was not providing it good any more. My Sister, Lois, had gone to Emmett
to go to high school. She was entering her third year of high school there
because we still didn't have but two years in Montour. So there was a little
more room in the house and my folks had two school teachers. One was a gal named
Audrey Phillips from Nampa, I think she was teaching high school, and one by the
name of Fenette Guthrie from Emmett, I think she was teaching the fifth through
the eighth grade. She had just graduated from the Emmett High School the year
before and gone to a little Summer School and she was able to teach under the
laws at that time.
Well, I went to work for Dad at the flour mill and the warehouse and he had a few
cows, a few milk cows and hogs that he was feeding his surplus grains from the
flour milling business to. So, between the mill and the warehouse and taking
care of the livestock, it kept me pretty busy. And, my first real honest to
49
goodness interest in a gal begin to develop. That was for that Fenette Guthrie
gal, the school teacher that was staying at our place. She was a pretty girl,
a talented girl and a smart girl, a good school teacher. I was nineteen years
old, near twenty, and Fenette was eighteen when she started teaching there. I
was very attracted to her. I think maybe I must have done what they call fall
in love with her, which, of course, in a young buck's life, that is an exciting
time. Fenette usually went home to her folk's place in Emmett on weekends but
she was there for five days a week at the house. My friend across the street,
Ted McRoberts, he was going with a gal who worked at the bank by the name of
Lillian Woodall so we associated quite a bit together during the week.
I still did not have a car. I had sold my old Indian motorcycle to a local guy
there named Ben Newell, and I think Dad had bought me a better one the Summer
before down at Emmett that I liked. A Harley Davidson, 1922 model. So that was
the only transportation I had, so I didn't get around much but we had fun. We
enjoyed living and our excitement about our gal friends and that sort of thing.
Working all day every day, of course, too. And that's about the way things went
until about September, October of 1926. Fenette had come back to Montour to
teach a second year and I guess Audrey Phillips had also, but she was boarding
at a different place in the Fall of 1926. Ted McRoberts and his gall Lillian,
they were very much in love and going together regularly, but they couldn't get
along, they just could not get along. She always had Ted in a stew and, oh my,
finally Ted got involved with another gal down at Emmett by the name of Blanche
Wilkerson, I guess. He took her out two or three times and Blanche made up her
mind that she was going to marry Ted whether he lilted it or not. And him fussing
with Lillian at the same time, my goodness.
Ted finally come to me and he says, let's get out of here and go find a job and
see if we can 't get someplace. I said, well Ted, if that is what, yeah, that
sounds alright to me. I asked him where he wanted to go. Well, he said, maybe
he would like to go down to Portland, Oregon, and see if he couldn't go to work
for Montgomery Ward. He'd had some experience in stores and thought maybe he
would go to work in Montgomery Ward and make a lot of money. I think that was
in October, 1926. So, I told Ted okay, we'll load up the stuff. Ted had bought
a new car, he had a new Star Touring car. A nice little car that was built in
competition to Ford and Chevrolet and maybe a little bit better car. It was the
first car that had four wheel brakes on it I remember. So we loaded up and
headed for Portland. I kind of knew that area down there from having gone to
school at McMinville for a year and Ted got down there and he did go to work for
Montgomery Ward. I doubt that he made as much money as he hoped he would, but
he went to work anyway for Montgomery Ward.
My only qualification really was as a flour packer from my experience in Dad's
flour mill, so I went down to the Crown Flour Mill there in Portland, asked them
for a job packing flour. They didn't need anybody, but they said that there was
a flour mill, a big flour mill, down in Astoria, Oregon, that was going to add
another shift in a few days, and if I went down there I could probably get a job.
So, I got on the train and I went on down to Astoria. Went down to the flour
mill, talked to a Mr. Brown, the Superintendent of the mill. I asked him about
the possibility of a job and he said yes. Two or three days he was going to add
another shift to the flour mill operation and if I could pack flour he'd give me
a job. So, I went back up town, Union Town they called it, a little town the
other side Astoria, and went to a service station and asked a man where I could
50
find a good place for board and room and he pointed out a place across the
street, toward a Finnish Boarding House, and he said you have come to the right -_
place. He said, I am the American Counsel in this town and you can get good
board and room right over there. Well, I believe maybe he was the American
Counsel because I will tell you, I could hardly find anybody in that town that
spoke English, not very much of the time at least. They were all Finnish and
Norwegian and quite a lot of Japanese and Chinese. But I went over the boarding
house and got me a room, arranged to board there. Got a lot of foods I had never
seen before, I didn't know even what to ask for to get them, and I couldn't even
pass it to them that were eating there because they all talked Finnish.
But anyway, I reported down to the flour mill about two or three days after that.
Mr. Brown took me up to the packing room, put me on a machine there, and I went
to work. I was pretty good at packing flour. I could fill and weigh and sew
about sixty sacks an hour, fifty pound sacks of flour per hour. So I went to
work. Mr. Brown stood there and probably watched me for ten minutes or so, maybe
fifteen. I don't know. Then he came over and he said, well Pugh, he says, I see
you've done quite a little bit of flour packing but, he says, you are not fast
enough to hold the stream in this mill. Well, I wasn't. The stream in that mill
was about 125 sacks an hour and sixty sacks an hour was a pretty good load for
me. Course, down there you sewed with a sewing machine instead of by hand so I
could go a little faster with that. But, Mr. Brown said he would put on another
man with me for about a week and he thought perhaps I might be able to get up to
125 sacks per hour in a week. Well, that's the way it worked out. I was
handling 125 sacks an hour comfortably in about a week, and it was a good job.
Incidently, Mr. Brown paid the helper and me full wages for that whole week,
chuckle, and I was getting paid 90 cents an hour. Oh boy, that was good money.
Common labor around the country at that time was paying about 35 cents an hour,
so ninety cents was really in the money.
I continued to work there all Fall. I think I worked there till end of February,
perhaps, when they laid off their extra shift so I did not have a job anymore.
That had been an interesting time in Astoria. All that flour was, well maybe I
better tell you a little more about this. I got faster and faster in that flour
mill as I learned how to handle it more skillfully. I got up to where I could
pack 300 sacks an hour. That's a fifty pound sack of flour, filled and weighed
and sewed every 12 seconds. And, I was not hurrying. I wasn't missing any
licks, do not misunderstand me, but you didn't hurry. Anybody that would come
along and saw me doing that work would have thought that is an easy job isn't it,
just click, click, click and away it goes. And if a beginner had tried the job
he could not have got one sack out in five minutes maybe, oh yes maybe three or
four minutes. All the sacks were going to China. We were right on the dock, the
flour mill was right next to the dock. We dumped the sacks on a live belt that
carried them right on to the warehouse where they were loaded into the ship. And
of course, when I got up to around 300 sacks an hour then I only had to work half
the time. There was a big bin over the top of the machine and it could fill up
and I would go out and look these ships over from China and Japan where the flour
went. All the writing on them was in Chinese and Japanese and I couldn't read
any of it on the sacks. And, Astoria was an interesting town, loaded with a lot
of salmon fishing and big fishing canneries, mostly run by Japanese. Just three
years before, the city of Astoria had burned down. It had been built on pilings
over the water a lot and some firebug had gone down there and lit it there in
about a dozen places, and the whole city burned down. It was in the process of
51
being rebuilt and the firebug was in the penitentiary, so it was an interesting
time for me.
I got laid off again about the end of February and headed back toward Boise, and
stopped in Portland to see Ted. He was still working for Montgomery Ward. Lil -
lian Woodall had come down from Montour to Portland and they had gotten married
and they were living together there in Portland, which was a sad mistake because
they didn't get along any better married than when they was going together, but
they were trying to. I went on up to Montour and got there in the Spring of
1927. Well, I had been making good money for the last four or five months, but
somehow it doesn't go very far. This working for wages doesn't work out as well
as it seems like it ought to and, anyway, I suspect that my earning capacity had
not quite reached my spending capacity yet. Matter of fact, it took me quite a
while to get me to where my earning capacity could equal my spending capacity.
By the Spring of 1927. Dad's flour mill operation was just about folded up and
he was getting into the dairy business. I, pretty quick, went to Boise and I got
a job at Chevrolet garage in Boise, run by a man by the name of Cranston. Crans-
ton Chevrolet, located right on the corner of Tenth and Grove Street in Boise.
He had a Chevrolet garage there and kept the service station open twenty -four
hours a day and I got a job running that service station at night. Ten hour
shift, six days a week. He paid the best salary in town for service station
work. Twenty -seven and a half dollars a week, most of the others were paying
twenty -two fifty a week. I worked there at that service station from March to
some time in August, but I was trying to figure out all the time how to get a
better job and make a little more money, one that I liked better.
I remember during that Spring, a Mr. Lemp, I think his name was, Herbert Lemp was
elected Mayor in Boise and he was going to take office I think in the Fall, and
I thought maybe there might be a job for him. I was a pretty good motorcycle
rider by that time and thought maybe I could get a job as a motorcycle cop in
Boise. I don't know, I was probably looking a little ahead of myself, I was only
twenty years old, but I went up and asked him for it, and he promised me the job
when he took office. Old man Cranston of Cranston Chevrolet was a miserable
character to work for anyway and I would have been glad to get away from there.
Well, I had a job lined up in the Fall when he took office. The only trouble is
Herb Lemp went out and got to playing polo and got killed. So, I didn't know if
my job was going to be any good or not. He had decided to put a man in as Chief
of Police by the name of Robinson, and I went up and asked Mr. Robinson if he was
going to put me on that Fall when he took office. Robinson was going to become
Chief just as Mr. Lemp had planned. He said yes, he thought he could put me on
as a motorcycle cop. Well, pretty quick Mr. Robinson became Chief and I didn't
hear anything from him so I went up to see him again, and he said he guessed,
well, he couldn't use me after all. I got curious as to why he had changed his
mind, and come to find out that my boss Mr. Cranston had heard that I could be
a traffic cop in Boise and he had put in a bad word for me for some reason. He
was an ornery old devil. So that made me so mad that I quit Cranston Chevrolet,
I went down and quit that day, I never even finished that night's work.
There was a big carnival in town, the John T. Wortham Carnival was in town. I
was down there the next day or two seeing the carnival and they had a great big
motorcycle drome where, you know motorcycles go around and around in a thing like
a silo and climbed the walls, the straight walls. Well, that intrigued me quite
a bit. They had a guy running that drome by the name of Cannonball Bell. I
talked to him and he said he could use somebody taking care of his motorcycles.
He had ten. He used three or four of them for riding in the drome and three or
four to make a hell of a racket outside and one or two that he rode around. I
think he had a total of ten motorcycles he was carrying with that outfit. He
needed somebody to sort of keep them working. So I asked him how about me
getting the job. Well, he said, there is one over there with a flat tire, if you
might fix that, let's see how you fix that. So I found where the puncture was
and slipped the tire off of the rim. It was clincher type rim, so I pulled the
tube out and patched it, and put it back in and pumped it up and never even took
the wheel off the motorcycle. So, old Cannonball Bell decided maybe I did know
a little bit about motorcycles so he gave me a job. Well, this was a big carni -
val. Thirty carloads, thirty railroad carloads of stuff. Took a whole train to
move them from one place to another. The drome was probably twenty -two, twenty -
four feet across in diameter and in height. It had about twelve foot of 60
degree wall and then about six or seven feet of straight and up and down wall at
the top. The motorcycles would ride in those walls there, chuckle, boy what a
business.
Well we finished the period in Boise, and from Boise we went to Baker. We stayed
in Baker for a week and we stayed in LaGrande for a week, and I guess the guy
that was riding in the drome with Cannonball Bell got hurt or something. I think
he broke a collarbone or something. Cannonball Bell found me riding one of his
motorcycles one day down the street, standing up out there on the seat, so he
decided maybe I could ride a motorcycle. He asked me if I wanted to ride in the
drome, so he put me on the gas tank, started around the slant wall, and went
around there for awhile to get me kind of used to not being too dizzy on it. I
climbed on it, and I did, I rode in the drome then for some at LaGrande and then
we stopped in Pendleton and then we went to Walla Walla, Washington. And,
chuckle, I rode in the drome. I never did ride in the straight wall, I was not
that good and I didn't want to even. But, it was a lot of fun riding those
little 45 cc twin cylinder Indians on that wall. Of course, with their exhaust
pipes sticking out, and no muffler on them so it would make one hell of a racket,
people would really think you were doing something. That was quite an outfit.
Old Cannonball Bell had ten men, or boys, with that outfit. He paid me seventeen
dollars a week, that's all.
But, a carnival outfit is a gambling outfit. And he had these two big wagons
that he hauled all his outfit in and when he would set up for a week in some
town, why Cannonball would empty those wagons so as to set up his drome and
everything and then after the shows were over at night, he'd run a gambling den
inside those wagons and all the carnival people would come and gamble for the
rest of the night. Well, that did not interest me any but I did sit up on the
drome with a little button under my finger so if anybody got snooping around
those wagons, all I did was push that button and that set off an alarm inside the
wagon that somebody was bothering. Maybe he was worried about the cops being
around you know. And, I usually got five or ten dollars a day for sitting up
there on that button from about 10 till 4 in the morning. So, between the two,
I did alright. But, I didn't like that business very well. I tell you that is
the most miserable bunch of characters around a carnival you ever saw in your
life. Oh, Cannonball was alright. He had his wife with him, they were a pretty
good couple, but gosh that bunch of bums around that place.
53
I know that in the audience in Walla Walla I got to talking to a man who had just
come in from a combine. He was a sack sewer and he had just come in for the
weekend from a combine job and he told me he was not going to go back. And I
said, well, how about me going back, are they expecting you back. Yes, they were
expecting him, but he was not going back. Well, I said, sell me your needles,
your files, and the stuff that you sew the sacks with, and I will go out to where
you were and report for duty Monday morning and get me a job. Well, it worked
that way. I think I bought his needles and files and stuff for a dollar or two,
caught a ride down the road out of Walla Walla toward a place called Tousha. And
another ri de back up i nto the hi 11 s about twenty- f ve mi 1 es from Tousha on Tousha
Creek and reported to the old farmer that I was the man come back to sew sacks
for him on the combine. Well, I don't know, he didn't look very favorable to
that idea. Chuckle. It was a horse drawn outfit. The hills were so steep back
in that country they could not pull their combine with a tractor. So they had
twenty -five head of horses on the front of a 12 foot cut combine. I said horses,
actually, most of them were wild mules. So, part of my job was to take care of
eight of those mules and to sew sacks on the combine, for which I was to be paid
eight dollars a day and my board and room. Well boy, I'll tell you, those mules
were wild. They run loose wild all the year until it was time to combine the
grain in that country. Then they'd go rope them and bring them in and some of
them they had to tie down to put harness on them even. I think they could kick
you ten feet away. Boy, you sure had to watch them. I had two of them that I
did not take the harness off but once a week. But, anyway, I completed the
season there and that meant about a month's work I think. I finished the job
there, finished the combine job, with, I guess, with about two hundred and some
dollars in my pocket. Boy, I was getting up in the world.
I headed down the Columbia toward Portland, toward Astoria to see if they weren't
going to start another shift that Fall, that was the Fall of 1926, in the flour
mill so I could go to work in the flour mill again. Well, when I got down there,
it was about ready to start another shift so I did. I went to work. I didn't
enjoy Astoria so much that year. The challenge of the work was gone, now it was
just routine, just routine to sew those sacks. So I worked until I knew we were
getting near to shutting that shift down, and by the latter part of January I had
saved enough that I thought I might be able to go back to school.
54
CHAPTER 5
IDAHO STATE POLICE - 1928 -1931
So I quit and I went back to Caldwell and registered for the second half of the
year. This was in January, 1928. Also, I made arrangements to stay in the fire
department at Caldwell. They only had four full time men at the fire department
in Caldwell and they had about eight or ten call men they called the call force.
Four or five of the call force could sleep at the fire department. The regular
men were the key men, of course, and they ran the equipment and the call force
was the rest of the gang, and whenever they got a fire they'd all gather to where
the fire was and put it out. So I became one of the call men in the fire
department which entitled me to sleep there. I boarded around the restaurants
and places, and went to school and completed that semester. Stayed in school til
early June 1928. I was then twenty -two years old.
Some time before school was out that year, I had noticed in the paper that, an
announcement that there was going to be a new State Highway Patrol, State Police,
assigned to Canyon County. It seemed that he hadn't been selected yet who he was
to be and so I got to thinking maybe I better apply for the job, so I did. I
went over to the Sheriff's office and met the Sheriff, an old man by the name of
Guy Boyd, talked to him about it and applied for the job. About my only qualifi-
cation for the job was that I was young and husky, knew how to ride a motorcycle
pretty good, and I could provide my own motorcycle for the State Police work.
The fact of the matter is that I didn't have sense enough to know that I did not
have very much of a chance for the job. But there were an odd bunch of circum-
stances that year. They had never had any Idaho State Police force, Highway
Patrol, before then, and there had never been any money appropriated for it.
Fred Lukins, who was the Secretary of State and ex- official Commissioner of Law
Enforcement of the State of Idaho, wanted to get some State Police started. So,
he was talking to the various counties throughout the state trying to get some-
thing set up, he had some funds available and, if they could provide half of the
funds and he could provide half of it for a few months, why he wanted to get some
State Policemen started in the State so that maybe the following year they could
get the Legislature to appropriate funds for it. So, of course, money was a
factor and the fact that I would furnish my motorcycle had something to do with
it I guess. Actually, Canyon County, old Sheriff Boyd had been sort of stalling
them a little bit because he wouldn't provide any money for the program unless
he had the opportunity to have something to say about who was employed on the
job. So, Fred Lukins had turned it over to him, find somebody to be a State
Policeman for Canyon County, Owyhee County, and Gem County, those three counties
were going to be together.
Well, come to find out, there had been a little bit of a war going on in Canyon
County before I applied for the job. The American Legion and some other organi-
55
zation were putting all the pressure they could possibly put on the Sheriff to
employ the man they wanted into that job. I think maybe it put good old Sheriff
Boyd in a little bit of a spot. I think he knew whichever one of those two that
he hired, he was going to make a lot of enemies out of the other group. So
danged if he didn't offer the job to me, and, maybe he made enemies out of all
of them, I don't know, chuckle. Anyway, he gave me the job, and I was amazed.
I didn't have any qualification for that job really, and no political influence
to get it with. Maybe the old boy just liked me, I don't know, but that was one
of the lucky breaks I've had in my life that didn't really make any sense.
Well the job paid one hundred and fifty dollars a month, my expenses while I was
enroute, and I went to work early in the Summer of 1928, as an Idaho State
Policeman. They sent me over to Payette to work for a few days with a Mr. Lane
who was the State Policeman that was already on duty in Payette County. Then I
went up to the Capitol building in Boise, which was the headquarters, to Mr.
Lukin's office and got my instructions and proper forms and reporting forms and
so forth, and went to work. I was pretty much on my own, 1 didn't have much
guidance. I just worked the busiest roads in the county. Kind of learned how
to handle the various problems that a State Policeman comes up against. Oh we
had a good man in the Sheriff's office by the name of John Tucker. He advised
me and helped me where I needed it and good old Sheriff Boyd too. He helped me
quite a bit where he could. I learned how arrests work, and how courts work, and
all the rest of that business you know.
Well, to tell you the truth, I could take up half a dozen tapes telling you of
the experiences I had in that police force working the next four years. In
reality, they were just typical State Police work. Of course, I learned a lot,
I had a lot to learn. Did have a few rather interesting experiences. One of
them was, that after I got on the job and got my new uniform, I went up to Boise
and dropped into the Cranston Chevrolet Company and went in and had a little chat
with Mr. Cranston, the ornery devil that kept me from getting the job in Boise.
I tell you he sure did drive nice all the way through Canyon County the next few
years. I never caught him, I never caught him romping around with that car like
he used to do, not down in that country. I would have been tickled to death to
give him a ticket and he knew it.
And I remember the following year, the John T. Wortham Carnival came through town
again, and I thought, gee, I'll go down and see some of the gang at the carnival
in the old motor drone. And, old Cannonball Bell and Curly, his ticket taker,
were glad to see me. We had quite a visit, but the rest of that gang disappeared
like a bunch of quail.
Continuing with some of my early experiences in the Idaho State Police in the
Summer and Fall of 1928. As I was saying, I visited the John T. Wortham Carnival
when they came back to Boise to see if any of the old gang that I knew were still
with the motor drome, and they were. There was quite a few of them there, but
when I asked for them they disappeared like bunch of quail. The fact of the
matter, I think, was that probably all of them were wanted by the police some-
place or other, and they weren't about to hold still if anybody in a uniform come
around asking for them. Matter of fact, the truth of the matter, I never did
learn but two men's names in the month that I was with them in that outfit of ten
men. They didn't want to know each others name and none of them knew mine except
the boss. I was Slim, that is all they knew me by. If they didn't know each
56
others names then they couldn't answer questions about each other, it was that
kind of gang. Well, so much about that.
As I said, the next four years were a definite learning process for me, I learned
a great deal in that State Police. How the police work, how the courts work, how
the governments work and sometimes how a lot of other things work. Along in
December, that Fall of 1928, we ran out of money for my office, so, I was laid
off for a couple of months until the Legislature had authorized funds for the
Idaho State Police and then I was put back to work. Well during that two months,
or maybe two and a half, old Sheriff Boyd got me on the Federal Court Jury in
Boise. So I went up to Boise, stayed in the Boise Hotel, had a room in the
hotel, had to spend every day over in the Federal Court. I think they had about
forty people there, perhaps, on that jury panel, from which they selected their
juries, so there wasn't much for me to do while the trials were going on but I
had to be there whenever they were selecting jurors. But I got paid every day,
got my expenses. I think it was only six dollars a day but that was alright.
I didn't sit on but two cases I think, and one of those was a civil suit. That
one I'll always remember. Some guy was suing another guy for a bunch of money
for alienating the affections of his wife. Well, those kinds of trials are
always kind of lousy you know, but I was always sort of amused at the way it came
out. Probably the wife had as much to do with it as anybody. Anyway the deci-
sion of the court was that yes, he was guilty. They would award him damages
because that man had alienated the affections of his wife, so they gave him one
dollar. So that decision sounds like yes, he was guilty, but the affections of
that wife was only worth a dollar. Of course, that wasn't a good decision. The
fact of the matter was they awarded the one dollar so that the man that was being
sued would have to pay the court expenses. Chuckle. Okay, but that always kind
of tickled me.
Got acquainted with a lot of wheels in the law business during that session.
Listened to a lot of pretty wild trials too. But, by a couple of months, I was
back to work with the Idaho State Police and this time they had an appropriation
so I had a new car. A new Model A Ford Coupe, with an engine souped a little
bit. I had been the eleventh Idaho State Policeman employed. Now we had fifteen
employed in the whole state, three counties for each man. There wasn't any such
thing as work hours. I think I worked all the hours I was awake. I didn't do
much else, but eat and sleep and work the State Police. Oh I might get a day off
once a great while and go up home and see the folks. But I'm not going to take
time on this tape to tel l of my experiences on the State Police because they were
typical State Police and there were so many of them that I couldn't tell them all
if I put it on five tapes I suppose. Except that it was a danged good job for
a young buck in my situation. Good wages. The Depression came on that 1929 year
and here I was into a good job that paid a $150.00 a month, and jobs were getting
hard to find by 1930.
I worked through '29, '30, and most of '31. So, in the Fall of '31, the Admin-
istration for the State had changed from Republican to Democratic and all of the
State Policemen were laid off. I didn't know it was a political job up until
that time, but I guess it was. They laid off every one of them no matter what
his qualifications were and gave all those jobs to good Democrats if they could
find them. I had a dang good record. I don't know of any black marks I had and
my work had paid the State three to four times as much in fees and fines and
licenses and things like that that I had collected over the years. Three or four
57
times as much as the expenses of my office. And, I had a good record, that had
nothing to do with it. You get into a political job, a good record hasn't got
anything to do with it, so it really disgusted me. I never asked for a political
job again as long as I have lived. I didn't want anything to do with them
anymore. I think four years later, I'm not sure just how long it was, the State
went back Republican again and they offered me a job on the State Police again,
but I had a better job by that time and I probably wouldn't have taken it if I
hadn't. I think they laid me off in the Fall of '31, and I went back to work in
the fire department on the call force and stayed there and went back to college.
CHAPTER 6
THE YEAR 1932
I went to college during the winter of '31 and the Spring of '32. What money I
had saved was about gone by the end of the school year in the Spring of 1932, so
I was up again to finding a new job, and I found one in a trucking organization.
It was a freight trucking, motor freight trucking organization in Boise called
the Teague Freight Lines. They had about four International vans, trucks that
were running from Boise to Portland. They hit nine terminals between Boise and
Portland with local freight for those terminals, and I asked them for a job
driving. I tell you, by 1932, it was tough. The Depression was getting about
aS rough as it could get. But, they tried me out, put me on a run to Portland
and back and let me drive some and decided that I was alright for a driver, put
me on, and I went to work. I got eight dollars for driving a truck from Boise
to Portland, paid all my own expenses on both ends of the trip. They were Inter-
national two -ton trucks with big vans on them, always overloaded. One of them
was a semi and we would put about seven tons on it. I guess two of them were
semi's and two of them were just straight vans. We put about five or six tons
on those two -ton trucks. They were underpowered for the job, had mechanical
brakes and four gear transmissions with an underdrive. Oh boy. It would take
about twenty hours to make Portland if everything went just right. If you had
freight for all of them you wouldn't make it in twenty hours, and you would be
lucky if you made it in twenty -four hours. If you could skip any of the
terminals, you could cut the time down a little. If it was day time why they
helped you unload and load stuff at the terminals. If it was night time the
driver did it himself. Unloading I mean, you didn't pick up stuff.
That was a terrible job, I just about wore myself out. I was trying to make
twenty -four dollars a week, three a trips a week between Boise and Portland.
That meant that you were driving at least 80 hours a week, sometimes more. And
you got too tired in twenty to twenty -four hours straight driving. You didn't
get rested up when you got back. I about did myself in on that job. I stayed
with it till Fall and I got so tired I just quit. I said the heck with this.
If that is what a man has to do to make a living, why I will quit trying to make
a living.
So, in the Fall of 1932, I went back over to Mont
with him and helped him for the Winter. He i
twenty, twenty -five head of cows. He either ha
hire somebody to help him. He was milking cows
barn built up and milking machines, power cream
acres of irrigated land, and so he had quite a
land was covered with big old apple trees with i
there. He needed those all pulled out so that t
raise wheat, and raise hay.
59
)ur to hel p Dad out and I stayed
as needing help, he had about
I to have me there or he had to
lown by the river, had a big new
separators and a big silo, 150
bit to do. Sixty acres of his
few prune trees mixed here and
e could farm it and raise corn,
So we got ahold of a big husky pair of Percherons, beautiful, buckskin Percherons
with black tails and black manes. Oh I loved those horses. We got us a single
and double block outfit, cable outfit, and started pulling those big old apple
trees out with those Percherons. Took me half the Winter to get them pulled out.
Course you couldn't do it while the ground was frozen, but while it was thawed
out you could pull them out. Matter of fact, the early Spring is the best time
to pull out trees like that. We rented the horses from the next door neighbor
that was a good horse man. Abe McKinney was his name. That pair of horses was
something, they could out pull a Fordson Farm tractor. Right back, chuckle, down
the road with the wheels spinning. Matter of fact, I could hook them up to that
rig and pull those trees right out of the ground and the Fordson Farm tractor
wouldn't even touch it. They were some horses, you better have good rigging
because when they hit the collar, either something come or something was going
to break. It is real fun to work horses like that.
Well Spring came, and again I want to get out on my own. I never did get much
of a salary out of Dad. I could always do a lot to help him but it was hard to
get any money out of him. So I thought maybe he better hire somebody else and
let me get at finding what I could do. If he saw I needed something, he would
buy it for me, but I don't think I ever got wages out of him. I think that
duri ng that Wi nter, , somebody downtown i n Montour needed to have thei r house wi red
and I did wire it. It was a five room house and we ordered the electric wire and
the fittings necessary to wire the house. I think they paid me three dollars to
wire that house, and I think that is the only three dollars I got for five months
of work there at Montour. Chuckle. But you can't kick, I ate awfully good, and
if I needed some new clothes to work in I got them.
Z
V& r
CHAPTER 7
CIVILIAN CONSERVATION CORPS - 1933
In May, the Roosevelt Administration had started a program called the CCC's. I
guess you have heard of it, The Civilian Conservation Corps. They were going to
bring a company of men out, about 180 young bucks from the East and put them to
work for the Forest Service and things around out here and they wanted to put
about twenty, what they called local experienced men, they were just natives to
this area with them. So I got employment as one of the LEM's, local experienced
men, so called. They sent me up to a CCC camp near Donnelly at a little place
called Paddy Flat about 8 -10 miles East of Donnelly over the first mountain
range, to Paddy Flat Ranger Station. That was in May, 1933. I was now twenty -
seven years old.
A Mr. Theodore Hoff was Superintendent of the CCC camp, in other words, he ran
the work that the 200 young bucks were supposed to do. We were building a road
from Long Valley over to Paddy Flat over the mountain, that was our job. There
was a kind of a trail you could get in there already to Paddy Flat but we had to
make a better road out of it. They set up a tent camp at Paddy Flat. The only
frame building in the bunch was the mess hall, all the rest of is was tents, with
floors in them, a frame set up with a tent put over it. About ten different
tents served as barracks with about twenty men in each tent. Then, of course,
the Army had an Officer, I think he was a Lieutenant Colonel, a Lieutenant
Colonel was there, and two or three Sergeants. They administered the running of
the camp, the feeding and housing and paying of the men, and the Forest Service
provided supervision of the work. The administration of the camp kept twenty men
for supplies and handled the cooking and office work and so forth and the other
180 men worked for the Forest Service. We had about eight new Chevrolet trucks,
stake rack trucks, that we could haul the men back and forth to work and all the
necessary supplies for the work. And they couldn't any of those boys from the
East drive, our boys from the East were from Trenton, New Jersey. They ran from
about 16 years old up through 21 or 22. Quite a few of the older ones had been
let out of reform school so they could join the CCC's. None of them had hardly
any work experience, except maybe carrying messages for Western Union or some-
thing. So, the only ones we could use for truck drivers were Idaho boys. And
Mr. Hoff, who was running the works in the camp, put me to the job of supervising
the trucking operations along with driving one of the trucks. So all my truck
drivers were Idaho boys and practically all of them from Emmett.
Well, we rebuilt the road to Paddy Flat that summer. Built some new buildings
around the Ranger Station and rebuilt the telephone line into Paddy Flat. Our
normal work was five days a week, well, I'll take that back, our normal work was
five and a half days a week. We worked on Saturday mornings also. But the camp
always kept some of the forest service gang on Saturday morning. Saturday night
the truck drivers still had to work because they would haul the gangs out to
61
Donnelly or someplace and give the boys a little recreation at a dance or some-
place. Not all of them, some of them didn't want to go, but there would be two
or three truckloads every Saturday going out to some town.
The program paid those boys five dollars a month and their board and room and
then sent twenty -five dollars a month to the parents of the boy. I said they got
board and room, they got their clothes, they got their medical care, and they got
their food such as it was. And they got to live in a tent, chuckle, with an Army
cot with a couple of blankets. We did have a good bath house built up with hot
running water. They could come in and get into that shower and take a bath every
night, and that was good. And, they kept the place clean, they made them keep
the place clean, and a lot of boys learned quite a bit. They were enlisted for
six months, then after six months they'd go back, the ones that wanted to, the
ones that could re- enlist could re- enlist.
After about six months we had to get away from Donnelly, I mean, that is cold
Winter country up there. By that time, they had built a semi - Permanent camp down
at Riggins, low country where there wasn't much snow in the Winter. Wooden
buildings with tar covered, tar paper covered, I mean. The barracks, the bath
house, the office and recreation hall and Forest Service storage for the trucks
and equipment and repair shops and so forth were all built out of lumber. So we
moved into one at Riggins, about two miles towards New Meadows from Riggins. The
camp was identified as F -107, meaning Forest Service for the F and the number
107. They also had another camp at Riggins down near town called F -106. Now the
boys from the East had gone back East at the end of their six months and these
two camps at Riggins each now had about 200 men, but they were all what they
called LEM's, they were all Idaho boys. They were made up from a lot of camps,
twenty men from each camp that had been up in the forest during the Summer. We
had 200 Idaho boys in our camp at F -107 and 106 was the same way.
Our primary mission at Riggins was to start building a road up the main Salmon
River from Riggins towards Salmon City right along the main Salmon River. There
had never been a road across the state there. Probably 150 miles from Riggins
to Salmon, no road clear across the state. There were roads further south down
in the Boise area that went across the state and there was a road up Lewiston
that went over the Lolo Pass into Missoula, but this one was going to be a water
grade, where you would get out of the snow and the cold weather and maybe you
could keep it open all Winter. That was the hope anyway. And it certainly was
going to open up an awful lot of back country that had never been opened up
before. Well, that was our mission. First thing I had to do with the trucks,
I was still running the trucks, and Mr. Hoff was still running the show there,
was to get enough wood in there to keep all those buildings warm all Winter. So
we put the trucks to work getting wood, getting logs up around the New Meadows
area. Mostly, we brought in dead logs, dead timber, so we wouldn't have to fight
them being too green to burn good, they were dry so they would burn. And between
haul i ng the men to work and then haul i ng the 1 ogs, and of course, some of our men
were getting the logs, they were up there getting the logs out , I suppose it took
us a month, month and a half, to get that stock of wood in there. Then, after
we got the logs all in for the wood for the Winter, the Commander of the Base,
a Lieutenant Colonel Johnson, told Mr. Hoff that he wanted me to become a so-
called First Sergeant for the camp. So that is what happened, I didn't stay with
Hoff anymore. I went to work as First Sergeant, running the camp. Not the job
where the work went on, but the camp.
62
We also had what was called an Educational Advisor that ran some education
programs for the boys, it was a good program. Mr. Hoff, I guess, had about five
men working for him that served as Foremen over various production crews and the
Educational Advisor was sort of independent by himself and he ran his educational
programs that, oh he tried to get some training done on the job, and he ran some
training programs in the camp in evenings. And one of the interesting parts of
it was that the man who had been my boss as an Idaho State Policeman, who was
Secretary of State at that time and Commissioner of Law Enforcement, his name was
Fred Lukins, was now the Educational Advisor at 107 where I was located.
Chuckle. He was a very capable man. He worked as an Educational Advisor for a
few years, oh two or three years in various camps, and then he was called back
to Washington D. C. and he headed up a program that wrote up a history of the
complete CCC program for the Federal Government.
Well, I continued as First Sergeant all that Winter. I was getting 45 dollars
a month. A few of the men could get 45 dollars a month, a few of them got 36,
and a few of them got 30. And of course, twenty -five of it always went home to
the folks, that was a part of the program. But I wasn't very happy with that,
I wanted a better job.
63
CHAPTER 8
BROWN TIE AND LUMBER - McCALL - 1934
By the Spring of 1934, I was twenty -eight years old. I just had to find
something better. But, jobs were hard, hard to find. We were right in the
middle of the worst Depression this nation has ever experienced. But. I guess
I am kind of lucky. I went up to McCall and Mr. Carl Brown had a sawmill in
McCall. I knew that he was going to start it in 1934. It had stayed idle all
Winter every Winter there, but early Spring I went up there and asked him for a
job. He needed somebody to run his retail lumber sales. I wasn't a very good
salesman particularly, but I knew lumber, and I knew how it was counted and
graded and all those sort of things. He gave me a job, hundred dollars a month.
So I went back to Riggins, resigned from the CCC's as of the first of April,
1934, and moved to McCall, into the McCall Hotel, and went to work for Carl
Brown.
Most of the working men at the mill were Finnish people. There had been a
Finnish settlement in the upper end of Long Valley in the early days and they
just about covered the labor market up there. Mr. Brown had a man running his
office by the name of Jack Hayes, he was a good one, and he had come from this
lower country. He had been the Superintendent of the mill, Les Almer, he had
come from Horseshoe Bend area too. And he had a millwright, a good one by the
name of Joe Casper, one that had helped build the Emmett mill in 1917. And
otherwise, most of his crew were Finnish people. Well there was one, Browney
Hoff, the sawyer for the mill. And this, incidently, the mill that they were
running there was the same old mill they had bought from my Dad in 1915. Still
running it up there and it was really putting out the stuff. They had speeded
it up a good deal. Their primary production was railroad ties, but they sold
lumber in addition, all different grades and dimensions, but their mill was
called the Brown Tie and Lumber Company. So they made lots of ties for the
railroad.
I worked, primarily, for Les Palmer, he was the Superintendent of the mill. The
only way he knew how to do anything was the hard way. Whatever it was, it was
done the hard way. It didn't make work any easier, but I got the job done. I
handled their lumber sales alright, I did a good job. The mathematics of
computing lumber is pretty good, pretty simple and I handled that in my head so
fast that they developed confidence in me right away.
We had had at home an old camera, a Kodak folding camera that took black and
white pictures. All there was then, in postcard size. And during the Spring,
when I was at my first CCC camp in 1933. I had taken that camera with me up to
Paddy Flat and early in the program there, in the CCC program there at Paddy
Flat, I had taken quite a few pictures around the camp and of the work, work
crews and so forth. I think I had taken twenty -six pictures.
64
Well, I sent them out and had them developed, got them back. Some of the boys
in the camp indicated an interest that they would like to purchase some copies
of those pictures and send them back to their folks. So I told them alright I'd
have some prints made for them. Cost them ten cents apiece. Cost me seven cents
apiece to have them printed and I had to buy the film so I figured ten cents
apiece was alright. So I took the twenty -six pictures and mounted them on a big
piece of cardboard and put a number beside each one of them and told the boys to
tell me what they wanted by number. I would write down the orders and have the
pictures made and collect from them in the pay line the next payday at the end
of the month. After all, this was serious business. All they got was five
dollars a month. So I started writing orders, chuckle, oh boy. You know what
happened? That gang of men, that 200 men, ordered 2,200 pictures off of my
twenty -six negatives. Well, that was an average of about 85 prints off of every
negative I had. Some more, some less. So, I contacted a couple of photo
processing shops, one in Boise and one in Payette, and got a bid on the job. And
Payette said he would print them for me, for three cents a print. So he made
them for me. 2,200 prints. I got them back, put them all into envelopes the way
the boys ordered them and wrote their names on them. When the boys came through
the payroll in alphabetical order, I was sitting there at the table, had my
envelops all arranged in alphabetical order and I just collected the money as
fast as they come along and got paid. Well, I made over $150.00 on that deal.
And, that was right in the middle of the depression and by any way you figured,
that would be more than fifteen hundred dollars today. And, you know. I have
seen some of those pictures around Emmett here since I have been back that I made
almost sixty years ago.
Well to get back to my chronological sequence, getting back to the Spring of
1934. About the first of April when I went to work for Carl Brown, I was twenty -
eight years old. I thoroughly enjoyed working in McCall, loved the mountains,
the timber covered mountains, and the lake and the country. Nice, crisp air.
And the friendly happy people and the hard working situation. It was all good.
I thoroughly enjoyed all of it. Carl Brown ran an organization that was a real
pleasure to work in. A lot of hard work, but a real pleasure to work in. Well
organized, treated you right and Mrs. Murphy at the Murphy Hotel treated me
almost like I was her son.
Three things of significance happened to me that Summer at McCall. Two of them
of major significance to my life. First one, not so important, but I did, I
bought my first car. It was a 1926 Buick Sedan, pretty good shape for its age,
it was eight years old. I paid $75.00 for it. Nothing down and $15.00 a month
and no interest. How can you beat that. I bought it from a man named Roy May
who ran the leading store in town. He was a brother to Mrs. Murphy at the
Murphy's Hotel, and we used that car for the next four years. Did alright,
without any major expense at all.
The next significant thing that happened to me in McCall was a little gal that
was there. Her name was Bertha Hansen. She was from Council. Idaho, a farm
family down at Council. She was the second child in a family of seven children.
She had an older brother. She had graduated from high school in Weiser and she
had gone down to Salt Lake and went to a Beauty School and got her graduate
certificate for that from the Salt Lake School and she had come back and she was
in McCall to earn some money for the Summer. She was nineteen years old, almost
twenty years old, and she was working in one of the restaurants there at McCall
65
where I ate most of the time. She was a mighty pretty girl, very attractive,
vivacious and confident. I pestered her around there for about three and a half
months and finally talked her into marrying me. We got married in Cascade on the
30th of July, 1934, civil ceremony. Mrs. Murphy at the Murphy Hotel rented us
a little housekeeping apartment in the hotel and Bertha continued to work there,
well she changed jobs, I guess she went to work for the Goodman Cafe right across
the street from the Hotel and I continued to work at the mill. It was a happy
time for me. I was in love and Bertha was a beaut'ful gal. I don't know whether
she knew it or not but I had to borrow fifty dollars from the boss in order to
have enough money to get married. Chuckle, boy. But, we got along alright.
M.
CHAPTER 9
U. S. FOREST SERVICE - 1934 -1940
August came and went and September, and by October, I began to realize that one
of these days Mr. Brown was going to close down the mill for the Winter and I was
going to be out of a job, and here I was with a new wife so something needed to
be done. I thought that I could do a good job as a Foreman in the CCC camp. And
I knew that there was going to be two new camps at Riggins that fall. Thought,
perhaps, there might be an opening for me so I went down to the Forest Service.
Talked to a Mr. Scribner who was the Forest Service Supervisor there then. Fine,
fine old boy. Very highly respected man that had run that Idaho National Forest
for a long time. Well, he told me he thought he might be able to use me that
Fall, but he told me I would have to get on a list, the list that was issued by
a United States Senator Compton I. White. Mr. Scribner said he couldn't put me
on unless I was on that list. I told him I didn't much want a political job and
Mr. Scribner said he wasn't going to let the job be political. If I could do the
job, he would hire me and he wouldn't let anybody lay me off as long as I did it
and he needed me. But, nevertheless, I had to be on the list. So I asked him
how to get on it and he said to go down and see Carl Brown, my boss, and maybe
he would put me on the list. Maybe he would recommend to Compton I. White that
I be put on the list.
Carl Brown was the State Senator from Valley County at that time. So, first time
I caught Mr. Brown in the office, I had a talk with him about it. Yes, he said,
he thought that was a good idea. He thought that I would make a good Foreman
down there in the CCC's. So I wrote a letter to Compton I. White. Mr. Brown
endorsed it and we sent it on and I got on the list. I was notified maybe a
couple of weeks later by the Forest Service that my name was on the list. Well,
along about the first of November, the CCC camps got established in Riggins and
I didn't hear anything from the Forest Service, so I went down and talked to Mr.
Scribner again and he said he was sorry, but he guessed he couldn't use me after
all. So I just went back and went to work for Mr. Brown. Mr. Brown was back at
Chicago at the time attending a National Democratic Convention in Chicago. About
a week or two later he came back, walked in the office one morning. He said good
morning Pugh, I thought maybe you would be working down on the river by this
time. You still working for me? I told him yes, I had been down and talked to
Mr. Scribner and Mr.'Scribner said maybe he guessed he wouldn't be able to use
me. Well, Mr. Brown said, well is that so? And that is about all he said.
Next morning I saw Mr. Brown in the office again as we were getting ready to get
started with the day's work. He said Pugh I want you to go down and talk to Mr.
Scribner again this evening. Oh. I said alright, but he seemed pretty definite.
Well, he said, you do it, you go down and talk to him again this evening. So,
I did. I went down and talked to Mr. Scribner and he welcomed me with an
outstretched hand and said Mr. Pugh, we'll be mighty glad to have you this Fall.
IOTA
How soon can you report for work. Boy, did that take a weight off my shoulders.
This was depression time. Well. I told him I needed to give Mr. Brown a few days
notice and I could report. So it all worked out. I don't know what Carl Brown
did, but he wasn't going to be denied.
They sent me down to Riggins and I went to work for Lawrence Loose. Lawrence
Loose was the Superintendent of Camp 106 at Riggins. Well, Lawrence Loose was
a kind of a hard nosed, cocky, short spoken type Superintendent of the camp
there. I went in to see him, I knew who he was and he knew who I was. We
weren't personally acquainted but we knew who each other was from the prior years
work. I told him I had come down to be a Foreman for him. He looked up and he
said, well, I haven't got anything that you can do around here. Well, I didn't
know what to say. I looked him right in the eye and I told him, well, Mr. Loose
you haven't got anything around I can't learn to do. So he kind of grinned.
Well, he said, you been running those trucks over there haven't you. Well, maybe
you could keep an engine running. Yeah, I do pretty good on that. He said, well
I am going to give you the job of the Dynamite Foreman. The Drilling and Dyna-
mite Foreman job on this road he says, and maybe you can keep those damned
compressors running out there. Well, that cast my lot with the Forest Service
right then. We had abut eight or ten men I guess, and I was the youngest man,
in the least seniority I mean, in the Forest Service crew at the Riggins camp
there. So, I got the least desirable job, running that damn dynamite crew. I
had learned a little bit about dynamite back in my teens when I was working for
the railroad at Montour. Not very much, and I didn't know anything about
drilling equipment, so I had to start from scratch.
Continuing with the first of my employment as a Foreman in the CCC's at Riggins,
Idaho. Well, Mr. Luce had given me the job as the Foreman of the dynamite crew,
the drilling and blasting gang. They give me about twenty, twenty -five CCC boys
and sent us out to work. I am sure I didn't do very good job, not to start with.
I think I probably had a boy or two in that crew that knew a little more than I
did about it, might have done some work of that type before then, the prior year.
But, I asked and I talked to people and I looked and I studied and I got books
and I contacted the DuPont Powder Company representative in Boise and I went to
see some expert powder men there in Boise that worked for Morrison Knudsen. And
I got the Blasters Handbooks and Manuals and I studied and studied, and in six
months time, had a good operation going. I think in three months I had my crew
going as good as any crew had done before, and probably in six months they were
doing a little better.
Bertha and I had settled into Riggins. We had rented a little garage apartment
from a man by the name of Charlie Clay. A long time resident of Riggins who
probably was the acting Mayor of Riggins. We had set up housekeeping there and
we were getting along alright, Bertha was taking good care of me. She turned out
to be a cracking good cook, and competent in all the things necessary for running
a household. And, she got acquainted with the Foreman's wives and into a little
bit of social activity there and we were getting along alright.
I think it was a nice Winter. Weather is always pretty good in Riggins in the
Winter time. Oh, once in a while it gets pretty windy down there but Winters are
relatively mild in Riggins. The elevation there was only 1,700 feet. And the
canyon is so darn deep though where we were working up the main Salmon River that
there is about four months the sun never shines in the bottom of that canyon.
.:
The sides are too deep and high. So it would get pretty cold, that wind blowing
up the river, even though the weather wasn't that bad. But I have to say we had
a good Winter that year in Riggins. But Spring came and we had problems again.
The Idaho National Forest, that one out of McCall, was going to lose a few of its
CCC camps. Strong possibility there wouldn't be a job for me that Summer. The
camp I was in was going to be transferred down near the American Falls reservoir
down toward Pocatello, to a Bureau of Land Management camp.
And another problem was that Bertha was pregnant, and she wasn't getting along
very well. Went into see Dr. Beck a time or two when we were in Boise and he was
kind of worried bout her not keeping the baby, so he asked that she be brought
to Boise and kept there where she would have immediate medical attention if she
needed it and could be very inactive for the last two or three months of her
pregnancy. She was due about the, near the end of' July, so there was nothing to
do but get her down to Boise, I guess. My Sister was working in Boise and had
an apartment there, so Bertha went down and stayed with Lois in Boise. I don't
know just when, but it was two or three months before the baby was born.
In the meantime, it came time for the CCC camp to move down to American Falls
Reservoir and to a new situation, working for the Bureau of Land Management.
They told me that the camp and the Foremen and all were going to be transferred
down there. So, we moved the camp, I loaded up what we had in the car and headed
down there to try to get a location and get situated. When I got down to Ameri-
can Falls, the Bureau of Land Management said there hadn't been any arrangement
like that made and they were not going to hire any Forest Service people at all,
they had their own Foremen. Okay, so all I could do was head back. I didn't
have a job, and I didn't have a place to live, and Bertha was going to have a
baby. Oh boy.
So, I want back up to McCall. Told them that it didn't work out. I hung around
there two or three days and by gum they decided to put me to work anyway. They
sent me out as a bulldozer operator on road maintenance crews. I think my salary
on that job was, yeah, ninety dollars a month at that time. As a Foreman in the
CC's, I had gotten $133.00 a month, but now I was getting ninety dollars a month
as a tractor operator, a bulldozer operator on road maintenance. I guess I
probably spent a month and a half, two months, doing that.
I was up on the Goose Creek Road out of McCall, going up toward Hazard Lake,
doing the regular maintenance work on about the 23rd of July, when a phone call
came that a baby was due, I better get to Boise. So, off I went to Boise. Karen
was born on July 24th, St. Lukes Hospital. Beautiful little baby girl, and
everything was alright. Well, so far so good. The only trouble is that three
days later, the Forest Service put in a riot call to me that they had a great big
fire going back in the, far back in the mountains, and they wanted me back in a
hurry. So, with Bertha hardly out of the hospital, everything seemed alright,
but boy I had to take off if I was going to keep a job.
I went to McCall and they gave me crew of 25 men and sent me back to Mosquito
Ridge behind Big Creek about 125 miles back in the woods East of McCall. So far
back that I think we had to walk the last 20 miles to get there. Well, that was
a bad fire. There had been a lightning storm come across a few days before, and
they had 21 fires start in twenty minutes from lightning. The crews back there
on the lookouts and so forth had gotten all but two, but those two fires had
ZU
gotten away. Within three days, I think we had 900 men on that fire. It was a
rugged deal, I got my fire camp burned out twice in that fire. Yeah, we laid out
in the rocks overnight a time or two to keep from getting burned up, it was a hot
one. And I couldn't get any word about how things were Bertha. Such a rat race
with that big fire going on, you couldn't get any word. And I think I was on
that fire six weeks.
Well, anyway, I finally got out of there, headed for the lower country. Bertha
was with my folks at Montour, Bertha and the new baby. And this was getting
along into September, well into September in 1935. And the CCC camps that the
Idaho National Forest was going to get back in Riggins that Fall, were coming
back and getting set so they were ready for me to go to work again. So, Bertha
and I went back to Riggins. This time we rented an apartment from Johnny Clay,
the man that had the store and was the postmaster at Riggins. I think we paid
him $15.00 a month for his residence. A pretty nice little two bedroom house.
I think he had moved out to another cabin so he could get that $15.00 a month
from us, chuckle, things were tough then.
I went back to running the dynamite crew again on the main Salmon River road.
We worked in Riggins all Winter til Spring came. And the Idaho National Forest
had a job for me that Summer. That was the Summer of 1936. They were just
building a new CCC Camp back on the South Fork of the Salmon River near a place
that was known as Reed's Ranch. Over the mountains it was about due East of
McCall, but the way the road went, you drove from McCall to Cascade to Warm Lake
and then twenty miles down the South Fork, North down the South Fork. So it was
about 80 miles out of McCall actually to the CCC Camp. We moved in there early
June. Far as we were concerned, it was a tent camp.
I rented a frame from a guy, well I purchased it for a little bit of nothing, guy
that had been there the year before. Set a tent over the top of it, had a floor
in it, and a door, screen, roll up sides so you could get fresh air, screens on
them, a nice cellar behind the tent, dug out in the hillside, a sink, water
running into the sink from pressure from a pipe up the creek, and a drain out of
the sink, and a nice little cook stove in the tent to keep it warm. We moved our
bedding and whatever was necessary and a bed and started keeping house in a tent.
Oh, that was a nice year, that was beautiful country near that nice South Fork.
Work went good, I was running the dynamite crew again, building a road down the
South Fork of the Salmon River. We stayed there until late Fall, and then headed
back for Riggins. It was the Fall of 1936. I think that year we rented a cabin
from a guy there that had three or four cabins by the name of Johnny Clay. No.
no, I am sorry, not Johnny Clay, we rented that one from Johnny Chamberlain. He
ran a gambling hall there and he had these cabins behind, I think we rented one
of those.
So, through the same routine again. Building road up the main Salmon in the
Winter time, building road down the South Fork in the Summer time. Me running
the drilling and the dynamite crews in both places. Getting better and better
and better. I really had a production crew by that time, and I knew how to take
a green crew and get them into production in a month or so.
I remember that year there was some contractor was building, improving the
highway between Riggins and White Bird on down the main Salmon. And he was
having a problem finding drillers and dynamite men to work on his crew. I saw
70
him in Riggins sometimes there in the evening and he was complaining about that.
I kept telling him that he was paying ninety cents an hour for those boys even
during the Depression. Huh, my boys were still getting $5.00 a month you know.
I told him, I had some good men, you ought to give them a try. Oh, he says, damn
CCC boys, he didn't want any of that. But, I talked to him about it two or three
times. Finally, I made him a proposition. I'd get the Commander at the Camp to
give my boys a week or two weeks leave and let them go down there and work for
him for a week or so or two and see how they worked out. And, if they didn't
work out alright, they could come back and have a job at my place, and if they
did work out alright they could get discharged and have a lot better job than
they had with me. Well, he finally agreed to that. I picked out my eight best
men, and he took them. Hated to lose them, but those boys deserved a better job
if they could find one. Picked out my eight best men and sent them down there
to work for him. Well, he liked them alright, he liked them fine, he kept them
all. He got in a row with one of them later and fired him, and another one of
them became Foreman of the drilling and blasting for him. And the other six
stayed with him I don't know how long. He said that was the best dynamite crew
he ever had. I know, I know they were good drillers and blasters. Hell, I had
them in production. So I lost my eight best ones, I had to train some more. But
that's alright, that's what we were there for.
Well, in the Spring of 1937, back on the South Fork of the Salmon again for the
Summer, and the Fall of '37, back to Riggins. Only I didn't land in Riggins that
time, they sent me up to French Creek. Had two Camps located at French Creek,
400 men, and the heavier dynamite work then was up there. French Creek was about
20 miles up the main Salmon from Riggins, and we had that much of the road built
and the Riggins Camp was going to do some other work around the hills. They
wanted the dynamite work up the main Salmon, so they moved me to French Creek.
Well, Bertha didn't want to go to French Creek, she wanted to stay down where
there was a little social activity and things were better down at Riggins. So
we got a cabin down at Riggins from some people by the name of Nails, Doc Nails.
I think his wife was the post mistress at Riggins. And Bertha stayed in Riggins
and I came down during weekends. There wasn't any place really for her to live
at French Creek. I was busy evenings trying to build us a little trailer house,
and what time I could on weekends, but I also came down to Riggins to see the
family on weekends. But evenings, after work up there at French Creek I would
do what I could building on that trailer house. I finally got it built and
Bertha moved from Riggins up to French Creek into my trailer house beside French
Creek. I know Mother came up to see me, stayed a few days up at French Creek
while we were living in the trailer house there. Made accommodations pretty
tight. Chuckle, I went over and stayed in the barracks at the Camp while Mother
was there so Mother could stay in the trailer with Bertha. I think Mother enjoy-
ed the visit.
By that time, I had gotten up to where I was classed as the Assistant Superin-
tendent of the camp. Lawrence Luce was long gone and we had a new Superintendent
by the name of Fred Kirby, a man that I liked to work for very much. You get to
be Assistant Superintendent they raised your wages, I think, from $133.00, I
think I had gotten up to $155.00 a month by that time, but I was looking for more
if I could find it. And, I was getting a little burned out on that dynamite
work, so damned dangerous. Men hanging by ropes on those cliffs and rock slides
coming down. The pressure, the high pressure of making that a safe operation was
71
pretty tough. I was getting tired of that job. Also. I was looking for a better
job.
There was a mine up there on the mountain, the Golden Anchor Mine, that I knew
was going to get some new equipment. Diesel powered generators, two big
Ingersoll Rand diesel powered generators, was what they were going to get. I
knew they'd need somebody to operate them. So I climbed the mountain up to the
Golden Anchor Mine to see a Mr. Davis who ran the mine. Propositioned him about
a job. The job was going to pay $250.00 a month. Well, that was almost a
$100.00 a month raise.
So, I came back down and went in to McCall, went in to Mr. Shank, Henry Shank was
then the Supervisor of the Idaho National Forest. Mr. Scribner had retired and
we had a new man, Mr. Shank. Oh, he was a good one too, he was one of the best
men I ever worked for, I loved to work for Mr. Shank. He got you what you needed
and he got it for you in a hurry and he left you alone. He outlined what he
wanted done, and as long as you was getting at it, he left you alone. I could
sure produce for that guy. But, I went in and told him I had another job,
$250.00 a month. So, I thought maybe I would turn in a resignation to be effec-
tive in a couple of weeks or whatever he wanted. But, Mr. Shank didn't want me
to quit. So he propositioned me that if I would stay with them and not quit, he
would change my job from a Dynamite Foreman to a Superintendent of the CCC Camp
at Riggins. Well, that was a pretty good promotion itself, that put me up to
$216.00 a month, and I would rather be at Riggins at $216.00 than I would at the
Golden Anchor Mine at $250.00, and I'm sure Bertha would have much rather too.
So I accepted, the Superintendent job at the CCC Camp at Riggins. I think that
was about the Fall of 1938. Camp was just coming into Riggins. I think maybe
what pleased me the most about it, was that Mr. Shank gave me that job as Super-
intendent of that Camp at Riggins, and he didn't hire Mr. Hoff back as Superin-
tendent who had been the Superintendent the year before. And that was the Mr.
Hoff that had tried to keep me from getting the job in the first place. So that
sort of pleased me, I'll tell you, chuckle. Course, that didn't hurt Mr. Hoff
very much. He had saved a little land down around Horseshoe Bend and in a couple
of years, he had started a sawmill down there and war came along and the sawmill
business got good and he made some money in Horseshoe Bend running his sawmill,
that's the Hoff Lumber Company, known as it is around here now. But, I got his
job at Riggins anyway.
Well, we worked all that Winter of 1938, Superintendent of the Camp at Riggins.
Spring come, and we went back to the South Fork and I became Superintendent of
the operation on the South Fork of the Salmon. They furnished us a nice little
house when you were Superintendent up there. Thoroughly enjoyable little house,
two bedrooms, front room, kitchen, little porch, nice lawn around it, on Phoebe
Creek. In other words that is where we kept the Phoebe's. The rest of the
Foremen had their wives there too. Well, things went fine. I had a good crew,
good crew of Foremen, good crew of men. Mr. Hoff had had the same identical kind
of an outfit in that Camp at South Fork the year before, and the best he could
do was a little less than a half a mile a month, and our crew did over a mile a
month all Summer. Course, that Mr. Shank, he'd assigned me a mile and a quarter,
he always assigned more than you could get done, but I found out later that he
was tickled to death with the mile a month that we built down through there that
72
Summer. That was the Summer of 1939, that is when Europe broke out in war, you
remember. Well, the Fall of '39 we went back to Riggins again running the CCC
Camp there at Riggins. 1940, back to South Fork again running the CCC Camp at
South Fork.
73
CHAPTER 10
COUNCIL, IDAHO - 1940 -1941
But, I would still like to get something better. Some job that would be more
stable, where I got to stay one place and get established and start keeping my
family in one spot and, hopefully, a better job. Thought maybe I had it. A man
by the name of Hickox, from Boise, said he would build me a nice Standard Oil
Company service station in Council if I wanted it. So, I told him to build it.
There was a big sawmill, Boise Payette Lumber Company had just built a big
sawmill in Council. Council was building up some and I thought maybe I could
make a service station go over there.
So, in September, 1940, I resigned from the Forest Service and we moved to
Council. Lived for a little while in Council with Bertha's sister Venice and her
husband, John Kite, until we could get an apartment. We had a nice little
apartment there, right in the middle of town in Council. Facing a nice little
park right in the middle of town and my service station was adjacent to it.
Bertha set herself up a little beauty shop, corner of her front room in the
apartment. Karen was about, what, five years old then, I guess, so we tackled
a new line. But, about three months after we got in the service station, they
started rationing gasoline in this country. And boy, consumption went away down
and the service station didn't do hardly any good at all. Had a little repair
facility in the back of it, but it wasn't adequate. It wasn't going to do the
job.
Dad wound up his job at his sawmill in Mountain Home, sold out his interest in
it. He came over and lived with us for awhile there at Council. My Mother had
died in 1938, so Dad was sort of lost and wondering what to do himself. He
helped me some around the service station, but I could see that place wasn't
going to go.
74
CHAPTER 11
SAMOA AND MORRISON- KNUDSEN - 1941 -1942
So, there was another possibility with Morrison Knudsen Construction Company.
There was a lot of building going on, and I went down and hit them up for a job
running a dynamite operation. I felt qualified to run a sizeable dynamite
operation by this time. And they had some big dynamite operations out in the
Pacific Ocean. Pago Pago, Samoa, Wake Island, Midway Island, Guam, and a
tremendous one right at Hickam Field there in the Hawaiian Islands. They would
offer me $300.00 a month and my board and room, so boy, they were talking money.
Well, they wanted to send me to Wake, but I refused the Wake assignment because
I told them I wasn't going to go anyplace unless I could take my wife with me,
or bring her on after I got there.
We knew that Bertha was perhaps two and a half months pregnant. We had gone to
Dr. Beck and told him that we thought we probably shouldn't raise one daughter
by herself. She was about five years old now, a little over, and we had had no
addition to the family. So Dr. Beck said, well, he could take care of that, and
he gave her a few pills to take and I guess he sure did take care of it, I think
she was pregnant in a week. But I thought she could probably be well enough,
only two, two and half months, pregnant, she could come on over to wherever I was
in the islands as soon as I could find her a place to live.
So, about the 20th of June, Morrison Knudsen put me on the train to go down to
Alameda, California, a place near San Francisco. I was there a day or two and
then got on the Lurolene, flag ship of the Matsen Line and they sent me to the
Hawaiian Islands. That took five days, then I had to wait, oh I guess, a week
or two, such a matter. They set me up in the University of Hawaii dormitory and
there was two or three other contractor personnel traveling with me. We stayed
there for a few days until another ship came in. It was called the Hawaiian
Planter, a brand new big Matsen Navigation Company freighter. It had room for
about twelve passengers along in the freight. Nice, nice service. Took us about
a week to go down to Samoa. Samoa is about 13 degrees south of the Equator on
a line just about toward New Zealand, oh about 500 miles east of the Fiji
Islands.
Well, I got down to Samoa and they assigned me immediately to a crew of about
twenty -five men operating a big rock quarry. In Samoa all of the supervision of
the job was white men from the United States. Five companies had gone together
on the project. Morrison Knudsen was one of the five, Utah Construction Company,
Bechtolt Steel Corporation, I've forgotten who the other two were. Anyway,
Morrison Knudsen was supervising the whole job. Had about eighty white men down
there doing the supervising and about 2,000 natives doing the work. Had a few
heavy equipment operators, shovel operators, drag line operators, from the States
also down there.
75
It was pretty obvious when I got down there that Morrison Knudsen had mislead me
a little bit. There wasn't going to be any chance of bringing Bertha down there.
There wasn't any place for her to live, except a grass but with little coral
rocks or sand for the floor. and no furniture of any kind in them. Those native
facilities were still in the stone age. There were perhaps twelve nice little
cabins around the place, cottages that had been built for Navy families and a few
for key people in the construction operation. They were all full and they were
not about to have one of those be empty.
So, I wasn't very happy with that job because it wasn't filling what I had asked
for, and the communications back to the states was pretty lousy. A passenger
ship, the Mariposa or the Monterrey, came through there once a month, one going
toward Australia and the other one going toward the United States, and that was
our only contact outside. Course, they carried the mail, but that was it. So
the contact was pretty lousy too. That made me pretty unhappy, with Bertha
pregnant and everything. But I was there, and the job was good and the pay was
good, so there wasn't much to do but to get at it.
They assigned me the job of running a big quarry where they shot the rock down,
all volcanic rock, the whole island was volcanic. Shot the rock down and they
had broke up pretty well into pieces the size of a football and smaller, and they
were making big rock fills out onto the coral reefs and all over the swampy area
so we could build things on them. I suppose the face of the quarry that we were
working on was about 200, 250 feet tall, almost straight up, just leaned back a
little bit. A man by the name of McCullouch had been running that quarry. He
had about twenty -five natives there.
They came to work barefooted and a piece of cloth wrapped around their waists and
tucked in and that was the size of it. The men and women both dressed the same
there, so that really wasn't much protection when you are trying to hang by a
rope on a cliff and run a jackhammer. They had about six jackhammers working up
on the face of that cliff trying to shoot stuff down. Production wasn't very
good, a little three quarter yard shovel running half time. That is about all
the rock they were getting out. McCullouch was a good construction man but he
didn't know the dynamite business, so they gave me his job and made him an
Assistant Superintendent. He was a good construction man, he just didn't know
the dynamite business well enough to make it go.
It was an ideal situation really, so I really made that one pay. I laid off
about 7 or 8 men, because I didn't need them, and I quit using jackhammers
altogether. Got down off the face and went to working down at the bottom with
wagon drills putting in horizontal holes about thirty feet deep, and I started
springing them. Springing is a technique known in the blasting business that is
the key to a successful operation but not very many of them know how to make it
work good. Yeah, it's the business that separates the men from the boys. Well,
it worked out beautifully there. In about three weeks I had a ten ton dynamite
shot ready to go, and popped her off. They moved the three /quarter yard shovel
out and put a two yard shovel in and started running at two shifts a day and it
never did catch me. While it was shoveling that pile, I moved over and loaded
another row of holes, about fifty holes to the shot, along side and by the time
they had gotten that pile shoveled up, I had another one ready to go. Well, the
operation cut the costs of rock put in the fill from ninety -five cents a yard to
twenty-one cents a yard. A most fantastic reduction in cost.
76
Actually, the assignment in Samoa was a tremendously interesting assignment to
study that native civilization, if you could call it that, native culture. Tutu -
weila was the name of the island where I was, and was about 17 miles long and
about four miles wide and had practically been cut in two in the middle by a
volcano which was all filled up by water from the ocean. It made one of the
finest harbors in the South Pacific, I guess it is the finest harbor in the South
Pacific. Half of the Navy can be put in that harbor and be completely protected
from the waves from the open ocean. There were about ten thousand natives on the
island. All of them, practically all of them, living around the edge of the
island near the ocean in grass huts, little villages made up of grass huts. I
could make out about three of these cassettes I guess, just telling you about the
type of a civilization they have and my experiences down there, but I don't think
this story is probably the right place for that.
After about four months on the quarry, they moved me out to start dynamiting to
build a strip for a landing field. Half of it on the land and half of it built
out on the coral reef. Actually, the island was very rocky, all volcanic rock,
mountainous, with a coral reef all the way around. Beautiful country, heavy,
heavy vegetation, so thick you can't get through it without cutting your way
through it.
Well, everything was going along pretty good you know, until December 7th when
the Japs hit Pearl Harbor. Then our whole operation took on a different tone
entirely. Started working two ten hour shifts, seven days a week, complete
blackout at night, doing guard duty around the perimeter of the island at night.
Two shifts on the runways so as to get those runways going. And, as I said,
complete blackout at night except for out on the runways where we had to have
lights for our work. And communication with the States absolutely stopped.
There were no ships coming in and out of Samoa anymore. We ran out of food, I
mean, well I guess we had a lot of corned beef left, and we had apples. I think
we lived for a month and a half after we run out of food on corned beef and
apples. I never knew there was so many different ways you could fix corned beef
and apples.
About three weeks, maybe four, after I
to Samoa with a submarine firing a fiN
into our Navy station and the big guns
couldn't even be turned around in the
coming. We only had about 200 Marines
people handling the big radio station
he Japs hit Pearl Harbor, they came down
e inch cannon. Fired about fifty shells
that guarded the harbor there at Samoa,
direction from which those shells were
on the island I guess, and about 40 Navy
that they maintained there in Samoa.
Tutuweila, the island I was on, was only one of twelve islands in the Samoan
group. Six of them belonged to England, Great Britain, and six of them mandated
to the United States. They had been mandated to the United States since about
1902, and we had maintained a coaling station for ships from about 1902 till, I
don't know, '20 or '30 when they got to using oil mostly in their ships. The
government was mostly by the natives themselves. We did have a, what was called
a Governor, the Navy sent down there a retired commander who was appointed after
his retirement to be a Governor of Samoa. I sometimes thought they were trying
to punish somebody when they sent him down there as a Governor, but they made
quite a splash out of it. Actually the island was pretty well governed by an
association of village chiefs, and the Governor was there mostly to take care of
the United States interests, the operation of the Navy station, which was
77
actually a communications link in the radio communications between Australia and
the United States.
Well, about three months after Pearl Harbor, there were about thirty -five ships
came into Samoa. The Mariposa and the Monterrey had been converted to troop
ships and they had 12,000 Marines on them. And the rest of the ships were
cruisers, destroyers, and a little carrier or two, and various freighters, mine
layers, and so forth. So, we didn't think after that that we were going to get
captured, been quite a concern up to that time, and all of a sudden now we had
food. After Pearl Harbor we began to work long hours, and they started paying
overtime so I made more money. I think I was running, maybe $450.00 a month
during that time. That was big money in 1941.
Well, I completed the contract. By that time, the Navy had begun to organize
what they called the Seabees and the Seabees began to replace our construction
jobs provided by the contractors.
In the Spring of 1942, the runways at Pago Pago were pretty well completed and
the CB's were beginning to take over the construction requirements that the
contractors has so far been doing and they were willing to release me, so first
opportunity that came along, I took it to go back to the States. I don't
remember exactly when it was, in the mid - Spring sometime. We left in a Navy
transport, a twin diesel Navy transport and travelled straight from Samoa, Pago
Pago, Samoa to San Francisco. We didn't follow the normal ship channels, they
were afraid of the Japanese submarines in the area and we were traveling unes-
corted. Took a full three weeks to go from Samoa to San Francisco. I had
accumulated about $3,500.00 I guess above our expenses. Certainly was the most
money I'd ever had in my life by quite a bit. Had it mostly in Government Bonds
that I had bought at the Post Office in Pago Pago. I was afraid to keep any cash
money because I was too afraid that the Japs were going to capture us, so I put
all my money that was available to spare in the Government Bonds.
We arrived in San Francisco. I don't know exactly when, but I do know that
nothing ever looked quite so good as that skyline in San Francisco. I don't like
cities very well, but boy that one sure did look good, going under that Golden
Gate was something, chuckle, you bet. Well, when I got into Frisco I climbed on
the train and came up to Boise, got on the Stage and headed for Riggins.
My term in Samoa had been hard on Bertha, but she had handled it pretty well.
Dad had disposed of the service station after I left for Samoa and he'd borrowed
our car and made a very extensive trip back East to Washington D. C. and
Missouri, I guess. When Bertha found out that it wasn't going to be possible for
her to come to Samoa, she closed the apartment in Council and moved up to Riggins
and rented a nice little house from a friend of ours, Beth Gordon, who ran the
store there in Riggins. And that Fall put Karen in school for her first year of
school there at Riggins. And in December, she had returned down to Council, had
a new baby, let's see the 22nd of December, 1941. A pretty new baby girl named
Ethyl Ann for her two grandmothers. Then she had returned to Riggins for the
rest of the year, rest of the school year I mean. I reached there about the time
I think that Karen was just about to get out of school.
Morrison and Knudsen had a lot of jobs around and one of them was a big one down
at Eden, Idaho, where they were building a Jap relocation center, and they wantec
me on that job right away. Dad had just about wore out our old Pontiac Coupe in
i all his travels, but I guess it was worth it, he found himself a new wife in
Missouri too. He had married my Mother's niece, one of her nieces in Missouri.
The Pontiac was a little small for us now so on our way down to Jerome, we
stopped in Boise and bought us another car. Traded the Pontiac in on it and got
us a 1938 Fleetwood Cadillac, bought it from the Cadillac Garage there in Boise.
Boy, was that a beauty. That car was a, it was the first Fleetwood Cadillac had
ever built, Sixty Special Fleetwood. The first car built without running boards
as a regular production model. The first car with shift on the steering post
rather than in the middle of the floor, and it was a nice car, boy. We went on
down to Jerome and rented a nice little home, a nice little house right there in
Jerome.
I reported for work, down at Eden for the Jap Relocation Center. They were just
getting started on the job there. What we were going to do was build a city for
10,000 people, right out there in the sagebrush where it had never been settled
before, about four or five miles North of Eden. My job was to supervise the
construction of the roads and streets and the putting in of the sewer system and
the water system, all the water circulation system. And, I had to build a little
railroad spur too off the Union Pacific Railroad so that they could bring the
trainloads of the Japanese in that were going to populate the city. That was a
rush job, we only had three months to do it under the terms of the contract.
Anything more than three months started giving us a penalty. My biggest problem
was the water lines and the sewer lines. All that country down there over that
Snake River aquifer is volcanic rock and you dig through the soil about 18 inches
down there anyplace and you strike that volcanic rock. So, all of our sewer
lines and all of our water lines which needed to be about four feet deep to get
rid of frost, had to be dynamited. And, I had thirty miles of that ditch to
shoot in three months for water lines and sewer lines. The streets were not so
bad, course, first thing they had to do was scrape all of the sagebrush off of
the area and then go to work on the dirt and the rock.
In about two or three weeks, that job almost reached the point where I could
hardly control it. I had forty jackhammers working, a man on each jackhammer of
course, and I had two ten hour shifts running on those jackhammers. That is
eighty jackhammer men. Had about four or five powder crews of about seven or
eight men each loading those things up into shots of about fifty holes to the
shot, and we did the shooting in the early morning, between 2:00 and 6:00 A.M.
Came to between sixteen hundred and 2,000 holes shot in about four hours every
day. That job pert near run me nuts.
Oh, there was a fine old guy by the name of Morris Olson who was General Super-
intendent of the job. I went to him one day and told him I couldn't handle that
thing, I couldn't keep it straight. I needed some help and supervision. He said
he knew it, but he said he just didn't know where to get it. Terrible shortage
of qualified men in most any field you picked in those days. Well, they were
paying me $100.00 a week there on that job. I told him I thought I could get him
four danged good Supervisors if he would pay them $100.00 a week. He wanted to
know where, and I told him well I would get them out of that gang of CCC Foremen
we'd had at McCall. I thought I could get some of them at that salary. So, he
said to go ahead and try and get them, see if you can get them.
79
I called McCall, and I got four of them. My old Superintendent that I'd had,
Fred Kirby, and three others. They come down and we began to split the job of
running the spread around a little bit and then I could begin to keep track of
it. Fred came and stayed with Bertha and I, roomed with Bertha and I, at Jerome
there, left his family in McCall. And, in about three months we had the job
done. Oh, we had shovel operators, drag line operators, tractor and bulldozer
operators, compressor men, jackhammer men, dynamite foremen, and dynamite
blasters.
Mr. Harry Morrison, who owned the Morrison and Knudsen Company, he used to come
out on the job every three or four weeks, and usually brought his wife Ann with
him. I was talking to him one day and I asked him if he realized how many of
those boys and men that we had there had come out of the CCC organization. He
said yes, he was well aware of them. In fact, he didn't think his company, and
the other companies, construction companies early in the war would have been able
to handle their job if there hadn't been so many men trained in the CCC organ-
ization to qualify them for the various tasks required in construction work. I
think I knew of over thirty in that gang that I had there that had come out of
the CCC organizations.
Course it wasn't always so good for them. I know that we had fifty -six men
working for Morrison and Knudsen on Wake Island when the Japs captured it, that
had been trained in our CCC Camps around McCall. They all became Japanese
prisoners, some of them the Japs just murdered. I knew one, George Dean, from
here in Emmett. They just lined up a bunch of them and shot them one time over
there.
But, that problem of getting qualified men was really something. I know we had
700 carpenters, no we had a 1,000 carpenters on that job. Yeah, there was about
1,000 carpenters on that job and I was talking with the Carpenter Foreman one
day. He said that 700 of them had come to work with a new pair of overalls and
a new hammer and a new saw. So you kind of begin to get an idea of their quali -
fications. The 300 were put on finish work mostly, and the others had to be
given specific one man tasks for each man, and build a production line. The
Carpenter Foreman got that Carpenter Superintendent I guess maybe out of a
calling. He got that up to where we were finishing 36 two bedroom apartments per
day. They were small, two bedroom, front room, little kitchen. Most every block
in the city had a central bathhouse, wash house, and dining hall. Course, each
apartment had its own bath and toilet facilities, so it was quite a plumbing job
to run water into everything. I don't believe there was a hot water facility,
however, in each apartment. I'm not sure about that, I just don't remember.
Well that had been a rough job. When Morrison and Knudsen had bid on that job
they didn't realize all that rock was there underneath, well about a foot
underneath the soil and then you struck that solid volcanic rock. They had
underbid that job quite a lot, not realizing that rock was under there. And, my
portion of that job had lost the company about a quarter of a million dollars.
So, chuckl e, you woul d sort of thi nk maybe they woul d f re the heck out of me but
they didn't. They just said thank God Pugh, it wasn't worse. Give me a bonus
of $500.00 and sent me on to another job, chuckle.
Well next time they transferred me to the railroad department. Morrison and
Knudsen, at that time, was doing quite a lot of extending the railroad capabi-
.E
lity. Daylighting a few tunnels here and there, improving the railroad road bed,
Putting on some additional side tracks and things. Actually the railroad was so
loaded with the early war transportation requirements that it was taxing the
railroad capability to the absolute limit. Well, first place they sent me to was
The Dalles, Oregon. They wanted about a mile and a quarter side track built in
the yard, the railroad yard, in The Dalles, Oregon. So I guess we were there a
couple of months. Went down there and rented a house, were there a couple of
months I guess getting that job done. Then they transferred us to Huntington,
Oregon, for the same job again, about a mile of side track beside the main line
to give them more switching capability at Huntington, Oregon. We rented a place
there, moved the family into it there at Huntington. Built a new road bed for
the railroad, built about a mile of side track. Well, Karen had been in four
schools before Christmas that year. Boy oh boy.
I was getting pretty restless with all that moving and that's the way it was
going to be from then on as long as I followed the construction business. And,
I was getting a little unhappy with Morrison and Knudsen. Actually, the company
is as good a company as I ever worked for, but they had promoted quite a few
relatives into key positions in the organization who were not qualified in their
jobs and I was getting unhappy with them. So. I resigned for the time being and
moved to Boise. See if we could find something a little more stable.
For a while, we lived with Bertha's sister, Mary, and her two children, and Mary
was single by then. A little later we got a nice home, rented a nice place, oh
three or four blocks from where Mary lived. I didn't find any work around there
fnr while that T wanted. Karen had entered her fifth school before Christmas
a deal.
CHAPTER 12
ARMY AIR FORCE - 1943 -1947
Well, there was a man working out at Gowen Field. Gowen was just getting well
organized and going. They were training crews to fly B -17's, the flying
fortress, the four engine heavy bomber out at Gowen then. Just getting well
started. And a friend of ours by the name of Robert Marshall, who had been the
Educational Advisor in the CCC Camp up at French Creek, was now filling a
training requirement at Gowen. He was aware of a need they had out there for
someone to teach a lot of those mechanics how to read blueprints. They had
hundreds of aircraft mechanics, machine shop men, engine men, sheet metal men,
propeller men, instrument people, welders, every kind of a thing that you could
think of necessary to maintain aircraft. And, they did all their work based on
blueprints which were all done in what they called orthographic three view
drawings. And, unless you have quite a lot of training, it's almost impossible
to read those drawings. A lot of those men had come into their work fast and
hadn't gotten qualified in that, and they had a need to put on a good training
program teaching hundreds of those men how to read aircraft blueprints, ortho-
graphic drawings, in other words.
Bob Marshall propositioned me to come out there and take on that job. The grade
was a GS -7, I have forgotten what the pay was. Oh, just about what I had been
getting as a Superintendent at a CCC Camp at Riggins. The reason that I was able
to do that job was because of that mechanical drawing course that I had taken at
the Intermountain Institute in my senior year in High School. It had been an
excellent course. Course, I had to write up a training program, there wasn't
anything available. There was plenty of things available on how you make those
kinds of drawings, but how to read them was another problem. I certain didn't
want to try to make draftsmen out of all those mechanics, so I specialized the
course, just on how to read them, and we started in.
I put hundreds of mechanics through that course. both civilian and military,
mostly military. A few months later Bob Marshall transferred to Mountain Home
where they had a big Airbase down there, and they were training pilots to fly the
Liberator, the B -24. When I got most of the mechanics trained in that course at
Gowen, Bob started wanting me to come to Mountain Home. He needed help too. Bob
had had a heart attack and he wanted some help. So, after six months at Gowen
I transferred to Mountain Home. Told him I wasn't going to transfer unless he
would give me more money. So they raised me to a GS -9, and I have forgotten now
how much that was, but it was a pretty good salary. They raised me to a GS -9 and
I transferred to Mountain Home. There wasn't a very good place for family out
there, so they stayed at the house we had there in Boise and I came back home
weekends. Oh, three or four months later, they had some apartments in Mountain
Home built for people that were working at the base, and I rented one of those
RN
apartments, moved Bertha and Karen and Ann to Mountain Home.
Well, Bertha became pregnant again early in 1944, and along in late December,
Bertha's youngest sister Martha came down and stayed with us, because we were
anticipating that we were going to have an addition to the family pretty quick,
and Martha was going to stay there and take care of our two kiddies. Well, on
Christmas Day, why Bertha began to say there is something going on here, so we
climbed in the old Cadillac and headed for Boise. And, about five minutes after
Christmas on the 26 of December, 1944, she gave birth to a good looking little
baby boy. We named him Harvey James. Harvey for my Dad and James for Bertha's
younger brother, one of her younger brothers. Then we went back to Mountain
Home.
Well things had been going on alright at Mountain Home. I had trained most of
them that needed to be trained on how to read aircraft blueprints and Bob
Marshall wanted me to set up another program there. There were so many of the
Supervisory Personnel that didn't know much about how to supervise. A rapid
expansion of a thing like a war causes, always makes problems along that line.
So, with my experience in supervision, and getting a bunch of books to teach me
how to do it, I set up a program to train supervisors on how to supervise. Twas
kind of an unusual program, but it was very popular at the base, and they'd put
their men into it regularly, and the wheels were pleased with the results. It
helped.
By the Spring of 1945, I guess I had been handling that for around fourteen
months maybe, supervisory training, had it refined and doing pretty good. It was
doing good enough that we were getting recognition from our Airforce Head-
quarters. We were in the Fourth Airforce, the Headquarters was at Peterson Field
in Colorado Springs. A bunch of the wheels had been getting to note that effort
at Mountain Home, and began to think that maybe we should put out such a program
for the Fourth Airforce. The Fourth Airforce had about fifteen different bases
around the country. Most in the central part of the United States, Western
Central part of the United States. Mountain Home and Gowen were two of them
that were under that Airforce Headquarters. So, they developed a plan to set up
a Supervisory Training Program, and they propositioned me to come to Peterson
Field and help in that plan. Well, I told them no soap unless it paid more
money. So they said okay, they would go for a GS -11, so that was pretty darn
good.
So, I got in the old car and headed for Colorado Springs. That was in the Spring
of 1945. Bob Marshall was going over there too, so we set up a training program
that they wanted and they decided to set the school up in Tuscon, Arizona, Davis
Airforce Base. So, we went to Davis and arranged for the facility at the base.
What they were going to do was try to set up a Supervisory Training Course to
qualify officers coming back from overseas who had gotten their commissions from
flying airplanes and were now Majors, Lieutenant Colonels, sometimes Captains,
who had never had any supervisory experience. They had gotten their commissions
from flying airplanes. And now they were back from their missions and they had
to take on a responsibility commensurate with their grade, which meant that they
would be supervising sizeable organizations and they had no knowledge of what was
involved in supervision and organization. So, we were supposed to set up a
school that would show them how.
They would bring in about forty of those officers, sometimes fifty, put them
through a thirty day course, full time, and send them back to their jobs and send
us another forty or fifty. Well, it was quite a job. We pert near had to write
our own course, our own lesson plans, the whole program. We divided it up in
four logical segments and each one of us took one of them, and we got the school
going there in Tuscon, Arizona at Davis - Monthan.
I got permission to leave for a few days and take my old car and head for Boise
to get my family. I had rented an apartment in a housing facility that had been
built to accommodate the employees at the base, and I headed for Boise, 1,200
miles away. I went up there and picked up Bertha, Karen, Ann and Harvey. Loaded
all the stuff into a little trailer that I had built when I was at the CCC Camp
in Riggins, headed South, another twelve hundred miles back to Tuscon. Well, the
weather was hot, it was early Summer, Tuscon, Arizona. We did have an evapora-
tive cooler in the window in our apartment that helped quite a lot, but it was
hot. They kept us there into the Fall, the late Fall. The Fall and early Winter
was the best weather I have ever experienced anyplace. A lot of rain and
lightning during the latter part of August, but September and October were
beautiful. Well, about then the Airforce decided they were going to move us to
another base, that is the Fourth Airforce Headquarters in Colorado Springs,
decided to move us to Roswell Airforce Base at Roswell, New Mexico, about three
or four hundred miles East. So, we loaded up and rented a house in Roswell, got
up to the school there, started in again.
This wasn't working out, boy, this was as bad or worse than the Morrison and
Knudsen Construction Company and the Forest Service, boy. But they were paying
good and I was enjoying the work, so I better hang on. I don't think we stayed
in Roswell, New Mexico, more than two, two and half, months. I was sort of glad
to leave there. Boy the water in that town was terrible, worst I ever run
across. I think they had to distill it twice before you could use it in the
radiator in your car, chuckle, and I am serious, I am not kidding. It was
terrible. So, pretty quick we loaded up and were on our way to Carswell Airforce
Base in Fort Worth. That was the early Spring of 1946.
Well Fort Worth, turned out to be the toughest problem in finding a place to live
that we had run across. We found a little shack out in the South end of Fort
Worth. It was miserable, and we could not find anything else. We finally got
it cleaned up enough so that we could live in it, and got our school started in
the facilities at Carswell Airforce Base.
We were now under the Command of the Eighth Airforce Headquarters. Carswell had
been transferred to the Eighth, the Eighth Airforce had been moved from England
where it had been the big Airforce that did the bombing of Germany, and it had
been moved to Carswell Airforce Base in Fort Worth, Texas. It had about fifteen
bases under it and it was located right there at Carswell, and that is where they
set up our school. Facilities were good at Carswell. Right across the runway
was a big factory that built Liberator Airplanes, Consolidated Vultee Aircraft
Corporation. Had one building over there about a mile long and they had about
forty thousand people in that building working around the clock, and it was right
across the runway. When we landed there in '46, I guess, they were just getting
along in the development of the B -36 Bomber. It was being built in that facility
right across the runway.
• ,
Our living situation wasn't good in Fort Worth. Bertha didn't like it there a
bit and I don't blame her. And polio was pretty prevalent around that country
and we were worried about it. Bertha sort of wanted to go back to Idaho for a
whi 1 e at 1 east anyway and we f gured out a deal that when Karen was out of school
that we would move out of that shack we were in, and I would start trying to find
someplace else for us to live. In the meantime, she would go back to Idaho for
the Summer perhaps and visit with her folks. So that is what she did. She got
on the train, took the kids and went back to Idaho. I moved out to the Officers
Quarters on the base at Carswell, started boarding there, continued working in
the school, and started looking for a place to live. I was looking, I was
looking hard. I just couldn't hardly find anything. And. I didn't find anything
satisfactory until about November, I guess. Finally, I found a nice little house
not too far from the base, a little two bedroom house. A woman was living in it,
she owned it, a little house with rock sides I remember. She would rent it to
us for $75.00 a month. She had another little house in the backyard, and she
would move out into that little house in the backyard, I think a little one or
two room deal in the backyard, and we could have the two bedroom house. It was
hard to get her to rent it to me because we had three little kids . But, I
finally convinced her that they were not destructive kids and that we would take
good care of the house and all the rest of it, and there wouldn't be anymore than
just my wife and those three little kids there. Took me quite a few days to
convince her that she should rent that to me, but I finally got it done.
So, I contacted Bertha, she got on a train, and came back as far as Denver. I
went up to Denver in the car and met her and the kids and hauled them back from
Denver down to Fort Worth, about six hundred miles. We moved into the house, but
we had a problem. Bertha had brought her sister Mary and her two little kids.
Mary was divorced by then, with her. Mary wanted to get away from Boise and so
she'd brought them with her, and we didn't have a place for her to live, because
of the kind of an arrangement I had made with the old gal that owned that house.
But, if Mary was going to be in Fort Worth, there was no place else for her to
live, unless it was a motel, which she certainly could not afford. So, we moved
Mary and her two kiddies into our little house too. That made eight of us in
there, certainly wasn't any room for me, so I stayed in my room at the base, and
they all seven of them lived in that little two bedroom house. I had to work
pretty hard on that old gal to get her to accept it, but I think she did, maybe.
I don't know whether she was happy about it or not..
Well we did try to take good care of the place and we paid our rent regularly and
that sort of thing. But, by this time Bertha and I were having problems. 1
think in the last year or two she had been looking for greener pastures and,
perhaps, looking for a little more stability in her life than I was providing.
I certainly wasn't providing any, not in the types of professions I was follow-
ing. Our marriage really had gotten in such a shattered state there really
wasn't much to salvage. But, Bertha, Mary and her kids stayed there in that
house for the rest of that Winter, and in early 1947 the Airforce decided to
begin to reduce the size of their working force. They discontinued the school
that we had set up and so I lost my job at that, really. They offered me another
job at a GS -7 there, but I couldn't accept that, I couldn't live down there in
that country at that price, and take care of my family. So Mary and her kids
climbed on the train and headed for Idaho and I put my gang in the car and loaded
the trailer up again and we headed for Idaho without a job. For some reason, it
was obvious that Bertha wasn't going to live me anymore anyway so I had to take
them back. I think that was the Spring of 1947, or early Summer of 1947. Bertha
went down to Parma and lived with folks for a while with the kids.
M.
CHAPTER 13
THE YEARS 1947 -1949
I got me a job with The Turtling Construction Company and went up on a dynamite
job at Grand Coulee on the irrigation system in the Columbia Basin country up
there, up at Coulee City, Washington. Big job, building those big canals out of
the Grand Coulee Dam that irrigated that whole area. Again, all volcanic rock,
some of those canals ninety feet deep to get the grade, get the flow grade from
about eight wagon drills and a big Monigan Shovel, digging the canals, using
carload after carload after carload of dynamite. Most all the drilling was
thirty foot holes, same kind of a proposition I had had down in Samoa, same kind
of equipment, same kind of drilling problems. Boy that country was cold.
Oh, by the way, after we had moved back to Boise I bought a nice little trailer
house about 18 feet long, just about right for a poor old single man to live in
and I'd moved that up to Grand Coulee, up to Coulee City. I was living in there
while I worked up there most of the Fall and Winter of '47.
Spring of '48, I got word from Fred Kirby who was now Superintendent of Construc-
tion for the Idaho National Forest at McCall. Wanted to know if I wanted to come
over and go to work for him, do some dynamite work on the old Salmon River road
again. A big bridge across the river had gone out, and they were trying to build
another one that required quite a lot of dynamite work on the approaches and so
forth. I told him sure, I would like that. So, I went back over to Riggins,
went to work, did the drilling and the work and got that approaches and founda-
tion of that bridge all fixed up, as far as the dynamite work was concerned. A
man from Montana came down and was superintending the bridge construction. It
is the bridge, the first bridge above Riggins now on the main Salmon about seven
miles up there, a big steel truss bridge right at the mouth of Lake Creek.
Got that job done and then went over to Yellow Pine with a little crew, I think
I had eight men I guess. Sort of reconditioned the road between Yellow Pine and
Big Creek over at Profile Summit, surfaced some of the road, widened some of the
curves, and cut down some of the grade and improved some of the drainage. We
were there for about four or five months, I guess. Maintained some of the other
roads in the area, and when the weather began to close in in the Fall, I moved
on into McCall and I worked at the headquarters reconditioning some drilling
equipment. By the 20th of December, 1948, my work was completed there and I was
out of a job until early Spring when we could get back into the mountains again.
My little trailer was parked there not very far away from the Forest Service
Headquarters in McCall.
I remember I walked downtown one night between Christmas and New Years in 1948.
It was about four blocks to the downtown area and it was 55 degrees below zero
that nights. The air was cold and crisp, still as a mouse, no wind, but boy that
Nh
was cold. I think that was the coldest temperature 1 ever excerienced_ but mv'
little trailer house kept me perfectly warm." Boy it was a good one. Well, right
after New Years I tied the trailer to the old Cadillac and headed down toward
Boise, and I parked the trailer in a trailer court on Capitol Boulevard just a
little ways North of the railroad depot and decided to spend the rest of the
Winter there.
It was a bad time for me from about 1945 or '46 through to 1949. I didn't want
to lose my family, but I guess I had already lost them. I just could not accept
it and my job situation had gotten kind of sorry. In most respects, Bertha was
a pretty good mother and she loved her children. And, when she wanted to be, she
was a good wife and I thought a lot of her. I couldn't get along with her very
good, but I liked her real good. I guess I realized that the relationship with
her was done, I just couldn't accept it. I saw the kiddies, oh not very
frequently, but some times. And I don't think Bertha ever tried to prejudice
them against me any.
Continuing with my time in Boise, Idaho in January 1949. As I said, I saw the
children every once in a while that Winter. I wasn't working any, I was just
staying in that trailer court below the depot. Bertha had rented an apartment
on the bench and was working downtown. Karen had gone up to Seattle to see my
sister in 1947 and I had picked her up at Ellensburg on her way back from Seattle
and she had come over and she'd stayed a couple of weeks with me in Coulee City
and then she had come on home. I guess that was the most time I had gotten to
spend with my kids during those years. I guess that I knew that my life with
Bertha was done, but I just couldn't accept it.
About the only association I had the rest of that Winter in 1949 was with a
family we had known, that my family, the Pughs, had known for many years. The
Whittins lived at Idaho City. Mr. Whittin had died in 1948, and Mrs. Whittin had
sold their place in Idaho City and they'd moved to a place they had bought on the
corner of Curtis and Irving in Boise. They had a couple of acres there and they
were keeping about three horses, they always had horses. Francis was living at
home with her mother, working down at the First Security Bank in Boise. Bobbie
Whittin I think was still working in Alaska, she had been up there many years.
Albert Whittin was working, I think he was working for, oh I don't know, he was
running a sand plant there in Boise, a separating plant of some kind. And that's
about the only social activity I had was visiting the Whittins that Spring. It
was a lonely time for me, I was discouraged, boy. Bertha and I had separated our
assets. I still had quite a few hundred dollars in Government Bonds that I had
saved while I was down in Samoa and Bertha got all that. And she got all the
household furnishings we had such as they were and I got the car, the old
Cadillac with 225,000 miles on it.
That Winter in Boise was cold, had about almost two feet of snow in Boise. Thank
goodness my little trailer kept me nice and warm, but it was a discouraging time
for me. Basically, I just did not want to lose my family, and as I said, I
couldn't accept it.
::
CHAPTER 14
U. S. AIRFORCE - 1949 -1966
But, by early Spring, another one of my occasional lucky breaks came along, and
I was due for one I'll tell you. In 1946 in Fort Worth, I had taken a Civil
Service Exam for what they called an Organization and Methods Examiner. A type
of work somewhat related to the sort of thing I was handling down in Fort Worth,
teaching supervision, organization methods and things of that kind. And that
work, plus the supervision I had done years before, qualified me to take that
Civil Service Examination. Federal Civil Service was setting up a register for
Organization Examiners in Grades GS -7, 9, 11, and 12, and with my background and
experience, I was qualified to take all of those Exams for all those grades, so
I took them.
Well 1947 came along and the military had a rather drastic reduction in their
work force so there had been no Organization and Methods Examiners employed. I
did hear from the Civil Service Commission along in late, oh sometime in late '47
or '48 that I had passed the Exam and was on the Register for all four Grades,
but I didn't think anything of it because I didn't know of any vacancies. But
early Spring, 1949, I received a letter from Fort Worth, Texas, from Daryl Glenn,
was his name, the Civilian Personnel Director at Carswell Airforce Base. Mr.
Glenn said that they were going to establish a position, an Organization and
Methods Examiner at Carswell, and he knew that I was now on the Register and
wanted to know if I would consider such a position. Well, I called him back on
the phone and talked to him awhile. He said the job was a GS -9 and he thought
it could be made an 11 before very long. Yes, I told him I would accept the job
if there was such a job there that I could get. So he said that I would hear
further from him then.
Well, that job was very interesting to me down in Fort Worth. I had a kind of
a unique circumstance that made that job quite desirable. I had already acquired
fourteen years of Federal Civil Service but none of it counted toward any insur-
ance, retirement, or anything like that. I had about ten years with the Forest
Service, and that had all been on temporary appointment which necessitated a
reappointment every six months, and I had four years with the Airforce on what
they called a war indefinite appointment. Neither job of which would give me
what was called Civil Service Status. Therefore, neither job gave me any retire-
ment rights or insurance or anything of that kind.
Well, I had a special situation. I was 43 years old. The doctors that I had
talked to had always told me that I probably would not be able to work after I
was fifty years old because of my eyes, and I was aware that there was some
deterioration in my vision taking place, not a great deal, but some. And, in my
situation, any disability insurance was impossible. No insurance company would
consider selling me disability insurance. The condition of my eyes was well
documented in doctor's offices and there wasn't a chance of me getting any
.0
disability insurance. Well, if I could get a Civil Service job off of a Civil
Service Register, and work a three year probationary period, believe it or not,
thats what I would have to do, is work a three year probationary period even
though I had already had fourteen years, I would then have what they call Civil
Service Status. And, with Civil Service Status I was then guaranteed forty
percent of my salary for the rest of my life if I became disabled and couldn't
work. That was a very important thing to me because it looked like I was going
to have a situation in my older years where I wouldn't be able to make a living.
As I said, I would be guaranteed forty percent of my salary as a retirement for
the rest of my life if I became disabled and if I earned a retirement greater
than that as the years went by, whatever that retirement was, I was eligible for
it for the rest of my life if I became disabled. I needed that type of employ-
ment I thought.
Well, by early Spring, I had heard from Daryl Glenn and the job situation was all
set. I was to come to Fort Worth and go to work. So, I hooked up my trailer to
my car, bid the kiddies all good -by, headed out, 1,600 miles down to Fort Worth.
I put the trailer in a little trailer court right near the Base, and went to
work. The job was a GS -9 for the Base as an Organization and Methods Examiner
and that is what I started doing around the organizations on the Base. In sight
of four months, they had moved my position from the Base to the, what they called
the Eighth Airforce Headquarters, which was also located at Carswell, and set up
my position so that I was heading up Organization and Methods Examiners and
Supervisory Training Programs in all fifteen Bases of the Eighth Airforce.
Well, that turned my job from doing the work into supervising a man or two at
each Base in the Eighth Airforce, and that raised my grade to a GS -11. The work
was Headquarters work and required quite a lot of flying. I had to fly to each
of those Bases about twice a year, and see that the programs were going right.
By that time the Base at Carswell was a full blown B -36 Base, we had two Wings.
I don't remember how many of those giant airplanes they had, but they had a lot
of them. The factory where those big planes were built was right across the
runways, and some of our other Bases were flying B -36's also.
For social life, I didn't have any, I just didn't have hardly any. Was quite a
lot of work and that took care of it. I continued working there until the Spring
of 1952, when a vacancy occurred for a similar type position at Omaha, Nebraska,
at SAC Headquarters. That was the Headquarters that was over all the various
bomber Bases, and that job would pay GS -12. I have forgotten what the salary
was, but that was pretty good. They offered me the job, so I moved to Omaha,
sold my little trailer there in Fort Worth, and moved to Omaha to go to work at
SAC Headquarters.
Now I was doing a similar task at a higher headquarters, with three Airforces
under me. The Second Airforce, the Eighth Airforce, and the Fifteenth Airforce.
One located at Shreveport, Louisiana, one in Fort Worth, Texas, and one in
Riverside, California. Each one of those had about fifteen to twenty Bases under
each Airforce Headquarters, so I suppose we had probably 55 Bases in all. I was
now really getting up to where the work went on. My office was just down the
hall aways from General Curtis LeMay himself. But, don't misunderstand me, I
didn't get to know him very well. My boss was a full Colonel up there, pretty
good guy to work for. I worked at Moffitt Airforce Base for about a year and a
half. I didn't like it up there, I didn't like the headquarters, I didn't like
GIiI
being that far away from where the work was being going on. I don't think I am
very good at high level management, I do better when I am closer to the work.
I didn't like the town of Omaha and I didn't like the weather in that country,
and I didn't like my work situation very well. When a vacancy occurred down at
Second Airforce Headquarters at Shreveport, Louisiana, and I learned that I could
take that job as a GS -11 and not have any pay cut, they had raised the steps in
the 11 to give me the same pay that I was getting in Omaha, I talked them into
letting me go down there and I went down to Shreveport, Louisiana, sometime mid-
year 1953.
My work at Barksdale Airforce Base in Shreveport was similar to what it had been
in the Eighth Airforce at Carswell, except that I had an additional requirement
to try to help determine what the manpower requirements were for various func-
tions throughout the different jobs to be done throughout the Airforce, as well
as running the Supervisory Training Program, and heading up some Organizations
and Methods Examiners throughout the Command, on about fifteen different Bases.
Our Bases extended from Puerto Rico to Rapid City, South Dakota, and from Fort
Worth, Texas, to Savannah, Georgia. We had four Bases even up in Michigan, two
in North Dakota. They were really scattered.
By this time, Carswell Airforce Base didn't have an Airforce Headquarters any-
more. The Eighth Airforce Headquarters had been moved from Carswell to a Base
in Massachusetts, Westover Airforce Base in Massachusetts. and our Command, par-
ticularly, was beginning to take on another function. We not only flew air-
planes, we were getting all these big intercontinental ballistic missiles
installed and manned over the country.
I had moved into the Officer's Quarters at Barksdale Airforce Base until I could
get a living situation. Before long, I had purchased a nice trailer house.
Single bedroom, 37 feet long, Spartan Imperial Mansion, is what they called it.
It was practically new, it was a 1953 model and I purchased it in 1953, and moved
it onto a small trailer court, only had five trailers, close to the gate to the
Airbase. I liked working in Barksdale. It was a good Base, a good town, and a
good climate. I liked Louisiana alright, good pleasant working situation.
Soon after going to Barksdale, I had joined the Barksdale Federal Credit Union
and within a couple years they had voted me into the Board of Directors of that
Credit Union and I remained on the Board of Directors on that Credit Union for
as long as I stayed at Barksdale. Twas a big Credit Union, before I left there
it got up to fifty thousand members with $50MM in assets. So I did begin to
learn a little bit about handling money and investments and things like that from
that experience.
I didn't have much social life, was gone quite a bit, flying around various Bases
around the country, but I would get about three or four weeks off every summer
and got up to about five weeks when I got enough seniority. And about every
other summer I would take a trip to Idaho to see the kids and get back in the
mountains for a while. Every year, Dad would make a trip around from Missouri
and down through Shreveport, and on over to Los Angeles where he was staying
then, and he would stay with me for a week or two.
I had purchased me a little motorcycle scooter deal that I buzzed around on short
trips in town and getting onto the Base. It was a pretty handy little gadget,
you could use it, oh you could use pert near ten months of the year down in that
country. Harvey came down, I think in 1954, or '55, and stayed a couple of weeks
with me. He came down on the train. He came to Omaha and then on down on the
train. Stayed with me a couple weeks and then he went back. That sure made a
good break for me. Then in 1956, I think Karen was graduating from college. I
went out there for the graduation business and picked her up, and Harvey, and
brought them back to Shreveport with me, and they stayed for awhile. Then they
went back to Idaho on the train. And I would make a trip to Idaho every couple
of years and that was about the extent of my contact with the family. Dad was
always trying to figure out something that I was supposed to do during my
vacation times. I'm not sure, but I think it was in 1959 that he came down and
wanted me to go with him, drive with him in his old Cadillac car all the way to
Boise and visit the gang, so, I did. I drove to Boise and visited them awhile,
and I have still got a bunch of slides I took at that time of him and the kids.
And when the vacation time was done, I came back to Shreveport.
Well there was one thing that happened different, the Fal 1 -,- I think-it was -the --
Fall of 1959. Finnett Guthrie, the gal that I had been so interested in my youth
at Montour, the school teacher there, I had heard was making a trip through the
Caribbean on a ship, vacation trip. She was single, making a trip through the
Caribbean, down to South America and back and I learned that she was going to
dock in Mobile, Alabama, on a certain day, so I got a few days off and drove down
to Mobile. Met her when she got off the ship, she didn't know I was going to be
there, chuckle. So. I picked her up there, came back through New Orleans and
back up to Shreveport. She stayed there a day or two, then she went on over to
some place in Texas where she had some relatives and then she went on home to
Idaho. I think by then she was teaching school in McCall, I believe. Anyway by
the summer of 1960, I decided that I was going to take a vacation in Idaho, and
I was going up to McCall and see her. She had a nice little cabin on the lake
there at McCall. Yeah, that was the summer of 1960. I think I took Ann and
Harvey and we went up to McCall and we visited Finnette, and I know the kids had
fun out there on the lake. Then I took them back to Boise.
Dad came into Boise from California and I was visiting, staying with him there
in the Idanha Hotel. I don't remember the exact date, it was about the first of
August, we went downstairs to the Up -To -Date to get some breakfast, and Dad had
a paralytic stroke, right there in the Up -To -Date. He passed out and froze up
stiff as a poker. So they called an ambulance and rushed him to the hospital.
Well, my vacation was about done, so I had to call Shreveport and get an
extension on my vacation because there was nobody to take care of Dad but me.
My Sister had died in 1958. So I stayed with Dad for a week or so, until we kind
of stabilized that stroke a little bit. And I got him situated in a care
facility, geriatrics ward, kind of a nursing home type deal, in the hospital
there, in the St. Alphonsus hospital, the old one downtown. There wasn't much
to do for Pa. He had a lot of handicap in his right leg and right arm and had
trouble speaking, typical fairly severe stroke, and he needed custodial care. and
that was as good a place as I could find to provide it. You know what they
charged, believe it or not, $200.00 a month. So I arranged to pay for his care
there, had everything taken care of and I had to get back to work. So I left and
went back to Shreveport.
Well that stroke that Dad had changed the pattern of my life from then on out,
I'll tell you. I guess Dad stayed there in that facility for perhaps a month and
92
a half, two months. He began to get over the stroke a little bit, but not very
well. He talked Lillian Beckman, who was now a widow living in Emmett, into
taking him out of the place and taking him over to Emmett, and try to take care
of him. Well, his stroke was more serious than that. She took him over there
but she couldn't get the job done. My uncle, James Ware, came through Emmett and
Dad talked him into taking Dad to California where he had been living with his
sister, Laura, in Los Angeles. So, Uncle Jim Ware took Dad down there to
California. Aunt Laura was in no shape to take care of Dad either, and he still
needed care. Well, by Christmas, people had found out that whatever they tried
wasn't going to work, and they put in a riot call for me from California to come
and get him. So I flew to California, bundled him up and loaded him in an air-
plane and flew him back to Shreveport, and put him into a nursing home.
I had no facility to care for him, nobody to help me in my trailer house. He was
better, yeah he was better, but he certainly wasn't well and he needed care,
custodial care. So. I rented a house, nice house, nice three bedroom house about
a bl ock from where I 1 i ved i n my trai 1 er, and got i t al 1 furni shed, had to go buy
furniture for it. Hired a woman to come and cook for us and moved Dad into the
house. Took me about a month to get all that done, along with my work. But,
with my requirement to periodically go flying out all over the country and
sometimes be gone for two week at a time, it was a kind of a tough situation, on
how to care for Dad. We had a lady come and cook for us and care for him, but
she wasn't there weekends, I had to be there weekends. She was there five days
and five nights, one of the bedrooms went to her, but she didn't work out very
well. Wasn't very long until I had to let her go and hire another one, and
wasn't very long till I had another one hired. A lady lived a couple doors away,
a wi dow 1 ady, that was wi 11 i ng to hel p us. She di dn' t stay there nights, but she
did the cooking for Dad and kind of saw to him, and he was getting along a little
better. He could get out where he could walk around some on the road by then,
but certainly not a very good situation. Whenever I got stuck with nobody to
care for him, and had to go, why I'd have to put him in the nursing home for a
day or two. So that was the way it was going.
Well, along in the Spring, I got a letter from an old acquaintance. Mary
Herrick, the gal I had gone with for a little time when I was fifteen years old,
and a sophomore in High School at Montour. Somehow she had gotten ahold of my
address someplace, I have no idea where. She had been living up in the Spokane
area. She had married, had a girl, and the girl was now grown. Her husband had
died, she had married again and divorced him and now she was single. And somehow
she had gotten ahold of my name and she was going to come down and see us. So,
she did. She was convinced that she was the answer to all my problems, and I
guess after awhile she sort of convinced me too. Goodness knows with that
problem of caring for Dad, I was pretty desperate, chuckle. Anyway, on July 30,
1962, we were married in Bolger City, Louisiana, civil ceremony.
She came over and started taking care of Dad and me. Well that worked out
alright for a year or two, not too well, but fairly good. The only trouble was
her name was Mary Conyers, it had been Herrick, now it was Conyers, then she had
married a man by the name of Stone, and now her name was Pugh, but she couldn't
stay very long in Shreveport, not over a few months at a time. She had to go
back to where her daughter was near Spokane and see her mother in McCall, and it
didn't work out very good. Any time she would leave, why I'd have to get Dad
into a nursing home again. And each year, seemed like she was spending a little
93
more time in Idaho. Got up to where I'm sure she was spending a third of her
time in Idaho, and by the first part of 1966, my eyes were getting in a situation
where I couldn't do my work. A disability situation such as mine with my eyes
entitled me to take my sick leave then and I had quite a lot of it accumulated,
so I went onto sick leave for quite a few months. Oh, Mary was gone to Idaho,
she was bound I was going to go immediately and I couldn't, I had to stay there
and, I was employed on sick leave. I had almost a year that I put in in that
status, I had that much sick leave accumulated.
But they put me on a disability retirement on the 30th day of December, 1966, at
the end of '66. Well Mary was in Idaho and was going to stay there, she wasn't
going to come back to Shreveport anymore. She was trying to force me to move to
Idaho, and I had things I wanted to stay there and do yet. I was still on the
Board of Directors of the Credit Union and I didn't know where I'd go into Idaho.
I had a nice place to live in Shreveport. I was not happy with the way Mary was
doing me. She had sold me a bill of goods alright, but she hadn't delivered
them. During that year I made up my mind I wasn't going to live with her
anymore. Not the way she was operating.
94
;HAPTER 15
RED - 1967 -1970
So I stayed there in Shreveport, caring for Dad the best I could with him in the
nursing home part of the time and with him home with me most of the time. Em-
ploying somebody to cook for us some until the Spring of 1968. He was pretty
good, Dad was doing pretty good by that time. He didn't show very much results
of that stroke, believe it or not, but he was getting along in years. He was 94
years old that Summer. He wanted to go back to Idaho, so I told him okay. Twas
quite a job to move him, but I told him okay. So I flew to Boise, made arrange-
ments with the nursing home to accept him, Treasure Valley Nursing Home over on
Reserve Street, I think, a bit north of St. Luke's Hospital. Then I flew back
to Shreveport, got him and loaded him on a airplane with his necessary gear, flew
with him back to Boise, because you couldn't get him in an airplane unless I was
with him, flew him back to Boise and got him installed in the nursing home.
Then again, I flew back to Shreveport, loaded up my car, my boat, my motor bike,
and, well first I had to sell out all the stuff in the house that I didn't need,
sold all our excess furniture, kept some of it, stored it in Shreveport. Sold
my trailer house, hooked my boat and my motor bike on behind my car and loaded
it up and headed for Idaho. My eyes were not very good, but I could still get
by if I drove real carefully. I wouldn't have sold that beautiful big trailer
house, it was 8 feet by 37, single bedroom, if I could have been competent of
driving. I would have gotten rid of my car and got a good pickup and I would
have kept that trailer house. But I did not have confidence and ability to
handle that big a rig on the road anymore, so I didn't try it.
So. I moved to Idaho, moved into a motel in Garden City, with Dad in a nursing
home out at Treasure Valley, and that was the way we started living. Saw Mary
a time or two but she was spending most of her time up in McCall with her mother
and with her daughter in Spokane, most of it up in the Spokane area. Well, the
situation didn't change there in Boise for about sixteen months. I stayed there
in the motel, all of '68 and '69. Dad's health was failing, he was needing a
nursing home by that time. I had to move him from the Treasure Valley Nursing
Home out to the, I think they called it the Sunset Nursing Home, what used to be
old Collister, old Collister Nursing Home. On September 30th, 1969, Dad died
there at that nursing home. I think I had gone to see him almost every day for
that whole time that he was in the nursing home, for over a year. Oh I was away
for a few days, but not very much, and that is about all I did. We buried him
beside Mother out at Cloverdale and I went up to Spokane. Mary had a home in
Spokane which I thought maybe I should take a look at and see what the situation
was with her. But it was not a good situation, not for Mary, I couldn't live
with her, so we decided she was going to get a divorce. I came back down to
Boise, again.
95
About the only social contact I had around there was with the Whittins, and I did
visit them some, and my kids some. I decided to look up a gal I had met twenty -
one years before in 1947 or '48 when I was in Boise. She was a step daughter of
an old friend of ours that had lived on Brownley, a step daughter of man by the
name of Gilbert Peck. Went out to see the Peck family there in Boise Valley,
found that their daughter Mary was now single and living in Portland and was
working at the Armour Meat Plant in Portland. I liked her, she was a nice, sweet
capable gal. Been raised in the Boise area. So I drove down to Portland to see
her. I guess she was glad to see me, and we got along real good.
Then, I went on up to Washington, Poulsbo, Washington, where my Sister is buried.
I never had been up there to that graveyard. Her husband had died by that time
and I hadn't known anything about what had happened to their property or any-
thing. So, I went up there and got things straightened out, and went back down
to Boise. Stayed in contact with Mary for the next year, writing letters, tapes,
back and forth and occasionally getting down to Portland for a day.
Early in the Spring of 1970, I had been over in Emmett, and I noticed a sign in
front of a house that was for sale, and I knew the house pretty well. It was Dr.
Cummings' old house. Had a big For Sale sign out in front of it. Now it
belonged to a man by the name of Bob Newall. He wanted to sell it for about
$22,500.00 I think is what he wanted, and he wanted $6,000.00 down, no he wanted
about $8,000.00 down and he wanted me to take over the payments of the contract.
Well, I liked the old house, it was the kind of a house I would like to have, but
I wasn't going to give him that much money for it. Mary Hick's stepmother had
died sometime during that year and she had come to Boise to the funeral and I had
her come over and look at the house in Emmett, guess she liked it alright. Asked
her if she thought it would be a good house for us to live in, she said she
thought maybe it would, chuckle.
Well that was quite a long time before I got it. Anyway, it was too high priced
for me. So I moved back to Boise and about four months later, I guess, Mr.
Newall came over to see me one day. Wanted to know if I was still interested in
the house. I told him yes I was, but I couldn't meet his price. So he asked me
what I would give him and I told him I would give him $18,500.00 for it, that
would be $6,500.00 down to him and I would take over the contract at $12,000.00.
Well, he said he couldn't sell it for that, but about three days later he come
back and said he could accept it. So on the Seventeenth of August, 1970, I
signed the papers for the purchase of the house. Placed an order to Shreveport,
Louisiana for them to ship my furniture to me that I had stored down there.
I went to Portland and asked Mary Hicks if she thought she would like to live
with me in that house. She said she would, so we bought some more furniture in
Portland, got our bedroom set, dining room set and a few things down there and
had them shipped to Emmett. Well, I loaded quite a bit of Mary's stuff into my
car and my trailer and hauled it to Emmett, and I moved into the house. Some
days later why Mary and her sister Helen, who also lived in Portland, drove in
with the balance of Mary's stuff from Portland in Mary's car. Well on the 6th
of October, 1970, we were married in Weiser, Idaho, in the courthouse in Weiser,
civil ceremony. And twenty -two years we are still living here in Emmett, Idaho.
Mary had had three children, they were all grown when we were married, and course
mine were pretty well grown too. She was quite a little bit younger than I.
When we married in 1970, she was 49 years old and I was 64, so she was fifteen
years younger. Well this turned out to be a very successful marriage.
The last cassette, Cassette A, ended with my purchase of our home in Emmett,
Idaho, and marriage to Mary Hicks in the Fall of 1970. I have been away from the
recording of this book for the past two or three weeks, and when I returned, I
played the tapes back that I have already recorded. They sound like my little
tape recorder is doing alright, and I think most of the information that I put
in them is accurate, perhaps a date or two maybe off some but most of it is
reasonably accurate.
97
CHAPTER 16
MORE DETAILS ABOUT 1928 -1966
However, in reviewing what I have recorded so far, I got the impression that
quite a lot of it is pretty much a bare bones story, lacking much of the details
that give realism and interest to a story. For example, the last cassette,
Cassette #5, covers a period of 28 years of my life from the Spring of 1942 until
the Fall of 1970. Well, to cover that 28 years of my life in 90 minutes is bound
to be a pretty bare bones story, so I have decided to double back and see if I
can add some of the details of the lifestyle and pattern and events that occurred
and give a little added interest to a story of this kind. Actually, from 1947
to '49, the style of my life changed rather extensively. It changed quite a lot,
more than what the story in the tape sort of indicates. So I am going to double
back and try to do a little bit better job on part of this.
First, I want to discuss some more about my life between 1928 and 1947. In 1928,
when I went to work for the State Police, Idaho State Police Force, and in 1947
when I had lost my job at Forth Worth with the Airforce. Two characteristics
about my life during those 19 years stand out. The first thing was the relative
instability of our living situation. Of course, it was relatively stable from
1928 to 1931 with the Idaho State Police Force. I stayed in Caldwell, I lived
in Caldwell for those full four years. But between 1931 and '47, I had three
major employers, one was the Forest Service, one was Morrison Knudsen, and one
was the Airforce, and all three of them necessitated frequent moving and there-
fore resulted in a very unstable living situation for me and my family.
The other predominant characteristic of my work life during those 19 years was
that I was a workaholic. I suppose the word workaholic is used to mean, to
describe a man who works harder than most of the other people around him. But,
actually, the word means a lot more than that. Perhaps I should try to define
the word, workaholic. Actually, a workaholic is one who subordinates all the
other things in his life to the requirements of his job or his work. Most of his
interest and effort and energy go into his work. Most of his joy and satis-
faction in living comes from his accomplishments in his work. He tends to
subordinate social activities, family relationships, hobbies, and so forth to the
requirements of his work, and may carry it to the point where he has practically
no social life, limited relationships with the family and no hobbies. Well.
there is not much doubt about it, I was a full blown workaholic for practically
all of those 19 years.
It is not too difficult to sort of justify or give reasons why a person is a
workaholic. In the case of the Idaho State Police, I was a young man, 22 years
old with no qualification or work experience in the line that I was going into,
the Idaho State Police Force, and very little guidance and practically no
supervision. I'm sure that I tried to cover my inadequacies in those respects
..
by long hours and conscientious hard work. Mostly, I just worked all the time
I was awake. But, of course, as a result, I had a good record, an excellent
record in fact. Of course the work was a challenge to me and I've always enjoyed ,.
work that was a real challenge. I don't like work that is repetitive and boring,`
never did.
And then came the Forest Service, with the responsibility for the work of about
25 other men, in a field of work that I did not know anything about, dynamite
work, drilling and blasting. I cannot imagine anything being much more of a
challenge than that was. It sure as heck was. And there was no way out of that
job but work my tail off, and I did. Oh, it paid, sure, it paid good. I mean
from the standpoint of job stability, and promotions in the job. In a couple of
years I had gotten good enough that I could count on them keeping me over some
men that had more seniority than I because they just couldn't hardly get along
without me on that Salmon River Road and that dynamite work. And promotions that
came were outstanding. In five years time I went from an enrollee in the CCC
organization to Camp Superintendent. There were millions of boys enrolled in the
CC's and, at least in 1938, the National CCC Newspaper came out out and indicated
that I was the only enrollee that had ever advanced up to the Camp Superintend-
ency. I don't know whether anybody else ever made it after that or not.
Of course, there was another thing that caused a person to work his head off
during those years. It was Depression, the biggest Depression, the worst De-
pression that this nation or the world had ever experienced I guess. And there
was ten men, most of them qualified, for every job that was available. Unless
you were outstanding in some way, you didn't get very far. There was lots of
competition for jobs, and I think that I kept my work during those years just
because of hard work. Then after the Forest Service, the war started, and again,
that is a real drive for hard work, putting it out, really putting it out. And
that war caused a lot of that work stress up through '45 anyway. And it paid off
in the Airforce too. Went from a GS, let's see a GS -7 to a GS -12, before the
promotions stopped. Actually, in that Airforce work I turned down two more
promotions, one to Washington, D. C., Airforce Headquarters, for a GS -13, that
I just didn't want to move up to that rat race in the Pentagon. And the other
was to a GS -14 position in Germany, which I wanted to accept very much but could
not accept because Dad was sick.
So, I guess being a workaholic pays off in some respects, but in some others it
does not. It causes too many sacrifices in social life, family relationships,
hobbies, varied interests, and on and on. And, in time, tends to burn you out
on the job.
Well, as I said before, between 1947 and 1949 my life took on a major change.
But 1949 came on, the Spring of 1949, came on with a work opportunity for the
Airforce, Fort Worth, Texas, as an Organization and Methods Examiner, a permanent
Civil Service appointment, and at the time, I did not realize how much of a
change that that was going to make in my life pattern. I did not realize that
I was going to move to Fort Worth and not return to Idaho for 19 years, return
to Idaho to live I mean, for 19 years. I did not realize that I was never going
to miss a monthly paycheck again for as long as I live, at least I haven't missed
a paycheck for the last 43 years, and they are still coming, I guess they will
come as long as I live.
U' •
I did not realize that my living situation would become stabilized. I stayed in
Fort Worth three years, Omaha for a year and a half, and then to Shreveport,
Louisiana, for over fifteen years. I did not realize that I would not be a
workaholic anymore. I would begin to take on other interests, such as some
hobbies and things like that. And that, really, the job pressure would not seem
so great to me anymore. I felt more confident in my position, I felt more
qualified to accomplish the assigned tasks that I had. And I suspect that I
didn't realize quite how lonely it was going to be for a lot of the time. I
guess about the only thing I did realize was that I had a job opportunity in Fort
Worth that I better take. So. I borrowed $150.00 from Mrs. Whittin, to go to
Texas on, I was broke. Hooked the little trailer up to my old Cadillac car, bid
my three kiddies goodby, and took off for Fort Worth, 1,600 miles away.
The trip to Fort Worth was uneventful. I arrived down there about four days
later, parked my trailer in a trailer court a mile or so from the base, in a
trailer court that had about thirty other trailers I guess. They didn't have
mobile homes in those days, most all the trailers were 8 feet wide and 20 to 30
feet long. I think mine was about 8 by 20. So I got set in the trailer court,
got hooked up and went to bed. The next morning, about 4:00 o'clock in the
morning, I heard the police sirens going on outside and the public address system
on a car, a police car traveling around telling people that they better get out,
that there was a flood coming. There had been quite a bit of rain in the Fort
Worth area, and one of the dikes on the Trinity River had broken and we were due
for a flood. So, I got out of bed, looked the situation over, went down to the
bath house in the trailer court, shaved, and went back and hooked my car back up
to the trailer. About 5:00 o'clock I pulled it up to higher ground, left it for
the day, and went on out to work, to report for work that is.
That evening I returned and the trailer court was completely flooded. There was
about twelve feet of water over the top of all those trailers. Of the thirty or
so trailers in the court. I was the only one that had moved. It was a pretty bad
flood. One new housing development was completely flooded, 16,000 people had
been flooded out of their homes that morning in that new housing development.
It bankrupt the housing development company completely. One of the main streets
downtown, Seventh Avenue in Fort Worth, they had about fifteen feet of water,
that covered a lot of businesses. The Tandy Corporation, the home office of the
company that now has the Radio Shack stores, was on that street and they had
about fifteen feet of water over their whole installation. Sears and Roebuck had
about that much water on the first floor of their big store, and dozens and
dozens of other big businesses completely flooded out, and about six or eight
inches of mud all over everything in the area. It was a sorry, sorry mess.
Well, (chuckle) I didn't get flooded anyway. I had moved out. So, I moved to
another little trailer court near the gate of the Airbase, Carswell Airforce
Base, and parked in a little trailer court that only had, I think, four trailers,
within about one hundred yards of the entrance gate to the Base.
I went to work at my assigned tasks on the base. Work went alright, I had no
problem with that. My Civil Service rating was a GS -9, a good rate, and as time
went on, I began to take on some other interests. I joined the gun club at Fort
Worth, and began to spend a good deal of time out at their firing range, devel-
oping some of my skills in firearms. Of course, that always had to be with
telescope sites because of my eye condition. And I got ahold of a little twenty -
two high standard automatic pistol, target model, a new one. I designed and
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built telescope mounts to put a telescope on the pistol. Something that had not
yet been done at that time and I spent enough time out at the target range with
that little pistol to achieve some pretty good accuracy. I could fire from a
bench rest at a hundred yards away and group, consistently group, ten shot groups
that were under three inches, which, really, was fantastic accuracy. I had a lot
of fun with that little gun. I was ready then to start some contests with the
boys around on shooting my pistol against their rifles and I never lost one.
Chuckle. Had a lot of fun with that.
Also, a few months later I got ahold of a beautiful big old four cylinder Indian
motorcycle. I had always enjoyed motorcycles. I had had three in my youth, but
by '49 I hadn't had one for twenty years. But this was a real beauty, a show
stopper. A four cylinder Indian that had been built in 1942, the last year they
built that model. It belonged to an aircraft engineer that was working over at
the Consolidated Vultee Corporation across the runways, building the big 36
airplanes. He had brought that motorcycle with him down from Massachusetts and
he was willing to sell it to me for $300.00. So I bought it and I rode that
around for a few months, enjoyed it. Wish I'd taken some pictures of that mach-
ine, it was a real show stopper. But some captain there at Carswell Airforce
Base offered me $500.00 for it, so I sold it to him. I wish I still had it. I
would be worth thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars now. Actually,
I was a little bit afraid of that motorcycle. It had on it what was called a
suicide clutch, motorcycle riders know what that means, and I was afraid of the
machine so I did sell it. Otherwise, I don't think I would have. There was
another problem too, Indian Motorcycle Company was out of business by that time
and there was a problem of getting parts if they were needed, so I let it go.
Later, I picked up a 1948 little Harley Davidson, 125, a little rig for scooting
around town that was pretty handy, I used it for quite a while there at Fort
Worth.
Also, I think in the Summer of 1950, somebody sent me a clipping out of the Idaho
Daily Statesman that stated that I had been divorced. I think that is the only
announcement I ever got. I suspect that probably Francis Whitton put that in an
envelope and sent it to me. I had never received any legal notice in that
matter, so I don't know, I guess Bertha must have told them she didn't know where
I was, I don't know what else.
Also, during that time in Fort Worth, I began to get a little bit interested in
photography. I still had Dad's old 3A postcard size folding Kodak camera, and
I remember during that time for some reason, I am not sure why, I wanted to get
about twenty pictures copied. Had about twenty pictures and no negative for
those pictures, and I wanted to get some more copies of them. So, I contacted
the photographic shops around Fort Worth and they wanted $5.00 apiece for each
negative that they made off of those prints that I had. Well, that would have
been $100.00, I was not willing to pay $100.00 for those twenty pictures. So I
found a cut rate place that said they would make copies for $1.00 apiece. So I
had them made, and when I got them they were so poor that they were almost
unacceptable. So I got curious about what was involved in copying pictures.
I got ahold of a close up lens for Dad's old camera and started doing some
experimenting. I tried a lot of different situations, focusing, exposure,
lighting, angle lighting, and so forth, trying to see what was involved in
copying a photograph. I think in my experiment, I probably took, oh maybe as
milli
ao
many as 24 pictures trying to get some copy work. Well I think of all those 24
that I took, I think only one came out good, really good. Now I did know that
it was possible to do a good job of photographic work, if I could set up controls
that would do exactly the same as that one picture had been. The exposure, the
focusing, the lighting, the angle of lighting and everything, to be identical
every time, to what that one condition was, would give me good results. But I
was so green to the business, I didn't know just how to go about it. I did not
try that anymore at Fort Worth. It was too involved for me. That is about as
far as I took that photographic work at that time. About three or four years
later when I was in Shreveport, Louisiana, I got back into that. Some more
experimenting, some more learning, trying to find out what was involved and it
worked out very successfully. I'll go into that later.
Anyway, in 1952, on to Nebraska, at a GS -12 which was a good promotion, and I
accepted the job. Sold my little trailer house in Fort Worth, and went up to a
little town called Bellevue, near Omaha, and went to work at Moffitt Airforce
Base at SAC Headquarters, Strategic Air Command, SAC Headquarters. I didn't like
working at SAC Headquarters very well. I was getting a little too far away from
where the work went on I guess for me. I was trying to supervise people in
Organization and Methods Examining and in Supervisory Training Programs at all
the various bases around the country. There was a lot of traveling involved and
I didn't enjoy it very much.
My living situation was not good, I couldn't follow through with any hobbies,
interests outside of work, and it was a boring time in Omaha. About all there
was to do outside of work hours was hang around a bar or bowling alley or
something, and I am not much good for that sort of thing. The weather was kind
of lousy. I remember in that Fall of 1952, I guess it was when I went up there,
it was 1952 that I went to Omaha, I remember one time they told us we better go
home, one Winter afternoon. Maybe there was a blizzard coming and we better go
home early, so they turned us loose about 3:00 o'clock in the afternoon. I only
lived about a mile from the base so I got home alright, but there was about ten
people started out to drive down to Omaha ten miles away and none of them made
it. The blizzard caught them. There was about two thousand people stayed on the
base. They slept on their desks or anyplace they could find a place to sleep
that night. They didn't even try to go home. And the next morning, these ten
people, who had tried to go home to Omaha and didn't make it, they had gotten out
of their cars and got into any house they could nearby to spend the night. The
next morning was nice and bright and clear, and no storm, and there they were out
on the road in those cuts with long poles trying to fish down through the snow
to find where their cars were. Chuckle, boy those blizzards were something
around that place.
I remember that Fall in 1952 I had to fly out to Fairchilds Airforce Base in
Spokane, Washington, once. Couldn't land anyways near to Spokane because of the
fog, we had to go all the way to Seattle and land at the Boeing Field in Seattle,
and then climb on a train in the middle of Winter and come back to Spokane and
then I was stuck in Spokane for ten days because it stayed fogged in. Finally,
I was able to get out, caught a flight down to Boise. Dad had been in Emmett
three or four weeks before, maybe a couple of weeks, and he had crossed the
street in Emmett and a car had run into him and broke his leg and he was in the
hospital in Emmett, so I went by to see him. I stayed two or three days in
Emmett, then went on to Boise and caught the train back to Omaha.
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Also, the Spring of 1953, I remember they sent me to Washington, D. C. for two
weeks, preparing the budget for the next year for the Airforce. Course I was
working with the Strategic Air Command part of the budget. Stayed in the old
Willard Hotel in Washington, D. C., a nice old hotel that had been there for
years and years, but what a rat race that Pentagon was. I think that two weeks
in the Pentagon there cured me of ever going to take an assignment in that place.
Then in the Summer of 1953, an opportunity came up to go to Shreveport, Louisiana
without a loss in pay, and a job I thought I might like better, similar to the
one I'd had at Eighth Airforce Headquarters in Carswell, Fort Worth. So I
accepted that, talked them into letting me go down there. Well, it was a good
transfer. I stayed in Barksdale Airforce Base at Shreveport, Louisiana, for the
next fifteen years. Not long after I got located in Shreveport, actually a
little town adjacent to Shreveport, next to the Ai rbase called Bolger City, where
I had purchased a beautiful big trailer house, big for me, 8 feet wide and 37
feet long, a Spartan Imperial Mansion, 1953 model. So I had good comfortable
living about half a mile from the gate to the Airbase in a little trailer court
that had only five trailers, and a nice big yard.
One of the first things I got interested in, as a hobby type of thing, was tape
recorders. I got a good one, a Webster tape recorder, and in my letters I got
my son Harvey interested in them and he picked up a good old Webster also, and
we started writing letters by tape back and forth to each other. And I've still
got most all the letters I received from him. I think I've got over a hundred
of those letters I received from Harvey. A few years later he was on his Mission
to Brazil, he spent two years down in Brazil, and he got a beautiful German
portable tape recorder down there and we wrote letters back and forth by tape
most of the time he was in Brazil, and I have copies of those letters also. I
have kept them. And, I have sort of carried that tape recording hobby to the
present time, although I have stayed with reel types and never gone seriously
into cassettes. But I have a lot of good music, the kind of music that I like,
recorded on those tapes, and all indexed and arranged in a manner so that you can
find any selection you want any time. That was a good hobby.
I decided to carry my photographic hobbying business out more seriously. I got
ahold of 35mm camera, and experimented with photography awhile on slides. I was
particularly interested in taking color slides, and I was interested in taking
a lot of old pictures I had from my fathers family, old pictures that I had, and
I wanted to copy those into slides and make projection shows of a lot of old
family records. So I seriously got into that copy business. I think I spent
eight months studying and designing and building a copy outfit. Course, I
suppose a third of that eight months at least was learning exactly what the
problems were in doing copy work. A lot of experimentation and a lot of studying
publications from Kodak and here and there. Of course, as usual, I had a special
problem. I couldn't see good enough to focus the camera so I had to design some
method of copying that would not require me to focus the camera, not by vision
at least. So. I built an outfit that resulted in me being able to precisely
duplicate a given set of conditions, time after time after time, with no
variation in it. I say it took eight months of my spare time to study, design
and build that outfit, but after it was done, it did the best work I have ever
run across in copy work. It was good enough that the photo shops downtown began
to send me their copy work. And some other people around became aware of my
ability to do photo copy work and to take any kind of a picture and make it into
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a slide, and so I began to do that work commercially as a sideline, a self-
employment type of thing, you know.
I continued doing that all the time I was in Shreveport. Matter of fact, I can
still do it here. I am still using that copy outfit that I built thirty -five
years ago and I still do not find anything that does any better work than it
does. And I did enough of it, commercially, that I got my Social Security
coverage out of it. I had never spent much time in my employment under Social
Security coverage, I think I only had six quarters, a year and a half was all I
had under actual Social Security, and that wouldn't give me coverage. And I
think I got another six years of Social Security coverage from that self -
employment with that copy outfit. I did thousands and thousands and thousands
of them. I charged about half as much as the other places did and did work that
was better than they did, so I didn't have any trouble getting all the work I
wanted. I didn't do any advertising I will tell you. I would have been loaded
too heavy, chuckle, and I still had my job to do. But I have still kept that
copy work as a major hobby clear through to the present time. I am still using
the same copy stand that I built thirty -five years ago, and it still precisely
duplicates a set of circumstances every time, exactly as I want them. I can't
see the settings on the camera anymore, but Mary sets them for me where I tell
her to and we still do good, good work.
Another hobby I developed while I was in Shreveport, was boating. I picked up
a little half cabin cruiser with a good outboard motor on it and a trailer and
I used to spend quite a lot of time on the lakes. A lot of nice big lakes around
Shreveport. Matter of fact, there is one ten miles long in the city limits of
Shreveport, called Cross Lake. Spent a lot of time on that boat, thoroughly
enjoyed it, on weekends.
Another extra curricular activity that I took on in Shreveport, was that I joined
the Credit Union soon after I went there, the Barksdale Federal Credit Union, and
within two years after I joined it, they had elected me to the Board of Direct-
ors, and I stayed on that Board of Directors for over twelve years, I guess. I
was on it for a year after I retired. Most of that time, I was on the Executive
Committee of the Board of Directors, Chairman of the Executive Committee, which
gave me the responsibility for investing all of the Credit Union's surplus funds,
and most of the time, it ran to about five million dollars of surplus funds.
That was a big credit union. Before I left there we had fifty thousand members
and fifty million dollars in assets. And, as a result of having to invest all
that money, I did get a little bit better information on handling money, invest-
ments and so forth.
I was somewhat limited in where I could invest that money. I could invest it in
other credit unions if they were creditworthy. Otherwise, it had to be pretty
much in something that was insured, insured by an Agency of the Federal Govern-
ment. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation or the Federal Savings and Loan
Insurance Corporation, but it still was quite a job. The maximum limit of
insurance at that time was only ten thousand dollars per account, so I had money
in over 500 of those Savings and Loan organizations throughout the United States.
I was always studying and trying to find out where I could get the best return
on the money. Five of those Savings and Loan organizations went broke, went
bankrupt, that I had money in, but I never lost a penny, it all paid off because
they were insured, as I said, by an Agency of the Federal Government.
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I began to note in that Credit Union that about ten percent of our people at Z
Barksdale owned about ninety percent of the shares in that credit union. In
otherwords, the only people who seemed to be getting any place financially, were
ones that had saved some money and got a little money ahead. They seemed to be
getting the return for it. Also, I began to become aware that my working life
might not last too long and I needed to have some savings. I remember the day
I was fifty years old, that was on March 14, 1956. I made an appraisal of my
financial standing at the time. Well, I had a trailer house that was worth maybe
two or three thousand dollars, I had a car that was probably worth twelve hundred
at the most, they were both paid for, and I had $256.10 in my bank account, and
that was the extent of my holdings in the world. Course, I had a good vested
interest in retirement in Civil Service. And that was savings really. I guess,
but it did not seem to count much, not for the time. And I knew it was going to
be short, it was not going to be enough to make me a good living in my later
years and I needed to have some savings. Well, my income was better, my income
had gone up some, and I was living relatively cheaply. My requirements to send
money for my children was going to begin to reduce. Karen was out of school, and
I decided that I was going to make a desperate effort to try to save some money.
I was getting quite a little bit of money from my self - employment with my
photography, so now maybe I had an opportunity.
Well, I set up a bookkeeping system, an accounting system, to keep the score, and
I think I saved about nine hundred dollars that first year, and I was being
pretty tight. Next year I think I saved maybe fourteen hundred dollars, and from
that time on, I have continuously added to my savings. Every year, except one,
since then. I think by ten years after I had started that savings program. I had
accumulated something over $75,000. And the interest from my savings was
beginning to substantially increase my annual income.
In 1958, a kind of sad thing happened. My only sister, Lois, who with her
husband lived up in the Olympic Peninsula near Seattle, across the Sound from
Seattle, had died rather suddenly. She had died in the hospital at Bremerton
where she was working, after only a few days of illness. Dad was in Los Angeles,
living with my Aunt Laura, his sister, in Los Angeles. I called him on the
phone, he was sick. He was so hoarse I could hardly talk to him on the phone.
I tried very hard to get him to not go to the funeral, because I was afraid for
him, but he wouldn't stay there. He was bound he was going to go up to Poulsbo
to Lois' funeral in Washington. So I told him, that I would not go if he was
going, but if he would just please stay home, I would go up there. But he would
not stay, so I stayed in Shreveport. A sad time. Lois was only fifty years old
when she died. I had been over to Poulsbo to see her the Summer before and I
thought maybe that was a lot better to see her when she was alive than try to go
up after she died, so that's what I did.
Continuing with my review of the time in Shreveport, Louisiana, in 1958. The
Airforce had always had a policy of trying to improve the performance of their
key people and part of that policy was to send them to schools that were perti-
nent to their function. I know that over the years I probably had attended as
many as ten or twelve different schools, schools that would usually last two to
four weeks. And I think I still have ten or twelve certificates that I got from
those schools over the years.
Two or three years before, the Russians had sent up their Sputnik and that really
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shook things up in our country. By 1959, we were getting quite a few satellites
into orbit and our Intercontinental Ballistic Missile program was getting well
started. And we, in the Second Airforce, had the responsibility of quite a few
of those big missile bases that were being built. Well, in connection with that
sort of thing, they decided to send me to school to Los Angeles. That was in
1959. It was a school conducted by the Rand Corporation, a think tank they
called it, of the Rand Corporation, located in Los Angeles. The purpose of the
school was to provide an indoctrination into the theory and the principles and
some of the mechanics and mathematics of orbital flight around the earth. And,
of course, also involved some of the problems involved in space flight. Well,
I thoroughly enjoyed that school. I certainly didn't become an expert in the
field, but I certainly got a lot better understanding of what was involved in
travel in orbital flight. At least there wasn't anything mysterious about after
that. I began to understand from a mechanical aspect the principles involved and
thoroughly how it works. It is not simple, but it is not that complex either.
I have always had some interest in astronomy. Took some courses in college in
fact that give me some background in that sort of thing. And this course in Los
Angeles, merely added to it. I thoroughly enjoyed that.
Well, after that course was, oh wait a minute, there was one interesting thing
happened while I was in that course. I sat beside a full Colonel, from someplace
in the Airforce all during that program in Los Angeles. At the end of the
course, we were each one of us given a list of the people who were attending it.
And this Colonel, he took his list back home with him and his wife was reading
the list one day and she came down to my name on the list, and she said, "Oh, I
know that man." Come to find out I had been sitting right beside a man who had
married one of the little girls raised at Montour. Her name was Fay Palmer. She
lived across the tracks from us in Montour. He's retired now and I see him once
in awhile when he is back up here visiting the Palmers.
Well, anyway, when that school was completed in Los Angeles, I took an extension
on the trip as a vacation and went on up to Sacramento to visit my Uncle James
Ware and his family. Had quite a visit with them for two or three days. Dad was
there. He was going on to Boise with me during my vacation time so I got him
into an airplane, first time he'd ever been in an airplane, in fact, and we flew
to Boise. It wasn't easy to get in an airplane either. Chuckle. He was nervous
about them. He had gotten past the point of driving his car around the country
anymore. I think he had been 85 that Summer. So, then I visited around the
children a few days and then returned back to Shreveport. I think the rest of
the events that occurred in, major events that occurred in '59, ' 60 , '61 and '62,
I have pretty well documented in the previous cassette when I first described
this time of my life. This period of time, from '59 to '62, caused another major
change in my life pattern.
Then in '63 I got a little change in my work assignment. A man by the name of
Robert McNamara, had become Secretary of Defense. He had come from the Ford
Motor Company where I think probably he was the Chief Executive Officer in the
Ford Motor Company, I think, President of the Board or something. Anyway, I
think he had been running Ford Motor Company and he came in as Secretary of
Defense. Well, Mr. McNamara was quite cost conscious and he tried to instigate
a new cost accounting system throughout the whole Department of Defense and that
hit us pretty hard. It was not a practical system for the government. I suspect
many features of it would have been practical in industry but somehow it didn't
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work out good in the government. There's a lot of difference between the
accounting requirements of private industry and any accounting requirements of
government. The accounting requirements in industry are, need to tell you where
you stand in relation to money, give you a profit and loss statement and many
other factors that are not involved in the government business atall. Matter of
fact, most of the government accounting systems are designed to prevent fraud.
There is no method in the government system to define a profit because you don't
have a profit. Of course, it's always good to determine what things are costing
you and whether they are worth what they cost you, and the government system did
provide some of that. But a profit system, a loss system, and stuff like that
didn't work very well.
But, we had to do it, Robert McNamara was the boss. So they gave me the job of
running that new cost program for all of the Second Airforce. We were then
getting well into the computers you know, the modern computer system. They were
not nearly as modern in 1963 as they are now, but we were well into them. We had
the master computer in SAC Headquarters that cost us $25,000 a month just to
rent. And we had that thing running twenty -four hours a day, seven days a week,
except for twenty hours per month when it was down for maintenance. And that was
what we had to feed our new cost program into. Of course, at that time it was
all done on IBM punch cards. So, that program was a real dilly. I had a man or
two at every base trying to make that cost accounting program go and all the
reports came to me and then we consolidated our Command Report and sent it on to
SAC. SAC consolidated it and sent it on to Airforce Headquarters in Washington
and I know that they got warehouses full of those cost reports that they never
did look at all. Golly sakes from the whole Department of Defense they would
have railroad carloads of those reports on those big sheets coming out of those
electronic computers. Boy that was something. Well, at least, I learned quite
a lot about computers, learned quite a lot about even how to program the durn
things. And I stayed on that assignment till I retired in 1966, the end of 1966.
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CHAPTER 17
EMMETT, IDAHO - 1970 -1992
I think my previous cassette defining that time from the end of my employment
when I retired until 1970 when I purchased this home here, is sufficiently
detailed that I do not need to repeat any of that, so now we will go on ahead to
the Fall of 1970, right after I had purchased this home at Emmett and had married
Mary Hicks.
As I have said before, this marriage turned out to be a highly successful
marriage. Mary and I got moved in to our old home at 710 East Main Street in
Emmett. It had been built in 1917 so it needed some improvement work done, some
modernization done on it, and I did a substantial job on the kitchen. Mary took
the paper off the walls in the front room and in the dining room, off the
plaster, put some patches where the plaster was cracked in places, and painted
the whole area. I redid the basement so as to make it more usable. Up to that
time, it had only been a utility room and a furnace room, but we turned in to a
photography projection room, and other photographic work, and an office and a
tool room and sort of a hobby shop for me. Made it look a lot better than it had
before.
Mary has a pronounced artistic capability and temperament and she joined the
Artists Guild here in town. She paints a lot of oil paintings, took some
lessons. And, we both joined the Gem County Historical Society, began to
participate in some societies around Emmett, and got some friends here.
One of our major recreational activities became going to the mountains in the
Summer time. Mary had a 1964 Rambler Classic Sedan that was a nice little car.
We would load our camping gear into that and take off for the mountains and stay
sometimes for a week at a time. We thoroughly enjoyed the back woods of Idaho.
Early in 1974, I purchased a pickup and camper, and after that, we did our
camping in style. I think in the Fall of '74 I traded that outfit in and got a
better camper and pickup, an Avion camper, and we still have it and still enjoy
it. This Fall we will have had that camper for seventeen years.
Mary has nine brothers and sisters and all of them have been here to see us since
we lived here, some of them quite a few times and for extended times sometimes.
We've been pretty glad sometimes that we had a large house. Actually, this house
can have five bedrooms, all with big walk -in closets, so it's quite a lot of
house, and a time or two we have had it plumb full and running over. So really,
we, as a family, have had quite a lot of social activity at this place. Mary's
Father moved to Emmett not too many years after we got here, and we sort of had
to see to him until he died quite a few years later. Mary's Mother also moved
here when her husband, old Gilbert Peck, died, and she was quite a lot of problem
to care for. A couple of years in a retirement home and four years in a nursing
home. All made quite a task for Mary and sort of limited our activities some-
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times.
We made many, many trips to the mountains in our campers, many times back up to
Riggins, the Riggins Road where I used to work, and over on the South Fork Road,
and many, many times to other places. We made one trip in the camper back to
Shreveport, Louisiana. That was something around 1977, '78, I'm not sure, and
we were gone on that trip for about a month. Of course, we made many trips down
to Salt Lake to see Karen and Ann over the years, and we've made a couple of
trips to see her brother Dave who lives in Las Vegas, made a couple trips down
there in the camper to see them. Two or three trips down to Portland and Tacoma,
Washington, to see Mary's children and grandchildren, and we made one trip down
to Walnut Creek, California, when Harvey was in training for his Dental School
in San Francisco. We parked the camper out in front of his place for about a
month that time and, as a part of his training in this school, he made us den-
tures, each one of us a set of dentures. I am not sure what year that was, but
I suppose around '79 or '80.
In the Spring of 1972, I had a bad, bad time. Just a little less than two years
after we had moved into this place here in Emmett, I got a ruptured appendix.
I had had quite a pain in my stomach and then it ceased. I went to see the
doctor and told him about it, but he did not test me for the possibility of a
ruptured appendix. The danged doctors let me run around for eight days and I was
very near to death by that time. I was still taking care of the furnace, putting
coal in the furnace, carrying the ashes out, doing the normal work around here
and eating a little bit, not much. But, I knew I was getting sicker and sicker
and sicker. Saturday afternoon I went to see the doctor and he called a special-
ist, a surgeon, from Boise and that surgeon came over and took a look at me and
they opened up that afternoon. I guess I was as near death as a man can be and
still live almost. The doctors both gave me up, but they had opened me up, fil-
led me full of sulpha I guess, and somehow I managed to come out of it. That was
a bad date too, because Karen was getting married the very day they operated on
me and I would like to have been at her wedding. But I wasn't in any condition
to make it, but I was a year getting over that operation. That was a tough one,
but I did get over it. Then I got down in Salt Lake a couple of years later and
had another emergency operation, this time for prostate that was badly enlarged,
so I laid in the hospital in Salt Lake for about a week. Other than that I guess
I been pretty well most of my later years, except for, of course, my eye condi-
tion.
The last time I had been able to pass a driver's test was 1959. I did get a
driver's license a few times thereafter based on a doctor's certificate that he
thought I could drive safely, but I couldn't see to pass the test. I think the
last time that I got a license based on a doctor's certificate was 1966, I think
that was the last time I got one, and it ran out in I think in 1968, so I've
never been able to get a driver's license anyway since then. I did drive the car
for a few years because I knew I could drive safely, if I was careful, and I
occasionally drove the car up until 1980 or '81. But since then I have not made
much effort to drive at all, cause I am not safe anymore to drive and I know it.
I still have, oh fairly decent peripheral vision out of my right eye, not much
in my left eye, and I use it to the maximum extent that I can. Also, I ride my
bicycle to town. I've been riding my bicycle to town for a good ten years, and
now I've gotten me a three wheeled bicycle with a little electric motor on it.
The cops don't bother me, and I don't think they will so long as I stay out of
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trouble. Chuckle. I use that to get around with.
About four years ago, Mary got a pretty severe attack of rheumatoid arthritis.
It hit her suddenly, and within in a month, she was in a mess. Well, we've been
kind of fortunate on that. We went right to a specialist in rheumatic specialist
and she has been rather successful in holding that rheumatoid arthritis down, and
Mary's doing right well. And, two years ago I began to get osteoarthritis in my
knees. Since that time, I have been having trouble walking, and my little tri-
cycle with the electric motor has certainly been a blessing to me. I think I
have only walked to town now, once in the last two years, and I sort of paid for
that too for a few days. But last Winter, I think it was February 4th, Mary was
going to town here and she fell down and broke her kneecap into four pieces, and
that kind of put a little handicap on her getting around for the next six weeks.
Matter of fact, she couldn't even drive a car. So I had to go to town and do all
the shopping, had to do it on my tricycle. Went every day. The weather was so
nice, we never had any ice or snow or anything and it wasn't very cold this
Winter. I was able to go every day, do our shopping and we got by. After about
six weeks, Mary could begin to drive a little then. Now this is in June and she
is getting along pretty good. Well, she should, it has been well over four
months since she broke that kneecap. I suspect it will probably bother her some
for the rest of her life.
Well, age, the last two or three years has begun to hold us down. We don't get
out camping as much as we used to by any means. And Mary is not able to handle
the company that she used to have when she was younger and felt better, so, we
haven't had as much of that either. But, Mary still stays right up to her neck
in her artisan work. She has gotten looms, and spinning wheels, and between
those and her tatting shuttle and her membership in a little incorporated
association of a few other women here in Emmett where they sell their products
in a little store downtown, she stays pretty busy. Takes a lot of hobbies to
keep that gal out of mischief. Chuckle. She has to stay busy on something all
the time.
I think that this will now probably wind up the chronological portion of my life
and times. Mary and I have now lived here in our house in Emmett for about
twenty -two years and I do not anticipate that I will probably ever move from
here.
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CHAPTER 18
LUCKY BREAKS
As I said when I started this book, most of my life has been interesting and fun
and much of it has certainly been a challenge. Oh, I've had my ups and downs
like everyone else does. Sometimes it seemed like more downs that ups, but I
suspect that is not true because I had a lot of lucky breaks. I was very
fortunate in much of my life. Certainly, my education had not qualified me for
any particular profession and the lucky breaks that came along had a major impact
on my life. In fact, I think these lucky breaks practically determined the
pattern of my life.
Perhaps, I should try to define what I consider to be a lucky break. I think a
lucky break is something that occurs that perhaps I did not earn or plan or
arrange, that just happened to me as I was living, that benefitted me. I can
think of nine events or circumstances that I consider to be very lucky breaks
that had a vital effect on the pattern of my life. Perhaps, I should list those
down now so as to give a little bit better perspective of my life.
I think the first lucky break I had was the environment in which I spent the
first twenty -two years of my life. And I think the lucky break resulted from the
fact that my Father never did work for anybody else. He was always in business
for himself of some kind, that is, during my life time I never knew of him
working for anybody else. He was always operating his own business or activity
and he was always trying to improve the efficiency or the operation of the
activity. And, he was a builder by nature, always building things. When I came
along in 1906 he was right in the middle of building his third sawmill and the
first eight years of my life I spent in a sawmill camp where he was operating,
improving, and running a sawmill operation. Of course, I was too young to
participate in it, but I observed a lot of things about that operation, even at
that age. Then for the next ten years, I was in another building environment.
He was building his lumberyard at Montour and his elevator and his flour mill and
his warehouse business, and he was operating the business, and I was getting big
enough to participate in that, and to a certain extent, become a part of it.
Then for four or five years, he was building up a dairy, a big dairy farm at
Montour, building a nice big barn and a home and getting the land ready to
produce. And I know that those twenty -two years, course I was going to school
too, but those twenty -two years with him had a major impact on my future
activities. Things that I had learned during those twenty -two years assisted me
a great deal in many of the efforts I got into in later years. When I think of
what it would have been like if my Father had been employed by some company or
some corporation where he had gone to work every morning at eight o'clock and
come home every night at five o'clock, and I had no chance to know much about
what he was doing, as is the situation with many, many young people, there would
be no comparison atall in the basic background that I got from those first
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twenty-two years. I think that first twenty -two years I had with him was a far
luckier deal than his first twenty -two years or the first twenty -two years of my
own son, either one. I think I would have not done nearly as well in later life
as either Dad or my son have done if I had not had that first twenty -two years
so I have got to call that a very lucky break.
My second lucky break came in 1928 when I was twenty -two years old. That was
when that fine, tough old sheriff of Canyon County, named Guy Boyd, decided that
I was going to be the Idaho State Police Officer for Canyon County, Gem County,
and Owyhee County. Certainly, I had no background or qualifications for that job
at the time. I still kind of marvel at the fact that he gave me the job. For
some reason, apparently, he had confidence in me and I worked my tail off trying
to justify that confidence. And I think I probably learned more on that State
Police job in the next four years than I would have learned if I had been in
college, unless it would have been headed toward some specific profession. It
certainly was a lucky break, and came right at the start of that major depression
when it was almost impossible to get (chuckle) an acceptable job.
My third big break came in the Fall of 1934 when I was twenty -eight years old,
at McCall, Idaho, when I was working for Carl Brown in his sawmill at McCall.
I had only been married a few months, and I knew the mill was going to shut down
for the Winter and I didn't know what I was going to do. I certainly needed some
kind of a break. Well, Carl Brown was certainly the most influential citizen in
all of Valley County. For some reason, Carl Brown made up his mind that I was
going to get a job as a Foreman for the Forest Service in one of the CCC Camps
at Riggins that was being set up that Fall. And he put forth a quite a lot of
extra effort to see to it that I got that job over some objections from some
other people. Any way you look at it, that was a valuable good luck break for
me, and set a kind of a pattern that had an effect on the rest of my life.
Well, the fourth major break that I got came only about two weeks after that in
the Fall of 1934 when I was still twenty -eight years old. I had terminated my
employment at McCall with Carl Brown, reported to the Forest Service and been
sent down to Riggins to go to work as a Foreman in a new CCC Camp that was set
up down there. The Superintendent of the CCC Camp at Riggins was a gruff ornery
guy by the name of Lawrence Luce who most everybody was afraid of. I don't know
at the time whether he wanted me to be a Foreman for him or not. I do know that
he assigned me to the least desirable Foreman's job that he had. He decided that
I was going to be the Powder Foreman, the Dynamite Foreman and Drilling Foreman
in the operation, and I know that nobody else on his crew wanted the job. It was
hard, dirty and somewhat dangerous work and it had not gone very well the year
before. Well, certainly I wasn't qualified for the job, but inside of two to two
and half years, I had developed a very productive drill and dynamite blasting
crew down there. I had learned how to make it go, and that is the reason I say
that it was a lucky break that he gave me that job, because by that time the
Forest Service decided they could not get along on the job without me. I became
essential to that Salmon River road. By that time I had tripled the production
of the dynamite crew over anything they had had before and the dynamite crew was
the one that set the speed of the whole operation, because it is most all rock
down in that country and you could only build what had been dynamited. And that
experience that I gained on the Salmon River, on the South Fork, over the next
six years provided an entrance for me into the Morrison Knudsen Construction
Company where I ran some really large drilling and blasting operations. I think
112
Morrison Knudsen would have kept me just as long as I wanted to stay with them
as a result of my qualifications in that area. So I have got to say that when
Lawrence Luce put me on that dynamite crew it was a lucky break, that at the
time, if I would have had the chance, I probably would have avoided. Chuckle.
My next real lucky break came in 1943 when I was thirty -seven years old and,
again, I was in a situation where I needed a good job, I needed a break. And Bob
Marshall, friend of mine that I had known for quite a few years, knew of a
position, a teaching position at Gowen Airforce Base to teach those aircraft
mechanics how to read blueprints, propositioned me to go to work for them out
there. For some reason. I guess he thought I could do the job. And, it worked
out alright, and it set quite a pattern for me for. Well, I worked for the
Airforce after that for around twenty years, with one break in it, and I expect
that that started it right there. Have to consider it a very lucky break. I
never even asked for that job. Bob Marshall lined it up for me, then came to get
me.
My next, or sixth, very lucky break occurred in 1949 when I was forty -three years
old and Darryl Glenn, the Personnel Director at Carswell Airforce Base in Fort
Worth, Texas, decided that if they were going to establish an Organization and
Methods Examiner position in Fort Worth, that he was going to get me for that job
if I would take it. Well, again, I was certainly in need of a job, but it sure
was a lucky break when he started reaching out trying to find me to put me into
that job. And Darryl Glenn went a long ways out of his way too to see to it that
I got that job. What he went through to get me that job would make a pretty good
story all by itself, and not a very short story either. He went through a lot
of gyrations to get me that job but he got it done. And I think that one action,
that one lucky break, set the pattern pretty much for my life for the next
eighteen years.
My seventh lucky break came in 1955, when I was forty -nine years old at Barksdale
Airforce Base, Shreveport, Louisiana, when I was elected to the Board of Direct-
ors of the Barksdale Federal Credit Union. That job on the Board of Directors,
I remained on the Board of Directors for the next twelve years, gave me an
experience and an acquaintance with the handling of money and financing and so
forth that I never would have gotten without that lucky break of being elected
to the Board of Directors of that Credit Union. I suspect that my present
financial position is quite a bit dependent upon the things that I learned in
that Credit Union during those years. I know it got me going on a formal savings
program.
Well, there's no question, those breaks definitely had an affect on the pattern
of my life, perhaps, in fact, they might have even been controlling in the
pattern of my life. They were that important. And, of course, the question
comes up, would you have liked to have made it any different, would I have liked
to have had my life any different. Of course, I think probably I should have
finished college and maybe a Master's Degree in some type of an engineering
course. That has always been my strongest area. And, perhaps, followed some
profession throughout my life. But, if I even had the opportunity to trade my
life the way it has been for some professional life in an engineering field, I
don't know whether I would trade or not. I sort of doubt it. As I said, my life
has been interesting and fun and broad in many respects. And I don't think I
would trade it for some unknown quantity in some other life, life pattern that
113
is.
Well, before I leave these lucky breaks, there are two more lucky breaks I have
got to list, but were certainly a different kind of luck, but maybe luckier than
the others. My first marriage resulted in three children that are as good a
children as any man could every hope to have. And I didn't have very much to do
with the raising of them, and for them to turn out the way they have, boy that
was a lucky one, that I am profoundly thankful for.
And one more lucky break came in the Fall of 1970 when I was sixty -four years
old, when I married a gal named Mary Hicks. Any man that can have a wife like
she is, has got to consider himself very fortunate and very lucky.
I think this will end the chronological portion of my life history, and that I
will now take up some special subjects such as my Mother and her parents and her
brothers and sisters, and my Father and his parents and brothers and sisters.
And my Mother and Father together and about my Sister, Lois. Perhaps, I'll even
discuss some about my hobbies and the automobiles that I have owned and maybe the
motorcycles that I have owned, and some about religion and some about my
philosophy of life.
I guess in reality there is no limit to how many different subjects a person
could cover in a story of this kind, but it might begin to get a little boring
after while, if it isn't already, for that matter. I know I haven't done very
good on this book because I am working 100% from memory without notes and I get
fouled up in sequence, present things out of order because of that, and I know
that it makes it sort of hard to follow sometimes but I don't know what to do
about it, chuckle. I hope to heck it isn't too fouled up that it messes the
reader up too bad.
114
CHAPTER 19
MY MOTHER
That last cassette, Cassette #6, completed the chronological part of my story and
now I will go into some special subject areas which will not necessarily be in
any chronological sequence.
First, I will take up the early years of my Mother and her family. My Mother was
born on September 22, 1878, to Samuel Clark and to his wife, whom I remember as
Grandma Clark, at Marshall, Missouri. She was named Ethyl May Clark, and she was
the youngest of ten children. I think by the time that Mother was born, the
Clark family was pretty well established on a sizeable farm or plantation, I
don't know which you would call it, near Marshall, Missouri. Her Father, Sam
Clark, had built a nice big two story brick home to accommodate his large family,
the oldest of which were now practically grown, and some out with a family of
their own I guess.
I know the Clark's had had some slaves prior to the Civil War, I don't know how
many, not very many I think. And I know that a couple of the slave women, a
couple of the Negro women, that had stayed with the Clarks after the war, had a
significant role in the early years of my Mother. I know that the Clark family
was a Protestant Christian family, they were Presbyterians. I don't know just
how active they were in church activities, but I think that regular Sunday
Services was part of their life.
I think Mother's early years H
had been. She got a pretty
training and she was a pretty
a choral group pretty good. I
there at Marshall. I'm not
graduated there, but I'm not
of her in her youth and they 1
the groups that she was going
gal.
ere happy years. She always talked to me like they
good education, part of her eduction was music
good pianist. Good at singing too, she could lead
know that she attended the Missouri Valley College
Sure how many years, I kind of thought maybe she
sure. I've got a lot of pictures that were taken
)ok like happy pictures, around the plantation with
to school with. Mother was a mighty good looking
I think she met my Father while he was attending the Missouri Valley Normal
School at Warrensburg, Missouri, where I think they were both attending in order
to get their Teaching Certificates. That would have had to been prior to 1897
when Mother was nineteen, because Dad came to Idaho that year. I know Mother
taught school for five years in Missouri and that Dad and her were married along
about 1902 or 1903 at Marshall, Missouri. That must have been a pretty big deal
from the pictures that I have got that were taken at the time. Dad was dressed
in full dress, Swallow Tail and all, and Mother's wedding dress was something.
I think it must have been a pretty big deal.
115
Beyond that, I don't know very much about my Mother's early life. I never met
her Father or her Mother, they were dead before I was born. I think maybe her
Mother just died a year or so before I was born, and I only met some of her
brothers and sisters once when I was ten years old and just for a few days that
time. Otherwise, I've had no contact with them all my life, and the only thing
I can tell about them is the things that Mother told me when I was a little
fellow, and that was over seventy years ago. So. I'm not real sure just how good
my memory is of it.
As I said, Mother had nine brothers and sisters, she had four sisters and five
brothers. I don't even know the sequence of her family. I know that her oldest
brother was named Jim, Jim Clark, and I know that he was the oldest in the family
and I know that she was the youngest, and otherwise I do not know the sequence
of her brothers and sisters. One sister named Ella, married a man by the name
of Boatwright and they had a farm outside of Marshall, Missouri, and lived in
Marshall, Missouri. Another sister named Susan, and she was always called Suni,
married a man by the name of Higgins and they had a couple of children I think
and lived on a farm just out of Marshall aways. Another sister named Mollie, had
married a man by the name of Higgenbotham and lived in St. Louis. The fourth
sister was named Minnie, she had married a man by the name of Guyer and lived in
Kiowa, Kansas, just across the line from Oklahoma. Mr. Guyer got involved in the
early day oil business, Southern Kansas and Oklahoma, and I guess they became
quite rich, I think they were millionaires.
Then her brother James, the oldest one, had a farm near the home place there,
near Marshall, Missouri. Sam Clark settled in Northern North Dakota. I think
the name of the town was Willistown, North Dakota, raised a family up there, and
I don't know how many children he had. I don't know how many children Uncle Jim
had either. Aunt Minnie had a couple but I don't remember who they were. Then
there was Uncle Ernest, and Uncle Price, and they both had farms around the
Missouri area, the Marshall, Missouri area. Uncle Irving had married a French
girl by the name of Pauline, and they settled in, let's see, they settled in
Salem, Oregon, and I did go see them once when I was going to school down at
Linfield College. And that is about the extent of my knowledge of my Mother's
early years and her family.
116
CHAPTER 20
MY FATHER
So, now I will go to my Father's early years and his family. Dad was born on the
5th of August, 1874, at Alny, Illinois, I think, to John Wesley Pugh and Sarah
Elizabeth Falk Pugh. I don't know how long they stayed in Alny after Dad was
born or where they lived for the next few years after that, but they did end up
in Cedarvale, Kansas, about eight years later. I think that Dad's Mother and
Father had been married when they were pretty young. I think Grandma was about
17 and Grandpa John Wesley was about 19.
In the next eight years they had four children. First, there was Dad, name was
Harvey Albert, then there was a sister, Loretta, and then another little brother
named John, and another one named Clark. That was in the first eight years of
their marriage. From what I've heard Dad say, they were getting along alright,
seemed to be a happy family. His Father was a carpenter and far as I could get
from Dad, he was a good carpenter. Up to eight years old, I don't know much else
about my Dad.
When he was eight, his Father died and his two little brothers, leaving only him
and his sister Loretta, and his Mother, and no way of making a living, and I
guess things got tough after that for Dad. I guess they were a destitute family,
I think things really got tough from what Dad has told me, and Grandma was taking
in washing or whatever she could do to feed her two little kiddies. Two or three
years later, Grandma had married another man, a man by the name of Ware, a man
who made his living freighting with teams and wagons and they had ended up for
a time in Southwest Missouri in a little town called Pineville, Missouri. The
Wares were running a small hotel, a rooming house in Pineville.
I think Dad did not get along very well with his stepfather, Mr. Ware, and I
think by the time he was eleven or twelve, he was out trying to get along for
himself. About the only thing I ever learned from Dad about those years was that
it was pretty tough. I know he was working down in Southwest City, Missouri, for
awhile and here and there and trying to go to school. And with the help of some
of the men around, business men and so forth, Pineville and Southwest City and
so forth, he got enough education that he could enter the Missouri Normal at
Warrensburg and by the time he was twenty -three years old had a Teaching
Certificate. I know that for a while in his earlier years, he'd been working in
a men's clothing store at Southwest City and he'd gotten lined a little bit up
on the clothing business and he went to Warrensburg to the Normal School and he
sold clothes, tailormade clothes to the other students in the school and helped
pay his way through school. He took orders for tailormade clothes for some
tailormaking outfit in Chicago that made clothes to measure.
Anyway, when he was twenty -three years old, in the Summer of 1897, he got lined
117
up for a school in Missouri that was going to pay him thirty -five dollars a
month, and then someone who knew of him out in Idaho, out in Emmett, Idaho, where
they wanted some teachers, had written to him and asked him if he wanted to come
out to Idaho to teach school and offered him seventy -five dollars a month. So
he moved to Emmett, Idaho, in 1897, when he was twenty -three years old. He rode
the train out to Boise that Summer and then caught a stage, horse drawn stage
over to Emmett and found that he was going to have to have an Idaho Certificate
to teach here. So, he borrowed a bicycle and rode over to Caldwell, which was
then the County Seat, and got himself a Certificate based on his qualifications,
went back to Emmett and went to teaching and taught there for three years.
Summer time, between school, he experimented with some other things. He tried
real estate business some and he owned the Emmett Index Newspaper for awhile,
just about long enough to get rid of it I guess, and a couple of Summers he
worked in sawmills up on Dry Buck.
In late June, 1900, he was working at a mill near Dry Buck that belonged to a man
by the name of Bill Parrish and a man by the name of Martin, and that mill burned
up in late June. They didn't hardly feel they could rebuild it and go, so Dad
propositioned them to sell him the old burned up sawmill on credit. He got
enough backing at one of the banks to rebuild the mill and put it in operation
and he went into the sawmill business in the Spring of 1901, I guess he got that
mill going.
I think it was 1903, he'd been writing to my Mother and they arranged that they
were going to marry and he went back to Missouri, I think in 1903, and they were
married. And, of course, from about that time on, I know quite a lot about my
Mother and my Father. Chuckle.
For the time being, I will double back to Dad's Father and Mother and brothers
and sisters. His Father had died in the Fall of 1882, when Dad was eight years
old at Cedarvale, Kansas, at the age of twenty- eight. At that time. Grandma was
twenty -six and had two little kids. As I said, she later married Mr. Ware, and
I don't know very much about what happened to Grandma after that. As I said Mr.
and Mrs. Ware ran a rooming house in Pineville for a while, but I think Mr. Ware
primarily was a freighter, with his wagons and teams. Where they went, I'm not
sure, but I do know that Grandma Ware had six more children then, and I think
that most of that time they were living i n Southwest Missouri, Oklahoma, Southern
Kansas, and that part of the world.
The first child born to Mr. Ware was Molly and she only lived a few years, she
was not a very healthy little girl, I don't know what the problem was. The next
one of Vory James Ware, then another one they name Henry Ware, then another boy
who I think was named Everett, then a girl named Pearl, and then the youngest
girl, named Fanny. Course all six of them were half brothers and sisters to my
Father and as Dad did not get along very well with Mr. Ware, he didn't have much
contact with that family for quite a few years.
Some time during that time, I think they were living in Oklahoma, a tornado came
along, typical to that part of the country and my Grandma Ware and Vory Ware her
oldest boy and two other little boys, Henry and Everett, all got into a cyclone
cellar, they called them in those days, for protection from that tornado, and
while they were in it, that cyclone cellar caved in. Uncle Vory got himself out
and dug out Grandma, but the other two little boys died before he could get them
118
I
uncovered. That left Grandma Ware with only three from the Ware family, Uncle
Vory James Ware, and Pearl and Fanny. I guess Pearl and Fanny came on later
after the cavein, I am not sure about that. I just know that in the final
analysis Dad had one full sister, Loretta, one half brother who later became
known as James, Jim Ware, and a half sister Pearl, and a half sister Fanny, and
that the five of them were the only ones that had lived to adulthood. I don't
know where Dad's half sister Molly and half brothers Henry and Everett are
buried. I know that his Father and his two little brothers, John and Clark, are
all buried at Cedarvale, Kansas, and that later Dad had Grandma Ware moved, her
body moved back there and they are all buried there together in Cedarvale,
Kansas.
I did, in later years, get acquainted with all of Dad's living brothers and
sisters because they all came out to Idaho where we lived. But for Dad's early
years, that's about all I know about it.
19
CHAPTER 21
MY MOTHER AND FATHER TOGETHER
So, now we will start talking about Dad and Mother together from 1903 on. I
think Mother had been about twenty -five years old when they were married in 1903,
and Dad was about twenty -nine. He brought her out to Idaho and he set her uP in
that rough sawmill camp far back in the mountains away from all of her brothers
and sisters and family, but, I think they had a happy life there together in
those early years. Hard work, of course, and nothing to spare because they were
in debt trying to get that sawmill business going that had all be purchased
practically on credit. I know it wasn't easy years for them, life was primitive
out in the sawmill camp in those days, and everyone worked hard. That is the way
people got along in those days, they worked hard.
I would like to spend a little time describing them. Dad was a good looking man
of average size and he retained his good looks all of his life too. Perhaps he
was about five feet eleven, eleven and a half, and weighed about 175 or 80
pounds. Rather quiet man, nice, easy to get along, never, never throwing his
weight around, an honest man, and his word was good. People thought a lot of my
Dad. He didn't do much but work and manage his business. I never knew him
having any hobbies and he was always trying to figure out how to make his
operation more efficient, more productive. And, he worked right with the men all
the time, carrying his part of the load. I never heard of such a thing as any
labor troubles with any of our crews during those years. I don't think such a
thing existed, they al 1 felt 1 i ke they were a team together somehow. And I think
quite a bit of it was Dad's handling of the business.
Mother was a good looking woman, a pretty woman, slender and strong and capable.
I know that she certainly did her part in running that sawmill, taking care of
the cookhouse and things like that. I mean helping to take care of it, they
always had hired help for cooking. And she didn't have much of a little house
to live in either. She always was strongly, with strong religious leanings.
They were, those leanings, were not as predominant though in her early years as
they were later, but there never was any drinking around Pugh's Sawmill and they
had Sunday School every Sunday. We always had a piano there and Mother could
play that piano and there was singing groups around quite often, and special
deals at Christmas and Thanksgiving and things like that, of course. I really
think they were thoroughly enjoying their life up there and trying to get their
life started in a substantial sort of way.
I didn't come along until 1906, and then my little Sister, Lois Lucille, was born
in 1908. And that's all the family that they had.
One recreation my Mother and Dad had some was riding. We had a beautiful pair
of riding horses and they also used them on the buggy or on a sleigh. I guess
120
that was probably the recreation they had was getting around in the hills wits--)
a buggy or the sleigh after the work was done. Of course, I began to be
conscious of things around me pretty much after four or five, six years old, so
I remember they were happy years for my folks. My folks always seemed to get
along perfectly as far as I could see, I never ever heard a cross word between
either one of them.
Mother was always busy trying to help somebody else that needed help. If there
was a sick woman in the country, she'd always be there helping her. And, as I
have said before, if there was any kids that needed a place to stay, why they
could come and stay at the Pugh's. I remember we had one old man working at the
mill by the name of George Deets, and I remember he couldn't hear very good, but
he was our yard man, he handled the lumber sales out of the yard. He was a
bachelor, he lived in Emmett, and he would'come up the mill and work the season
out, then go back and live in Emmett. And he didn't dress very well, Mother was
scrounging clothes for him and knitting socks for the old boy and anything she
could do to help the help the old boy. And then old George Deets died and he had
$5,000 in the bank hid away, Chuckle. I know she was sure disgusted, cause
$5,000 in those days was a lot of money. But, she was always trying to help
anybody that needed any help and carrying her load at the mill along with it.
Then in 1914 we moved out to the lower country, sold the mill in '15, then had
a nice home built at Montour, which made a much nicer place for Mother to live.
But danged if she didn't go and take on more entertaining of preachers and
company and so forth.
But before I get into that, maybe I better double back to my Dad's brothers ano
sisters again, his half brothers, Aunt Laura, his full sister, and the Wares, his
half brothers and sisters. Aunt Laura had married, oh some time around the time
I was born, and I think by 1910 she and her husband had come out to the sawmill.
and her husband, Uncle Tude, worked there for a season or two and then they moved
to Boise. A few years later they moved to Los Angeles, where Aunt Laura went to
work for the Bullock, the big Bullock Store there and, in time, became the boss
of their alterations department where she had up to fifty women doing alterations
in Bullock Store in Los Angeles. She worked there the rest of her life and
retired there. I think she lived until about, oh 1963 or '64.
Grandma Ware in her last years had been living with Aunt Laura there in Los
Angeles. Grandma Ware died there in 1941, at the age of eighty -five. And James
Ware, Dad's oldest half brother had come to the mill about 1907 or '08. He was
something like sixteen or seventeen years old, and he worked at the mill for a
season or two and went out to school. Matter of fact, he graduated from the
Intermountain Institute at Weiser and got his Teaching Certificate and I think
he probably went to teaching by 1910 or '11. First taught over at Ola, seven or
eight miles away from the mill. Later, married one of the gals that went to
school to him there in Ola, and she became a teacher, and I think they went back
to school and both got Master's Degrees later and stayed in the education field
for the rest of their lives. And the last good many years of their lives, they
spent in California, around Sacramento. Had five children, one of which had died
some years before in Pocatello. Three of the children became, two of the boys
became dentists, and a girl married a dentist and became a dental assistant. I
guess they are all doing fine down there. I think Uncle Jim Ware died about 1965
or '66, something like that.
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Aunt Pearl had married a man by the name of Brummet in New Mexico, had two
children, Jeff Brummet was his name, they had two children. Thelma and Henry.
They had moved to Idaho in 1918, and not long after they came to Idaho, I don't
know just how long, but not long, both Pearl and her husband Jeff caught the flu
in that Winter flue epidemic of 1918 and they both died within a day of each
other, left two little orphans. They ultimately were raised by their father's
folks down in New Mexico.
Along about 1913, Grandma Ware and Fanny had also come to Idaho, and Fanny was
still in high school. Dad had built them a home in Emmett so that Fanny could
go to school there. She didn't finish High School there though, she decided when
she was about fifteen to get married. She married a man up near the sawmill by
the name of Alanthis Moore, a Seventh Day Adventist family, strict Seventh Day
Adventist family. They ultimately had eight children, most of whom are living
around this part of the country, actually about the only relatives I've got
around here, they are cousins of mine, of course, and the only cousins I ever had
that I got really acquainted with. Aunt Fanny and her husband, Alanthis, have
both died in the last five or six years, here in Idaho. I think he lived to 98
years old, I believe, and I think Aunt Fanny was something like 87, 88 when she
died.
Well, back to Dad and Mother, and when I left them last, we were living in
Montour and just getting the lumberyard and the elevator and the warehouse and
the flour mill business into operation. Mother began to have some physical
troubles after about 1915 and I think I have covered those pretty well previously
in these tapes. But I don't think I have done very good on coverage of Dad in
his later years.
As I told you, Dad never did work for anybody else during my lifetime, he always
worked for himself. Dad seemed to have the ability to see a possible opportunity
of business for himself and tackle it, take it. He had made a success of his
venture into the sawmill business, which he entered about 1900 and sold out his
sawmill in 1915, and he'd come out of that deal with about $35,000, which was
pretty good money in 1915. And he saw the possibility of a grain elevator and
flour mill at Montour as a good potential, and it was a good potential. The
business did very well indeed up till about 1921, but two things happened in 1921
that changed his luck, and they were definitely not his fault, and they did not
show any poor judgement on his part for that matter.
The first thing that begin to mess up his grain and flour mill business was that
we had a depression, or maybe you'd call it a recession, a pretty severe
recession, after World War I in 1921. Always the grain business, that type of
business, you buy your grain in the Fall when the farmers are ready to sell and
the prices are relatively low, and you store that in your elevator and then you
start milling it for the Winter and Spring. By Spring the prices have raised
because of the shortage of the grains you know, and then you begin to make a
little money on the deal because the prices have raised. And you go through that
every year, and that's just about the only profit there is in the business.
Well, in 1921, as usual, Dad stocked up the elevator full of grain but the
recession came along and the price in 1921 -22 did not raise. It actually went
down and I think, as a result of that, that Dad lost his working capital. He had
built the flour mill and the elevator and the warehouse and those things on
credit and he had kept his $30- 35,000 out as a working capital and when he lost
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his working capital, then he had to borrow money to be a working capital from
then on. And the little bank that he was dealing with was pretty well strapped
for money, but whenever he needed the money, they would go out and get it for him
and loan it to him. The rate going then was 10% per annum, but I remember going
out and finding the money for him and getting it for him, they would charge
another 2% commission, and usually the loan was for only ninety days so that 2%
turned into a rate of 8% for the year. And you add that to the 10% they normally
charged and that was 18% for the operating capital money while he had it
borrowed. And 18% was all you could expect profit on the grain in the long run
anyway. So, the borrowing of his working capital took the profit out of his
business. Well, that was the first thing that messed him up.
The second thing that messed him up was that those farms up on Brownley that had
been raising so much grain, in 1916 they had raised, there had been 66,000
bushels of grain come off of Brownley in 1916. Good grain, that hard wheat, that
Turkey Red wheat that makes the best bread there is. 66,000 bushels is 1,200
wagon loads of wheat that came down that year. Well, by 1921, '22, shortage of
rain, drought on those dry land farms and a year or two had hurt the farmers
enough that they began to quit raising grain and, perhaps, their lack of
fertilizing their fields might have reduced their production some, and they got
more into raising cattle and hay. And the big volume of that perfect grain begin
to dwindle down to where it didn't amount very much off of Brownley. By the end
of 1926, those two factors had put Dad out of business.
The bank began to foreclose on his property in order to protect their invest-
ments. Dad had seen it coming and had arranged to purchase 147 acres there in
the valley in Montour through the Government Land Bank, that Farm Home Loan deal .
And he started up building up a dairy, and within a year he had a good Holstein
Dairy operating there. Got a new barn built with room for twenty -eight head of
cows, good cement floors around the milk room, milking machines, power separator,
hot and cold running water to keep things clean, and all the rest of that sort
of thing, and he operated that dairy from about '2.7 on through to '37. Well, I
think he sold it in '37, and I think he came out with about $12,000 clear for
those ten years, which was quite a trick in the middle of the Depression. I
don't know how he did it.
Mother had not been very well, they had a hard time for quite a few years during
the late '30's and caused quite a lot of doctor bills. The Fall of 1938, at age
sixty, she died. They had finally diagnosed a brain tumor and she was on her way
to Mayo Brothers in Rochester, to tackle an operation on that when she died on
the train.
Well, Dad took what he had left of his $12,000, a pretty good portion of it, and
went over to Ketchum, Idaho, and purchased a portion of a sawmill that was
faltering over there, and he got it going. He milled the lumber out for the Sun
Valley spread over there. Then, later, he moved that mill to Mountain Home and
I think early in '41 he sold that mill to somebody at Mountain Home. After he
sold the mill in Mountain Home, he came up to Council and lived with me for a
little while and when I went to Pago Pago, Samoa, he took care of disposing of
the little business I had at Council.
A few months later he went back to Missouri and married one of Mother's nieces,
a woman that was a good deal like Mother, even looked something like Mother. He
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name had been Rose Higgins Harris. Her maiden name had been Rose Higgins, and
she had married a doctor by the name of Harris, and the doctor had died leaving
her with two little girls and she had been a widow quite a few years, and when
Dad went back to Missouri in late '41 and they were married. She had two ranches
back there that Dr. Harris had left her, that were pretty well run down and were
not paying her any income. So, Dad got busy getting those ranches straightened
out and getting them on a paying basis. But by five years later, Dad was begin -
ing to have heart trouble and he couldn't get the work done that he wanted and
I do not think he got along with Rose near as well as he had gotten along with
my Mother. I think he decided that if he couldn't carry his own weight along
that he was not going to live with her anymore, and I guess he couldn't. The
doctor had put him on a pretty strict limitation on his physical activity, would
not even let him walk upstairs. He was 72 years old by that time, so he left
Rose and he left Missouri.
He went out to Seattle, Washington where my Sister was then living, my Sister
Lois and her husband Harry Farris. Lois was working out there managing a big
housing project for the city of Seattle, a women's housing project, and her
husband, Harry, was sitting around their apartment doing nothing. He was a
ne're -do -well engineer and he didn't have a job. About all he did was sit around
and nibble at a little whiskey all the time. I know Dad did not think the
situation was very good and Dad thought maybe he wanted to live with Lois, but
he certainly didn't want to live in that situation they had in Seattle. But, and
they were looking for something else, but he went across the Sound, over near
Bremerton, North of Bremerton about twenty miles where they had run across an
advertisement for a place for sale.
Conti nui ng wi th my Dad up i n Seattl e tryi ng to arrange to 1 i ve wi th Loi s i n 1947.
Well Dad and Harry and Lois all went over to that little town of Poulsbo, North
of Bremerton to look at that property that they were considering over there. It
looked good, it was a nice three bedroom frame house, upstairs and basement, nice
two car garage, nice big barn for a cow and horse if you wanted, nice big berry
patch, four acres of pasture and four acres of forest land, and a nice spring up
on the hill that provided water pressure into the house. And a good buy, about
a quarter of mile out of a little town called Poulsbo, and not very far from a
ferry that run across the Sound night and morning so if Lois wanted to continue
working in Seattle, she could. So they all thought it was alright.
So Dad provided the money for a very substantial down payment on that. Matter
of fact, I think he put most of the money he had into that house for them to get
them started there and decided to stay there with them. Well, that didn't work
like he thought it would, because one Winter of that fog and rain on the
peninsula, on the Olympic Peninsula there, chuckle, beside the Sound thoroughly
cured him. He would not have spent another Winter there for anything. So the
next Summer he was down with my Uncle Jim Ware, down at Sacramento. Uncle Jim
wanted to do some more building around his place there.
Surprising as it may seem, Dad had never even gotten his Social Security cover-
age. He never worked under Social Security in his live, because he had never
worked for anybody else. Self- employment was not covered by Social Security in
those days. Here he was, about 74 years old, stuck what money he had into that
house that Lois and Harry had and they were not in a position to pay him back,
so my Uncle Jim Ware put him to work. My Uncle Jim Ware wanted some carpenter
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work done around there, he wanted some home improvement done there, and he wanted
to build a house out on the ocean, Bodega Bay, and Dad was a good builder, he was
a good carpenter. Working for Uncle Jim he could just take his time as he wanted
to and Uncle Jim paid him a fair wage for what he got done. But the end result
was, that Dad earned his Social Security coverage after he was 74 years old. At
his age, it only took six quarters to be covered, that was a year and a half.
Well, he worked for my Uncle Jim Ware for longer than that, he was fiddling
around there for two and half years, I expect, before he got all the building
done that Uncle Jim wanted, and that had put Dad onto a minimum Social Security
income. And he was getting a little bit of money out of my sister Lois and her
husband Harry, payment of their property.
He got ahold of an old 1942 Cadillac Sedan and he would drive up to Boise and
spend a little time with my kids and some of his friends around there and then
drive back to Missouri and visit the people in Missouri, and then by that time,
I was getting down in Fort Worth, Texas, and later into Shreveport, Louisiana,
and he would come down and visit with me. And then he would go back in the
Winter and spend his time with Uncle Jim Ware at Sacramento, or his Sister Laura
in Los Angeles. And he continued to do that for the next four or five years.
Spend his Winters where it was warm, California, travel around quite a bit in the
Summer. Dad always loved to travel anyway. I think probably by 1957, when he
was about 83 years old, he probably had to quit driving his car. His eyes got
so he couldn't pass a driving test. So he made that loop around a time or two
on busses, that he had on the car before. By 1960, he was travelling around in
the Summer on the bus again and he was in Boise and I was in to Boise and he had
that paralytic stroke that changed everything for him and me both from then on.
And I think I have covered his story pretty well after that, previously, so I
think we will drop Dad with that. And go on with the story about my sister Lois.
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CHAPTER 22
MY SISTER LOIS
Well, Lois had been born on March 21, 1908, in Boise, Idaho, in St. Luke's
Hospital. Again, the same doctor, Dr. Beck, that had been my doctor. She grew
up in the sawmill, of course, with me, the first six years of her life, and she
was about my only playmate and she was a good little playmate. We had fun
together, and I don't think we ever had much troubles really. She was a real
sweet little gal anyway. 1914, she entered the first grade at the Montour
schools, went right through school in regular order, completed her grade school
in 1922 at Montour.
Lois had always been a serious minded little girl, a real good little girl, an
excellent little girl. Never causing anybody any trouble. Obedient and cheerful
and helpful and sweet and a good student, an excellent student in fact. If she
got anything besides an A it upset her terribly. And Mother's rather strict
handling of us as children didn't seem to bother her any, and Mother's emphasis
on the religious aspect of living was alright with Lois. During most of her
early years, she thought that she was going to become a missionary, and of
course, I know Mother encouraged such thought. As we began to enter in our teen
year age I sometimes got the impression that she was kind of tattle tailing on
me a little bit, but I guess no more than I should expect. But she was such a
sweet gal that there was nothing ever to tattle about on her, so I couldn't get
even. But, really, she loved her brother, me her brother, and we got along real
good.
She completed her two years of high school at Montour and then went to Emmett for
her other two years, and graduated as Valedictorian at the Emmett High School in
1926. Lois was a pretty girl, she had coal black curly hair, curly wavy hair,
a fair complexion and blue eyes. A somewhat unusual combination. In her later
teens she grew up to be a pretty good sized girl. I expect she was 5'10" tall,
but she was a good looking gal. She had learned to sew pretty well, and I don't
know how she learned to sew so good, but she was good. She made a lot of her own
clothes and they looked good on her.
I think, if I remember right, that after she got out of high school at Emmett,
she took that short course, Summer School course, that would qualify one to
teach, and I think she taught at Montour for a couple of years. Then she went
on to college, and again, Mother had to do that very careful picking of college
so that it wouldn't be some school that would have bad influences you know. And
I don't know much about the school they picked but it was Taylor University, I
think, in Illinois. Lois went there and graduated from college with honors,
about 1932. As always, Lois had to have the best grades you could get. Always
did her work very thoroughly and she earned it, she worked hard at it.
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Some time during those years, I don't know when it was, she had gotten a few
months training at Link's Business School in Boise and was qualified as a
secretary. And some time after '32 she went to work, in 1932, she went to work
for somebody in Boise, some lawyer, I don't remember who. I'm just not sure what
Lois was doing in Boise, in those early years in the Roosevelt Administration,
but it wasn't too long until she had a key job and I really don't know how she
got it. She was working up, working up.
She became Director of a State Self -Help Program right along in the middle of
that Depression that was financed some way by the Federal Government in which
they furnished money for people to start little business ventures around various
places in the State so as to try to get some people to work. Twas a desperate
situation during those years. The organization would provide the money to get
the venture going and then they wanted to it to be self supporting and provide
work for people. I know she had a sawmill or two going and she had two or three
canneries going, where they canned vegetables and fruits and things like that in
metal cans. Some clothes making ventures someplace, I don't know what all she
had going, a lot, and she had about five or six people working for her directly,
and she was the boss. I think two of her people were engineers to help evaluate
the operations they were getting into and evaluate the performance after they got
them going. One of the engineers that she had working for her at that time was
Harry Farris, a man whom she later married.
One of the ventures that she had financed to get it started and wasn't going very
well, was that sawmill over at Ketchum that Dad bought into and got going over
there to build the Sun Valley Lodges and so forth. But her work kept her travel-
ing a great deal, all over the State, keeping track of all those deals she had
goi ng and maki ng reports on them and so forth. That effort of hers went on unti 1
World War II was beginning to get warmed up and the Federal energies began to be
looking toward war effort rather than fight the Depression.
I know that her business began to slacken off and before long, I knew she had
taken a job as a Chief Secretary for a United States Senator Kerr, from Oklahoma.
And the next thing I knew, she was in Washington D. C., heading up his office.
I may have this a little wrong, she may have gone to work for Senator Kerr by
1938, late in '38 or '39, cause I know she didn't work in Washington, D. C. very
long for Senator Kerr until they had her in another big self -help operation that
covered the whole Southern part of the United States. And was a program that,
really, covered the underprivileged and low income people of the Southern States
and certainly involved a lot of Negroes too, trying to develop programs that
would better their conditions and try to educate them better on how to live and
how to make their ends meet and so forth. That was a whale of a program for
Lois.
I was 1 i vi ng i n McCal 1 worki ng for the Forest Sery i ce and I di dn' t keep very good
track of Lois those years, but she was really wheeling and dealing. I don't know
what her grade was, must have been pretty good though from the area of responsi-
bility that she had. She had to travel quite a lot throughout the whole South,
initiating and following up on that program. Then we got into the war, and that
program was thrown out, everything went for the war effort then. Lois went to
Washington, no, she went to New York as Women's Personnel Director for the
Republic Aircraft Corporation, on Long Island, New York, I think it was. Old
Harry Farris who had been her engineer in Boise was, by that time, working for
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another aircraft corporation back in the New York area.
Lois and Harry continued back there until the end of the war, and sometime during
that time while they were back there, they were married. Harry had been married
before and was divorced, I think he had family someplace. I don't know very much
about Harry. Anyway, they finished the war back in New York and then that
operation ceased of course, when the war ended, because aircraft corporations
quit manufacturing those aircraft for the government, and Lois and Harry decided
to move to Seattle. I think that was in 1946 that they moved out to Seattle.
By 1948, they were living over there in Poulsbo on the place that Dad had
purchased over there, and Harry was working at the big Navy hospital down at
Bremerton, twenty miles away. Within a year or so, Lois found that that commut-
ing back across the Sound every day and the ferry didn't work very good and she
got a job in the accounting office of that Bremerton hospital also, in that big
Navy hospital at Bremerton. I think she went to work there oh about 1952 or
1953. Well, they continued to work there till Lois got sick in 1958 and died
there in the hospital in the Fall of 1958. Harry was something like twenty years
older than Lois, but he outlived her anyway. I think he died along in 1961, and
they are buried side by side up there in the Poulsbo Graveyard, Poulsbo,
Washington.
Lois was always the perfectionist. She had literally worked her head off her
whole life. Much of her life she was working in fields that she didn't have a
lot of background and a lot of experience in and she made up for it by drive and
hard work.
Well, as it happened, Dad had probably done his poorest management he had ever
done when he invested in that house that Lois had because he certainly did not
expect Harry to outlive Lois, but when Lois died then, of course, all the
property, all the equity in the property and so forth, went to Harry, and when
Harry died it all went to his relatives, family, whatever he had. So that left
Dad holding the sack on what his investment had been on that property, and that
was a real boner that he pulled, chuckle. Never did hear him complain about it
any though. Dad just didn't ever complain about anything far as I know, I never
heard him. He always just seemed to take it as It come.
While I am talking about my Sister Lois, I think I will mention something that
happened along about 1938, and I'm not exactly sure about which year. But
anyway, we were having a World's Fair in New York and another one in San
Francisco at the same time. I know Lois wanted to go to those Fairs and the
railroads had put out a very special rate. Nowadays, it actually seems fantas-
tic, but it was not so fantastic during the Depression, and the Depression was
still on, clear up to '41. But anyway, the railroad put on this fare and she
could go from Boise to New York, attend the Fair in New York, go from New York
back to San Francisco, attend the Fair in San Francisco, and return back to Boise
for the total railroad fare of something less than fifty dollars. Boy, what a
deal. Well, she made that trip, and she was gone two or three weeks. Hard to
imagine a situation like that now, almost impossible to imagine in fact. And
that was with good trains, with good pullman accommodations and everything. Of
course, that was quite a special rate.
I have missed my Sister since she died. We were fairly close because, after all,
128
we didn't have any other brothers and sisters, and my Sister was a pretty good
friend to me. And it would have been kind of nice if we had had some later years
together after the pressures of mid -life are past, you know, but we didn't get
it.
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CHAPTER 23
MY TRAVELS
Well, I think it is time now to take up another subject. I will take up is my
travels during my lifetime, and I have done a tremendous amount of traveling in
my lifetime, but until I retired, very little of it was on my own initiative.
In other words, very little of it before I retired was just for the purpose of
travel, to be travelling. I think of the sixteen years that I was married to
Bertha that we only had one traveling vacation, and I think that was in 1937.
I think Bertha, Karen and I piled into the old Buick Sedan and we went over to
Seattle and crossed the Sound on a streamlined ferry over to Bremerton, and drove
up around the Olympic Peninsula to Port Angeles, and then down the Washington
Coast to a Aberdeen, and on down to Astoria at the mouth of the Columbia. Then
from Astoria back up to Portland and on back home. It was a nice vacation, but
I think maybe that is the only one I ever took of a true vacation nature until
after I had retired.
Since I retired, Mary and I have done a great deal of traveling. Matter of fact,
for the last twenty years I suppose that traveling has been our major recre-
ational activity, except for some hobbies. Many trips in the Summer up to
mountains of Idaho, primarily, and to Riggins, and to the South Fork of the
Salmon, all the way up the Clearwater into Montana at Missoula and back through
Salmon, oh all over this part of Southern Idaho, and two or three trips up to
Cour de'Alene to see Mary's sister who lived up there. Many, many trips to visit
my children in Salt Lake and her children down around Portland and Tacoma, and
two trips to Las Vegas to visit her brother there. Two trips to Shreveport,
Louisiana, each of which lasted about a month. One was in her little Rambler and
the other in our camper. Then a month long trip to California when Harvey was
in Dental School. It was our major recreational activity, whenever the weather
would permit, and sometimes when the weather wasn't very good. But that has been
since I retired.
Before I retired, there was a great deal of travel but it was not for vacation.
Most of my life, it was dependent on first traveling back and forth to school,
second, traveling on job related activities and trying to keep my family with my
unstable living situations. And third, with coming back to Idaho to visit my
kiddies after 1949, when I was living in Fort Worth and Shreveport, Louisiana,
and the biggest load of those trips, of course, were my job connected travel.
Of course, as long as I worked on the State Police, I was travelling all the
time, but in a limited area in this part of Idaho. I went to work for the
Airforce and most of the time was in the Headquarters where I had to visit the
various bases, and the amount of travel involved in that was tremendous. Some
of it by train, some it by my car, if the distance was not too great, and they
authorized that kind of travel, but most of it was by air. Some by commercial
air, some by military air, probably about half and half. Mostly supervising
130
programs that I had at the various bases that I was trying to run from Head-
quarters. Some trips would only last two or three days and some of them would
last two or three weeks.
Most all of my travels was in the Continental United States. I have not had much
experience in foreign countries. I think the only time I ever got out of the
Continental United States, perhaps, was the year I spent in Pago Pago, Samoa, and
then I had a couple trips up to Victoria, British Columbia on Vancouver Island.
I think about four flights over the years down to Ramey Airforce Base in Puerto
Rico, and three or four times into Juarez, Mexico, across the Rio Grande from E1
Paso where there was a Base that I had to visit. Otherwise, I think all my
travels were in the United States, but they are far too long a list to try to
list in this tape. I know I have been in every State in the United States except
the six New England States and New York and New Jersey. I missed those eight
States but I have been in all the rest of them and, quite a lot of them, many
times.
I have kept track of all my flying time over the years. I have not kept track
of travel time by car or train or bus and they would all have to be added into
the travel time too for a complete record, but of the air time, yes I've kept
track of that. I have now gone up 418 times, I think, and it involves about
1,100 hours in the air. Planes did not travel quite as fast when I was doing
most of that flying as they do now with the jets. I know that at least 90%.
maybe 95%, of my flying was done on propeller driven aircraft. That flying
record covers a period from 1925 through 1973. I haven't been up now for the
last 19 years. There isn't any point in trying to list where all that travel was
to, it was just all over the nation. And that is a pretty short coverage for all
the traveling I did. But, if I tried to provide detailed information on all that
traveling I did, it would certainly get terribly boring and would take a good
many cassettes.
I haven't got much desire to do much traveling anymore. Oh I still like to get
up in the mountains, but it is not nearly as much fun as it used to be. When I
could see good, and wasn't so stiffened up with arthritis, so I sort of doubt
that I'll do a great deal of traveling for the rest of my time. Probably be
selling our camper one of these days, not sure.
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CHAPTER 24
MY MOTOR VEHICLES
So now I think I will take up another subject. I think I will tell about all the
motor vehicles that I have owned in my life.
The first one was a 1918 Indian two cylinder standard motorcycle, spring frame
front and rear, nice machine. I got it for the sum of fifteen dollars and my
bicycle. I bought it when I was sixteen years ofd in 1922 down at Li nfi el d
College at McMinville, Oregon. I think I rode that machine back and forth
between McMinnville and Idaho two or three times. And I think I kept it for
about two years and then sold it some fellow in Montour for fifteen dollars.
When I was eighteen, my dad bought me my second vehicle. It was 1922 Harley
Davidson, twin 61 cubic inch machine. I think he paid $125.00 for it and he
bought it from a man here in Emmett. I drove that machine for a couple of years
I guess and then I wrecked it, and sold it for a little of nothing.
Then in 1928, I bought my third motorcycle when I was twenty -two years old. I
don't remember what I paid for that machine, I think it was a 1927 Harley
Davidson, 74 cubic inch machine. The big Harley, the one that was standard for
police work at that time. I think I paid something around $250.00 for that
machine, if I remember right. I used it for the first three or four months on
the State Police and then kept it for a year or so thereafter for special work
on the police, but after that, they gave me a car. After I went to work for the
State Police, I didn't need a car, they furnished the car for most whatever
travel I needed because I was always on duty in that police work.
Actually, I did not buy an automobile for myself until I was twenty -eight years
old. I had built up some kind of a little Model T bug in 1932, but it didn't
amount to much and I didn't use it very much and I think I sold it to somebody
for fifty dollars, so the first real car I had was in 1934 when I was twenty -
eight years old. I was living in McCall at that time working for Carl Brown.
I bought it from a man by the name of Roy May who had the General Merchandise
store in McCall. I paid him seventy -five dollars for it. It was 1926 Buick
Sedan, Master Six Sedan, they called it. It was eight years old when I bought
it. I think I paid for it at fifteen dollars a month, with no interest on the
loan. Bertha and I drove that car for four years and we never had any signifi-
cant expense on it either. Early in 1938 1 sold it to somebody in Riggins and
I think I got seventy -five dollars for it, same as I had paid for it.
We went to Boise and I purchased a 1936 Pontiac Straight Eight Coupe, two years
old with about thirty -five thousand miles on it, a nice running car, and we used
that Pontiac for four years. Bertha still had it when I got back from Samoa in
1942, but Dad had been using it for about six months of that time and he didn't
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take very good care of cars, and it was sort of beat.
So in the Spring of 1942, on our way down to Jerome to another job for M -K we
stopped in Boise and bought another, traded the Pontiac in on another car, a 1938
Cadillac Fleetwood, the first Fleetwood that had been built. Four door sedan.
It was a beauty. First car built, production car built without running boards,
first production car built with the steering shifter on the, with the gear
shifter on the steering post. Before the shifting lever had always set in the
middle of the floor. The car had been completly overhauled, and had about
seventy -five thousand miles on it. Belonged to a man by the name of Al Fisher,
well belonged to Al Fisher's wife. He was a gold dredge operator from Boise
Basin and he purchased a new Cadillac every two years, and he had traded it in
to the Cadillac Garage there in Boise and we bought it. It cost us our Pontiac
and six hundred dollars. At that time, new Fleetwood Cadillacs, four door
sedans, had sold, delivered in Boise, for $2,800.00. Well, that beautiful
Cadillac didn't have any power equipment, didn't have any power steering or any
power brakes, no air conditioning, no automatic transmission, but it certainly
was a joy to drive. I kept that Cadillac car for ten years and when I finally got
rid of it, it had a total of two hundred and seventy -five thousand miles on it.
In 1952, early in '52, I traded that '38 Cadillac for a 1949 Cadillac Sedan, not
the Fleetwood, just the regular four door Cadillac Sedan. That was the first
Cadillac built with the Kettering Engine, the short stroke, low friction engine.
It also had no power equipment, no power steering, no Power brake, no automatic
transmission, no air conditioning, and was quite a little bit lighter weight than
the previous Cadillac I had had, the old Fleetwood. It was a pretty high per-
formance car, it would really get up and scat, and still gave pretty good
mileage, and I run about eighteen miles to the gallon with it.
I kept that Cadillac for eight years and early in 1960 I traded it in on another
Cadillac, a 1957 four door Hardtop Fleetwood Cadillac that had everything on it.
It was gadget loaded, power steering, power brakes, air conditioning, power
windows, remote control on the trunk, automatic dimmer switch every time a light
shined in your eyes, the lights would automatically dim, six way electric
adjustment on the front seat. It had the full works and about twice the horse-
power that my previous Cadillac had had, but not nearly as good a performance as
the previous Cadillac had had. All those gadgets and all that power equipment
had taken the real honest to God performance out of it, and it was a heavy car.
Nevertheless, I kept that 1957 Fleetwood Cadillac Hardtop Sedan for about fifteen
years. I think I sold it in 1974 here in Emmett. It was shot, it was wore out.
Friend of mine kept bugging me and bugging me to sell it to him so I finally told
him he could have it for a hundred dollars, and he ran it for a couple of years,
but I don't think he got much of a bargain.
Well, I had had nothing but Cadillacs for thirty - two years by that time and I
enjoyed them. I did not find them to be expensive cars to run and own. Course,
I had only put out six hundred dollars on the first one I got, and eighteen
hundred on each of the other two, in addition to the trade -in of course. So,
even though I had had nothing but Cadillacs for thirty -two years, my investment
and purchasing of them had only been $4,200.
Well in 1974, I think it was, I purchased a 1961 Plymouth Fury four door sedan
that had only 36,000 miles on it, even though it was thirteen years old. Seemed
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to be in pretty good condition. The man that owned it had treated it pretty
gently, I think. He had died and his wife couldn't drive the car and she sold it
to me. I told her I would give her whatever a garage would sell it for. Went
down and talked to the garage and they said if they had it, they would sell for
$395.00, so I gave her the $395.00 for it. And, we've still got it, it has about
90,000 miles on it now, and it is now thirty -two years old. It came out in
November of 1960, so next November, it will be thirty -two years old. And still
runs pretty durn good. The engine has never been opened up in those thirty -two
years and we use it every day or two, we do our short trip driving around town
in it.
In 1983, we bought a 1980 LTD Ford Sedan. I think it had 58,000 miles on it,
seemed to be in pretty good condition. Course, by 1980, we were getting up into
the cars that had a lot of electronic gear on them. Very difficult for any shade
tree mechanics to do any work on them, maybe that's good. I have had a little
problem with it with the automatic controls of the carburation, the electronic
automatic controls to the carburation, but otherwise, it has been a fabulous car.
It is air conditioned, of course, and all the automatic power, like power brakes,
power steering, automatic transmissions, and all those kinds of things. Six way
electric seats and so forth. I will have to admit that they are making better
cars, course it is twelve years old now, but it is the best car that I've ever
owned. Has about 90,000 miles on it. I have never had a car twelve years old
with 90,000 miles on it that still had as good a condition as this old Ford LTD
has got.
So, my whole life, I have only owned seven cars and I've still got two of them.
And I have never purchased a new car, they have all been used. I think I paid
$5,300.00 for the Ford LTD and it cost me more than all the rest of the cars,
including the three Cadillacs, had cost me all of my life. But, even so, I've
got less than $11,000.00 in my seven cars that I have purchased in my lifetime.
I guess that's pretty good. Guess I can't kick.
Continuing with a list of the motor vehicles that I have owned throughout my
life. I guess I have listed all of those vehicles I have owned except three
motorcycles that I had after 1949. First, was a 1942 four cylinder Indian
motorcycle that I purchased in 1949 that I have discussed before. I paid about
$300.00 for and sold it a few months later for $500.00 and made a couple hundred
dollars on it. Beautiful machine.
Then in 1950, I purchased a small used Harley Davidson 125, little scooter type
deal that was designed primarily for running around town, which I used there for
a year or such a matter. Very efficient machine, no trouble to get 125 miles to
the gallon out of it and I was paying twenty cents a gallon for that gasoline
there in Fort Worth at the time, 1950. Even though it had a pretty small engine,
it would run along about fifty miles an hour on the highway. And I figured out
one time I could get on that and drive back to Idaho a for cost of under $5.00
for fuel and oil for the whole trip. That meant that I could have ridden that
motor bike back to Idaho for less than the cost of the shoe leather to walk to
Idaho. Yeah, that was pretty efficient transportation wasn't it.
Well in 1951, I purchased another Harley Davidson, it was a 165 cubic centimeter
bike. It was a 1952 model and I kept that machine I think for thirty -four years.
I think I sold that in Emmett along about 1985 or '86. I had made a great many
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modifications to that bike and it was a honey, bu t
into my hobby business. So, I guess that winds
135
I will go into that when I get ei
up my motor vehicles.
CHAPTER 25
MY HOBBIES
So, now, I guess I will get into the subject of hobbies. Hobbies that I have
followed during my lifetime. I have usually considered that I didn't have much
of any hobbies until after about 1949 when I moved back to Fort Worth. And I did
begin to slack off a little bit on work then and got into quite a few hobbies
really. Such as motor bikes, which of course had been a kind of a hobby in my
early years also. And, music and stereo systems and tape recording, and general
photography and photo copying and firearms and boating and then, after retiring,
into camping in the mountains.
Those were all significant hobbies for me, but it may be that I'm defining
hobbies too tightly. Of course, anything, anything can be a hobby, anything that
a person shows a lot of interest in that is not part of his normal vocation, I
guess, can be considered a hobby. Some people are, have hobbies of playing
cards, some of them have hobbies of painting, art work, some of them in stamp
collection, some of them in coin collection, anything I guess that you get
interested in can be a hobby, unless it's actually a part of your livelihood and
occupation, other than an occupation.
As I think of my life over the years, I have always had one hobby, ever since I
became an adult. That hobby has the been the innovative design and construction
of various electrical and mechanical devices and tools and equipment and gadgets
and procedures and methods to improve the performance or production of some piece
of equipment or to adapt it to some special requirements that I might of had.
As I look back on my life I can't think of any time when I was not doing that
sort of thing. Sometimes they were connected with my job, sometimes they were
connected with things that I had at home or my automobile or this and that. But
I was always trying to build something that was new and different, that would
perform better than the normal stuff you could get, you could obtain and things
like that, and I have to think of that, as I look back on it, as my hobby. That
sort of thing was my major interest when I was not doing my normal work of occu-
pation. Sometimes I'd go quite a while without generating much of that sort of
thing, but sometimes then I'd do quite a lot of it.
Throughout my life I was always to design and construct something that was going
to do a better job than I had been able to obtain otherwise. Of course, the
early efforts of most people in trying to improve the design of things mechani-
cal, electrical and so forth, usually do not work out very practically and don't
work out very wel1. A person needs some background in mechanical and electrical
things before they begin to work out very good and maybe some experience in
developing improvements too. Maybe you need some experience in that before they
begin to work out, but I was sort of lucky. I had grown up in a mechanical
environment in Dad's sawmills and flour mill and elevator and lumberyard and
136
I
machinery around, I had grown up in a mechanical environment.
Then I got ahold of that 1918 Indian motorcycle when I was sixteen years old and,
heh, I got a pretty good indoctrination to a few things mechanical with that.
I had that thing all to pieces three or four times and all over the yard. Then
I would get it back together and finally get it to running. And I'll tell you,
you learn a little, just keep studying and studying how this works and how that
works, and how it has to be put together or it won't work. Chuckle. Try and
fail and try and try again. After awhile you begin to learn about such things.
And then of course my experiments in 1924 when I was eighteen years old in
building a real good radio began to teach me a little bit about electrical
things.
I never had much training in school on such things. I never went to the right
kind of schools. I was always going to schools that did not specialize,
especially in science courses. Oh, I took physics when I got in college, chemis-
try, all the math I could get, but specific mechanical training and specific
electrical training, I never had in school. So, I had to learn the best I could
by trying and by trial and error I guess. And many of my efforts at improving
this and that, my early efforts, were failures too, they didn't do much. And
most of the ones that did succeed were pretty simple, they weren't very involved.
I am spending time on this subject because it is a very significant portion of
my life. That is an interest that I always had that most people that knew me
didn't know very much about. Took a lot of my time, took a lot of my effort,
took a lot of my planning and thoughts, you know. Most of the people that were
acquainted with me were not aware of the significance of that part of my life
really. I might tell about a few of them so as to provide a general idea of what
I am talking about.
One of the first improvements that I made that I can really remember, was a very
simple one. And I think I did it when I was about twenty years old, there at
Montour. Dad had developed his dairy farm by that time and we had a nice big
dairy barn with eighteen cows into one side and about ten on the other. And the
method of milking cows in those days was different than it is now. We put all
the cows into the barn at the same time and then went down the line milking the
cows and then let them all out. And on that one side of the barn we had eighteen
stantions where eighteen cows came in and stuck their head into the stantions and
then we walked down the line, walking in beside each cow and closing the stantion
over her so she couldn't get her head out until after we had finished our work.
And then when we got through, why we had to walk down that full line of eighteen
cows and open those stantions and let each cow out one at a time. By the way,
it is remarkable how those cows know where to go. You would open the door when
it was time to milk and there would be those cows standing outside the door and
they would come in in an orderly fashion and each cow would go right straight to
her own stantion and stick her head in it and start feeding. How she knew which
one it was, I don't know, I could not have done it. I would have had to count
down from the end of the barn to see that I got into the right one or I would
have had to have numbers on each one or something. But those cows would just
come right in and stick their head right into their own, and no monkeying around.
Well I figured I could somehow figure out a better system than that, so I fixed
up a devise whereby, with one lever I could close all those eighteen stantions
at once. And by working that lever the other way, I could open all eighteen
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stantions at once. Saved me a lot of work, saved me a lot of time. Course, you
could go work each stantion individually if you wanted to, but I fixed it so they
all worked together. And Dad used that system for years, no problem. And so far
as I know, I never saw that kind of a system used in any other barn, so I guess
it was a sort of an innovation. Surely there are other people that have done
that sort of thing of course, but I never did hear of one or see one.
Another problem I remember I got into at Dad's in 1932. This was an electrical
UseIt was about, oh about a city block, about 300 maybe 350 feet from the
house to the barn on that dairy, from the house where we lived down to the barn.
And always in the Wintertime, heh much of the year, we were going to work early
in the morning in the dairy before it was daylight and you were coming back. at
night after dark, and even sometimes there was snow and ice on the trail.
Anytime it would have been good to see, so I wanted to put up a couple of light
bulbs between the house and the barn so as to light that pathway. And Dad had
a few electrical supplies around there. I started figuring how I could do it.
He had a couple of poles that I could set out midway and a couple of weatherproof
sockets, a couple of three way switches. I didn't know very much about
electrical work. I'm still not a qualified electrician but I've learned about
wiring circuits, but I didn't know very much about them then. And Dad had enough
wire to reach just one wire from the house to the barn. The only way I knew to
do it was to have two wires run from the house to the barn. And I'll tell you,
things are such in the depression that you did not buy anything you just did not
have to have so we were not about to go buy enough wire to reach from the house
to the barn. We had 110 volts and 220 volts at the barn, and we had 110 volts
and 220 volts at the house, but we didn't have any wires running between the
house and the barn. They both got their power supply from the transformer that
was quite a little way to the side. I felt that maybe there was some way that
that could be done on one wire and I kept trying to draw it, trying to figure out
how the circuit would work and this and that and I was not getting anyplace. I
know when I went down to Emmett and I got an Idaho Power man, electrician, and
I went to an electrical shop and I talked to three or four electricians around.
The only answer I could get was that it was impossible unless I had two wires to
reach from the house to the barn. But finally, I figured a method I thought
ought to work, and I drew it out on a piece of paper and I went to work
constructing it. Put the two poles out there and strung that one wire from the
house to barn, installed a weatherproof socket on one pole and another
weatherproof socket on the other pole. Installed a three way switch at each end
of that one wire and hooked it to the 220 volt line at both the house and the
barn, and then put a 110 volt light in each socket, lamp that is. And it worked
fine. One wire did the job and it lit up and you could turn it on or off from
either end. Well, I took my drawing back down to Emmett to those electricians
that I had talked to about that and they took a look at the drawing and said, why
of course you can do it that way. And, of course, my question then was why
didn't you tell me that in the first place. But none of them had considered that
possibility. Well it was pretty simple, but it worked there for years and years
after that and only took one wire. And for me it was a very innovative, chuckle,
development because I was just getting into that sort of thing.
I know that same year I built me up a little bug out of spare Model T automobile
parts that were laying around and got it to running and used it awhile and that
gave me some more experience with mechanical things.
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I can't think of any other significant devices I built until two or three years
later when I was up on the Salmon River with the responsibility for the drilling
and dynamite crews in the CCC Camp on the Salmon River. One of the pretty good
sized problems in rock drilling has always been the problem of stuck steel.
Drill steels getting stuck down in the hole and then you can't get them out.
There are many things that cause steel to get stuck in the hole and it is kind
of a bad deal, because you not only lose the steel, you also lose the hole you've
been drilling in, and you have to drill a new hole. Very typical to see quite
a little bit of stuck steel stuck out of cliffs around the country where there
has been big drilling operations. Well I hadn't not worked in that field of work
more than about a year, a year and a half, till I begin to realize that that was
a potentially and important field for me to do some development in. So I started
developing a lot of special tools and devices and techniques to get that steel
out of the holes. Some worked, some didn't, most of it worked some. Some of
those things I built helped a great deal. But in about four or five months time,
I had practically stopped the sticking of steel in our operation. And that one
fact alone, more than paid my salary all the rest of the time that I worked in
the rock drilling business. What I mean, was that on my operation, there wasn't
hardly any sticking steel and the other similar operations on the river had
always stuck more steel than my salary was. And we weren't now losing the holes
we drilled either. I don't want to get into the technicalities of that thing
here, but it was a very important improvement in our operation.
One of those devices that I had built, I thought had sufficient significance that
it would justify a patent. So I did, I put in a patent application for it, and
the next time one of the big company representatives, this time it was Ingersol
Rand, representative came through, I showed him the device. We were using it
every day on the job. Well, he didn't show much interest in, in purchasing the
rights to it. Said that he doubted that there would be enough volume in the
manufacturing of it to justify it, and went along. But, a few months later out
came their catalogue and had a device similar to that in their catalogue for
sale. Their design was sufficiently differently than mine so that it did not
involve patent encroachment, but all it did was the same job that mine did, and
sold for about 10 times more than mine would have needed to sell for. And
goodness knows, no company would hesitate in buying it. at either price, so maybe
they knew that. So I learned right there about some of the problems involved in
trying to cash in on a patent. Well. I never did buy one of those Ingersol Rand
devices, I always had the welder manufacture me one at every job I got on to, and
always used them. Never had any more problem with stuck steel.
The next serious problem that I run across was compressor synchronization, be-
cause all the jackhammers, wagon drills, and things like that run on compressed
air, and anytime you have more than one compressor on the same air line, you get
into a problem of compressor synchronization. I had four compressors up on the
Salmon River most of the time and they were 215 cubic feet per minute compres-
sors, and they were set to run at about a 110 pounds per square inch pressure.
They would pump the pressure up to 110 pounds and then stop pumping until it
dropped down to about 95 pounds and they would kick in and start running again.
Well, when you have got more than one compressor on the same line you find that
always one compressor does practically all of the idling and the other com-
pressor, or compressors, will probably run continuously. So you get in a problem
of overworking some of them and overheating, and maybe one of the others not
working enough. In all the time that I have spent in my life on rock drilling,
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I have never seen a bank of compressors on the same line that were synchronized,
so that they all kicked in together and kicked off together that is. Matter of
fact, the operators on the compressors were always fiddling with the device that
caused the loading and the unloading on the compressors. They were always
fiddled with them trying to get them adjusted so they would operate together, and
nobody that I ever heard of ever was able to keep them that way, more than just
a very few minutes at a time.
Well, I think I worked on that problem on all my spare time for probably three
months, and I think probably the first month and a half or two months of that
time was spent in trying to learn precisely what the problem was. In other
words, how the controls worked and what was involved in those controls doing
their controlling. I had to learn just how they functioned before I could
consider trying to synchronize them. Well, after a lot of study, I came to the
conclusion that they could possibly be synchronized by providing a major control
action by one unloader instead of letting all of them operate. And I spent the
next month or so designing the hook -up so it would work and it worked beauti-
fully. Boy, oh boy. Those compressors would all just idle together and then
they would all hit it together, and oh boy. And, of course, I was trying to use
100% of my available air so they did not idle a great deal. I had eight
jackhammers out on about a quarter of a mile of airline. If they had done much
idling, I would have put another jackhammer to work, but there wasn't much
idling. Well, the wheels from the head offices had come out you know and they
would see that bunch of compressors sitting a whaling away and synchronized 100%
and it was an eye opener to them. They had never seen anything like that.
Matter of fact, I have never seen anything like that in my whole life of working
around rock drills. Surely, some people, some place, have synchronized their
multiple compressors but I have never heard of it. And all the people that ever
do it always tell me it can't be done, but, okay, I know better.
Anyway, my head boss up at McCall, a man by the name of Henry Shank, had two
other compressor outfits running around the forest and he ordered them to
synchronize theirs too. Chuckle, oh boy. I tried to tell then what to do but
they never did get the job done. You first had to learn the principles involved
in the control system, and it was not very simple and I guess some of those guys
tried it and went half nuts trying to make that thing work. That's what they
told me later, but I never heard of anybody making it work. It was fabulous.
The next problem I got into was electrical. All of our dynamite charges were set
off by electricity, and we had equipment that was designed to fire up to fifty
holes simultaneously with an electric blasting cap down in each hole in the
dynamite. Well, all the powder men I ever knew were willing to accept a certain
small percentage of their holes as misfires, that didn't set the dynamite off.
And there probably isn't anything much more dangerous around dynamite work than
a misfire. You have to dig a dang misfire out, you may blow your head off.
Everybody is afraid of misfires but they were, said they had to have a few, so
I didn't believe that. I got to studying the length of time the current was
coming out of a blasting machine and I got to studying wiring circuits and how
you had to make hook -ups so that you were positive, and if the wiring was right.
How you tested them with a galvanometer to know that your resistance is right and
that they are all balanced circuits and all that sort of thing. I even developed
a method of parallel series unbalanced lasting circuits where I could blast up
to 168 holes simultaneously with a fifty hole machine. And with the other care
140
that I developed in it, I stopped those misfires. I never knew of a misfire that
I had in the last seven years that I worked at dynamite work. I won't say there` °
weren't any, there is always a possibility, but I never knew of one and I never
found any indication of one. Nowadays they have another method, they not only
use the electric wiring system, but they connect each hole with what, with a
material called cordite. Gives two possibilities of everything being detonated.
We didn't have cordite though when I was working, but I did eliminate those
misfires. And most of the study and the work in eliminating them came from after
hours work.
I don't know whether you call this sort of thing a hobby or not. Maybe some of
them were, maybe some of them were not, I don't know, but I know that the next
one I tackled was more closely tied up with what you could call a hobby because
it was not job connected. It was a definite improvement in the lighting system
on my old Pontiac Coupe car. In 1938 when I tackled that proposition, the lights
weren't very good on automobiles. Sealed beams had not yet been developed. All
motor vehicles operated on six volt systems instead of the 12 volt system they
have now. And they used what was known as generators to make the electricity to
keep the battery up instead of what they call alternators now. Thirty -two candle
power light bulbs, I think was the brightest that were allowed in the headlights
in those days, and they were not very bright. Most of our driving, if we got to
go anyplace, was at night. There wasn't much traffic on the road, you weren't
facing lights a great deal of the time, but I never could see very good because
of my eyes anyway, so I needed better lighting at nighttime. I could put some
additional lights on the car, I mounted a couple of headlights on the bumper as
well as the regular headlights, but then I had trouble keeping the battery up
and, because of the extra lighting, they were operating at a little lower voltage
than would give the most efficient lighting. So I got to scratching around
trying to figure how to make a better lighting system on that Pontiac.
I wasn't that good a mechanic or that good an electrician that those kind of
things came easy to me. Twas a lot of study and a lot of experimentation, some
of which worked and some of which didn't work, but after two or three months, the
end product was a pretty good device. I had put two extra headlights on the
bumper, I had put an extra generator, so now the car was running two generators
instead of one. I had enlarged the wire sizes on most of it because the
resistance to flow of the six volt line is a little too much. Enlarging the wire
put a little more current through. I had put relay switches on everything, I had
five relay switches so as to shorten the wiring circuits. And with that
equipment I was generating current all the time, no matter what my consumption
was so that it didn't not run the battery down. The way it worked was that when
I hit my dimmer switch, three things happened. The two extra lights on the
bumper went out, the two regular headlights dropped their light beam down to low
light beam, and the extra generator quit charging. Then when I hit the dimmer
switch again, the regular lights raised to the normal headlights, the ones on the
bumper came on, and the extra generator went to work. And along with my relay
switches that meant that I was getting about 7 to 7 -1/4 volts to my lights
instead of the normal 6. Well, I had a brilliant set of lights. On dark nights
on a straight road, I could count as many as eight telephone poles in my lights.
Boy, that output looked like airplane landing lights. You had to be careful not
to leave on peoples faces when we were meeting, but the traffic wasn't so heavy,
you didn't meet people too often. Those lights were so bright that I had to not
use them when I was on the snow. It made too much light and hurt your eyes.
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Well, I know that was an innovation. Boy!
When I traded the Pontiac off in 1942, I installed the same system on to my new
Fleetwood Cadillac and used it as long as I had that Cadillac. In 1939, sealed
beam lights had come out and so I had replaced all of the Cadillac lights, the
normal headlights, plus the ones I had installed on the bumper. I had put in
sealed beam headlights with each one being a fifty candle power light instead of
the thirty -two candle power that was the limit before. And boy, they were
something, and I never had any problems with batteries running down, and I
lengthened the life of the battery I was using a great deal from then on. I took
that system down to Oakley Electric, Oakley Automotive or Oakley Electric, I
don't know which it was, there on Idaho Street in Boise, I think in about 1942
or '43 when I got it in the Cadillac. And the head mechanic there at Oakley's
called all the other mechanics over, shut down the shop for a little while while
they studied that system through. And within a couple of months, they had it
installed on to all of the Boise busses. They were using Mack trucks for busses
running around the town at that time and, of course they operated nights too and
they had all those inside lights, and they were always having trouble keeping
their batteries up and keeping their lights bright and so forth. So they
installed that system on their bus system in Boise. So I know it was a good
system. I loved it. Well that was for me, that was not for work, I know that
was a hobby item. My efforts to improve things around me were, that was a hobby
with me.
I had tackled another job too that I don't know whether you would call that hobby
or not, I think it was. In about 1936 or '37 I decided to build Bertha and I a
trailer house. Trailer houses were not around in those days like they are now.
There was a little talk about them and you could occasionally see some plans in
something like Popular Mechanics or Popular Science on how to build a little
trailer house or something, but that's about all there was in trailer houses in
1936. But the Forest Service was moving me enough by '37 that I wanted one. So
I designed one, one without a frame, believe it or not. I had designed a truss
made out of steel rods inside the walls so that it did not need a frame and it
could be very low and reduce the weight quite a lot and make it a very rigid
little trailer. It was eight feet by twenty feet. And I spent my spare time for
a year and a half or so building that. Maybe it was a hobby, I don't know.
Anyway, we moved into it in French Creek. And in 1938, late in '38, moved it
back to Riggins and lived in it in Riggins. And kept it until I moved to Council
with the service station in Council in 1940, think I sold it early in 1941. But
it was really an innovation in those days. There wasn't another one in our
camps, no place, no one else had one.
The war came along and that old 1938 Fleetwood Cadillac I had, late in '41 and
early in '42, with Morrison Knudsen making me travel quite a bit and gasoline was
rationed. Oh boy. And it was quite a struggle to get the ration tickets you
need, so I found that Naptha Cleaner was not rationed, and I started experi-
menting with it and found that I could do some modifications to the old Cadillac
and I could operate on Naptha Cleaner. So I built an additional gas tank, a
thirty -five gallon gas tank and put it in the back of the Cadillac and that gave
me a fifty -five gallon capacity and I could travel quite a long ways without
having to refill. Had to put a couple of extra leaves in the springs in the rear
of the Cadillac to handle the extra load, but it worked out alright. And I ran,
oh, as long as I was working for M -K and some time thereafter, on Naptha Cleaner,
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as long as I was having to do a lot of driving of the car. Got along very well
Guess it did not hurt the old Cadillac any. When I finally got rid of it ill
1952, it had 275,000 miles on it. But, my most innovative efforts were still to
come later.
One started in 1951 when I purchased that little Harley Davidson 165 in the fall
of 1951. It was a new motorbike. See that bike cost $425.00 when it was new.
You know, motorbikes, of course, are made to fit everybody. Big men, little men,
middle sized men, anybody at all, they are supposed to fit everybody, which
really is not so and, as a result, they do not fit anybody very well. Sort of
like trying to put same size pants on everybody. It won't work. So I decided
to make some modifications on that little bike, and one of those modifications
was to make it fit me. I am a large man, fairly heavy, and it was a small bike,
165cc. So I started doing modifications, raised the handlebars, and put them
further forward, put on a larger seat, put in a larger gas tank, moved the pedals
below, put on different springs for the seat, put on different springs in the
spring mounts in front. But that was just part of it, I wanted to pretty the
bike up also. The original bike had held one and three quarters gallons in the
gas tank and I fitted a gas tank to it that held four gallons. I made crash
guards for it, chuckle, and I made a front stand for it, an automatically
retracting front stand. Crash guards and the front stand were made out of 4130
chrome melignium steel, commonly known as tool steel. They only added a weight
of about two and a half pounds to the whole bike, but they were very strong.
Expensive dang stuff, aircraft tubing that's what it was. Cost me about $2.50
a pound when normal steel was selling for five cents a pound. And I put on a
special windshield and windshield mounts.
All in all, the modifications that I made to that motorbike cost more than the
bike did new. And a lot of those modifications had been relatively cheap. I
paid some of the G.I.'s at the Airbase to do some of that work in their machine
shops and welding shops and so forth after hours, and they didn't charge very
much for the work, and they did good work. But my total investment in the bike
after I was done, total investment in the modifications that I made in that bike,
were just about equal to what the new cost had been. Well, that was a lot of
fun. It was a beautiful little bike, and I used it for years for scooting around
here and there on short trips. As I say, I think I kept it thirty -four years and
I think I drove it over 50,000 miles.
Continuing with a description of my hobbies and some details on that last little
motorbike I had. I think I sold the bike here in Emmett, Idaho in about '85 or
'86. A gal came along and saw that bike and thought she had to have it, so I
sold it to her for $400.00, just about what it cost new. And the last I heard,
she had it setting in her front room in her home, where nobody could get ahold
of it and mess it up any. Course, that's been seven or eight years ago, I don't
know whether she is still doing that or not, but I don't think you could you get
it from her at any price. I know who she is, I'll ask her one of these days what
she is still doing with it.
Well, by far, my most extensive hobby work was in photography, which I have
mentioned before in these tapes. And the copy stand that took me eight months
to design and build and $250.00 to buy the material for it, was really the most
extensive part of that photographic hobby work. And, as I said, I have continue
to do photographic copy work for the full thirty -five years after I built that
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machine, still do it some. It is all set up, ready to go, all the time here in
my basement. But there was quite a lot of other photographic work that I got
into in that, improvement, building gadgets and devices to produce what I wanted
better, and to cover my vision limitations.
Most of my own photography for myself has been done on slides. Oh, some copy
work, but copying onto slides rather than on to prints has been my primary
interest. And I've developed a lot of slide shows over the time and most of the
time I have used what is called LaBelle Projectors. LaBelle Projectors have been
obsolete for over thirty -five years. So there's no possibility of getting any
parts for them or anything like that, except projections bulbs, projection lamps,
but otherwise, nothing is available. But I have liked those projectors. I like
the kind of magazines they have and how they function and how they operate.
Over the years, I've purchased three of them. Far as I know, I have got a corner
on them, I don't know anybody else anyplace that has a LaBelle Projector. But
I've got three of the remote controlled LaBelle Projectors. I mean the slide
changing is controlled remotely, but they did not have a focusing control that
was remote. With my eyes, I cannot stand back at the projector and tell whether
it's in focus or not. I have to be right up close to the screen before I can
tell whether the projector is in focus or not. So I had to design a system that
would make those LaBelle Projectors into a remotely controlled focusing system.
Well I've got it here in my home in Emmett, and it is more accurate than any
focusing system I've ever seen on any projector. Works beautifully. And I
wanted to get the sharpest possible pictures I could get on the screen I could
get you know. So I bought a Lica three inch projection lens, and then had to
build a mounting tube to put the lens in, so it could be used in the LaBelle
Projector. So that was another thing that was pretty complicated design but it,
too, gives me a beautiful picture on the screen now.
And there's quite a lot of other photographic equipment that I have designed and
built so that I could do my work with it better even though with my limited
vision, special focussing frames, illuminated slide sorters, special air
circulation system so that the projector would not overheat the slides and many
other special devices. I don't know whether you would say that I had a hobby of
photography or that I had a hobby of improving and changing photographic
equipment. I really think that the modifying and the building of special
photographic equipment that I have done was, was quite a little bit more of a
task than my actual photographic work. Certainly required one heck of a lot more
innovation, planning, designing and construction and all that sort of thing. And
I think that part of it was my hobby.
Well, I got into another one when I bought this house at Emmett in 1970. This
house had been wired for electricity in 1917 when it was built and about all that
amounted to was for a lighting system. Very few outlets had been put around the
walls at that time, if any, I guess there was one or two I found one or two that
were of the design that was available in 1917. But most of them had been
installed later and the Cummings family, that had this home, had had a relative
of theirs that a sort of a shade tree electrician you know. He had put electric
outlets in many of the rooms around the house, a lot of additional wiring to take
care of the load of additional electric appliances that had been added to their
inventory over the years, and from 1917 to 1970 that was quite a load.
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Well, one of my first jobs when I got into this house was to check out the wiring
system. And I found quite a few circuits that were overloaded, from the
standpoint of safety at least, they were overloaded. And I found some rather
questionable wiring. It was all based on fuses instead of circuit breakers,
which is alright, I have no objection to that. Matter of fact, maybe it was
better. I might have not been able to find those faults in the wiring system if
it had had circuit breakers instead of fuses. But anyway, I did find some errors
in the wiring. There was two places in this house where, by removing one fuse,
I could cause two 110 volt circuits to go from 110 volts to 220 volts in series.
All it took to cause those two circuits to go from 110 parallel to 220 series was
for just one fuse to burn out. And that possibility was in two places in the
system.
Well, as I said before, I'm not a licensed electrician, I'm not a licensed
plumber, I'm not a licensed any of those sort of things, but over the years I've
had to learn some things about them. And I did not know about tackling that job.
So I went downtown and had a talk with the Idaho Power people and they weren't
interested in talking to me about it even. So I went to the commercial
electricians and they wouldn't tackle the job of finding the trouble either.
They would tackle the job of completely rewiring my whole house, which really
would have been something in this old house. I really couldn't find anybody
interested in trying to find what was wrong with my system. So, I had little
choice, I had to go to work and try to find it myself. So, I got me a piece of
wire fifty feet long, insulated wire, and a continuity tester, and put Mary out
at the back porch at the fuse box. Cut the power off to the whole house and
started travelling all over the house with the other end of the wire checking
through the circuits for continuity. I think Mary and I spent a significant part
of the time for over two weeks tracing out all these circuits in this house
before I began to get a picture of where it was crossed up. Well, the Cummings'
electrician had really fouled us up. Fore I was done changing the wiring in
here, I had thrown away over 400 feet of the wiring that had been done in the
basement, and replaced with it with simple wiring. For us, that was quite a
project but we corrected all the errors in the wiring without any expense.
Chuckle. Quite a deal.
And, of course, I did a lot of modification in the kitchen after we moved here
too and I think that was hobby work. I am not a carpenter, I was just having fun
doing work around here. I don't know whether many of these things were hobbies
or not, but the changing, improving, correcting deficiencies in certain designs
and so forth has been such a strong part of my life that, has taken so much of
my interest, that might have put in some other kind of a hobby that I call it my
hobby.
Well, my major hobby since we moved, however, has been our camping trips to the
mountains. For the first eighteen years of the time we were here that was the,
probably our major Summer activity, Spring, Summer and Fall, really. Other
things left mostly for the cold weather times.
Another somewhat minor on and off hobby that I've had during most of my life is
playing the game of chess. My Father taught me how to play chess when I was
eight years old and I've always enjoyed the game, and I've taught a lot of people
how to play. I remember I taught all the firemen in the fire department at
Caldwell how to play, and I taught a quite a lot of the CCC boys up in the forest
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how to play chess. And in both of those cases, it ended up that they later were
having occasional tournaments, chess tournaments, that is.
I think my major Wintertime hobby for the past twenty years has been reading.
Never did read very much before, except at work, but for the last twenty years
I've done a great deal of reading. Course, can't see to read so I do it with
these Living Books they call them, that I get from the Library of Congress.
That's books on tape and in cold weather I'll average two or three books a week.
About every two months, we get a catalogue with three or four hundred of the
later books listed and we order what we want from that catalogue, and the Idaho
State Library for the Blind then sends us those tapes, and as I finish them I
return the tapes to the Library there in Boise. That is a fabulous program for
people who are unable to read. Most of my selections have been on science
subjects or astronomy or things of that nature, but quite a lot of them have also
been on history and biographies of famous people. Many, many different subjects
in fact. I only have one rule in what selections I make, there is no fiction.
I think there are so many facts in this world that are tremendously interesting
that I do not need to spend my time reading fiction, and I have hardly scratched
the amount of facts that there are in the world anyway.
I think probably my favorite authors are Carl Sagen, Issac Isamove or James
Mitchner, but there's lots of others that are excellent also. I can't think of
a better hobby that I could have in my condition now where I can't read and I
can't drive a car, and many physical activities are getting difficult to
accomplish.
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