Author: Ronald Guenther
Written: May 5th, 2014

I should add a little bit more about the place the folks bought.  As I said, there was no refrigerator and so mom put things into jars and put them into the creek.  That was not as bad as it sounds.  Many people at the time would rent a lock down town where they would put the meat.  The folks also had a locker where they eventually put the pigs that were butchered, many of the chickens and so on.  Underneath the front porch was a pantry and mom would from that time on for the next four or five years store jars of fruit and vegetables that she had canned as well as jams and so on.  Half way down from the road to the house was a garage.  The car was parked there and there were a lot of tools that were needed to take car of the car.  Tires were always blowing out and so there was a tire iron, things for repairing the inner tubes and that sort of thing.  We had not been out there for more than about a week when there was a huge wind storm that came through.  The next day was, I believe, a Saturday, and it was beautiful and so the folks decided to take a walk up the road in the direction of Glasgow.  Things were not as grown up then as they are now and as they walked up the road, mom said, oh look, there’s a car down there.  Somebody has tome to see us.  Pop looked down and said, Well, we better get back home.  Then he paused and he said, Wait a minute, that looks like our car, that is our car.  Mom said, but then where is the garage?  The garage had blown away, it fact, the wind had lifted it up and flung it down by the creek.  Our water came from the creek and it was a gravity driven system.  A pipe was laid in the water.  We constantly had problems with it, too, and when the water would stop, pop would say, Well, I have to go up to the water power company and see what is wrong.  For years, I thought there was a water power company, with people up there.  There was no hot water in the kitchen or any where else, and when mom emptied the sink, a pipe took the dishwater out into a cess pool in the back yard between the kitchen window and the big maple tree.  But the pipe eventually rusted out and the water just ran out into the area under the kitchen window and down the path.  The cess pool collapsed and so there was a rather large indentation where the cess pool had once been.

So, the folks got in and started to make the place their own.  There was electricity in the barn and mom used that separator just once and then never again.  She got Uncle Dick to come out with his bulldozer and bulldoze out the turn-around.  Then the first appliance that she got was a refrigerator.  I remember they got it from the Sears Catalogue.  It was a kelvinator and I thought was pretty good, small by modern standards, though.  Pop also got in and started to make the place livable.  First he took out the wall between the kitchen and the dining room and then the wall between the dining room and the living room.  That opened up everything.  Then he took out the staircase and built another stairwell at the far North end of the living room and enclosed it.  We all slept in the upstairs bedroom at the head of the stairs.  The other bedroom and the hallway area was used for storage.  We started to eat the chickens.  Pop would cut off the heads of two or three chickens and leave them there just outside the kitchen door.  Pop hated killing anything, even the chickens, and later I was the one who killed the chickens, but initially, he did it.  When he chopped off the head of the chicken, though, he would turn away, and one time he chopped off a head but did not get it off cleanly and so the head was being held on but a noodle and was still alive.  Mom went out that morning to get the chickens and there was that undead chicken walking around.  She was so upset that she called up Uncle Dick to come out quickly and finish the job.  So, he did.  The harvest was pretty much over, there was still some corn and a few potatoes and so on, and we ate those up and prepared for next spring.  During that time we kept the horse so that pop could plow.  How he hated that plow.  During that winter, he got a big barrel and a small barrel and put a plaster around them and painted them white, he was so artistic, and put them on stumps right at the top of the hill where eventually we had that big slide.  He made a light house out of the big barrel and a home for the attendant out of the small one and then made a little bridge connecting the two.  It was really cute.  That hill had nothing really on it, so he cleared the brush and went to the sand hills and got some native rhododendrons and planted them as well as some pompous grass that mom wanted.  They were really busy that winter.  He also but down the hard wood floor after had had gotten rid of that staircase that had come out into the living room.  He would go to work at four in the morning, get up at three, work until noon and get home around one and then start to work.  Mom was no slouch, either.  She had three children and she took care of the livestock.  We ate quite a bit of chicken then.  Mom had names for the kinds, there were pullets (chickens about a year old), fryers, stewing hens.  With the stewing hens we had a lot of chicken and dumplings, the younger chickens were a bit more tender and she baked them and fried them and so on.  The next thing that had to go was that old wood stove, though, in the kitchen.  I saw one in the museum in Florence, Oregon last weekend, that looked a lot like the one we had.  It was nicer, ours was black with smoke and heavy use.  Mom really thought she had hit the jackpot though when she got her electric stove.  It was a GE if I remember right.  White like everybody had in those days.

But things changed dramatically in December when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and we entered the war.  Uncle Dick immediately joined the army air corps.  We listed to the news every night throughout the war.  It came on at six o’clock and the fellow doing the broad cast was Gabriel Heater.  This was the old alka selzer news paper of the air.  He was the most pessimistic newsman who ever lived.  First we would find out that the broadcast was sponsored by alka seltzer and he would toss a bit of it into water and say, listen to it fizz and it would go ssssshhhhhhhhhhhhh, just like it was supposed to, and then he would start out with something like this:  Well, there is bad news tonight.  Right up until about the final surrender, you would have thought we were losing the war.

To be continued.