Flashback Friday - Life was glorious after I got married.

I only worked at home. We stayed with the old folks over on the ranch that first summer. They went to Nissa that fall. They moved over there with Granddad’s brother, Harry Brown. And we stayed on the ranch. It was just another winter on the ranch. You did your chores and went to town once a week and survived. I COULD milk the cows and do all that stuff if Dick was busy at something else. But I didn’t go out and do that in the winter time. It’s hard to just up and say what we’d do, your days work is cut out for you. You get up and get breakfast on a wood stove. Keeping wood in the wood box was quite a chore.

We ate bread and butter and taters and meat. Granddad Brown had a swell garden. It was half a mile away from the house, but Granddad Brown took care of it. Mac always said that Granddad counted his day’s work by how tired he got instead of with what he accomplished. Mama had always canned green beans, so I wanted to can green beans to have in the winter time. But Granddad picked the first mess of them things that got ready to eat and brought them over to the house and when I asked him if there were going to be enough to can; he had pulled them all up and fed them to the cows. We milked cows and ran the milk through a separator. We made our own butter and cottage cheese and drank all our own milk. We went to Eagle Valley and got peaches to can. We had one apricot tree over in the garden at the ranch but I don’t remember canning very many apricots. We canned quite a few tomatoes; we went to the valley after them too.

For supper we had meat usually ham and bread and butter and taters and vegetables. We had a garden. We raised our own pork. Any time we could find one we would have deer. But the hills were pretty closely watched so we didn’t break the season. Besides in the summer there was no sense killing something and having it rot. We had no cold storage. I don’t remember making any jerky. I didn’t like jerky. It’s tough stuff. To keep things cool we had to put them in a bag and hang it out behind the house in the winter. I remember wrapping a quarter of beef and hanging it out in the night when it was cold then putting it in the bedding during the day so the warmth didn’t get to it then hanging it back out at night.

Right behind the ranch was a placer cut 12 or 15 ft deep and about 50 or 60 ft wide. There was a spring up the creek above the house what would be about a city block and it put a steam of water down that little creek all summer. We got our water for the house from another spring right below the house right down in that placer cut; we had to go down a bank. It didn’t go straight down you had to go at an angle. I don’t know how far it was down there, but before you got up that bank with a couple of buckets of water you knew you had something. We had no water at the house; we had to pack it all.

I washed our clothes on the wash board. You stuck your clothes in a tub of water with the wash board and pick up a piece of garment and run it up and down the wash board then ring it by hand and then put it over in the rinse water. And then you put it out of that rinse water into another rinse water. To fill my buckets I dipped them into the spring, picked them up and packed them and climbed a 40 ft. bank with them. To dry them I hung them on the line. I had quite a time with getting the clothes line in a place that suited me. Bill Weir got the first washing machine with an engine on it that I knew of in the early 30s. We got that one when his family got another one. About all it saved me was the wash board and you ran it through the old ringer so I didn’t have to ring by hand. However I could ring by hand better than the ringer could.

We had no electricity. We had coal oil lamps. We had a radio on the ranch. And we had a phone at the ranch – a community phone. You had to call Brasswells to relay a message if you wanted to call into Baker. The phones were about a foot and ½ long and hung on the wall. You cranked the handle to make it ring. When Dad was working for the Forest Service his ring was a long and 3 shorts. I think that’s what I chose for out on the ranch too, it felt like home.

Our mode of transportation was mostly horse. If we had a horse that needed broken, Dick and Mac broke it. We had a sorrel team; they were Pat & Mike. They weren’t very big horses but they were good work horses. They had belonged to Dick’s family. They took us there and brought us back. They used them in the farming. In the winter time we had a sled. We had a lot of winter in Sparta. Sometimes the snow got 4 ft. deep. And it was easier to go by sled than any other way when the snow got deep. Sometimes we didn’t have snow; sometimes we had mud. Then we’d have to take the buggy.

The end of the 30’s we moved to Milton-Freewater and Dick and I worked in the peas. They had machinery out in the fields. Dick ran a loader. I worked in the cannery. We just picked the bad things out of the peas when they came by us on the belt… like a little dead mouse.

(What made them “The Good Old Days”?)
I guess it’s because we were young.