Part 24 (1/2)

I showed hi at 15 cents He looked at theht bulbs You mean you sell them for 15 cents?”

I told hiot to make a little profit on thehed at Wes, and he laughed with us, for thinking he had found such a big bargain at Sater, and had overlooked a bigger bargain right at home

This shop ent on for about three months Then one day it rained and I closed up shop and went back to far at a dollar a day, I cleared about 3 a day in the shop

CHAPTER 17

WORLD WAR II WAS ON-WE WENT TO CALIFORNIA

Well, the Great Depression was not soain, but all in all it wasn't so bad We were broke, but then, so were our neighbors We had plenty to eat and wear-and we had each other The lean years seeether, we didn't have enough o our separate ways And of course we had our children

Dennis was ten and Anita was eight when Larry became one of the family in 1942 And then when he was six weeks old, the little tyke alood He was one sick little baby We took hiave hioat's oat that was giving oats that would be giving milk after the first one stopped It took awhile, but then I found a oats He didn't need theht all twelve of them

When we sold out a year later and went to California to get into ork, we bought goat's ot there In El Paso we bought oats He sold goats for as much as 80 each The ones we had at Royston were of the 4 variety I was glad the El Paso istered; we couldn't have afforded it

Bill Carriker, a neighbor at Royston, said Larry was sure going to be oat

When our two oldest kids were little bitty kids, and we had this two-holer off down there under the shade of a o down there and peep and see what those kids are doing They've been in there a long ti in there”

I peeped, all right, and found the with each other

As our country got deeper into World War II, the quality of kerosene ay down It didn't burn well enough in our Servel refrigerator to make the box cold, and it left a lot of soot on the wick So Ithe quality back up I told asoline in So they suffered arain I was out front, but ht I was crazy

We heated our Royston home with oil It was h we had plenty of wood, the oil proved to be cheaper than hauling and bothering with the wood

We had an oil heating stove that heated all four rooms of our house It would burn used lube oil with just a little kerosenestations in Hahted our heater in the fall and didn't shut it off until spring I kept an expense account one winter and our entire fuel bill was 12

By 1940 the price of cream was up and a year later it was up even ave a little ht a gasoline engine to run the separator and I startedcrea the cowsthree dollars a day and ere feeding the ski two dollars a day Oh boy! The depression seemed to be over for us But it turned out that this business had another side to it The as killing us

I sat thereand three hours in the afternoon, and the weather was hot By the time I had milked those twenty cows, I could almost swim in my oeat When I walked I could hear it squash in my shoes; and I set close to it There was only one good thing about it; it beatone cow, Anita was feeding the next one and getting her ready to beit into the separator which was being driven by the gasoline engine, and I after Larry

The kids alanted me to milk Old Pet last They could ride her out of the pen and up by the house as she went on her way to the field to graze They got a free ride home and Old Pet didn't h there were no kids around

But there was one day Anita fell off Old Pet They were riding the cow in the cow lot after a rain and the lot was boggy and messy Dennis was in front and Anita was on behind him The cow started under a low shed and Dennis realized that he would be dragged off it he didn't do so There was no way to stop the cow nor turn her, so Dennis did sorabbed hold of a joist above his head to avoid being dragged off into the filth below Meanti to hold onto, so she was forced off backward and landed in a sitting position, momentarily, until she lost her balance and fell backward in six inches of cow-lot slush

Guess what Inize her little girl, but she could tell where her little girl had been The evidence was not all on her back She had to roll over on her sto hair had quite a bit of evidence on theht us that coould do alrass a couple of hours in theand a couple of hours in the afternoon, as they would if they grazed all day, and the grazing would last twice as long So when the weather was dry and grazing was scarce, ould drive the cows out and close the gate after a couple of hours grazing eachThen ould turn them back in at four o'clock in the afternoon But this presented a problem We were not always home at four in the afternoon What could we do about that? Let the alarm clock turn theed it up and it worked perfectly It opened the gate a lot better than it built the fire in the wood heater many years before

We had no electricity on the farm until 1949 Before that tis to come Sometimes the summer heat teamed up with the lack of a breeze to make the weather almost unbearable But since I wasn't very well known in Washi+ngton at that tiress unit Instead, I did what I could on ine from the cream separator and put it on an oil drue fan blade on the shaft, aimed it toward a , cranked it up and let it blow air through theand all through the house It was far short of air conditioning like we have today, but it was a lifesaver sometimes, and it wasn't inflationary

Now, all this hard work, dry weather, inconveniences, and low far So in the fall of 1943 we toyed with the idea of getting into ork Later the toying became a definite plan which led to the purchase of a travel trailer In November we stored our furniture, left our farm machinery for Earl to sell, and headed for California We knew soone to California froes were fine We called it ork, but its purpose ofold, to help produce the weapons of war and to help the Clarence Johnsonsinto asn't all that easy