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Letter: 10

January 3, 1995

      DEAR KIDS: We have had great excitement at our house. Grandma, Craig and I had Turkey dinners and all the fixings for both Thanksgiving and Christmas. I should have carved up the whole turkey after the first day and froze a good part of it but I just left it in the roaster and cleared a shelf in the refrigerator. The first couple of days tasted better than the first day and we kept on eating it. I had plates of turkey dinner, dressing, mashed potatoes and gravy, etc. Then I had turkey sandwiches and finally I had turkey cut into small pieces and mixed it with cream of mushroom soup and had creamed turkey on toast. At present I am not hungry for turkey. I wish I had your dad's savvy on cooking.

      We had a rain last night and early this morning. It seemed to rain quite a bit. I hope our drought will be broken.

      I have told you about money being scarce when I was a kid. We didn't feel sorry for ourselves because most of the people in a small town like Blunt were in the same boat. We always had plenty to eat. We had three milk cows which I had to milk when I got big enough. This gave us plenty of milk, cream and butter. We had chickens. Mom quit having the hens set on the eggs and bought a 50-egg incubator. She would have a couple of hatchings. I remember that I thought that a new fuzzy baby chick was the cutest animal in the world. We would be down in the basement and they would let me hold one in my two palms and would caution me not to let them fall because they were too fragile to jump from any height. We had eggs and chickens to eat — usually at least two big roasting chickens every Sunday.

      Nowadays it wouldn't pay to have chickens and milk cows unless you raised your own feed. When I was a kid, Pa and Uncle Gus owned two farms which were farmed by tenants. We got 1/3 of the grain and the tenant got 2/3. Pa and Uncle Gus stored a lot of grain in some grain bins in the machine shed behind the store and office building. The chickens and milk cows were fed with the grain that wasn't sold. We froze a 6-quart freezer of ice cream every Sunday.

      We also had a big vegetable garden. Mom canned a lot of vegetables. In those days, fruit at the height of the season would be very cheap and people canned it. The mason jars could be used over each year. Someone would have box cars of apples shipped in from the State of Washington and a 40-pound box was sold for $1. One time a man in the trucking business didn't have any work to do and he went up to the Red River potato area in North Dakota and brought back a truckload of potatoes. He drove the truck around town and sold the potatoes for 50 cents a bushel. We also made jams and jellies from wild plums. Grandma Spencer on the Fairbank ranch made jellies out of wild grapes. I thought the preserves from the wild fruit tasted better than anything you could buy at the store.

      All this business of raising and preserving our own food made it possible for the family with eight kids to eat very well for very little money. The amazing thing was that my little five-foot mother was able to do the mountain of work that she did. Of course my sisters, Irma and Enid, helped her a lot.

      In spite of all the necessary work to be done, mom did extra things. We never bought bakery pies. Mom made them all. She would sit on a rocking chair that Pa made (like the one you have in your home). She put a bucket beside the chair and had a pan full of apples. She sat there and peeled the apples putting the peelings and cores in the bucket. The peelings and cores were saved for the chickens like a lot of other scraps including melon rinds and seeds. In fact the chickens thought they were as good as the ground grain they got every day. Mom made pies for every occasion. We usually had three or four pies at Christmas and Thanksgiving. She made mince pies (better than the stores sell now), apple pies, pumpkin pies and to top it off she made four extra pies every Thanksgiving and Christmas. It was my job to take them to three old widowers. I took two to Pap Perkins and his "live in" son Bud, one to old Bill Mccillavry, and one to old man Bronson. We do well at present to bake a Mrs. Smiths or Sara Lee frozen pie.

      There was very little already prepared food in those days and all the house wives knew how to make things from scratch. A lot of food was prepared for meals and if an extra person showed up, they were invited to eat with us. One more on top of 8 kids and two parents wasn't noticed. My oldest brother Jim had a friend, Edgar Marriette, who was an only child. Naturally, he found life at our house with eight kids much more interesting.

      He was such a steady fixture staying at our house and eating meals there that his mother told Mom, "I know that there are times that you have to discipline your children. If you have to give anyone a spanking and Edgar was in on the mischief, I want you to go ahead and spank him too." She knew Mom's spankings were not very fierce. Years later when Irma and I were invited up to Edgar's house in Glendale, CA, for Thanksgiving dinner, his mother brought that up again. I asked Edgar if he had ever gotten a spanking from Mom. He said, "Oh yes I did, and I had it coming too. Jim and I did something we shouldn't have and she spanked us in turn."

      My PSA was 11.5 October 27 and on December 1 it was 10. I haven't heard what the December 29 PSA was as yet.

      I believe I told you that Blunt was a Boom town in its early days and at one time had 21 saloons. When I was a small kid, Blunt was quite a town, but it kept fizzling out until there was almost no town. In spite of this there were a few ways for a kid to make a little pocket money. I'll tell you in another letter about some of my high finance.

      Grandma is going to get a permanent on Friday. She thought she was being very witty when she asked me if I could fit it into my schedule. I assured her I will be able to, but I want to know why something so temporary should be called a permanent wave.

      Get together and each of you write us a part of a letter so that we will know what you are doing. Get plenty of sleep, eat healthy food and keep warm this winter.

      Lots of love,

      Grandpa

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