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Letter: 12

February 20, 1995

      DEAR KIDS: The subject of this letter is to tell you how we entertained ourselves in a town like Blunt where a great many of its inhabitants said "There is nothing in Blunt and nothing to do."

      First of all when I was a very small boy, the town was a busy thriving place. We had three grocery stores, a hardware store, three or four gasoline service stations, a bulk gasoline and oil distributor, two grain elevators, a railroad passenger and freight depot, a drug store, a candy store (called a confectionery), two or three restaurants, a blacksmith shop (not my dads any more), two or three auto repair shops, a couple of pool halls, two meat markets (one of which was owned by Pa and Uncle Gus), two land offices (the equivalent of real estate businesses), two lumberyards that sold several kinds of building materials, three banks, and two or three hotels. I don't think of the Howard Johnson when picturing the hotels. They were like the ones you see in the westerns. There was no indoor plumbing — an outhouse out behind and each room had a commode with a large wash basin and a pitcher of water sitting in it. Someone wanting a bath in a tub went to the barber shop. Of course there was my dad's and Uncle Gus's hardware store and International Harvester agency. There were two or three cream stations, the post office, and silent movies were shown at the legion hall. There were four churches.

      We had periods of poor crops, low prices, and later the depression and the town fizzled out — one business after another failing and leaving until there was very little left. Then the depression and several years of crop failures piled on in a row. During this time I did the various things to earn a little money that I talked about in a previous letter.

      "There is nothing to do in Blunt" was a common statement by almost everybody. Some of the housewives had their bridge club and others the Ladies Club called the Tuesday Club. Mom belonged to both of them. But the automobile and better roads made it easier to get to Pierre to shop and Blunt kept having failed businesses. Since some of the ladies made their own entertainment with their club and bridge, the kids had to make most of their own fun. We played a lot of group games outside like Run Sheep Run. One side hid and the other set out in the dark to find them. One member of the hiding group would call out coded signals telling where the hunting group was and when they were far away from the home base he would holler "Run Sheep Run" and the hiding group was supposed to beat the hunting group home. The town had no crime and we played in complete safety. This game could only be played in a very small town.

      In the summer time I rode Midge, my Shetland pony, around with Jack Roach and Roy Tennyson on their ponies. We had lots of open land (nothing but surrounding Blunt) and explored a radius around the whole town. When we came to a fence I took my staple puller and pulled a staple out of the post on the two middle of a four-strand stand barbed wire fence. We would stand on the bottom of the two strands and hold up the top one and and lead the ponies through and then replace the staples as was specified by the farmers.

      In the summer time we had a lot of warm weather and did a lot of swimming. Jack, Roy and I would ride our ponies to one of the swimming holes in the creek. I became a pretty good swimmer. We would swim and splash around until we got tired of it and start home. Sometimes we would see a car load of people in an open touring car, and we would ask them if they were going swimming and gallop back to go again if they said they were. Some different people made it interesting again. We took the ponies in swimming sometimes. We didn't wear any bathing suits — we skinny dipped. One of the swimming holes was right parallel to the railroad track. We'd stand up in the middle with water up to our navels and holler at the passengers on the train "belly deep."They waved and laughed at us. We thought we were pretty smart.

      We had a lot of time when we had winter weather zero temperature. Our old house was comfortably heated and the sound of the howling wind made us content to stay inside. We played several kinds of cardgames.

      My mom had an eighth grade education plus one year of "Normal school."She was a school teacher in an eighth grade country school house. She said she had to hustle to be able to keep ahead of the eighth graders in arithmetic. My dad had only a sixth-grade education. Both of them were great readers and we had a big variety of magazines around the house. That caused us to all be pretty good readers. We had the Saturday Evening Post, The Country Gentlemen, Ladies Home Journal, Christian Herald, Colliers, National Geographic and Pathfinder (similar to Time magazine). Pa had subscribed to Scientific American since being a boy. He built the first radio in Blunt from information in the Scientific American. It had about six dials to make it work. It was powered by two batteries in the basement. So another way we killed time was to do a lot of reading. We had seven bedrooms in the old house and it was typical for each kid to be in his or her own room reading and studying. My parents with very little formal education were two of the best-educated people I knew because they did so much reading. They always had two or three newspapers coming to the house and some extra Sunday Papers. Mom couldn't refuse any paper boy. I forgot to mention the Reader's Digest, American Magazine, Cosmopolitan, and McCalls. Of course we didn't have all of them coming at once but usually five or six different periodicals. If anyone wanted one, they would subscribe to it. I liked Current History and that was subscribed for me. Subscriptions were quite cheap in those days because the postage was subsidized. So many people needed the information with no radio or TV.

      In the fall when we were having Indian Summer, the boy scouts would go down to the creek and cook our own breakfast over a wood stick fire. That outdoor eating made great appetites. In the evening in the fall when not too cold, some of us might get up enough nerve to invite some of the girls to come down to the creek with us for a "weeny roast."Of course some of the local wags had to kid us about some supposed hanky panky but the truth was that we didn't get around to even kiss a girl at that age.

      Another tradition was to go out in March after most of the snow had melted and pick crocuses growing on the north side of the hills. The flowers didn't keep well, but we enjoyed them anyway.

      There was quite a bit of wild fruit growing down at the creek — wild plums, choke cherries, and wild grapes. I thought the greatest jam and jellies were made from wild plums. Choke cherries were great to eat but wouldn't jell, but could be used for other things. We would stand in the choke cherry bushes and eat them by the hour. We'd pick the plums and take them home to Mom who made jams and jellies with them.

      I mentioned that our old house was comfortable and that it made us content to be home inside when so terribly cold outside. When Pa and his family homesteaded in 1884, they quickly built their house. Apparently the upstairs didn't have an attic and in the cold weather Pa said he slept cold. He made a vow that he would have a good heating system when he got his own house. He put in a hot air coal burning furnace and put hot water radiators in all of the bedrooms.

      Almost every Sunday we had big family dinners. Enid lived in Pierre about 28 miles away and Leona lived in Blunt. Jim and Elaine were living in other states. The empty bedrooms were filled up with roomers who boarded with us. I considered the big family dinners as great entertainment because of the visiting and my good appetite. It was very common to have 12, 14, or more eating Sunday dinner. Mom was a good cook. The girls helped with the dishes. Anyone stopping by was invited to eat with us — numbers didn't count.

      When I got my bicycle, some of us boys would ride to the neighboring towns. Harrold was about 12 miles east, Canning 11 miles south, and Onida was 18 miles north. It was some kind of an adventure to ride to another town, and I even rode to Pierre 28 miles away one time!

      We could also go fishing on the creek. We caught bullheads (which are really small catfish) and some called sunfish. I think they were a kind of perch. Sometimes we roasted them over a fire right there. It didn't seem to bother us that we didn't have any salt or seasoning. The wood we used for the fire was boxelder (a hardwood) and it made the fish have a smokey flavor.

      I would go up and visit my dad at the shop quite often and in the hot weather I would say, "Papa" and he would say "Whatta" and I would say "Can I have a nickel for an ice cream cone?"He would get out his coin purse and fish out an Indian head nickel.

      My dad was a mechanical genius. Jack Roach's dad said, "Leon Howard is the best mechanic in the State."He could fix anything and make anything. They used to store ice in the winter time. Pa thought cutting ice by hand was too much work and should be done with a machine. On the lot south of the machine shed, there were a lot of old automobiles they had worn out and just parked them there. Pa made an ice sawing machine on runners out of parts from seven of the old cars. In those days most people hadn't gotten electric refrigerators and needed iceboxes. We owned an icehouse and stored ice in winter. Our cold weather froze very thick ice. Some of the older boys had a route delivering the ice — a quarter for a big cake. Sometimes when the weather was very hot, I would go up to the icehouse, brush the straw off some of the ice and sit on the ice between two big cakes of ice to cool off.

      I considered digging the garden and planting vegetables part of the summer fun. It was a big treat to eat vegetables out of your own garden. In those days tomatoes (plural is OK with an e) were a lot different. When we would go out into the garden among the tomato plants, we could just smell the vines. They were much tastier. We raised peas, green beans, radishes, beets, sweet corn and tomatoes. Mom even succeeded in growing asparagus.

      Traditions were fun. One tradition was popping popcorn. Pa would let the furnace fire die down some, then throw a piece of sheet iron over the coals and take his homemade corn popper with a long handle and pop corn in the furnace. On New Year's day we would all go down in the basement and he would line us up on our own board on the coal bin door and measure our height drawing a line at the spot and dating it. That coal bin door is still there. I saw it on one of the reunions. Some of the pencil marks are fading some but could still be made out.

      The furnace was nearly in the center of the basement. On some cold days I would go down there and roller skate around the furnace on the concrete. We made rubber guns and turned off the lights and stalked each other and would shoot a person if we spied them. I shot Celia Carey's glasses off but they didn't get broken. Irma thought it was terrible. Being a boy I thought that was just part of war.

      Another thing to do was to go skating on the ice in the creek. It used to get two or three feet thick.

      All these years I almost had an inferiority complex about the little dinky town I came from, but now that I think back about all the things we did, I think I had a pretty good childhood.

      I'm enclosing an old photo of the invention Pa patented. It was a rig you could ride on when harrowing or disking a field. It was usually unsafe to ride because a fall off the rig would result in the farmer getting chewed up by the following harrow. Pa made the wide wheel and with a seat to sit on, and it had a lever that would release the horses and let them go without spilling the rider. It was very fatiguing to walk in the soft soil behind the harrow. Pa never made much money because most of the farmers were buying tractors soon after.

      We have been having summer weather. Yesterday it was 92 degrees in Brea. Hope we get some more rain before the season is completely over.

      I went to see Dr. Eli Monday. My blood count was OK even though your mother thinks I look pale. I told her that that is old age she is seeing. I had them give me an EKG. He said it was OK. Hope you are all well. Do well in school. Get plenty of sleep and help your mother so that she won't have to work all the time and can get enough rest.

      I love you all,

      Grandpa

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