Charles Everard Dills

      I remember sleeping in the bedroom overlooking the back yard. It was a kind of child's bed, not a crib. It had a rubber sheet which I hated. Mom and dad slept in the same room. One night I woke up and ran across the room and shook mother awake, saying, "Mom, Dad, there's a bear in the room". Dad was snoring!

      Somewhere about this time we had a very snowy winter. I have several pictures of it which I will place here. I'm sure someone crouched down to take this picture of the Northern Pacific Railway Station from in front of the Dills Bros. Rexall Drug Store.

      In the picture on the right you can see the sign "DRUGS" whch is Dad and Uncle's Drugstore. Again, I suspect this is another "crouching" shot.

      The third picture of course is the train, ready to go to Fargo, 110 miles away. Passengers are waiting. Note the icicles hanging from the eave trough on the station. You can also see the snow level in the park by the fountain, showing the exaggeration of the "crouching" shots.

      The fourth picture shows an engine and a caboose, going west toward Streeter ND. No passenger car!

      Probably about this time I was sleeping in the big bed, Mom and Dad had moved to the front bedroom. I have no idea where Irene and Helen slept! I remember going into the room at night in the winter and getting into the bed between the very cold sheets, the room was not heated even in winter. I remember the cold clean feel of the sheets and the coziness when my body heated them up. I can remember having some "night terrors". It seemed like the door to the room was retreating, getting farther and farther away!

      One time there was a bad summer storm. Lightning was tremendous, wham, bang. I watched out the window and saw a tremendous bolt appear to hit the ground several miles out of town to the west. Later I heard that it had hit a Winslow barn and split a cow in half. I was told that but I never really believed it. I vaguely remember being down by the railroad track, downtown, with the family, apparently looking to see what the damage was.

      I've been told that this was the Presbyterian Church. I think it burned down sometime after we left. I was baptized here. I also attended the first session of a bible school one summer. I don't remember it looking this way but it probably well illusrates the fallibility of memory.

      I remember that first session of Bible School. They were going to teach us 26 verses, each starting with a different letter of the alphabet. The letter A verse said, "All hath sinned, and come short of the glory of God;". To my mind it says there is no hope so I never went back.

      Early one spring, my mother had sent me out to play telling me not to take my shoes off. It was too early in the spring. Dutiful child that I was (?) I of course took them off. We kids would spend the whole summer barefoot, she just wanted me to wait awhile longer. When I got ready for bed she found my feet were dirty. We had an old fashioned bathtub, with feet and a wire and wood bench built like those stools in an ice cream shop. She put me on the bench and started trying to wash my feet. Then it hit her that I had been barefoot. She asked me where my shoes were. I told her they were alongside the stoop at the backdoor of the Muir house across the alley. So after I was "cleaned" up she went out in back, over to Muir's to retrieve my shoes and socks. It was quite dark and I watched her out the back bedroom window. The windows we had were the sliding type with no counterweights. They had spring loaded steel pins that went into holes in the side jams of the window. The window was up but whoever did it didn't make sure the pins were in. All of a sudden I heard some sliding, it was the window coming down by gravity! I stepped back, took my right hand out from under the window but left my left one there! The window slammed down on the index and third fingers on my left hand. I let out a big screaming howl and Irene and Helen came up and raised the window. It didn't break the skin but the flesh had a groove down to the bone. I guess this was payment for not obeying my mother!

      Another friend was Norman Sherman, the adopted son of the County Judge. He had kind of Jungle Jim in his backyard. It was vertical for about ten feet, then slanted down to the other end which was probably about four feet high. It was about two feet wide and had 3/4 inch pipe handles every foot or so. We would climb the high end and the go hand over hand down the slope till we touched ground. One time Porter was doing it and he slipped and fell. He stuck out his arm and hit the ground with it locked straight and broke his elbow. I can still hear him screaming when they got him home and in bed.
      This sketch shows approximately what this jungle jim looked like. It is not an engineering sketch by any means.

      While my nose accident was healed, I had adenoids that needed removal. So they took me to Dr. Ribble's office on the second floor above the First National Bank. He sat me in a chair that remembers like a dentist chair and removed them there, in his office. While I don't remember at all, I suspect my diet for a day or two was probably ice cream.

      We used to play a game we called mumblety peg. According to Answers.com, "A game in which players toss a jackknife in various prescribed ways, with the object being to make the blade stick firmly into the ground." That describes it pretty well. There was a ritual that one went through. And if you missed sticking it in the ground the knife passed to the next person. When it came back to you, you had to start from scratch. One could take another turn after a miss if you were willing to risk the game. If you did that and failed you were out of the game! One day we were enjoying the game and Norman missed. He then risked the game and missed, Then he risked the rest of the games for that day and missed. He was ticked off and went to throw the knife and stick it in the dirt in front of me. But at the same time I stuck out my hand and it stuck in my hand just below the thumb. I remember being in the Sherman kitchen while his mother took care of it. I remember looking up at the square ice sign that had fat black numerals on a square of cardboard and the black numerals appeared green. I suppose this was what we would call shock nowadays. Then I started walking home. After about two blocks I felt faint and had to sit down on the sidewalk for a time till I felt better. I had a little scar for a long time!

      Norman was a very spoiled child. His parents always believed his stories regardless of what we said. They had a lot of trouble with him after we left LaMoure. One of the stories I was told later was that he opened a charge account at the bakery. This kind of thing could happen in a town of less than a thousand in those days. Would you turn down the Judge's son? Well, he entertained his friends, buying them donuts etc. The bill came at the end of the month and his parents took his bicycle away and sold it to pay the bill. The trouble was, the lesson was completely ruined when they bought him a new bicycle a few days later! I was told that when he became a teenager he would go out after his parents were asleep, take the car out of gear and coast down the hill, then start it and drive around till he felt like going back home. I've often wondered if he ended up in jail. It seemed like a good possibility.

      We took one of Dad's yearly vacations and went to Duluth Minnesota in our new 1926 Buick. We stopped at the Mesabi Iron Range and got the obligatory tube of the various colors of ore and stared amazed at the size of the hole and the size of the engine that was hauling the ore cars. They were 4,8,8,4 articulated engines, some of the largest in the world.
      The railroad went from around Hibbing Minnesota to Two Harbors and to Duluth on Lake Superior. The very large engines were needed to pull the heavy ore trains out of the bottom of the open pit mine, then only about 60 miles to Duluth and the down the steep bluff at Duluth and out onto the ore docks to dump the ore into ore boats for transfer down the chain of the Great Lakes to the iron mills in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania.
      A 4,8,8,4 articulated engine had four wheels on the small front truck. There were two sets of drivers with eight wheels each and a final small four wheel truck under the cab. The rear half of the long boiler was supported and the front half was cantilevered. The chassis was hinged in the middle and "bent" when it was rounding a curve. When it went around a corner, the front of the boiler would stick out to the outside of the track!
      They had to pull the ore cars out of the bottom of the hole, go a short distance to Duluth and then let them down the bluff at the west side of the town and out onto the ore docks where they were unloaded on to the ore ships that would take the ore to Pittsburgh.

      We got to Duluth and checked into a very odd but great structure. It was an indoor campground. The spaces were all marked out with areas for the tents and for the cars. There were washing facilities and showers as I remember.
      Dad took the bit in his teeth and took me to a barbershop and had my curls cut off. Mother was disappointed but accepted it. I was a boy, at last. This might have taken place the year before in 1925.
      We took an all day cruise on a good sized ship up to an island where we had lunch and then returned. I remember being fascinated, watching the ship's engine through the glass doors at the shining connecting rods going up and down, up and down. What a sight for a four year old!
      They had a funicular railway leading up to the top of the bluff to a view point. It made several stops on the way up and down. For those that are not familiar with a funicular railway, it is a long cable with a car on each end. As one went up, the other came down.
      There was a conductor on each car. The car would stop several times at the stopping points to let people on or off. When the car was ready to move and the doors were closed, the conductor would pick up a phone and in a strongly accented voice would say, "This cah cleah'". We could look down from the top and see the train and the ore cars being unloaded. My memory is that the cars opened bottom doors and dumped their load into a chute leading to the ore boat. If you are interested in the funicular railway, you can find it described at: http://hometown.aol.com/djbubba/incline2.html.

      I have written to the owner of the web site for permission to use these photos. If he objects, I will remove them immediately.

      Probably one of the most life-influencing events of my life happened when I was around three years of age and I have no memory of any part of the event. But the residual effect of it has been with me every day of my life.
      We had an outside entrance to the basement of the house. It was one of the low slanted double doors that looked like an entrance to a tornado cellar. Mother was doing the laundry one day and I was outside, playing. She had one of the two doors open and I started playing on the other.
      Apparently I started playing on both sides. I went down headfirst, probably four to five feet and hit the corner of a concrete step with my nose. I have been told that it smashed my nose and put a gash in my face from the outside of my left eye down to the bottom end of my nose. I have been told that there was some concern that I might lose that eye. I'm sure that we look back at the country doctors of the twenties as being rather crude and uninformed by today's standards but I will be forever grateful to this one for the quite masterful way he pulled me out of this crisis. I believe it was quite probably Dr. Ribble. He put everything back together and no one looking at me could guess that it ever happened, except possbly for the rather wide bridge at the top end by my eyes. But I believe some of the internal passages were misaligned in a way he had no means to detect. My breathing has felt a residual effect all my life, and particularly when flying.
      My nose has had excessive phlegm, always. While this has always been annoying it was worse when flying. When I had the beginning of a cold or was mildly "stuffed up", my Eustachian tube would have difficulty equalizing the pressure to my inner ear. So when I would go into a dive in Italy in this condition, one or both of my eardrums would get stretched to the point where blood vessels would break and the eardrum would become red. This was known as aerotitus media and I was grounded for two weeks on seven occasions. This made the drum thicker and less responsive, costing me part of my hearing. There will be more of this later when I encountered the problem in Italy. I have had two sub-mucous resections to try to remedy the situation and they did help. But I think the problem is farther back in the the nose than sub-mucous resections can reach.

      I have an odd memory about Mother and her coffee. We did not have the fancy percolators they have nowadays, it was more like "cowboy" coffee and had grounds in it. Mother had a way to minimize the grounds. She kept an egg inside the glass fronted shelving in the kitchen. It had a small hole in one end. She would shake some of the white of the egg into the coffee. It would collect the grounds and keep them in the pot, not your cup!

      Sometime at about this stage of things, Bob Jim and I had a fight in a Methodist churchyard. We threw roundhouses and battled and one of my roundhouses went around him and hit him in the back. He started crying and going home, I thought if he was crying I better be too or I might get whaled. So I started crying too and walked home. We were playing together again a few hours later. We had already forgotten what the fight was about.

      Another story with no date attached, probably took place before I was born. Mother was in the kitchen at the stove. Dad was at the table, probably having a cup of coffee. Mother was beating and beating and beating. Dad finally said, "What are you making?" She said, "I'm making that white frosting you like, seven minute frosting." And he said, "Don't ever make it again. I had no idea it was that much work." I cannot vouch for the authenticity of the conversation, but that's what I remember being told.

      There was a golf course, nine holes with sand greens north of town, to the east of the road to Marion. I remember my parents had some orange golfballs. I thought they were for golfing when there was some snow on the ground!
      One time, about this time, I came running into the drugstore to Dad. I was crying and told him in the typical childish wail, "I stubbed my toe!". He said, "Which one?" And I said, "This one, . . . . No this one!"

      I had a young friend three doors away named Jerome Benn. He had an appendectomy. Ordinarily this is a rather routine operation but something went wrong and he died. At five, this was my first experience with death. I was an honorary pall bearer at his funeral.

      The drugstore was a Rexall Pharmacy. Once a year they would have a one cent sale. When you bought something, you could get a second one for a penny! Of course a penny was worth a lot more in those days, like a dime or so! They had fliers of course, LaMoure was a small town, ca 800 peple. So they hired (?) me to distribute them to all the houses in town. I think I did a pretty good job. I didn't stick bundles of them in a culvert somewhere to make it look like it distributed them. I don't remember getting paid?

      They had a furnace in the basement. The heat came straight up through a grate in the floor by the cash register. The grate was perhaps 3 feet square. Once in awhile someone would drop a coin in this grate and it went down to the furnace. But not into the furnace, it went into a shell that surrounded the furnace. There was a small "tunnel" that led into this shell in the floor of the basement. About once a year, probably in summer, they got me and probably one of my friends to crawl through this tunnel into the shell outside the furnace and paw through the layer of ashes and find the coins. I don't remember being given any of these coins either. And I don't remember asking where the ashes came from!

      Sometime about now I remember trying to iron something with a semi-toy electric iron, probably left over from my sisters' early days. Back and forth it was all right but when I went sideways, the iron rotated about the handle and it went on its side and I got a rather large and very painful burn on the inside of my right arm, about where one would wear a watch. I had a discolored spot there for years afterward. That iron would probably be recalled if it were around today!

      Learning can someimes be so painful. I used to put two dining room chairs back to back, probably about 18 inches apart. Then I would hoist myself up and then swing back and forth. I thought it was fun until one day one of the chairs tilted, I fell and stuck one of my lower teeth right through my lower lip!

      This a picture of my father and a helper at the store named Pat Sennet. I really don't know what his function was other than sweeping out the store. I'm sure he made himself useful. I remember he used to call me Char-less. two syllables. The next thing I remember is him not being there anymore and they hired me to sweep out the store. I was paid a nickel. Disney came out with a Mickey Mouse pocket watch and I wanted one. So I gave Mr. Isaacs at his jewelry store these nickels and when it added up to $1.25 I got my Mickey Mouse watch. I wish I had it today!

      I'm glad my father arranged to have a two week vacation every year whether we could afford it or not. If he hadn't, he would never have had one. He died at age 48!
      If I remember correctly this was the summer we loaded up the 1926 Buick and drove to the Black Hills. It was pristine in those days and a beautiful place. Now it is wall-to-wall billboards and eateries and what is not covered by these is covered by traffic.
      There was a series of rolling hills in South Dakota, up and down. up and down. One time we came across a hill and a car was coming toward us who wouldn't dim his lights. Dad was going to "teach him a lesson!" So he put on his brights too. We managed to pass safely but we were two approaching cars on a two lane gravel road with two blind drivers. After we passed Dad said something like, "Wow, I couldn't see a thing. I'll never do that again." I've never forgotten that and was never tempted to repeat it.
      We camped on a hill above the baths at Hot Springs South Dakota. There was a steep road leading up there with a number of hairpin turns. We pitched our pyramidal tent in the campground on top of the bluff.
      Mom and Dad went down to the town for some reason and Irene, Helen and I were alone in the tent. I was about 5, Helen was around 11 and Irene was about 13. A storm came up and it rained, hard and the wind blew. The tent was shaking and we were afraid it was going to blow away. There were two vertical supports, one on each side. Helen stood holding one and Irene the other. I was sitting on the floor crying. We were all very afraid. But it all worked out, we weathered the storm.
      There wasn't enough room in the tent for the five of us so Helen slept in the back seat of the Buick and I slept in the front. Helen complained that I kept her awake banging my head on the steering wheel. There will be those reading this that will shake their heads with a smile and say, "Ah, that explains it!".

      The blocks in LaMoure were about 300 feet square. There was usually an alley going through the middle, north-south. There would be a maximum of five houses per block with garages accessed by the alley. There were occasional empty lots which became our playgrounds. There was a park but it was three or four blocks away. Besides it was covered with trees and wouldn't have been good for football. I believe they now call it Sunset Park. I have made a map of the town as I remember it. I gave a copy to the La Moure Chronicle when I visited once. I was hoping they would publish it and inspire other to correct it or add to it!

      Once in awhile, kids will do something seriously wrong. I was not party to the original act but I participated very marginally in the result.
      A number of the older boys actually broke in or somehow got in a railroad boxcar and stole a box of cigarettes. They had them stashed all over, in and out of town. Like everybody else, I tried one and hated it.

      There was a creek south of town called Cottonwood Creek that had been "improved" by the addition of sand. Families used to congregate there as a swimming hole.
      The road south of town led to the base of a small hill or ridge. At the base of the slope was a right angle turn to the left. We had a 1926 Buick sedan. It was very heavy and very underpowered, at least by today's standards. If we were going fast enough to make the hill, we were too fast for the turn. If we were slow enough for the turn, we couldn't make the hill. It was a touch and go thing but we would eventually make it. Many years later I took this road, which had probably been improved and I had trouble deciding just where the slope was. My 1950 Ford 2-door sedan didn't even slow down!

      We had a huge cottonwood tree in our backyard right on the lotline with the Jorves. For some reason it was decided that it had to come down. They hired some guys to do it. They started by digging a huge hole around the base of it exposing all the roots. I guess they took it down when I wasn't looking because I don't remember the removal at all. They probably didn't want me around, and with good reason.

      It was about the fall of 1927 that a story appeared in the Fargo Forum about a young girl in northern North Dakota that needed a wheelchair. It struck me and my mother and I wrote a letter to the paper saying that if people would send in some money maybe they could get one for her by Christmas. We taped a quarter to the bottom of the letter. They published it. I will contact them to see if I can get a copy of the article. I might remind you that a quarter was worth a lot more then than it is now. It would buy three quarts of milk and two loaves of bread!

      Bob Jim Muir, across the alley, was my best friend. We did everything together. We would sleep together in one house or another. One night we wanted to spend the night at our house. The parents said, "No!". We did not accept that. When it came to bedtime, we were not to be found. They looked everywhere. They searched and searched and finally someone looked in a long closet with a low angled ceiling due to the roof, just off the bathroom and there we were, sound asleep.
      Just to tantalize you, when he was five he did a reprehensible thing which I will not describe. No one was hurt. I just watched because I did not know what else to do. If he reads this, I'm sure he will remember.

      Memories of these days are bathed in a kind of golden glow of innocence. We would go out in the hills north of town in spring. The birds were back. Leaves came back to the trees. The snow was long gone. The sun was warm. The crocuses were the first bloom in spring and we enjoyed trying to find the first ones. There was a weed whose green parts tasted like onion so we called them wild onions. I remember shooting my rifle at some of the pigeons flying around a granary. I believe I managed to wing one on the fly, which we considered a real triumph, Wyatt Earp stuff!. It was a good time, a good time for cildren. No cosmic worries, just one after another of good days. The sun was always shining!
I remember. I only remember being an onlooker and taster.

      There was a golf course, nine holes with sand greens north of town, to the east of the road to Marion. I remember my parents had some orange golfballs. I thought they were for golfing when there was some snow on the ground!

      Children do not have the ability to foresee the consequences of their actions. We lived, second from the corner north of an unnamed cross street. The Crudens were next door and the Robes were on the corner across the street. Halfway down the cross street, behind the Robe's home was a barn. It did not seem to be used. There was an unused alleyway between the Robe's home and the barn, full of weeds. There were a lot of tumbleweeds for some reason, all very dry. I think tumbleweeds were a kind of thistle that grew in a globular shape and when they died, they got very dry, the stem broke at ground level and the wind would start them rolling. In more open ground outside of town there would be many of them rolling across the ground, like a litle army on parade. For some reason there were a number of them in this little unused alley. They looked like they would burn real well and we thought it would be fun and harmless to pile some up and set them on fire. Wouldn't that be a pretty sight? Surely it would be harmless. So we piled them against the side of this old barn, got a match from somewhere and set them on fire. We lit it up and our eyes shone as the flames began to mount. All of a sudden we "saw" the old wooden barn they were leaning against. All of a sudden it occurred to us that the barn would burn too. We ran and got help and the fire was put out before it did any real damage. I don't remember any punishment, probably because we did get help in time. This was probably the first time the word "consequence" became meaningful to me. It was a good lesson with fortunately no cost!

      Dad had built a kind of mutiple birdhouse for purple martins and put it on a pole in our garden. About this time he decided it had to go, took it down and put it out back of the garden along the alley. Halloween came and some kids roaming around looking for mischief pulled the pole out across the alley. Mr. Carroll was known to come roaring up the alley to his garage and he would have hit it in the dark. Fortunately we found it and put it back before that happened. Another example of children's inability to foresee consequences. I'm sure they did not mean to harm him, they just did not realize that it could have.

      We used to go down to the James River to fish. We had a length of bamboo with a string, cork, sinker and hook. We used angle worms for bait. I only remember two kinds of fish, shiners and bullheads. I don't remember ever eating either one. I was never much good at fishing but it was a pleasant group activity. We would go down where the railroad went over the James River and fish off the bridge. There was a ladder on the side where we could climb down and be closer to the river. We didn't have a lot of fishline. Somehow, to me, this whole era smacks of Norman Rockwell.

      When winter came, they would push a little mound of dirt up around an unused quarter of a block across from the Methodist Church and next to the old barn we almost burned. The they would turn on the hydrant and flood it. Overnight it would freeze and we would have a skating rink. They strung some lights over it, almost like Christmas lights. They built a small "warming shed" with some benches and a fire! When in use, it had a wonderful stench of moldy wet clothes and other undecipherable aromas, all mixed together. If you bottled it, no one would buy it. But it does bring back great memories.
      i would run home from school, grab my skates and head for the rink. There was something wonderful about this ritual and I feel sorry for the many people that never had the experience. I did not have a good pair of skates. They were quite primiive. They were shoeskates but the leather was not stiff and gave little or no ankle support. When I stood on them, although my ankle was straight, the skates would be practically on their side. But what the hell, they worked tolerably well. We played the usual games, like pom-pom-pullaway. Or we just skated. It was a dreamy Currier and Ives time in retrospect. When I think of those times I think of the ever present twinkling snowflakes and perennial smiles.

      I remember coming home from an early grade in winter. I was bundled up like an Egyptan mummy, leather aviation helmet, fleece lined overcoat, scarf, corduroy breeches, heavy woolen socks and lace up boots. I could have walked through fire and been untouched. I was young and exuberant. I remember the three or four foot long piles of snow at the side of the road. I remember running at one of the snowbanks, full tilt, and launching myself head first into the snow. Wow, what fun! I'm glad there waswn't a rock or some other thing that might be harder than my head.

      We used to hunt gophers and pocket gophers. I no longer know the difference. There was a 2 cent bounty if we brought in the tails and a nickel for pocket gophers. Bob Jim's brother, Porter Muir, brought a shot gun one time and blew a gopher to pieces and he couldn't find the tail! We hunted rabbits too. One time I remember I had seven shells. Doc Winslow, father of my friend Chacky (Charles) Winslow, took me out to one of his fields in his Model A Ford sedan. He was used to driving these things over ditches and fields in his work. It was the 1930 era Jeep. He would scare up a rabbit and "herd" it back and forth until it stopped and perked up on his haunches and froze. He'd stop, I'd shoot. I got five rabbits with the seven shells. This may sound strange to people in other parts of the country but rabbits were a real pest. I had heard of rabbit hunts where a large number of farmers and other hunters with shotguns would form a large circle and then back toward the center. As the rabbits tried to run out between them they would be shot. I doubt this ever affected the rabbit population significantly.

      Bob Jim Muir and I were the best of friends, inseparable. Here's a picture of us on our front lawn. I guess we rolled the tire in the gravel street. No traffic problem, of course.

      Chacky eventually became a veterinarian too. They were a large family. There was Harold, Donald, Martha, Ruth Ann, Joan, the twins Jean and Jane and Charles. They had a farm but lived on the edge of town. The large family had chores which were passed down as they got older.

      And speaking of bounties, there was a pilot named Ed Canfield. He carried a shotgun in his low wing plane. And when he saw a coyote he would swoop down and let him have it. Then he would throw out a small identifying flag. The farmer who found it would turn in his name so he could collect the bounty. I don't think this bounty worked here either except as a collateral income for Ed.

      I would be sent down to JC's in La Moure occasionally. I remember one time when I was out on the road to Marion ND with Bob Jim Muir and probably his brother Porter. There was a fishing hole out there along the James River, southeast of the Neverman farm. A large culvert drained the hills to the east under the road to the river. We could walk through it if we were stooped over almost to our waist. This time I straightened up a couple inches too soon and hit my head on the end of the culvert. Unfortunately the end of a small screw punched a small hole in my scalp. Scalp wounds bleed profusely and I started back to uncle's place. When I got there I was a bloody mess. I think I must have been a frightening sight. They took me in the bathroom, sat me on the toilet with the lid down and proceeded to clean me up. I'm sure they were relieved when they found the very small wound.

      We used to play cowboys and Indians out in the hills northeast of town, probably on Harkey's farm. There were some dilapidated sheds out there that came in handy with our lmagination.
      There's a lot of talk now in the "big cities" about the need for school courses in sex education. Kids in farming communities like La Moure (pop. 800) didn't need it. Judging by a couple of jokes we told at the time, we were well aware of the process by the time we were six years old. I can tell two of them here that illustrate the point.
      The first is about a mother that had polished her little speech for several years waiting for "the question". Finally the little boy came to her and asked, "Where did I come from?" She thought, "Well, this it!" and started in on her well polished speech. He became more and more restive and finally broke in saying, "No Mom, that's not what I meant. Johnny came from Cleveland. Where did I come from?"
      The second story concerns the time when the Dad finally comes to the boy and says, "Well, it's about time we had our little talk about the question of sex." At which time the boy said, "OK Dad, what do you want to know."
      It is my memory that we were completely informed by the time we were six.

      I'm not sure the kids from the big cities had our opportunities to learn. Much later, ca 1962, I was teaching at a ranch-college called Deep Springs in the White Mountains of California, about forty miles over a Westgard Pass from Bishop. Our students came from all over the country, Detroit, for instance. We had a favorite dairy cow who was about to deliver. One day during my math class the word got out that she was delivering down in the corral. So, to further their education, I dismissed the class and reconvened it on the top rail of the corral. The calf was born and we watched the whole process. I remember it took at least a half hour before the little one got on all fours. He would get his front legs up, try to stand and fall over, then the rear legs and again he would fall over. Finally he got up and walked unsteadily about the corral. He was named "Prince Hal" and had a quite unusual dark brown color. He became quite a pet of the students and didn't get sold off or given away as males often were. But, he died of pneumonia, I believe. I never knew whether or not student neglect was part of the cause.

      About this time I got the idea that I should take mother's butcher knife and go out back and try to throw it at a box elder tree rather close to the back stoop. It was right next to the rear sidewalk. I threw it, it didn't hit right, fell to the sidewalk and broke the blade in half. It was mother's favorite knife. I remember the event but I don't remember the consequence!

      I learned about handling guns by coming along when my Dad and Uncle JC went hunting ducks, pheasants or prairie chickens every fall.
      I was the "designated retriever". I learned that you never got out in front of the people with the guns. I learned that when you were going through a fence you stood the gun against a fencepost, climbed through and then retrieved your gun. You kept it unloaded as much as possible.
      It was great to go out on a crisp fall day, and walk slowly through the stubble field where the wheat had been harvested in August. The birds would hunker down and be invisble until you were ready to step on them and then they would erupt with a loud whir of wings that would startle you. The birds were hoping that it would startle you into missing your shot! They hunted ducks around the various ponds and sloughs in the neighborhood. I don't know how they were retrieved if they fell in water. We didn't have a dog.
      I remember two kind of birds, ring-necked pheasants and prairie chickens. The pheasants were beautiful birds. The prairie chickens were rather drab as I remember. But they both tasted real good! We would have a feast with both families. I don't remember anyone being concerned about how much work it was for mother to prepare these birds. She had to take off the feathers and then the pinfeathers. As I remember she did this by coating the bird with paraffin and then peeling the wax off taking the pinfeathers with it! I remember that I accepted their suggestion that the heart of the bird was great and I always got it. I'm not sure now that it was so great and probably would not touch it with a ten foot pole.

      We had invited JC, Frances and Mary over for Christmas. He and, I believe, Dad told me to go out into JC's car and look for a small package in the back seat. I went out and looked and couldn't find one. So I went back in and told them I couldn't find it because there was a big package in the way. They laughed and went out and brought in the big package. I opened it up and it was a trimotor airplane superficially resembing the Ford Trimotor. When I pushed it across the floor, the propellors would go around. It was magnificently strong. I could have stood on it without hurting it.

      It was either before or after this that Uncle JC took me out to a hayfield by the Lynch farm on highway 13, just west of town where a barn storming Ford Trimotor had landed. He was giving rides for 2 cents a pound, a dollar minimum. He had a scale by the door and I weighed 47 pounds! So Uncle had to pay a dollar for me. He probably weighed at least 220 so it cost at least $4 for him. I hope he enjoyed it as much as I did. A probably erroneous memory would show him holding on to my belt as I leaned out of the window! They knew I was nuts about airplanes even then!

      Late this fall, Dad caught a cold. It probably had nothing to do with what developed next but I've always wondered. He developed some pronounced bumps on his neck that I now know were his lymph glands. One day he came in the front door with a jaunty air, his hat back somewhat and an unlit cigar in his mouth. It seems the doctor had suggested it to him for some reason. I believe they knew it was Hodgkin's Disease. By next spring he was in bed. He made several trips, as I remember, to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester MN and St. John's Hospital in Fargo. They experimented with him using radium needles but they knew little about the disease. They took us over to the neighor's house one night toward the end. I was told at some time that he had taken a whole bottle of aspirin trying to end the pain. He died a miserable and painful death in October 1930. I was told that if they had been able to cure him at this stage he would have been a hopeless morphine addict.
      This is very difficult to write.