A Thanksgiving Story ( or how a 10 cent can of cranberry sauce cost more than $60.)

A Thanksgiving Story (or how a 10 cent can of cranberry sauce cost more than $60.)



I love cranberry sauce and after the holidays were over, I walked into Walmart and there was a stack of cranberry sauce at 10 cents a can.  I bought a whole flat (12) of them.  During the year I thoroughly enjoyed cranberry sauce with a lot of meals.  The next fall, I get invited to go to Missouri for Thanksgiving with some old friends from Virgiia, the Chapman family.  They said I could fly into Kansas City or St. Louis since they lived in the middle of the state.  It was decided that I would fly into St. Louis and their son and family who were driving from Virginia would coordinate their travel schedule so they could pick me up at the airport in St. Louis and take me the rest of the way.

Just before I left, I happened to notice that there was one of the 10 cent cans of cranberry sauce left in the pantry.  So, just for a joke I put it in my carry on bag and would tell them that this was my contribution to the Thanksgiving dinner.

At the airport, I always get stopped and taken aside for extra surveillance since I have a steel rod in my leg which always sets off the alarm.  They call over a female checker to do the searching and then turn me back over to the original male checker.  He goes through my carry on and pulls  out the cranberry sauce.  After looking at the label carefully he  says that  no jellied substances are allowed..  I said that he could just toss it.  After all it had only cost me 10 cents and it wasn't essential to the meal in any way.  But being an older gentleman, he said he would go and check with his boss.  After some time he came back with the approval that I could take it on the plane.

By the time I got to the gate to board, it was closed, although the plane was still sitting there, I couldn't get on.   The next flight would be in a few hours and so I got in touch with the family that was meeting me at the airport and told them I had missed my flight.

Half a day later I arrive in St. Louis and find a shuttle going to my destination.   It cost a little over $60 for a one way ticket and and several hours later I arrive at a  MacDonald's near the freeway in the middle of Missouri.  After a phone call, I am picked up by Lynn and Loren Chapman.

The bright idea to bring the can of cranberry sauce no longer seemed funny to me.  If there is a moral to this story it is to buy  whole cranberry sauce and not the jellied variety or perhaps just forget about making jokes at Thanksgiving time.

The Great Oatmeal Boycott

Throughout my childhood our family usually had oatmeal mush for breakfast even though on special occasions we had pancakes or waffles and quite often we had bacon and eggs, as well.

This story happened when I was in the middle grades of elementary school and probably during the summer months.  One morning all of the kids decided we weren't going to eat our oatmeal mush.  I don't recall if we had anything else to eat such as toast or fruit, but we definitely would not eat the oatmeal.  At lunch time our mother served us the same bowls of oatmeal that we had refused to eat for breakfast.  We still refused to eat any of it.

That night for supper our mother served us a delicious meal.  We must have really enjoyed it since we were probably very hungry by this time.  After the meal, our mother served a delicious dessert...some sort of baked pudding with raisins and cinnamon.  We all ate it and even complemented our mother on how good it was.  She laughed right out loud and told us that it was the same oatmeal that we had refused to eat at breakfast and lunch.

Mark one up for our mother.  I do not recall that we ever tried this again.

   Getting old is getting harder every day

Everything I do is slower.

 

I get tired and have to rest often.

 

.

When I hear hoof beats I don't think zebras I think giraffes.

This giraffe came galloping across my kitchen floor.

(He will be gone as soon as I get around to mopping.)

Grandpa's Ranch

Candelyn:  Tell me about the ranch.  How did grandpa build it?  Where did the materials come from?  Did people often build their own houses?  How did he know what to do?  Did anyone help him?  Tell me about the day you got a cement floor!

My father obtained land for the ranch in four ways.  First, he homesteaded one section(1 square mile.)  Homesteading was a specific government program that allowed people to get one section of land for free if they built a house and lived on it. 

(side bar story about homesteading)When my grandparents, Byrum and Addie Pace, were first married they homesteaded some land and built a house on it near Safford.  The house was so cold and inadequate that in the winter they moved into town and lived with relatives.  Someone "jumped" their claim that winter and thus got the land, the house and everything in it for free.   I remember reading all the Little House on the Prairie books to my children and the same thing happened to homesteaders there when they moved into town for the winter.  After I retired, and was taking my dad to various funerals and Navajo County  reunions, some man came up to us and introduced himself as the son of the couple who got By and Addie Pace's homestead.  I wanted to hit him on the spot.  I am sure he had no idea how much our whole family resented  his parents who had "stolen" my grand parents first home. I don't think By and Addie ever owned their own home again.  

The second way my father got land was obtaining a perpetual lease on a section from the school board (given to them by the state to provide funds to support the school in Woodruff.) 

 Third,  he leased land from Candelaria, a New Mexico resident that acquired large amounts of land going back to a Mexican land grant (I'm not certain of details)

  Fourth, he also purchased some land.  When I was in high school the ranch consisted of 10,000 acres that were used to  raise beef cattle.  When it rained and made grass, it was great when it didn't rain and you had to buy hay or move the cattle to rented  pastures, you had to get a bank loan to tide your family and your cows over.  I don't know how big the ranch is now.  Some leases were let go, others continue, more land was bought.  I know almost none of the details.

The land my father homesteaded did not have a "river running through it." The first thing needed to make a ranch was to get water.  My dad  hired someone to drill the well, which must go very, very deep before you hit water.  You have to have pipe to line the narrow hole that is dug. It is not like the wishing well storybook type well, where you just dig a hole and can lift the water in a bucket with a rope.   He obtained 4 telephone poles for the windmill tower.  He paid  for the windmill parts that were shipped by train to Holbrook.  He used pulleys and other engineering tricks to erect the entire windmill by himself.  He may have hired someone or borrowed someone's scraper to make the pond to hold the water.  He recycled a circular section of something into a holding tank for the cows to drink from and he obtained  a steel barrel for holding drinking water which he fitted out with a faucet.  Pipes connected all of these things together and gravity was the only force used to get the water flowing where it needed to be after the windmill brought it up from the ground.

The summer after I was born, my parents lived in a tent on this land and began to build the ranch house.  My father's job with the Arizona Highway Department seemed to have breaks when one contract was finished for a certain section of the highway and before another began.  That summer he quarried the large sandstone rocks you see in the house and laid them together with mud. The ones over the doors and windows were immense, but he managed to get the walls all laid up by himself perhaps with some of my mother's help.  

The ranch house had two rooms.  There was  a fireplace in the living/bedroom and a stove pipe connection to the chimney in the kitchen/dining room.  There was a big window in the south of the living room and a big window in the east and small window(think over the sink, but there was no sink) in the west of the kitchen.  There was a front door to the living area and a back door in the kitchen. He left an opening in one wall of the living room so he could add onto this house in the future, but boarded it up securely until that time.  Along the entire front was an open porch. There was no running water, thus no sink or bathroom.  There was an iron wood-burning stove in the kitchen.  The fireplace was the heat source in the winter.  An outdoor toilet was built a good distance from the house and  windmill.

My father told me that as soon as he had the walls up, he put up tarps for a roof and moved the family from the tent into the ranch house while he finished the rafters and the roof.  The roof was made of corrugated tin which was very noisy during a rain storm and even worse during a hail storm.  The ceiling was made of plywood with battens over the cracks. The walls were plastered with red mud that is so abundant at the ranch.  The floors were packed dirt. He purchased the windows, but made the doors himself from planks drilled through with long bolts held by nuts that you could see on the edges of the doors.   He made hinged shutters for the windows that closed and locked from the same planks as the doors.  He had even made the hinges for the shutters from iron rods.

I have no memories of living in a house with a dirt floor, but I did, because I can remember having to move out, so that a cement floor could be poured.  It was probably in the summer of 1936 when I was two years old.  I can remember my dad building us a "play house" which really became a tool shed.  After it was finished the family moved into it, temporarily, while he poured the cement floor in the ranch house.  He made a trough from wood and tin to mix the cement in. (Later, we kids would use this trough as a boat when the flats were flooded.)  He mixed the cement with a hoe and hauled it in a wheel barrow.  Since he was doing all the work himself, it probably took more than a week to finish, including time for the cement to cure.  He also plastered the walls with a thin coat of cement over the mud plaster.  As little kids, bored with having to take a nap, sometimes we would rotate our fingernail on the wall until it made a little hole and out would come pouring a little waterfall of red dirt from the mud plaster underneath. Since I have a vivid memory of this, I am sure that I was one of the kids who did this naughty thing.

Furniture for the ranch house consisted of a bed he made himself from the same planks as the front door and painted with the same pink and yellow paint that was everywhere.  I think they must have bought a five gallon can of both pink and yellow paint.  We even had a horse trailer painted that same pink.  He made a folding baby bed on casters, with screened sides and a screen lid for my sister who would be born that fall.  It got painted with the yellow paint. 
My brother and I slept on folding camp cots.  We had quilts of plaid flannel with wool batting that my parents had made when they were first married. My parents had bought two tables at an auction after they were married in 1929.   A round oak center pedestal table with leaves cost $2.00 and was our dining table for years.  It was never at the ranch.  One of my brothers still uses it at this time.  The second table was  a square drop leaf table on casters for $.50.  This fifty cent table was at the ranch for years and then became our kitchen table in the Eighth Avenue house.  I have inherited it and it is still in good shape.

Milton, Rayna,& Alleen in front of the original ranch house.  You can see the windmill, the corrugated tin roof and the front porch before it was closed in.  The girls have on homemade sun bonnets..  The horse is Old Blue, a very tame and gentle horse. She was a blue gray color when she was young and then she became almost white with a few grey specks when she got older, but her named remained the same, Old Blue.  I delivered newspapers on her in 5th and 6th grade.

I can remember once, at the ranch we were riding on Old Blue and it started to hail.  We ran under the open porch.  My dad was holding Old Blue's reins and the noisy tin roof sounded just like gun shots.  It spooked Old Blue and she bolted.  My dad explained that she was always shy of gunshots, because of something to do with her previous owner.  I don't remember the details.

Eventually the front porch was enclosed to make two bedrooms, one for the boys and one for the girls.  This meant that the kitchen window looked into the boys bedroom and so the kitchen was quite dark with only the small window to the west.  We also added a narrow table with a two burner portable kerosene stove in the kitchen.  There was a small table in the corner for a big water pail and a dipper for drinking was hung on the nearby wall.  

The well had a barrel of water where we drew our drinking water.  The overflow from the barrel went into the trough which was used as a cooler for many food items. The overflow from the trough went into the pond, which was stocked with fish. My father installed a valve and clay pipes to drain water from the tank to  water the trees and a garden.  One time we arrived at the ranch and a man, that knew my father or worked with him, was there with several boys, and they had dug up all the clay pipes and were taking them.  I don't know the details of this, but no fights or harsh words were spoken.  I asked my dad about this before he died, and he remembered it happening, but couldn't remember why this man felt he could just take it.  He told me the man paid for it, but all the labor to install the underground pipes was lost. I don't think it was ever totally replaced.

Some time later, my dad dug a deep hole, made forms, and poured a cement basement or cellar to the northeast of the house. It was half below ground and half above ground.  He first used it as a smoking chamber for ham and bacon and later it was used as a root cellar and storage for bottled fruits and vegetables.  

The second year after we moved to Phoenix, My dad built a rock room above the cellar for a girl's bedroom. He put a "safe" in the wall and hung a picture over it.  The safe was really just a mason jar embedded in the wall, but it's the first thing that little kids talk about when they go to the ranch.  To get from this room to the house, you had to go outdoors  and down a few steps to get to the kitchen door.  A later summer, dad added a roofed area open on the north and west that we used like a patio, eating, or playing cards. This kept us out of the rain from the kitchen to the cellar and to the girls bedroom.  Of course, it eventually got enclosed at some point, just like the front porch did. 

 We had a removable car seat from a station wagon as a swing near the pond and another swing hung between two trees, that was made from a bed springs.  There was a rock garden where petrified wood and other rocks of  "value" were placed.  For a few years when the rain was sufficient my dad cut grass on the hay flats north of the ranch house and had haystacks of grass hay for the cows the next winter.  He made a mouse-proof grain storage shed,  barns, garages, and various other enclosures.  There was even an ice house made of railroad ties and sawdust for storing ice cut from the pond in winter and it would still be frozen during the summer.   They eventually added another bedroom and a bathroom and kitchen sink with running water.  

Whenever we had something extra or a little old and didn't need it any more, it would be recycled to the ranch.  Old towels that were a little worn, unmatched glasses, odd chairs, broken water heaters that could become watering troughs, an old car, and just any junk that was too good to throw away were all sent to the ranch.  Eventually my father had to fence in this junk yard to keep the cows from getting entangled.  

 The one thing that my children liked the most among all the accumulated stuff at the ranch was the "Gizmo."  It was some kind of large machine that originally had been working, I think.  It came to the ranch after I was older, so I don't remember ever seeing it work. To this day I don't know what it does, but over the years it has given many hours of pleasure to several generations of kids.

After my brother took over the ranch, he had to hire someone to clear away all this junk that was waiting to be recycled into something useful, but he left the "gizmo" for another generation to enjoy.  

He also added another whole two story house onto the west side of the ranch house.  They put in a piano for sing-a-longs.  He erected a high water tank so as to get water pressure for the indoor toilets and shower.  He bought a generator for electricity.  They ran a telephone wire to the ranch, just prior to the common use of cell phones. He has added a big shade for family reunions and picnics  They have moved their family swing set to the ranch  and they have motorcycles for riding.   But no horses!   

There have been a lot of kids, grand kids, and great-grand kids who have a lot of memories of this ranch.  I would guess that there will  be a  lot more grand kids and lot more memories in the future.

Your last question about how he learned the skills necessary to build the ranch is not easy to answer.  He never had any training as such, but was always curious and watched people do things.  He was not afraid to ask questions.  I have overheard many times when he is asking someone how this or that goes or what you have to fix something.  I don't think his father had skills along these lines, but maybe his grandfather, Levi Mathers Savage, did.  Someone built a wooden house out at  Dry Ranch for my father's family and perhaps he learned from watching them. 

 He had all these interests early on, because one of his sisters once wrote a little essay about the future of their family and she had my dad  becoming an engineer.  He only finished 9th grade and luckily took a shop class with a drafting component. where he learned to do the italic like lettering like they use on construction plans. This helped get him the job working for the highway department where he kept the books and oversaw what the contractors were doing. Just before he got married, he took a wood-working class at Phoenix Technical High School in the evening and made my mother a cedar chest. 

Although he was never around him until much later, he  had an uncle, who was a registered architect, and who, signed off on my dad's house plans for the Portland house.  I don't know where he learned to draw house plans, but he did. He and my mother built a small  Spanish style house in Mesa when they first got married.  This was before they built the ranch house.  He also probably learned a lot from the engineers at the highway department and from the contractors they hired to build the roads.   He never worked for anyone in an apprentice sort of way, but it was taken for granted that people knew how to build things.  People built barns  at barn raisings since pioneer times.  I imagine that as a young boy in Woodruff, he probably watched people build houses but I don't have any recollection of him talking about it.  I grew up with him knowing everything about such things and it never occurred to me to ask him, how he knew it.  
              

Man on the Moon!

Sam:  I want to know what you remember about the first time man was on the moon.  Do you remember where you were?  What was it like?  How did people feel about it?

It seems strange to me that I don't remember where I was when it happened.   I do remember reading an interview with a woman who commented, "We have enough troubles in our own country."  I guess she thought it was a waste of money or that the moon was just another country.  I often use her quote, when people totally miss the main idea.   There were lots of people who thought it was a government hoax and that it never really happened.  

 I remember watching on television, the first step on the moon and hearing the great quote, "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."

  I do remember exactly where I was when I heard that Kennedy was shot and, again,exactly where I was when I heard that the Challenger had exploded with the teacher, Crista McAuliffe on board.  I know where I was when I heard about the twin towers.  

That semester I was teaching at Mesa Community College and an older woman who was in my class had a daughter working in the Twin Towers.  The daughter had stayed home to go to the dentist that day and so had survived.  This woman was so shaken at how unpredictable life can be, that she moved back to New York to be near her daughter and grandchildren.

Maybe, the reason I don't remember the exact moment I heard about the landing on the moon is because it came about in stages and was no surprise when it finally happened.

I got to see the John Glenn space capsule in Manila when I was in the Peace Corps. The U.S. sent it around the globe for  exhibits.  It was in a park not too far from the Peace Corps office the summer we were working in Manila.

 I saw some space capsules at the Smithsonian and touched a moon rock there.   From an overpass in Reston, Va, I also saw the space shuttle come down the Dulles Toll Road on the back of a truck on its way to be flown back to Florida.

Sorry, Sam.  No great stories about the Man on the Moon.

Nixon?

Sam:  Tell me about Nixon.  And everything you remember about that time and his impeachment.  

I originally thought that Nixon was an okay sort of guy.  He was smart in school.  He had been raised in a minority religion and I could relate to that.  I thought that deep down he had values from his youth.  His wife was a school teacher and I could relate to that, as well.  

My family and almost all of Arizona had always been Democrats when I was growing up.  I thought of myself as Democrat but...not anything like the ones you hear and see in the party today.  After the Peace Corps, which appeared to me to be run by political pay- offs of  Kennedy with no idea what they were doing, I began to question  myself as a Democrat and, eventually, registered as an Independent.  This turned out to be really silly, since you have no say in the primary votes. Some states now let anyone vote in primaries, which creates other problems. 

 I worked several years to help Fairfax County integrate schools and to help  Head Start get going as part of the War on Poverty.  It was supposed to help eliminate poverty.  When I got invited to a big party celebrating the first graduate of Head Start to have a child in Head Start,  I was appalled that this would be something to celebrate--another generation in poverty.  My doctoral research at American University showed almost no gains for kids in Head Start over their siblings who never had Head Start.  Forty years later we continue to dump money into a program that is just another entitlement in the worst sense.  All this is to tell you how I moved from a Kennedy Democrat  over quite a few years to become a Republican. 

There was another scandal about a politician, Gary Hart, I think, from Colorado that also came from a minority religion so strict that he wasn't even allowed to dance. So when he was young he would drive out in the country to some slab of cement and dance away with his girlfriend.  Nothing wrong with that, by almost anyone's standards.   Later, he was moving onto the national scene when an almost complete  lack of morals was revealed to everyone.  This was a big insight into human behavior for me.  If person has a set of  values and he decides to step away from just part of them, then he is blowing in the wind.  Once he has broken with one of his values, he seems to lose his moral compass and begins to break more and more of his original values, many of which were very valuable in guiding his life, much more valuable than the first one that was broken.  I do think that people can grow up  and move away from their original religion and still have values, but they have to work at it and do some soul searching on their own.  They cannot rely on automatically following some standard that they no longer hold to.

Someone posted last week, something like, "Don't throw away something good until you have something better to replace it with."  I think that sums up the above paragraph.

Lyndon Johnson had some of these same moral problems.  He had been a poor teacher and worked his way up in Texas politics.  He and/or his supporters  began to use methods of getting elected that were shady.  Near the end of his term, it seems like there was an investigation and a  secretary who knew a lot of secrets, was "accidentally" killed in a plane crash in the ocean.

     

What about this John Edwards who was running for president.  I didn't see any redeeming qualities in him from the beginning, but I haven't read that much about him.  

 Back to Nixon!  Since I now identified myself as a Republican, I didn't want to believe Nixon could be really bad, but it was beginning to look like it might be.  People couldn't go after him, at first, because the Vice President, Spiro Agnew, was totally corrupt, so they had to get rid of the Vice President first before they could go after Nixon.  In the end, Nixon did not seem to have any boundaries that he wouldn't cross.  When the tapes of his conversations were opened to the public, I was revolted that he had vulgar language, as well. 

I felt so sorry for his wife and children when he had to resign.  Some of his staff members went to jail.  I felt for their families, as well.  Nixon was probably not the worst president that the U.S. has had, but he was, maybe, the most disappointing in my lifetime. 

Post Script:  Just this year I read a book about Nixon and Jack Anderson, a popular columnist who lived in the Washington, D.C. suburbs.  Nixon hated him and had the FBI or Secret Service or his own goons try to get something on Anderson's kids such as drug usage, etc.  They came back with the answer, that his kids don't even drink coca cola.  Jack Anderson was a Mormon.  Nixon or his cohorts even had a plan to poison Jack Anderson by painting a poison substance on his steering wheel that could be absorbed into the body.

Fourth Grade

Fourth Grade Memories

Miss Augusta was my fourth grade teacher.  This photo must have been taken about the time I was in her class, since it looks just like I remember her.  She was an exceptional teacher.  I have used her as an example in many classes I have taught for teachers and students planning to become teachers.  I was always going to write her a letter and tell her what a good teacher she was, but I procrastinated until it was too late.  Thinking back over my fourth grade memories, not a single one is traumatic or negative.

Our Marvelous Coat Closet

On the west wall of our classroom was a long skinny coatroom.  Many  classrooms have a coatroom, but not like this one.  In our coat room was the most amazing thing--a glass beehive with a glass tunnel that led over to the window, so the bees could go in and out.   I remember  watching the bees at work and hoping to get a glimpse of the queen bee.

Another memory of this coat closet happened one winter day
 right after lunch.  Everybody went home for lunch.   At our house, my mother always had us wear an apron to protect our clothes from spills.  That afternoon, standing in the coat closet,  I took off my coat and hung it on a hook.  A girl in my class said, "Why did you wear that apron to school?"  I give her a look.  Then she says, "Oh, did you sew it yourself?"  I don't remember what I said next, but I quickly took off the apron, before someone else saw it and hung it on the hook underneath my coat. 

The Widow's Walk

I do not know why such a house was built in Snowflake, Arizona, which is far from any seaport, but Miss Augusta lived in this house.  It had a widow's walk on the roof like a lot of East Coast houses where the husbands went to sea and the wife would walk up and look out to see if her husband's ship was returning. 

On a clear night, Miss Augusta invited our entire fourth grade class to her house. She took us up on the roof and used a flashlight  to point out all the constellations.  It is the only time I was ever on a widow's walk in my entire life. 

Frogs Eggs

One spring day, Miss Augusta took us on a walk to a pond where we found some frog eggs.  We scooped them up and the next day they were in a huge tub at the back of the room.  I don't remember that they ever hatched into poly-wogs and later frogs.  But, later, after a big flood at the ranch, my siblings and I got frog's eggs and watched then change to poly-wogs and then grow legs and lose their tails to to become frogs.

Speaking Spanish

Miss Augusta had a metal box of pamphlet size books in the classroom.  One of them was about Mexico.  In the back was a section with words to learn in Spanish.  I taught myself to count in Spanish and also phrases such as, "Usted, Amigo?"  I was probably motivated by the fact that Mexican sheepherders often drove their sheep across our ranch and would say to my father, "No savvy d'English." They would often give my father a baby lamb or a goat for the grass that their sheep would eat while crossing our land. I remember having to feed the lamb or kid with a bottle until they grew enough old to eat grass or hay.

The Bear Pit in Bern

You may wonder why I have a bear pit in Bern on my fourth 

grade  blog.  It is because our fourth grade  social studies book  had a picture of it.  Many years later when I took my kids to Europe for a summer, I remembered and wanted to show them the bear pit.  We took a special train all the way to Bern and then a local bus and then walked.  We finally arrived.  We peered down into the bear pits, but there were no bears.  It turned out that it was a Sunday and the bears don't come out on Sunday.  So although I have seen a bear pit, I still have never seen a bear in a bear pit. 

(I looked it up on the internet and it seems that Bern has  built a new bear pit.  The article didn't say if the bears come out on Sundays, now,or not.  My grand daughter, Rachael went there in the summer of 2014 just  in honor of this story)

The Kalamazoo Clu

(Also known as the Culvert Club)

One weekend, I was picking at a scab on my knee, and it began to bleed.  So, as not to waste this good blood,  I got a pen and and notebook and wrote my name in blood.  By fourth grade, I was reading a lot of chapter books and, no doubt, this idea came from one of them.  Now, that I had signed my name in blood, I decided to start a club and get other kids to join.  Of course, they would have to sign their names in blood, as well.

I wanted the club to have a really good name,   I thought and thought. In our side yard, sat an old iron stove with the magical word, "Kalamazoo," written on it.  I liked the sound of it.  What a fun name!  I wrote the new name of the club on the front cover of the notebook.

The next day at school, I explained this wonderful club to my friends and we arranged to meet at recess in the culvert that drained the playground.  Our culvert was big enough for quite a few of us to sit in, but not big enough to stand in.  There was never any water in it.  It was perfect for our secret club meetings.  Several of my friends pricked their fingers and signed their name in blood.   It seems that I didn't get far enough in my club plans to decide a purpose for the club, so after a few meetings, we went on to some other recess activity.





Imagine my surprise, years later, when I discovered that Kalamazoo was not a magical word, but was a city in Michigan and that the stove had probably been manufactured there.





)

The First Time I Tasted Spaghetti 

One afternoon, Pearl Bigler, announced to the class that today was her birthday and we were all invited to go to her house for a birthday party.  She lived a little ways southeast of the town.   A group of kids began walking down the street which was on my way home from school.  My mother was a teacher at the school that year and had to stay after school so I couldn't really ask her permission to go.  I can remember right where I was standing with this group of kids and had to decide to go up the hill to my house or turn the corner and go with the group to Pearl's birthday party.  I chose to go with the others.  It was quite a hike  and part of it was along the railroad tracks.  Maybe we even crossed a railroad bridge because I can remember thinking what should we do if a train comes along. 

This was a surprise birthday party.  That is, it was a surprise for Pearl's mother.  She had not made any plans for a birthday party and did not have a cake made, but she was very resourceful.  While we played, "Red Rover, Red Rover"  she made a big pot of spaghetti and everyone enjoyed it.  It was the first time that I had every eaten spaghetti. 

We all walked back to town together and I went home.  When I got there, Ada, who sometimes worked for us, said to me,"You are in real trouble, your mom and dad are out looking for you right now."  Sure enough, she was right.  I think this was the last time my parents ever had to go looking for me.

Perfect Attendance

At the end of the year, I got the only perfect attendance certificate that I ever received in all my school years.  I tried to figure out why.  Was it because I loved school so much?  Was it because I was extra healthy that year?  No!  I figured it out.  My mother was teaching sixth grade in our same school that year and no one would be home to take care of me if I was sick.