A Long, Long Trail: Accounting for My Years

By Kent Gill

A long life fully lived might appropriately be documented in some concrete, long-lasting, retrievable form. So, at the risk of being charged with hubris, I here have accounted for those years, giving credit to ones who accompanied me along the way and implying the values that have motivated me. It has been a life of striving, of involvement, of reaching out for new experience, of celebrating successes and learning from failures. This journey has been deeply rewarding, taking me from the onion fields of Western Colorado to the tranquil forests of Central Oregon, through junior high classrooms and hotel conference rooms, over High Sierra passes, to the offices of government and to many foreign countries. Here I share that life story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 16, 2015
• ISBN: 9781499010800

Kent Gill

Kent Gill taught junior high students for thirty-eight years in English and History classes in three western states. He graduated from the University of Colorado in 1950, with graduate study following at the University of Oregon, University of California, Berkeley, and Harvard University. He and his wife, Lois Haverland Gill (she was also a teacher), are parents of three children, with six grandchildren and one great granddaughter. He was an outdoor enthusiast and visitor to the wilderness, mayor of Davis, California, director and president of the Sierra Club, advocate for environmental values, and leader in how to teach writing. In retirement in idyllic Camp Sherman, Oregon, he and Lois have “majored” in travel to four continents and across the U.S. They now winter in Arizona.

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Copyright © 2015 by Kent Gill.

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Rev. date: 01/12/2015

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Contents

Introduction

Down On The Farm

Childhood

Mother (July 31, 1904-May, 1990)

Dad (1905-2004)

Jerald Gill, My Brother

Grandma And Granddad Gill

Grandma Hall (1872-1950)

Family Background

In The Classroom—As A Student

Maple Grove Grade School

Montrose County High School

U.s. Army—An Interlude

University Of Colorado, 1947-50

Establishing A New Family Unit

Lois

Our First Years

Our Children

Laurie Susan

Kathleen Mara

Charles Howard

Allan Taylor

On To Oregon

The Springfield/Goshen Years

Cal Young Junior High School, 1953-1958

Life In Eugene, 1953-58

California, Here We Come

California, A Golden Opportunity?

Professional Growth Activities

Companions On The Trail

J.d. Herman

Dave Meyer

Herb Kariel

Del Bryant

Jacqueline Proett

Marcella Eddy

Howard Kasimatis

Elke And Erhard Dortmund

Where Nature Reigns, There Go We

Foot By Foot

Backpacking: A Way To Outdoor Adventure

Grand Canyon Adventure

Farewell To The Sierra

Sierra Club

Sierra Club

America, Broad And Beautiful

Across The Country By Automobile, 1996

Elderhostel Weeks

National Parks

Alaska

Shangri-La On The Metolius

A Quarter Century At Camp Sherman, Oregon

Winter Getaway

Escaping Winter

New Zealand

South Africa, 2004

Australia—1999

Patagonia

Wintering In Tucson

Travelers Abroad

Great Britain

Scandinavia And Switzerland, 1977

Central Europe, 1985

Eastern Europe, 2000

Euro-Railing, Fall, 1989

In Retrospection

Place— As A Concept And A Value

History As A Subject Of Interest

Music Delights Us

Politics

Theater

Peak Experience

INTRODUCTION

"I don’t want to get to the end of my life

and find I’ve just lived the length of it.

I want to have lived the breadth of it as well"

Diane Ackerman, Newsweek

My purpose in doing a life story is to record for people I care about (family and friends) an accounting of the time I have been granted, the opportunities that have been available to me, the achievements that have marked this passage, and the inevitable disappointments and shortcomings that are the price of such a passage. This is a life story which emphasizes US (my wife Lois and me) rather than just ME, since our marriage in 1950.

I am entitling this account A Long, Long Trail, detailing the life journey of a scrawny kid who in childhood lived on western Colorado sharecropper farms. I am narrating stories of childhood, school, college, and army life. I am doing character sketches of those most significant to that story: family members, friends, and colleagues, numbering ten or so people. I am developing both descriptive and analytical accounts of my thirty-eight years of professional life as a junior high teacher of English and history and as a leader in the field of English education, especially teaching composition.

Then I am demonstrating how an interest in nature and the outdoors led to significant service over many years for environmental causes and to avocations of hiking and backpacking, when the trail becomes a physical path through forests to mountaintops. A further narrative strand deals with foreign and domestic travel with its contributions to our appreciation of art, history, music, and culture as well as our outdoor interests. As well, time and continued good health in retirement have given my wife and me rich opportunities to volunteer in several settings, so I will detail those activities and their benefits, to the organizations and to us personally.

I intend this life story to speak to my values, but more through implication than in direct statement, feeling that values are best conveyed through actions, through behavior and then inferred by the reader. Place, a geographic space that holds special meaning and significance, will be an important concept to develop fully the sense of my journey. So I will focus on several of those places to illustrate, to celebrate my personal relationship to them; some of these pieces will be done in free verse, others in prose.

DOWN ON THE FARM

A kid in bib overalls crawls

down the onion row pulling weeds

Childhood

My Family

CHILDHOOD

Childhood, viewed through the span of so many years, takes on a golden glow. There was enough to eat, we had shelter, albeit in a different place every year or two and often in very spare houses at that, sufficient clothing, occasional medical and dental care (sometimes unreimbursed to the provider, I understand), some chores and then jobs, lots of good times with mother, father, brother, and extended family.

The Depression, although only background for my own life, must have been sorely trying to Dad and Mother: insufficient money, sometimes no job, low prices for farm crops (sometimes sold for less than the cost of growing them), pervasive feeling of despair all around on both the local and the national scene. Yet somehow, we children were shielded from those burdens. We must have heard discussion of the Depression at the dinner table, but the folks managed to keep those woes pretty much away from us. It marked our lives, I’m sure, but not really in a lot of obvious, harmful ways. We were poor, but so was everyone else. The really poor kids had lard on their sandwiches; we had a cow so we had butter on ours. Life was what it was, and our lives went on more in bliss than in travail.

Home and Food

Home in my childhood was a series of mostly small houses on farms occupied on a sharecropper basis: one-third of the harvest to the owner, two-thirds to the tenant. They were all located within a 2 1/2 mile radius in the Maple Grove School District. These were typically two-bedroom places on Spring Creek Mesa west of Montrose, single-wall construction, uninsulated but heated by coal, lighted by gasoline lamps. Water was typically from a drilled well or fetched in a bucket from a cistern. Hot water was heated in a reservoir on the side of the kitchen range or on top of the stove in a boiler or washtub. There was necessarily an outhouse situated a sanitary distance from the house, typically two-holers. A standard appliance was a slop jar where toilet functions could be carried out inside at night—with the results conveyed to the outhouse in the morning by one child or another. Electricity didn’t arrive until the late 30’s, courtesy of Western Colorado Power, competing in the face of the REA co-op advancing into their territory.

There was always a good-sized garden. I believe the garden truck was not shared officially with the owner. I remember Dad taking us into the garden, pulling a turnip, peeling it with his pocket nife, and cutting it into slices for us to eat on the spot. Mother, on the other hand, took us into the garden to harvest peas or beans or beets, at least for the day’s dinner, but also to be used for canning—basketfuls of them. Thus after lots of preparation (shelling the peas, snapping the beans, cleaning and peeling the beets, washing the tomatoes, all of which we helped to do); these vegetables were packed into jars and subjected to pressure cooking, so the contents were sterilized and the jars sealed. Then the jars were stored in the cellar, sunk below the ground level and covered over with a log ceiling covered with earth to provide some insulation. Pickles would be cured in big earthenware crocks and covered by a plate weighted with a rock. There would be bins in the cellar for potatoes, onions, and other root cops. This food preserved at the cost of much direct labor, mostly by the women, but essentially free from the garden, provided healthful foods through the winter.

There were always animals requiring a barn, a corral, and a pasture. We had three workhorses, Pet and Ralph, purchased as a team, and Old Blue (who was actually white) who was either teamed with the others for plowing or used alone to pull smaller implements. Once a fellow driving by stopped to ask if Ralph had come from eastern Colorado. He said that a horse that looked just like Ralph had been a champion bucking horse at rodeos there. We doubted if it had been Ralph; he was gentle and a tremendous puller. We had never tried to ride him; maybe that was a good thing. We always rode Pet and she tolerated us just fine.

There were cows in varying numbers from two to five, but managed so we always had fresh milk. Dad preferred Holsteins since they produced more milk, but some of the neighbors always had Jerseys, since their milk tended to be richer with cream. The cream was separated from the milk in a hand-turned machine. Sometimes, if we had extra, the cream was sold to the dairy for cash. There was a donkey, named Jack, of course, who pulled the implements used in the onion fields. We bought Jack in Coal Creek, so Dad had Jerald and me ride him home. He had a very flat back, so our short legs stuck out almost horizontally, a most unnatural and uncomfortable position. When we got up the next morning, Jack was gone,. He had gone back home. So we had to go and ride him back to our place again. After that we kept him in the corral. There were sheep sometimes, but we grew them for wool, not for meat.

We had pigs, which were fed kitchen and garden scraps, extra milk, and maybe a bit of grain sometimes. They were raised to be slaughtered, butchered on the farm and turned into hams, bacon, sausage, lard, and pork chops. Slaughtering and butchering the pigs was a family activity. I remember Uncle Bill shooting the animal, and Dad and Granddad stringing it up by the back legs on a single tree to have its throat cut and to bleed out. Then the carcass would be doused in water heated to boiling in a barrel over a wood fire, to soften up the coarse hairs so they could be scraped off. Then as the carcass was cut up, pieces of fat were tossed into a cast iron kettle about a yard across which was heating over the fire so the fat could be cooked or rendered, then cooled so it hardened and could be stored in buckets as lard, in an operation supervised by Grandma. The carcass was cut up into chops and hams, the scraps ground up into sausage, and the meat over the ribs cured into bacon.

We always had chickens; Dad and Mother preferred White Rocks, Aunt Nellie chose Leghorns, and Grandma always ordered Buff Orphingtons. These were to provide both eggs and meat. In the spring the folks would order 200 baby chicks from a hatchery, to be delivered by the rural route mailman in a big, flat box with air holes to provide oxygen. We’d put the chicks in a bigger box placed behind the kitchen range where the chicks could stay warm, not transferring them to the chicken house until they were several weeks old. As they became eating size (by June), we’d select a rooster, identified by a larger red comb, each day, chop his head off, and plunge him in a bucket of boiling water so we could pluck off his feathers. Then he’d be gutted and butchered, fried in lard with the pieces coated with flour, all accomplished between 10 a.m. and noon, the time for our dinner. Beginning then we’d have fried chicken with mashed potatoes and gravy most every day for the next 100 days. Dad got the gizzard, Mother and I the liver, and Jerald the heart. The pullets (female chickens) were kept to lay eggs, so we could have fried eggs for breakfast. There were enough eggs for deviled eggs, eggs in potato salad, and an occasional angel food cake, made from scratch for special occasions. Sometimes there were extra eggs to take to town where they’d be exchanged for flour or sugar or some other staple.

We seldom had fruit trees on these sharecropper places. But Grandma Gill had planted a household garden and orchard many years before, and she would invite us over to harvest her surplus sour cherries, plums, apricots, and apples. Peaches were almost a standard fruit for dessert, but since peach trees did not do well in the Uncompaghre Valley, we’d usually purchase the fruit from Palisade in late summer and can them in quart jars. There were cucumbers to be preserved as pickles and lettuce to be used through the summer and root vegetables to be preserved in sand in the cellar.

As you can see, we ate quite well, even if not having the most nutritious diet or the most variety. When hunting season came around in the fall, we usually had venison (deer or elk), the product of a hunt in the mountains. Mother sometimes canned some of the venison to have it available in the winter. We didn’t eat much beef. Until there was a locker plant in town, there was no way to preserve beef at home. Once we got a locker in a freeze room in town, we’d butcher a steer and have him cut up into family-sized packages. That meant a lot of round steaks, cooked to the well-done stage. The folks were always concerned that some of the choice cuts of meat were diverted to other people’s lockers by the butcher.

Clothes

For male children in Colorado in the 30’s, clothing was a uniform blue chambray shirt, bibbed denim overalls, high-top shoes and in winter long woolen underwear. If we got the wheat harvested and sold before school started, there would be money enough for new clothes, If not, we wore faded overalls with patched knees. In winter we did have heavy coats. woolen stocking caps and mittens, and overshoes. At school the outerwear was hung on hooks in the hall, ready to be retrieved for recess.

Washing clothes was a difficult and complex task. Early on, Mother washed clothes in a zinc tub by rubbing them on a washboard, then rinsing them in a second tub, and hanging them on a clothes line outside. Then we got a washing machine powered by a gasoline motor. When electricity became available, we got a washing machine that agitated the clothes in warm, soapy water. Then they were pulled out and run through a wringer to squeeze out the soapy water, after which they’d be run through one or two rinses, one of which had had bluing added to it. In winter, clothes would freeze on the clothesline. There were stories about the corners breaking off of frozen sheets when the wind blew, but I never saw evidence of that. Lois reported that they also had a washing machine run by a gas motor, since they did not have electricity either.

Bathing was a chore which tended to occur regularly on Saturday night in the kitchen, whether we were dirty or not. We’d fetch water in one of the washtubs and heat it on top of the stove. When the water was warm, we’d set it up on the floor and vacate the room to give Mother some privacy. She’d stand in the tub and wash and rinse. After she was dry and dressed, it was Dad’s turn, in the same water, then me, and finally little brother. What a pain to be the youngest! The hard water caused the soap to curdle, and the hot water had gone cold. At least we were small enough for a while to sit down in the tub. The stove kept the room somewhat warm, so the procedure was not totally uncomfortable. The tub of water was then carried out the back door and tossed onto the ground.

I still remember the luxury of my first recalled experience with a bathtub. Miss Hotchkiss, a teacher who was boarding with us, took us home to Colona one weekend to her parents’ house. She drew a bathtub of warm water out of a spigot, plunged both of us and her little brother into it, and let us splash and play before we got scrubbed down. Then she pulled a plug and the water drained away. What an invention!

Playtime

We had lots of opportunity for play, usually just Jerald and me, although we got together often with cousins Loyd and Bob when we lived close to them. On winter evenings (after homework) we’d play cards (rummy, hearts, poker). We’d keep score to determine winners, but gambling was forbidden. We also enjoyed board games. We had a Parchesi and Loyd finally got a Monopoly. I was envious of his having Monopoly until he invited us to play with him. I remember a Monopoly game lasting several hours, while the parents played a card game in the other room. We had dominos, too.

Radio was big in our growing-up years. There were serial shows offered five days a week in late afternoon. We listened to Little Orphan Annie and Jack Armstrong. These shows featured premiums—decoders for their secret messages, rings, badges—for which you sent in a small amount of money and product identification like a box top. I was a fan of I Love a Mystery. Each episode was complete, but characters and settings would often be continued for weeks. Then there was the weekly Lux Radio theater, a dramatic series, and the comedy shows featuring Fibber McGee and Molly, Jack Benny, and Bob Hope (Thanks for the Memories). The radio was powered by a car battery—until we got electricity. Reception was quite good; we sometimes even got a clear channel station from Del Rio, Texas, maybe actually transmitting from Mexico, where the rules were more lax. We listened to KFXJ in Grand Junction, especially for news, weather, and the crop and livestock markets. Montrose did not get a radio station until after I left home.

Our outdoor play was often derivative of the cowboy movies we saw when we were in town for Saturday shopping (movies cost a dime). Then we’d craft elaborate narrative sequences, featuring cap guns, stick horses, bar room settings, sheriffs, wild Indians, and always the good guys and the bad guys. Often these would run for several days, maintaining the roles and the story line with much I shot you and No, I shot you first. Especially in the summer, these involved Loyd and Bob as well as cousin Lyle Akey when he was up from Grand Junction to stay with Grandma Gill. At one house there was an old icehouse, with a foot or so of sawdust spread on the floor. Since it was no longer used to store ice for the winter, we made it a locale for our imaginative play.

Hunting and fishing were important to Dad, so we often had family trips into the mountains, occasionally camping overnight. I remember a fishing trip where we hiked along the recently abandoned D&RG rail line from Cimarron to the Gunnison River. There we had to cross the river on a railroad trestle. I’m sure now I was too thick to fall between the ties, but I was afraid to cross. Finally Dad shamed me into it. Jerald got carried across. Our fishing there consisted of sitting on a rock, baiting the hook with an earthworm, casting it into the head of pool or eddy, and letting it drift downstream; we were waiting for a fish to strike the bait.

When we got older, we went with Dad, Uncle Harold, and sometimes Granddad Gill for the opening day of fishing season the last weekend in May. We’d get up at 3:30 a.m. so we’d be a mile up the Gunnison River from the Sapinero bridge when it got light. I recall our all catching our limits and having wonderful fish fries when we got home, the trout dipped in cornmeal and fried, eating them with Mother’s light, airy biscuits and honey. It was bitterly cold those mornings, especially when we had to deal with wet fishing line. Alas, those fishing holes have long been covered by the lakes created by the three-dam hydro-electric project. There’s still good fishing there but it involves trolling a lure behind a noisy, smelly motorboat.

Another premium for getting older was getting to accompany the men on pheasant and deer hunting expeditions. These were serious outings designed to put food on the table. The role for the kids was to cover territory along side of or in front of the men, who carried the guns, to flush the game so they could shoot them. We were human hunting dogs, I guess. Of course, I eventually got old enough to carry a gun and on two occasions to fill my license, once with a four-point buck and once, by mistake, a yearling fawn. I remember those times fondly, feeling with pride the companionship of the men, as if we were being eased into adulthood. It was pleasant to walk through the aspen groves in autumn. Now I’d settle with joy for the walk, without the hunting. I’ve lost my Daniel Boone quality along the way.

Church and Religion

Mother apparently felt an obligation to give us some religious experience. Dad was very quiet on the subject; only much later did I realize that he was very negative about religion. Apparently when his maternal uncle Joe came to visit, he would pray for such long periods in blessing the meal that the hot food had gone stone cold. When we were about school age, we started going to Sunday school at the United Presbyterian church. That meant getting dressed up, being driven to town for that hour on Sunday morning. I don’t remember the instruction much—memorizing the names of the books of the Bible in order and reciting the Twenty-third Psalm. I do recall there were points adding up to rewards for accomplishing certain tasks.

There were special events for the kids at the point of religious holidays. The cradle roll teacher, Mrs. Reynolds, always made stuffed animal toys for her class at Christmas. We were too old for that. These gifts were presented to the children at a special holiday affair which also included treats for us all (hard candy, an orange, a popcorn ball). I remember Mrs. Warner as being a very friendly, very gracious lady. And I recall Rev. Warner taking a group of us older boys on a summer camping-fishing trip to the Cimarron. Only much later did I discover that he had been a Western Colorado leader in achieving special designation for the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, which is now a national park.

Jerald and I eventually were baptized and enrolled as Presbyterians. Neither of us has followed up with that commitment. Christianity did not fill any deep need for me, I guess.

4-H Club

When I was old enough, ten I think, it seemed natural to get involved in 4-H club (Heart, Hands, Head, and Health). Not all of the farm kids took advantage of that opportunity. The leaders were volunteers, mostly parents, with specific support in organizational guidelines and program by people from the extension service office. We were expected to keep careful records of our projects, attend meetings, apply what we were learning in skill sessions, and show at the county fair.

My first project was raising Suzy Q, a lamb rejected by its mother, a gift from Miss Jacobs, my fourth grade teacher, and showing her at the 4-H fair in August. That meant I had to learn how best to care for a lamb and to prepare her to show. The quality of the Hampshire breed Mr. Jacobs preferred and my application of what I’d learned led to her gaining the blue ribbon is her class and then the purple ribbon for the grand champion sheep in the show. I felt rewarded for my work.

Every year at the 4-H fair there was a calf-catching contest. A dozen ranchers would each donate a steer born that spring. Twenty-four boys would be qualified to enter the contest. The boys would enter the pen in front of the grandstand; the calves would be herded through the opposite end, and the chase was on. The boys who haltered a steer and led him from the arena were given ownership of the animal, with the obligation to care for him for the year and show him at the fair the following August.

I entered the event the first year I was eligible. I was an also-ran. I failed to catch a calf again the second year; aggressiveness was rewarded, and I was not very big nor very fast nor very aggressive. Finally, the last year we were on the farm, I got hold of a calf by the tail; the halter goes over the head, at the other end. He led me around that arena many times that hot afternoon. I was wearing the bright red silk shirt my mother had made me for the school pageant in May. People said my face turned the same red as the shirt. At one point I dropped the halter, then managed to steer the steer close to it so I could pick it up (or did someone kick it over to me?) Boys caught calves, haltered them, and led them from the arena. Soon my calf and I were the only ones left—except for the twelve lads who had so far been skunked; they were praying I would lose hold of my calf. Finally, with both my calf and me exhausted, I managed to work my way to where I could slip the halter over his head. Then we wearily made our way to the gate, and Happy was mine. The crowd cheered; the twelve losers resolved to try again the next year. There would have been no next year for me.

Dad had been busy stacking hay that day, so he had not come to town. We loaded the calf in the stake bed truck, tied him down, and Mother drove us by the hay operation on Granddad’s place. Dad seemed pleased. He offered to pay for the rolled oats we decided to feed, and we used hay from the barn. Then I could put the proceeds of his sale as a baby beef in a savings account for college.

I enjoyed working with Happy, feeding him, washing him, breaking him to lead and to show, and he thrived. The following summer I was complimented by the county agent on what a good job I had done. He had grown into a square, chunky Hereford yearling. I had high hopes for the judging; I wanted anther grand champion. When the time came, Happy behaved himself in the judging ring, but when the results were announced, Happy placed seventh in the class of twelve. The judge had been Dan Thornton, a rancher who later became governor. Some observers maintained he used breeding criteria to make his placements instead of beef production criteria, pretty unreasonable, since steers no longer have any reproductive capability.

The next day was the auction, the best bid being 14 1/2 cents a pound. Mr. Allen, a Montrose restauranteur, bid 14 cents a pound for Happy. We felt redeemed. Since Happy weighed nearly 1000 pounds, I received a check for almost $140, which seemed like a fortune. I marched the check down the street and put it into a saving account at the First National Bank. Mr. Ackard, the bank president, personally congratulated me, a 13-year old, on my achievement. No, I did not go to the cafe to feast on a steak from Happy. He had been too much of pet for that.

4-H had been a valuable experience. We had been directly responsible for the welfare of our animals. We got some experience in judging the quality of animals; we learned how to how show an animal for judging; we had requirements to keep records; we were even asked to make oral reports, so there was public speaking experience. Our club had people doing projects with animals, garden and field crops, sewing, and cooking.

Reading

Reading was important to me. It had been easy to learn to read, and I enjoyed being on my own with something good to read. I checked out books at school and somehow Mother had managed to get us a new set of Book of Knowledge, a multi-volume set of topical articles on a wide range of subjects, including literature selections. I’m sure she paid for them on a monthly installment plan. I remember sitting reading those books by the hour.

Some of the time we had a subscription to Saturday Evening Post. I remember going to the mailbox to wait for the delivery so I could read the next installment of Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians or was its original title And Then There were None? No, I didn’t correctly figure out the one who was guilty of the murders on the isolated island. I thought he was dead. The Chases, with whom Mother had boarded when she was a single teacher at Maple Grove School, had saved years of Boy’s Life and Youth Companion, periodicals for boys, gifts from relatives in Chicago. Mrs. Chase would let me borrow several of these, on the promise that I could have more when I returned those. I really enjoyed these magazines with both stories and articles. I even remember a story about a boy who was marooned on Wizard Island at Crater Lake on the last day of the tourist season.

Chores

From the time we started school, we had chores—gathering eggs, feeding the pets and farm animals, carrying water in and out, helping Mother by drying the dishes as she washed. We had wonderful conversations as we worked. Much of this interchange had a strong values content—in the course of stories she told, she made it clear where she stood in cases of moral dilemma.

As we grew older, Dad and Mother expected more of us. By the time I was nine or ten, Dad expected us to participate in the weeding of the onion field. He would hire Mexican labor for the first weeding in June when the weeds could be quite thick, but more weeds would show up by July and August, and he had to have the cleanest, best-looking field in the neighborhood. So we were given the responsibility for the three subsequent weedings. At harvest time, we helped get the onions topped and into sacks, but that was quite heavy work and we were in school by that time of year, so our contribution then was limited.

There were some jobs considered too hard for us kids. The cows had to be milked twice every day, but when I first tried, I found it difficult to get the cow milked out completely. So I was never given the milking chore except on occasions when Dad was not available. Driving the horses was easier; they already knew what they were to do. Sometimes I was allowed (expected) to drive the team with the wagon; once I drove to town to get a tank of water at the firehouse spigot. Finally the last year on the farm, I was given the job of mowing the hay field. The horses pulled a mower with a sickle bar with blades sharpened to a fine edge which moved back and forth to cut the hay. I suppose there was some danger in the sharpened blades. Going with the corrugates which carried the water to the field was not too bad, but when I’d have to turn to go across them, I found the bouncing on the steel seat of the machine to be pretty trying.

Pets

We always had pet animals on the farm. There were cats which were expected to be mousers. We had several dogs over the years; they were fed table scraps. Nobody allowed pets in the house. The cats stayed in the barn, and the dogs had a doghouse. I hadn’t developed the allergies I have now, so playing with them, the dogs particularly, was great fun. We didn’t do much about training them. They just grew up naturally, I guess, and we’d tumble and chase with them. When one would die, we’d mourn a bit, bury the body, and replace it. I have seen a list on which Jerald had put down all our dogs by name. The best I could do is recall a Brownie and a Tippy, and much later, a Judy. There was the sad occasion when I came home for lunch from the first grade to be told that Dad had found both our dogs, including the new puppy, dead in the front yard, poisoned by meat laced with strychnine which someone had tossed over the fence. We never knew who did it or why; our dogs always stayed home.

I particularly remember Granddad Gill’s dog, Duke, who lived to be very old; at the end he was crippled, with arthritis, I suppose. One day Granddad found poor old Duke collapsed on the porch, so he lugged him out back of the barn and placed him on the manure pile. When he came back later to bury him, Duke was gone. He had revived and was walking in the orchard. He lasted another six months, the miracle dog of Maple Grove.

Holidays

Holidays were very special occasions, usually spent with Dad’s family—his parents, his sisters and brothers, and their children, our cousins. Thanksgiving and Christmas were both occasions for family feasts, with each family contributing a dish or two. Nobody had a big house, so the adults usually sat at the big table, and the kids were distributed around the house at card tables. I recall eating too much of the delicious food and being uncomfortable for the rest of the day. We kids would sometimes go out and run off the surplus; often the weather would be too cold or snowy. Afterward we would play table games.

The menu was actually quite standard—turkey, bread stuffing and gravy, mashed potatoes, candied sweet potatoes, apple salad, homemade rolls and jam, home-canned vegetables (green beans, peas, or beets), jello salad, pickles, and pie (pumpkin, with whipped cream, mincemeat, or apple). We might have bought the turkey and the sweet potatoes, but the rest was homemade or canned the previous summer; Some times there would be olives stuffed with pimento, definitely a grocery store item and surely a treat.

The Gill family also got together some years on the Fourth of July for a picnic. Sometimes we went to Ouray where we would get to splash around in the Radium Hot Springs pool. These times always included firecrackers, sparklers, and Roman candles and skyrockets at night back at home. Our pleasure in fireworks diminished after Uncle Harold was injured with a errant cherry bomb, when the house on the Wilson Place burned the year after we had moved when a firecracker apparently landed on the roof, and when one of our firecrackers ignited the grass on Harold’s potato cellar roof.

Mother’s family was not so centralized at Montrose, but some of her siblings were available for family gatherings on some occasions. And we traveled a bit to see them. One year Mother and we boys went to Laramie, Wyoming, to see Aunt Lyndy, and we traveled to Sargents beyond Gunnison where Enid and Loran were teaching in a two-teacher school and Grandma Hall in a one-room country school up a graveled road to the east of there. That time Dad and Loran went deer hunting—out of season—and were successful. I had to ride in the back seat with my feet on the poached deer carcass all the way back to Montrose. I was sure we’d be stopped by the game warden. But we did have venison that winter.

Since there was little money in those days, Christmas gifts were limited. But we always had a tree; only when we finally got electricity was it lighted. Mother’s sisters, Enid and Lyndy, often sent nice store-bought gifts; they both had regular income. And the grandmothers would somehow manage nice gifts. One year Jerald and I got little boxes from Santa. There was seventy cents in mixed coins in each box. Years later Mother told us how there had been no income from the crops that fall, so they divided all the money they had into two stacks, one for each of us. Actually we were delighted since that meant seven Saturday afternoon movies. Another year I opened a little box that contained fifty 22-caliber shells. I was once again pleased because I could do a lot of target practice with Dad’s 22. Then I opened a long, thin box. There was my very own single-shot 22 rifle. I wouldn’t have to borrow Dad’s any more.

Birthdays were always recognized, always with a special dinner. Often it featured angel food cake, which meant Mother or Grandma had cracked a dozen eggs, separated yolks from whites, and whipped the whites into stiff peaks with a hand egg beater; that’s no mean feat. Neither of us had summer birthdays, so no strawberries on the slices. There were gifts, too, of course, albeit something modest or something we needed anyway.

Being Cold

If winter is indeed here, can spring be far behind? Or will winter seem to go on forever? Winter was a long trial for me in western Colorado in the 30’s. As a skinny kid, I suspect I may have been more prone to suffer on cold days; the other kids didn’t seem to complain much.

My mother had done her best, with limited means, to outfit us for cold weather. We had long underwear, of 10% wool, which made us itch fiercely, especially just after the weekly bath. There were four-buckle overshoes; mine usually fit since I was the older and my brother got them as hand-me-downs. There were wool mittens and knit caps done by grandmothers and heavy coats. But the trek of a quarter of a mile through the snow to the bus stop was still a misery many of the days of winter. I can remember shivering till my teeth chattered, especially if the wind was blowing. My fingers would ache from the cold.

The temperature in the classroom depended on where you were seated. There was a big coal stove in the middle of the room. The obligatory, arbitrary seating chart left some of the students near the stove flushed from the heat and others out in Siberia. It never occurred to me to ask for one of the hot seats. That might have put me in the wrong grade!

Somehow it didn’t seem so bad at recess. We’d struggle into all that gear and play fox and geese or have snowball fights or build forts from snow blocks formed in the classroom wastebaskets, all warming activities,

Being home was not necessarily a relief from the cold. If we were seated close to the coal stove in the living room or helping Mother close to the kitchen range, the temperature was tolerable. Any place else in the house was likely to uncomfortably chilly on most winter nights So we vied for the stove-side spots. Playing cards or board games in front of the stove was a pleasurable winter evening activity.

Nights were very long in winter, not so much because of the tilting of the earth but more because the bedrooms were so icy. There was neither insulation nor heat in those rooms. If we complained about being too cold, Mother would pile on a wool comforter atop two blankets and a quilt. Then I wasn’t cold, but I felt weighted down as in some kind of a press. I recall nights when ice froze in the water glass on the bedside table. One time I remember snow had drifted inside on the window sill overnight. By morning the whole house was frigid until Dad stirred up the fire. So we had to struggle out of the warm bed to stand on the cold linoleum floor while getting dressed.

So I’m not patient with cold temperatures. My bow to conservation would be to turn the thermostat down to 73 degrees. I winter in Arizona to avoid the 28 degrees below zero experienced at our home in Oregon one December. The cold snap once caused a 32-hour power outage there; I’m sure many folks suffered. I am very glad to be in Tucson where it dips a bit below 32 a few nights, enough to make me complain.

MOTHER (JULY 31, 1904-MAY, 1990)

My mother, Lena Marguerite Hall, born in Oklahoma, moved with her family to Montrose, Colorado, in about 1912. The family farmed a property east of Montrose where they became acquainted with the Gills, recently arrived from Kansas. Then her father decided to undertake a lettuce-growing operation on Specie Mesa in San Miguel County above Placerville. They must have taken over an existing homestead. At that elevation, needless to say, the lettuce growing did not succeed, which was the story of that gradfather’s life. Mother attended a one-room elementary school there.

To go to high school Mother had to board in Telluride, a mining town past its glory days, maybe 25 miles away. She found a place with Judge Woy’s family, where she worked for her board and room at housekeeping duties. She became acquainted there with some of the finer things available to people with money—-sterling silver, fine china, crystal, good magazines, nice clothes. Years later after the war when she was teaching in Montrose, she finally had money enough to indulge in some those luxuries. Her sterling she eventually divided among her granddaughters. As a graduation gift, she gave me a fine Hamilton watch (which I later lost when the pin broke on a hike in the Coburg Hills near Eugene).

One year when we were home visiting in the summer, we took Mother to Telluride for the Fourth of July celebration. She told about the town druggist who collected the photos of the high school graduating classes for his store. He was reputed to be able to call these people by name many years after they graduated. So we dropped into the drug store, where the sets of framed photos hung on the wall. As we walked up to the pharmacy window, this old fellow in a white lab coat looked up, paused for only a moment, and said, Why, Lena, I haven’t seen you in a long time. It had been maybe 40 years. Remarkable! In town later, I found the drugstore gone. When I asked about the framed photos, no one could tell me what had happened to them.

There was, of course, no family support for her to go to college. Granddad Hall probably didn’t even approve of women going to college. Mother did go a few terms to Western State College in Gunnison. To finance this, she taught in one-room schools in high elevation areas where school was held in summer since winter weather was too cold and snowy for children to be out walking or riding their horses to school.

Then she got a job teaching at Maple Grove School, where she boarded with the Chases. They had come west from Chicago; Frank had decided to become a farmer. In the early Depression years they lost their farm to foreclosure. Mother related to Zina Chase as if she were her mother, and she became very fond of the Chase children, Fan, Bob, and Margaret. The Chases came from an urban Chicago family which had some wealth and social graces commensurate with their money, so Mother, a child of poverty, once again came in contact with a different way of life, which she cherished as superior.

Mother and Dad had known each other from childhood. With Mother teaching where Dad was living, they got married on May 22, 1927. I was born in 1928 and Jerald in 1930. So Mother had a family of her own.

One year (1932 or so) Grandma Hall expressed a desire to see her daughter Grace and her sister Mamie, in Arkansas and Iowa respectively. Mother offered to take her in our one-seated 1928 Chevrolet coupe. So that summer after school was out, we set off. Uncle Dick went as far as Wheatland, Wyomng, where he had a job. So there were five, then four, of us for three seating places. Jerald and I were put up on the ledge behind the seat sometimes. Roads were sometimes paved, but more likely graded gravel

I don’t remember that trip, except for it being talked about—except for the rain storm at Grace’s in Arkansas. The roof of this old cabin leaked, so under each leak Grace put a pot, a pan or a dish to catch the rain, until she ran out of receptacles. Did I really remember all those receptacles and all those drips? Or do I only imagine what it was like? That trip must have covered 4000 miles and several weeks. Mother was daring to do that, I think. But it was splendid for Grandma. Dad had gone up to Lake City with Uncle Mick during our absence, seeking a mining job that didn’t pan out.

Before long Mother was no longer teaching. She may have been eased out in a time when married women working was frowned on since it filled a job a man, a head of family, could have had. We boarded single teachers from Maple Grove School for several years; it can’t have been a very deluxe arrangement for them. But Mother became very close to some of these women and kept in touch with them for years after they quit teaching or married or moved away.

So she became a farm wife, one of whose duties was feeding the harvest crew. When it was time to put up hay or thresh grain, several farmers would get together, sometimes even hiring available young men, to make up the necessary crew of seven or eight. So at noon, Mother would feed the crew—and us. The menu was typically fried chicken with mashed potatoes and gravy, creamed fresh peas, wilted lettuce salad, iced tea, and a fruit pie for dessert. Most of the provisions for such a feed came fresh from the farm.

The house was Mother’s domain, but that included the chickens and the milk after it was taken from the cows. (Dad did the milking; I was never any good at it because my hands were not strong enough.) She always sewed much of her own clothing as well as stuff for us, using a treadle sewing machine. She even found time to do a bit of quilting and crocheting. There was housecleaning, canning of surplus vegetables and fruit, and spending time with us on homework and reading to us.

Of course, she was the home nurse. We had frequent colds in those drafty old houses, which colds had the tendency to end up in our chests with a harsh cough. She then administered a mustard plaster. She mixed a paste with dry mustard, spread it