From a childhood in the Colorado sand hills to the woods of Southern Oregon--and about a hundred pages of cheating slot machines in between.

    This is the story of my life as far as I can think back to my childhood days on the dry land farm in Southeastern Colorado. Mine has been a very interesting life to me and full of a lot of adventure and variety. My two children, a son Loy and daughter Myrna, six grandchildren and many friends have all encouraged me to set all these stories that I have been telling them for years down in writing. My wife Ellen for over fifty years says my story will never sell. I tell her that I am not worried about that but just how much money to ask for the movie rights. The most important thing to me is for my great- and hopefully for my great-great-grandchildren to read it.
    My first sixteen years on the farm then moving to Long Beach, California to stay with a sister and finish my senior year of high school, then going with another sister and her husband on trips all over the U.S. to beat slot machines for many years to come. All this adventure and later on working in the woods in Oregon, working on a gold dredge, helping to build Shasta Dam and other heavy construction jobs and working as a carpenter building hundreds of apartments and homes here in our beautiful Rogue Valley the last twenty years before my retirement has added up to a very interesting life to me. I hope my story will be interesting enough that perfect strangers will enjoy reading it from start to finish.
    I especially want to thank Altha LeRoy, a retired English teacher, who taught my daughter in high school many years ago. She must have worn out a red pencil correcting my sentence arrangement, punctuation, some spelling. I hadn't realized just how uneducated I am until I started writing this story. I also want to thank a neighbor, Barbara Stevens, for her encouragement.
    I thought I had it pretty rough in those days, but looking back I am thankful that I was raised in a large and poor family. It has caused me to appreciate all the convenience and material I have amassed in adult life. So many of the young people I see these days have always had things easy so do not put much value to anything. That is why so many young people get disenchanted with life when they get out on their own and things quit coming easy. So they drink, use drugs and steal, and more of them are committing suicide than any other time in history.

    No one in those days had plumbing or electricity. We didn't even have an icebox, phone, battery radio or an automobile. All our meat we butchered had to be salt cured or hung up on the north side of the house in winter to freeze. We lived in an old house that the farmers back East wouldn't have thought to be good enough for their barn.
    The only fuel we had to cook and heat with was corn cobs or cow chips we picked up in the pasture. They had to be just the right color and weight to be suitable to burn. Sometimes we would be lucky enough to find some old railroad ties a few miles away that the Missouri Pacific railroads had replaced. These ties were tough and hard work to cut into firewood. One year we were lucky; my dad gathered enough ties to build a corral. Some of the young local men would catch a ride on a freight train when it slowed down going up a grade. They'd for a mile or two kick a lot of coal off a heaped-up half car. Then people came along later with a team and wagon and picked the coal up off the ground. Coal was really a luxury. I still say that if we'd had money enough to afford a thermometer to know how cold it really was, we'd have all frozen to death. I've seen cattle standing or kneeling where they had frozen in a fence corner several days after a blizzard. A blizzard, in 1931, I think it was, several children and a school bus driver were frozen to death near a town, about 30 miles from us.
    We kids used to hunt cottontail and jackrabbit for pastime. A young rabbit could be good eating. Most of them had been fattened in our grain field. We had to keep alert not to be bitten by diamondback or sand rattlesnakes. There was another variety that we called a prairie rattler. All of us kids had narrow escapes from being bitten. My sister, Eunice, nearly three years older than I, had a big six-foot-long diamondback strike at her as she was running by. His fangs caught in her dress about waist high, and she dragged him about 100 feet before his fangs tore out of her dress. I remember his jaws opening and closing for several minutes after mom had chopped his head off with a hoe. Once,while I was trying to see how long I could walk in a cow path with my cap pulled over my eyes, a big rattler slapped my loose pants leg with his head when he struck at me. I probably jumped three feet in the air and to one side when I heard him buzz. My older brother, Lauren, came running with a hoe when he heard me holler. He missed the first chop and this big snake struck up the hoe handle, just missing Lauren's hand. Another time I was bringing the cows in out of the pasture for milking and trying to head a cow off that was trying to run back to some other cattle, and I stepped right in the middle of a big rattler. He missed getting his fangs into my leg but was wrapped around it and I stopped and gave a big kick and the snake landed in a heap at least twenty feet away. He was so mad that I had time to run over to a fence several hundred feet away and break a piece off a wooden post and he was still coiled and buzzing when I got back, and I killed him.
    Another close call I had was one evening when we came home from town, Chivington. It was starting to get dark, so Mom told me to hurry and put a couple dozen baby ducks in a tub and cover them up with boards so the rats wouldn't kill them during the night. They were back under this wooden crate, which was about two feet high, and I had to crawl back under about five feet and hand them back into the tub. I had just picked the first one up when I heard a buzz right by my nose. I could never lift this crate before, but right then I upended it with ease. A little sand rattler had gone to bed with the ducks. He had bitten one duck, which was dead. They are a small snake, but I've heard that they are just as deadly as a big diamondback. I was walking along (with my brother rabbit hunting one day), barefooted as usual, and stepped right on a big snake in this tall grass. I was very lucky that it happened to be a non-poisonous bull snake. What a sensation that was.
    One time I had climbed up on a stanchion in the barn so I could reach up into a pigeon nesting box to see how big the squabs were getting, and grabbed ahold of this big snake with my bare hand. I pulled my hand back out of that nest so fast I nearly fell off the stanchion. A big bull snake came crawling out. He had already dined on the squabs.
    I always carried a slingshot around my neck to kill snakes or rabbits with. After I got a little older, I was a better shot with it than with a .22 rifle. For one reason, I couldn't afford a lot of shells for a gun. I would bring home pockets full of slag every time I went to the railroad tracks a couple of miles from home. They used steel slag for ballast, which was real heavy, and I'd pick out just the right size for ammunition.
    There were no rocks lying around in this sandhill country, so if you did see a rock on one of these old blown-off-to-hard-ground corn fields, it was always an arrowhead or at least a piece of a broken one. I still have a nice collection of these Indian artifacts that I found back there as a kid, in three different frames on my wall. I found over twenty of these stone buffalo skinning knives in one pile with the chips, where they had made them on the spot. The funny thing about that, there wasn't any of that flint rock within a hundred miles of where I found them. I also have a few old lead balls and bullets, human finger bones and a bone whistle. Some of my arrowheads and bullets were found on the old Chivington battle ground, where Colonel Chivington made a bad name for himself by massacring a bunch of Indians, including the squaws and papooses, at daybreak one morning. We lived about ten miles from this old battle field, and a historical marker has been placed nearby. The store keeper at the town of Chivington would trade kids a candy bar or gum for arrowheads, and I heard that later on he sold his collection for a good sum of money. I would never trade any of mine, even as well as I liked candy.
    We kids always had a horse to ride. We envied kids in town who had a bicycle, and they envied us country kids our horse. Very seldom did I ever bother to put a saddle on a horse. The only times I remember getting thrown off a bareback horse, was when a rabbit or prairie chicken would get up right under me as I was loping along. I was thrown for this reason once into a solid mass of sandburs in this old field. After I rolled to a stop, it took me an hour to pick all of these burs out of my clothes and skin. We always went barefoot in summer, to save our shoes for school in the winter, and we would get some terrible stickers in our feet from the many cactus, sandburs, cockleburs and Mexican bullhead nettles. These bullhead nettles would puncture a thin car tire. One time I stepped on a round cactus and hopped on one foot till I could sit down on another round cactus. We used to pick the prickly pears off one kind of cactus and roll them in the grass to get the fine stickers off and then eat them. They were sweet, and we thought they were good. One time my sister Eunice and I cut the top out of one, filled it with chicken manure, very carefully put the top back on and offered it to our brother, Art. He said, "Sure," and stuffed it all in his mouth. Eunice and I had to run for our lives.
    When mom wasn't around, Eunice and I would take old hen chickens and put their heads under their wings and whirl them around our head about fifty times and set them down to see how crazy they walked. Our mother had no use for dogs, but my brother, Lauren, five years older than I, finally talked her into letting him have two greyhound pups that a neighbor was glad to get rid of. He would take them rabbit hunting, and the only reason he would let me tag along was to carry the rabbits. He was a dead shot with a rifle and would soon kill all the rabbits that I could carry. He would tell Mom that the dog caught them to make her think they were valuable. It got so we weren't getting any eggs, so Mom made him get rid of them. Then he dug out a coyote den and brought home a couple of the pups and Mom also made him get rid of them. He gave them to some kids in town, but they soon dug out of their pen and killed every chicken for a mile around before the irate people could get a shot at them.
    Another time Lauren dug out this den of a mother skunk and her eight little ones. He was going to make a lot of money by raising them and killing them when their hides got prime that winter. He was always too busy to take care of them, so Eunice and I had to feed them all summer. Every evening when we went out in the mile-square pasture after the cows, at milking time, we'd take along a couple of gallon pails and try to catch enough grasshoppers and crickets to satisfy their enormous appetites. Once in awhile we'd hit the jackpot and kill a big rattlesnake, which they liked better than rabbit. They would lick the bones clean. They never were de-scented, and Eunice and I would get in the pen and play with them, but if a stranger walked up too close, they'd let him have it. Well, when winter came, we'd all made such cute pets out of them that he wouldn't kill them. So we took them about a mile out on the prairie and turned them loose. Several of them kept coming back to their pen and had to be deported several times before they would give up that easy way to live.
    Lauren had Eunice and me help him dig a hole about two feet wide and six feet deep, out a ways on the prairie, and then we tunneled back in about eight feet. Mom took one look at it and made us abandon it, after all our hard work, as she was afraid it would cave in on us. A couple of years later, I happened to go right by there and the ladder still looked good, so I climbed down to have a look-see. When I had crawled a few feet back into the tunnel, I heard a growl and saw a set of eyes. I about turned wrong side out, backing out of there so fast. While I was still running a hundred or so feet away, I looked back and saw a coyote slinking off across the prairie. In about a half second more, he would have torn me to pieces trying to get by me. There also could have been a big rattlesnake coiled back in that dark tunnel.
    I had heard that if you could pick a skunk up by the tail real fast and not let him touch his feet to the ground, he couldn't stink on you. One day I saw this skunk's tail waving above this foundation of an old burned down house and I thought, "Here's my chance." So I crawled up real careful and reached over the foundation, got ahold of his tail and jerked him off the ground. I was really elated as it had worked and I started with him toward home, a half a mile away. He was a big, fat, heavy skunk, and before I had gone very far, my arms started getting tired and I got to wondering what I'd do with him if I did get him home.
    Before I got halfway home, I let him sag enough to grab ahold of a clump of tall grass, and he let me have it. I let go and ran, half blind, the rest of the way home. My poor mom had to wash those clothes, as we couldn't afford to throw anything away. I couldn't get myself washed good enough to sleep well that night.
    In later years, when I was a little older, I trapped skunks to make money to help buy my school clothes. In those days, good, prime, narrow-stripe hides were worth four or five bucks each. Men were working a long hard day for a dollar at the time, if they could find a job. You could buy a good pair of shoes for two or three dollars and a pair of bib overalls and a blue work shirt for a few dollars more. You had to work two days to buy a pair of shoes in those so-called good old days. Now, even in these inflated 1980s you can buy more for only two hours' work.
    I didn't know what boughten toys were, so I made my own. One summer, I stayed at my sister Lottie's home. She had a boy, my nephew Jim, only a year and a half younger than myself. We caught a bunch of those dryland turtles, which were about five or six inches wide, and would drill holes in the edge of their upper shell, on each side of their tail. Then we'd make little wagons out of old cigar boxes, with spools for wheels, and hitch on to them and have races. We kept them in a wooden barrel with wet sand in the bottom and had to rustle bugs for them to eat. We had a lot of fun and played with them any spare time we had, but Jim's dad made us get rid of them, so we'd have more time to hoe weeds out of the corn and do other chores. Some of those turtles came back to the barrel several times from where we had released them over a mile out on the prairie. We had painted their shells all  up pretty with their names, and Jim said he saw some of them years later.
    The old story-and-a-half house we lived in had a stairway up the middle, leading to one big room upstairs. Here we kids slept. It had never been sealed above, and you could see stars shining through the cracks in the shingles at night. I remember the wind howling around the eaves all night long a lot of times.
    Many a time we'd wake up in the morning with a thick film of snow or dust on our pillow. In the winter, we'd sleep on a feather bed with another one over us and be as snug as a bug in a rug.
    One summer we raised a lot of peanuts, and the only place we had to store them was upstairs in the house, vines and all. We left a narrow trail from head of the stairs, through these vines, to our beds, and if we got hungry we'd just reach over the side of the bed and shell a few peanuts. The inside walls and ceilings downstairs were sealed with tin and were loaded with bedbugs, which would come out and dine on any of us sleeping at night. They left big red welts. Mom would use some of us kids for bait and kill bedbugs. They stunk terrible when you mashed them. Mom would swab the edges of the mattresses with kerosene to discourage them and kill their eggs.
    Eunice and I decided to sleep out on the rather flat roof of the barn one hot moonlit night, to keep cool. We were awakened in the night by a rustling noise. We could see hundreds of rats all around us, eating the grain thrown up there for our pigeons to eat. We both jumped up with this white sheet over us, stomped our feet, and made a run towards these rats. They didn't take time to climb down, but ran and shot out over the edge, and for several seconds we could hear them going plop when they hit the ground twelve feet below. We climbed down and never tried to sleep up there again.
    One hot day, when the wind didn't happen to be blowing for a change, Eunice and I were playing down by the windmill and got thirsty, so she said, "Harold, why don't you climb up on the tower and turn the wheel, and I'll get a drink out of the pipe before it runs into the tank, and then hold my hand over the pipe, so you can get a drink when you come down." The idea worked fine till a big whirlwind came along and spun the wheel around, nearly knocking me off the twenty-five-foot tower. My dad had been working on the gearbox and had left the cover off and I stuck my hand into these gears trying to hold on, and they ground my thumb and three fingers to a pulp. I guess I gave a big jerk to pull my hand free, but left over half of my right index finger up there and managed to climb down without falling. We ran for the house and when I looked back, I could see a bunch of crows landing on the windmill tower, and I knew they were fighting over my finger.
    We didn't have a car, so my dad walked to the nearest neighbor, a mile away, and had Forbes Walker take me to a doctor, at Lamar, about thirty miles away. Mom had put turpentine on my hand and wrapped it in a towel, but I remember it was aching real bad before we got to the doctor over two hours later. Dr. Knuckey did a real good job on it, as I only lost the one missing finger and no stiff joints. I still get nauseated when I smell anything resembling that ether that they put me out with, as it really made me sick.
    Mom always used turpentine on any of us kids when we had cuts, slivers, or other skin breaks. She would render out the fat from a big fat skunk or a goose and add turpentine to this to rub on our chests when we had colds, and it cured us every time. She would boil onions and mix with honey, add a few drops of turpentine and give us a spoonful or two for a sore throat. Both my older brothers managed to get broken arms before they grew up, and Mom set both of them as well as any doctor could have.
    My brother Art was in high school when I was only in the second or third grade, and he would teach me Latin at night while we were lying in bed in that old upstairs. He taught me "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star," in Latin, and I still remember a couple verses of it sixty years later. I think he must have been the one who taught me to read before I started to school, and Mom started me when I was barely five years old. I wouldn't advise anyone to start a kid to school that young, as it was a hardship on me all through school. Being a grade ahead of the other kids and small for my age made it rough, especially in sports. I was good for my size but that wasn't quite good enough in a small school. Mom subscribed for a monthly paper, "The Home Comfort," which was mailed to us from Augusta, Maine. We also got the weekly Kansas City Star and our local Kiowa County Press. I could hardly wait for the "Home Comfort" to come so I could read a serial story about Cubby Bear. I don't remember a rural mail route by our place. I think we only got our mail when we went to town about once a week.
    My sister, Eunice, was nearly three years older than I, and we used to have some dandy fights. One evening Mom came into the house from milking the cows and found us on the floor with leg scissors on each other's heads and both our noses bleeding.
    Neither one of us would give up, but Mom scattered us pretty fast. One time Eunice caught me sitting on the edge of the stock watering tank and shoved me over backwards. I about drowned before I could get my legs untangled and get to my feet. The only reason I was able to catch her in my wet overalls was because she was laughing so hard, but I was so tired that she was able to get me down and tried to make me eat dried rabbit manure by rubbing them on my mouth and teeth. One time we dared each other to eat a raw grasshopper leg. She had me do it first, and then she backed out. I can still remember that awful taste. Lauren and Eunice got mad at me one day and took my pants down and branded my bare butt with lit matches. This happened, of course, while Mom was away.
    We had this big thick magnifying glass, so one day I caught our old tomcat dozing in the sun on our front step and focused this glass on his bare rear end. In less than a minute, he let out a squall, made a big leap and ran under the house. He was still licking his rear end when he finally came out from under the house a couple of days later. He was the same cat that I hitched a little wagon to while he was asleep. When he woke up, he took off like he was crazy, tearing my wagon that I'd worked so hard to make all to pieces as he ran under the house with it. We had one cat that ate a little bee-martin, which had fell out of a nest on the corral fence. Eunice and I caught him and put him in a burlap sack and whopped him against the fence a few times, swung him around our head and jumped on the sack a lot more times. When we untied the sack and let him loose, he took off on a run, staggered like a drunk, disappeared over a rise, never to return.
    Pretty often, big hawks would get after our chickens. Mom was a good shot with the old 12-gauge shotgun and she killed many a hawk while he was on a fast dive after a chicken. One hawk she killed on the dive, hit the chicken anyway, hard enough to knock some feathers loose. I saw a coyote chasing a rabbit, headed towards our house. I hollered to Mom and she grabbed the old shotgun in time to get off a shot just as he was going by. He went a rolling but got up biting himself and was able to get to some tall grass a ways off. I found him dead a few days later.
    My mother was a real pioneer. Her mother and three older sisters had died of diphtheria back in Iowa when she was only about a year old, all within a few weeks' time. Her dad, John Smith, took her and brother Harvey and sister Gertrude and followed the Missouri Pacific Railroad west, helping build it on the way. They had lived in sod shanties, dugouts and shacks until her dad staked a 160-acre homestead claim in eastern Colorado, near the little town of Brandon. When they first arrived , there were quite a few antelope around. Grandpa had an old .45-70 Springfield rifle from Civil War days, and Mom said she saw him kill an antelope a good quarter-mile away with it one time. I remember it had a back sight on it you could elevate for a mile range. I still had this old gun up until a few years ago until I had it stolen from me. I wouldn't have sold it for a thousand dollars, and I have picture of Grandpa, standing at attention with it by his side.
    Grandpa was born on a ship coming across from Germany in the 1840s. They changed their name from the German Schmidt to Smith when they came to the U.S.A. Grandpa lost two brothers in the battle of Gettysburg. Mom's living sister and she had a falling out at a young age and never spoke to or saw each other again as long as they lived. Her only brother, Harvey, died from an epileptic fit at age 21. Mom's dad was called Horn Smith, as he polished buffalo, cow and Texas steer horns and put the finish polish by rubbing them with burned cow manure ashes, between his hands. I ended up with one unfinished powder horn and a couple of rough unfinished buffalo horns out of a wooden barrel of them that he had on hand when he died. He died the year I was born in 1917. I've always wished that he would have lived much longer, until I was old enough to talk to him and get acquainted. My son and several of my sisters have more of the horns that he had polished.
    When I was a small boy, we could still find the solid tips of buffalo horns that hadn't rotted away yet. They were white men's left from the great buffalo slaughter in the 1850s. I remember old wagon track roads cutting across our pasture. They had been made before there were any fences left by the western settlers. The country was hilly but still level enough so the pioneers could travel as straight as a crow flies toward their destination. I would like to know the history of some of those old roads now.
    In the 1920s, people visited each other more, as there was no TV, and very few people had battery radios out in the country.
    After I had started to school in 1922, my mother bought a used hand-wind phonograph. It was a Sears-Roebuck Silvertone and you had to hand wind it every record and change needles every few records. We only had about a dozen records, which we would play over and over again. We had "Red River Valley," "The Prisoner's Song," "Silver Bell," "Rovin' Gambler," "Sinking of the Titanic," "The Death of Floyd Collins," "Rosewood Casket," "Barbara Allen," "Zeb Turney's Gal," "Strawberry Roan" and "Hobo Bill's Last Ride" and a few others that I can't remember. My brother, Art, still has this old phonograph and the records, where he lives out in the Southern California desert.
    We would have parties at different people's houses. Mom could play a harmonica real well. She knew how to tongue it and chord for herself. I remember a neighbor man playing this real small accordion at one party, all night long, and the only tune he knew was "Yankee Doodle Dandy." People were starved for entertainment. We kids would try to dance the Charleston on our old wooden floor, barefooted, and would get some bad slivers. Sometimes Mom would take us kids with her in the wagon to dances in the old Kingdon Hotel in Chivington about five miles away by road. People would dance all night long to fiddle music with a caller for the square dances. The younger kids would be put to bed on or under benches when they got sleepy, and I remember more than once the sun coming up on our way home. In winter you could see the horses' breaths in the cold.
    One morning just at daybreak, a big thunder storm came along, with lightning cracking and loud thunder all around. Mom got us kids out of bed to watch a big dark cloud, which was low to the ground, about a mile away. We got to see it drop to the ground and in a few minutes, a wall of water, several feet deep and a couple of hundred feet wide, came roaring down this draw near our house. It formed a lake several hundred feet wide and six feet deep, where only a mud puddle had ever formed from previous rains. We had witnessed a cloudburst, which I had heard of but have never seen since. This new lake had drowned out about half of a prairie dog town, which was down in this hollow, and all of a sudden there were hundreds of small frogs, croaking, that I had never seen before. Where they came from, I don't know, unless they had been buried in the mud from previous rains. This was the only time I ever saw a rattlesnake swim. This big one had got drowned out I guess and was swimming real fast across this lake with his rattles held high above the water.
    He swam across that lake so fast that before I could run around, he had landed on the other side and disappeared from sight.
    The only Indian spearhead I ever found had been uncovered by that storm. It was a perfect, probably ceremonial, spearhead, all of six inches long. On the way home with it I saw this kangaroo rat run into a hole on the edge of an old cornfield and I tried to dig him out with this spearhead. I dug for a long time and plowed the ground up for a long ways and never did get the rat, but lost the spearhead in the dirt. I dug around for few minutes without success, gave up, and went on home. Now, I would never give up until I found a thing I now know is so valuable.
    An older couple lived on a small farm a couple of miles away, by the county road between Eads and Lamar. The mail route went on that road, and one morning the carrier found this man lying by the mailbox with his head blown off and a 12-gauge shotgun by his side. They found his wife still in bed with her head blown off also. It caused quite a stir in the community, as the people were well-liked and I don't think anyone ever figured out the reason for this murder-suicide.
    Another time there was excitement in our area was when the Manter bank bandits came through. They had robbed the bank in the little town of Manter in Kansas and came on the lam up our way. Our local sheriff in Eads stopped them a few miles out of town. They found him later, shot to death along the road, where these bandits had gotten the drop on him before he knew who they were. They finally caught these bandits over in another county, I think.
    Mom was really shook up about it, as she had known this sheriff from baby up. A few years later, the Fleagle Gang came through Lamar, robbed a bank and took someone hostage for awhile. I think they killed someone, too. There was a big manhunt for them, and several men from our area were deputized to help run them down. I can still remember, two of the gang's names were Ralph and Jake Fleagle. It was quite awhile before they were caught, and it caused a lot of excitement.
    Mom always had us kids take a bath every Saturday in a big galvanized tin tub. We had to heat the water on the kitchen wood stove. I was the smallest so was always bathed last in used water. Some of the things I did, I probably needed several baths a day. I remember spending a lot of time down by the windmill in the summer. There was always a lot of good mud where the stock watering tank would run over when the windmill would pump it full. I'd mix mud with grass or weeds and make miniature adobe bricks to dry in the sun. Then later I'd make houses with them, using fresh mud for mortar. I would put a weed-thatch roof on and coat that with mud. Sometimes I'd have whole villages built and would use lizards, grasshoppers or crickets for the citizens. They seemed to like their homes, as it was cool on hot days. Sometimes, the horses or cattle would trample and ruin a whole village for me and I'd have to start all over again.
    Mom had a garden that must have been all of an acre in size. She would get up at the first light of dawn and work in it before it got so hot. We were always real popular in the fall, and people that seldom came any other time would come for miles around to visit. Mom was good-hearted and loaded them up with all kinds of vegetables from her hard-earned garden. My Grandma Towse, who lived in Chivington, came to see us one fall on one of her rare visits, and while Mom was walking her through the garden, letting her pick any vegetable she chose, a big rattlesnake that was coiled under a squash vine struck and just missed biting her.
    Sometimes a coyote would get in the garden and eat a watermelon. They would never bite into one that wasn't a good ripe one. A lot of nights I'd go to sleep, listening to coyotes howling nearby. We had a cornfield that cornered up close to our chicken house, and coyotes loved to lie in a corn row and catch a poor old hen that ventured out. We'd find the feathers later where he had caught the poor old hen and carried her off. The jackrabbits would also find a way to get into the garden in spite of the chicken-wire fence around it. They would bark the rinds of melons, but they didn't care for the insides.
    We ate the field corn for roasting ears and planted a couple of rows of popcorn every year. We'd haul water from the windmill with horses hitched to a sled and two wooden barrels at a trip. A couple of boards floating on top would keep a lot of the water from splashing out of the barrels along the way. We'd have to carry water in buckets from the barrels to water the garden, to water the pigs and chickens, and for Mom to wash clothes.
    One year we raised about eighty of these white Peking ducks. They were good eating, and their feathers made good pillows and feather beds. After they were about half grown, they would follow the cows out to pasture in the morning, sometimes as far as a mile, and graze grass with them all day long. Then they would come back in with them at milking time in the evening. Mom put them in this solid corral at night to keep the coyotes or skunks from getting them, but one of them started coming up missing every night. We finally figured out that a huge owl was carrying them off. Before these ducks got very big, we kept them in one-by-twelve-board enclosure and one day, while I was feeding them some mash with a big pewter spoon out of a bucket, this big old barred-rock rooster kept jumping in the pen and eating their food. I shooed him away several times, but he wouldn't take no for an answer so I bopped him on top of the head with this big heavy spoon. I didn't think I had hit him that hard, but he started leaping several feet in the air, time after time, and finally lay still. I was really scared, as this was Mom's prize rooster, but she really surprised me by saying, "We'll have chicken and dumplings for dinner," and didn't even punish me.
    Eunice and I were always walking on stilts. One day she stepped in a hole with one of them and down she fell, with one stilt slapping the ground on either side of her, killing a bunch of little chickens that had been following her around. We hurried up and buried them before Mom got home, and she always wandered what animal had gotten those missing chickens. One day Mom went out to work in the cornfield and gave Eunice and I orders to do the dishes. Eunice made me wash them and then she laid them on the floor by a window to let the sun dry them, a lot more work than if she had dried them with a towel to start with.
    My Grandma Towse, her maiden name was Eunice Cronkite, lived in a cute little house in Chivington, surrounded by trees, vines and flowers in the summer. The trees really stood out, as there were very few trees in that country, except along Sand or Rush creeks. Even cottonwood trees had trouble surviving. Those creeks always dried up except for a few small puddles in the summer time. In later years, I've sometimes wondered if the famous newsman, Walter Cronkite, was any relation to my grandmother.
    My Grandfather Towse, died the year I was born in 1917, and also the same year my Grandpa Smith died. I remember hearing stories about Grandpa and Grandma Towse having skirmishes with the Indians when they first came west to Colorado. A band of Indians caught Grandpa away out on the prairie one day and started shooting at him from a distance. He fell off his horse with his rifle in hand and played dead until their chief rode up close, and Grandpa suddenly came alive and shot him. The other Indians fled. They said Grandpa had this chief's scalp hanging in his closet for years. My uncle, Ed Towse, was a reporter for the Cheyenne Sun and covered the story in Wyoming of a cattlemen and sheepmen's war, back in the late 1800s. My dad, George Towse, was the first white child to be born in North Platte, Nebraska, and he said he had seen Sitting Bull there when he was a young man. Dad was Scotch and Irish and Mother German and Jew, so that made us kids quite a mixture.
    We did have some rather important relatives. My Uncle Ed's boy, another Ed Towse, was state's attorney for all of Hawaii for years and my dad's sister, Inez, had a daughter, Alma, who was county superintendent of schools.
    I remember very vividly going to my Grandma Towse's funeral in 1929. It was the first funeral I had ever gone to and quite a shock, as I was rather fond of this Grandma.
    A neighbor, who had quite a temper, bought a Model T Ford. One day it died on him a short distance from our house and he cranked and cussed it for a long time and finally took an ax he had with him and chopped the hood and motor all to pieces. Later we heard that he had just run out of gas. There weren't many cars around our area in those days. Once in awhile, someone would give me an old red inner tube, which was very valuable to me for making slingshots. The school buses had exhaust heaters down the middle of the floor and we had blankets to throw over our feet and laps in winter. Several times the bus would get stuck in a snow drift and all the kids would about freeze to death walking to the nearest house. A couple of times, we ended up at our house with Mom and the bus driver rubbing a bunch of bawling kids' feet and hands to get the frostbite out of them. The school house had steam radiators from a coal furnace, which worked pretty well. On real cold days, sometimes the teacher would let us all stand around a radiator, while holding a class. There were only four classrooms in the school downstairs, plus the principal's room with a library. The whole upper floor was an auditorium where we got to play basketball and have box suppers and gatherings at night.
    When the wind blew, which it generally did, I would always get cinders in my eyes from the ashes from the coal furnace that they had scattered on the ground around the building. The wind was always blowing the tarpaper off of the roof, and we kids would sail pieces of it like frisbees. We'd even chew some of the tar, like it was gum.
    This one kid, Henry North, would go over to the store at the corner of the school ground and buy crackers, cheese and bologna for his lunch, every day, and I would envy him having that good lunch. Henry and his older sister, Martha, would always be crusted with dirt and didn't look like they had ever had a bath.
    The neighboring ranches would take turns doing their calf branding, dehorning and castrating. They'd pitch in and help each other. Each ranch as they worked there would put on a big mountain oyster feed for everyone. We young boys would take turns riding calves. The men would put a rope surcingle around the calf's stomach, behind the front shoulders and then hang a cow bell underneath. They would let us mount with our fingers under the twisted-together rope on the back and then let the calf up. Those roly-poly fat calves would really be wild and hard to ride after being cut on and burned with a branding iron. One threw me in the branding fire and scattered it, but I lit rolling and didn't get burned. A kid, David Foglesong, rode a calf half way around the corral, standing on his head and a shoulder with his feet straight in the air, before he got thrown the rest of the way off. He landed flat on his belly which knocked all the wind out of him and didn't get up for awhile.
    The Fourth of July was always a big deal. Mom would buy a big chunk of ice ahead of time and keep it wrapped down in the cellar, to make homemade ice cream. She would use lots of rich cream and eggs to make it and then bake a big chocolate cake to go with it. One year she sent off to Montgomery & Wards for ten dollars' worth of fireworks. You wouldn't get that many for one hundred dollars today. We were so excited when we unwrapped them. When we lit the paper off them in the kitchen stove, all the lids were blown off and it made a terrible mess.
    The Kiowa County Fair in Eads every September was always a big deal to us kids. One year an old bachelor, Tom Jenkins, supposedly a friend of the family, promised to stop by and let all us kids ride to the fair with him in the back of his old truck. We saw this old Tom Jenkins go past on the main road about a mile away, and that was the only fair that we ever missed. I hated that mean old man ever after that. Another time, he took my sister Lottie, her boy, Jim and I up to see my dad in Beth-El Hospital in Colorado Springs. After we had gone about half way and still a hundred miles to go, Jim and I both had to urinate real bad. He could have stopped the car any place as it was miles between houses along that road. We both were sick and crying the rest of the way, and it ruined the whole trip for me. I'm sure that old so and so never went to heaven when he died.
    I never had any money to go to the fair on. Several years, after I was a little older, I figured out ways to make my own money. The rodeo would give kids a dollar to mount or two dollars if you could stay on a calf for so many seconds. I'd get on as many as they would let me, as a dollar was big money to me and worth getting thrown for. Grown men at that time were only making one dollar for a long day's work on the farm, if they were lucky enough to find a job. I would also pick up empty pop bottles and sell back to the booths for a penny each. I hit this Gypsy kid who was going to take my bottles away from me over the head with a pop bottle. I thought I had killed him and was really relieved when I dared take a peek back there awhile later and he was gone. A friend and I would get in a ring and box for whatever money would be thrown on the canvas for us. The harder we fought the more change we'd get, so we'd really beat up on each other and then we'd split the money and go off arm in arm to spend it together.
    We didn't have a great variety of food to eat on the farm, but plenty of what we did have, which was more than a lot of people in the cities had in those hard times. Mom always raised a big garden and canned a lot of it. We had plenty of fryer chickens, and when a hen got too old to lay, we'd have chicken and dumplings. Mom would sell or trade eggs to the store for groceries and separate the cream from the milk and send it to a creamery in Denver. It would be shipped by train in five- or ten-gallon cans. We always had chickens, calves and pigs to feed the skimmed milk to. Our cream was thick and tested high, so we got top price for it. It was so thick that we kids would spread it on bread like butter, and it was delicious with a little sugar sprinkled on it. We'd put cream and sugar on clabbered milk to eat. We didn't know we were eating the equivalent of what they call healthy yogurt nowadays.
    I can still remember the smell of that homemade bread, hot out of the oven. Sometimes for a variety, Mom would pull off chunks of dough and fry it in deep grease, like doughnuts. We called it doughgods. We didn't know what boughten bread was. We kids would make our own pop, with a tablespoon of vinegar and sugar in a glass of water and a half spoonful of soda stirred in to make it fizz. It would fizz right up into your nose and we thought it was real good. In winter when it snowed, we'd put beaten eggs, cream, milk, sugar, and a little vanilla into a kettle of snow and stir it all up. It tasted better than our modern snow cones.
    We didn't have any fruit trees in our area without irrigation, but did have a row each of currant, gooseberry and sand plums which bore pretty good. The rows would keep filling up with sand from the windstorms but would grow up out of the sand higher and higher and keep bearing. Trucks would stop by from the west slope of the Rockies and go from farm to farm, selling many kinds of fruit and grapes. If you didn't have money, they would trade for chickens, eggs, pigs, calves or anything they could turn into cash later. We were always glad to see one of these trucks, as that was the only way we ever got any fresh fruit. Mom would buy enough cherries, plums, peaches and pears to can some for winter.
    In summer, one fellow came by in a big touring car with curtains rolled up on the sides. He was selling clothing, medicine and several other things. He had this big monkey on a chain in the back seat, I guess to guard his wares. While the man was in our house trying to sell something to Mom, I stayed outside to watch this monkey, as I had never seen one at that close range before. Our old tomcat was rubbing on my leg, and I got to wondering what this monkey would think of a cat, so I picked him up and threw him into the monkey's arms. That was a smart monkey, as he grabbed the cat by the nape of the neck and the tail and while the cat's legs were going around like a windmill, so fast that they were just a blur, that monkey raped him time after time. When the cat finally got free, he ran under the house and I didn't see him again for several days.
    To make some cash money, which our family never had much of, my dad and two brothers for several years would take off for a couple of months in the fall and follow the wheat harvest from Oklahoma clear up into the Dakotas. One time my brother, Lauren, came home after being gone for a month or so, with five big silver dollars. He let Eunice and I play with them for awhile and we thought he was rich.
    We kids were always thinking up new things to do. We had an old buggy, and we pulled the shafts back up over the seat to steer it and would coast down a low hill nearby. We'd gone to a lot of trouble, pushing and pulling it up to the top of this rise for the quarter-of-a-mile free ride down. Someone had shut this barbed wire gate one time and we had to bust right on through it, as we were going really fast and didn't have any brakes. It's a wonder we didn't wreck and get cut all to pieces.
    We had a solid, black rubber ball, about the size of a baseball, and Art, who was real husky, would bat fly balls to us out on the prairie with this big heavy bat. The ball would go a long ways and nearly out of sight, and if we had ever got in the way it would have knocked us flat. The gateposts going into our yard were tall and about three feet apart, just right for us to fasten a huge slingshot to. We made it out of an inner tube, split down the middle, with a big leather pouch. A couple of us would pull it back as far as we could and would shoot a piece of heavy slag clear out of sight.
    Mom would give me a nickel for each ground squirrel that I could kill. They would go down the rows behind the planter and dig up the corn before it had a chance to sprout. These squirrels lived in holes in the ground. They were striped similar to a chipmunk, only twice as big. I would walk towards them and try to see which hole they ran into. Then I'd cup one hand over the hole and pour water with the other hand. When they came up for air, I'd squeeze down and throw them on the ground, hard enough to kill them. I was very lucky not to ever get bitten.
    We rescued one of these baby squirrels from a big bull snake one day. We took him home and he made a cute pet. He lived in a baking powder can under a dresser. We named him Squilly Squee. If he saw you barefooted he would jump on and bite your toes so hard that you'd climb up on a chair. In August the big red flying ants would find a way to come down the brick chimney and would be all over our floors. Squilly would bite the tail end off of hundreds of them and they'd look funny, still crawling around tailless. Lauren was famous for bringing wild pets home and making Eunice and I take care of them and keep them fed. For a while he had a young owl that he'd caught down in a prairie dog town. It was the kind that lives in holes right with the prairie dogs. He kept it down in the cellar and told Mom it would catch rats so that she would let him keep it. He even had a baby skunk in the house for awhile until it got big enough to let off its stink. We rescued a baby bee-martin bird that its folks had abandoned, and built it a nest in a pound coffee can, and it kept Eunice and me busy catching enough bugs to satisfy its voracious appetite. It squawked from morning till night, and we were relieved when the window we had put him in to keep cool fell down and cut his head off over the edge of this can.
    Mom would also give me a nickel each for killing loggerhead shrikes, which we called butcher birds, as they would hang any victims, such as lizards, grasshoppers, baby birds or even our baby chickens they caught on a thorn on the locust tree or a barbed wire fence and let them die later. The only trouble was that these birds would land on the roof of our house,and ruin some wooden shingles every time I shot one with the .410 shotgun. I'd save my money, maybe a dollar in a month's time, and buy a big sack of candy when we went to the store. I would hide it out and try to make it last as long as I could without letting anyone else eat much of it.
    We'd send off to Sears or Wards for what few clothes we bought. We called the catalogs "wishbooks." The clothes didn't always fit too well. All the farm boys would go barefoot in the summer and save their shoes for school that winter. About all the clothes I remember wearing were denim bib overalls and blue work shirts. I hated those knee britches I had to wear when we went to school doings and longed for the day I could wear long pants like a few of the other kids did.
    I got into a few minor troubles at school. The school had outdoor toilets, which smelled terrible, even with a lot of lime poured down them. One kid put tar on the seats of the girls' privy one night when we had a school play. Several girls got tar on their clothes out there in the dark, which even I, as ornery as I was, didn't approve of. A few days later I caught this kid busy at the trough and wet in his hip pocket, which was bagged open. When it soaked through to his skin he told teacher on me, and I had to spend all my recesses for a week grubbing sagebrush out of the school ground.
    We played softball and games like last couple out, and fox and goose when it snowed, and we could lay out a big circle and a cross with a safety base in the middle. There were swings and teeter totters on the school ground. Some kid was always getting in the way and would be knocked out when hit by someone standing up and pumping high in a swing. I was chasing a kid around and around the teeter totter and he reached up and pulled one end down, just in time for me to run, full speed, into the other end as it was coming up. It caught me in the stomach and knocked the wind out of me, and when I came to, the teacher had my pants pulled away down to see where I was hurt and a bunch of little girls were standing around giggling. It didn't take me long to get well, pull up my pants, and leave there on the run.
    One of my friends was from a family of all boys. They lived in an old shack with dirt floors. Their mother would sprinkle and sweep, and it would be hard and slick as cement. I stayed all night with them one time and the next morning, as we were all standing around the pot-bellied heating stove, getting dressed, the youngest boy bent over and touched his bare behind against that red hot stove. He let out a yell and ran into a wall and couldn't sit down for several days. All those boys chewed tobacco, smoked and drank their dad's bootleg whiskey from baby up. One of the boys would unbutton his fly and whisper psst to the girl across the aisle from him in school and expose himself to her. One day he had me write my name at the bottom of a piece of paper, then he wrote a dirty note above and put it on a girl's desk. I had to stand in a corner for hours, apologize to the girl, and stay in my seat and study for several recesses. One of our favorite tricks was to wait till several girls had gone into their outdoor privy and slam a brick against the back so we could watch them run out with wet spots on the back of some of their dresses. I liked to hide around a corner of the school house and watch a bunch of girls turn rods on a pipe rail. I had a tiny slingshot, made with rubber bands, and would time it so I could hit them in the rear end as they turned over. They would fall off the pipe and rub their butts, wondering what hit them. If they hadn't all worn those baggy black bloomer underpants in those days,it would have stung a lot worse. We boys were good at hitting each other clear across the room with a blackboard eraser, when the teacher stepped out for a minute.
    A redheaded girl with two long pigtails of hair hanging down her back sat in front of me for awhile. I couldn't seem to resist dipping the ends of these pigtails into the inkwell on my desk. The teacher finally let the poor girl move to another seat. A boy who sat behind me couldn't get the teacher's attention when he raised his hand to get permission to leave the room. He puked all over the back of my head and down my neck. I'll never forget the feel and smell of that hot stuff, but I got to skip a class to get cleaned up. A kid who sat in front of me would always jump up when the bell sounded for school to let out in the afternoon and be the first out the door every time. He would never march out the door in single file like the teacher wished for us to do. I had about a ten-foot cotton rope, of which I very carefully tied one end through his belt loop and the other end to his desk. Sure enough, when the bell rang, he jumped up as usual to head for the door. When he came to the end of the rope he was jerked to his knees, and he pulled his desk out into the middle of the aisle. All the kids and even the teacher had a good laugh out of it, but just the same, teacher made me stay after school for a couple of hours while she worked at her desk. About sundown, she let me ride with her for three miles, in her Model A, on the county road and I still had to walk two more miles on home. Looking back, I feel sorry for some of those teachers, as a lot of us boys made their jobs a lot tougher for them. All the teachers I ever had were good people, and I loved every one of them.
    We used to play a lot of marbles, and we boys always had the knees worn out in our pants. I was pretty fair, but my brother, Lauren, was a crack shot and one year he had won every marble in the school playing keeps. When you lost all your marbles and then your shooter, you were through. I remember Lauren had a small suitcase full of marbles that he would let me count and play with sometimes. Four or five of us boys dug a hole back into an old washed-out bank on the school ground and put old boards and tin over it for a roof. This was our fort, and we practiced smoking roll-your-own-cigarettes out there. We wondered how the teacher found out about it. We hadn't thought about the cloud of smoke coming up out of there to give us away. The teacher made us stay in and study for several recesses to punish us.
    Lauren was working and staying at a farm about a mile away. We saw a tornado headed for that place one day, and Mom was worried sick as she knew Lauren was there all by himself that day. He had sense enough to get down in the cellar that had a dirt roof over it. The tornado just missed the buildings, but came so close that it sucked a bunch of old newspapers out of the cellar through the wide cracks in the board door. We watched it go across to another neighbor's house that was down in a hollow, and it raised up just enough to clear the house but took the wheel off the windmill tower, which they later found rolled up in a ball nearly a mile away. Two different tornadoes just missed our house. One took out a corner of our wooden corral fence, and the next year one rolled up about a quarter-mile of barbed wire fence into a big ball on the other side of our house, posts and all. I traced its path later, where it had gone across our pasture. It had left a trail about one hundred feet wide and sucked the ground an inch deep, leaving the short buffalo grass hanging by a root or two. It looked like a huge vacuum cleaner had gone over it.
    You could hear a hail storm coming a mile away by the roar they would make. One hailstorm beat all the leaves off our cornfield and just left stubs when our corn was about a foot high. The corn made a miraculous recovery and grew tall and was tasseling out when another hailstorm came along and demolished it, for good this time. One year we had an exceptionally fine maize crop, but there came an early frost which froze all the big beautiful heads in the milk stage. The whole crop mildewed and was a total loss. Then an early snowstorm came along one fall, with a high wind which knocked our whole field of corn down, and before we could get into the field to harvest it the rabbits had eaten most of it. Some years the grasshoppers would be so thick that they'd eat up a lot of the crops. Sometimes after the dust storms started coming along we'd have trouble raising enough crop to feed the stock through that winter. Even the buffalo grass would have a hard time surviving. Sometimes, cattle from a neighbor's ranch would break the fence down and do more damage trampling the crop than what they would eat. Our poor old work horses would get skinny from working on short rations. My brother-in-law had one old horse he called Napoleon Bonaparte. In the spring, when he would fatten up a little, he'd be called Napoleon, but later on, when he got skinny from working hard in the fields, he'd be called Bonaparte.
    My dad came home from town one day with a couple of old skinny nags hitched to the wagon. He said that he had traded our good team even up with some Gypsies for them. Mom was real mad, but never did find out how much "boot" Dad had received. One of those old skinny horses would stand with his head down low until you tried to catch him, then he'd come alive and be hard to catch, to harness and to go to work. One day my brother, Art, had chased him around the corral several times trying to catch him and finally got mad and threw the bridle at him. That old horse jumped over a six-foot fence and went pooping at every jump, over a rise and out of sight. Art was built real stocky and strong. One time while working for a neighbor a few miles away he was putting a bridle on this mule, when another mule, reached over and bit the top out of Art's new straw hat, taking some of his scalp with it. Art hauled off and hit this mule behind the ear with his fist and it went down and didn't get up again for awhile and he was afraid he'd killed it. Art came home one weekend from working for an old bachelor farmer and was laughing about a mouse he had scooped out of a ten-gallon crock of lard. He said this old bachelor had a very weak stomach and would throw the whole crock of lard away if he found out. A few days later, I went over early one morning to deliver a letter to Art, and he and old Forbes were just sitting down to eat a ham and eggs breakfast. I was sitting there watching and got to laughing and Forbes kept asking me what I was laughing about. So finally I said, if he knew that Art had taken a mouse out of the crock of lard, he wouldn't be eating those eggs fried in it.
    Old Forbes turned pale and headed for outside, holding his hand over his mouth. Art never told me any of his secrets again after that.
    Mom let Eunice and I ride an old tame gray mare over to see some neighbor kids, a couple of miles away. We had fun and played all day, but when we started home, this old tame horse bucked us off. The darned boy in that family had slipped a cocklebur under our saddle blanket, just for fun. I got back on, but Eunice was scared to, and she led the horse the rest of the way home. I had a habit of running away and playing with some neighbor kids all day long, and Mom would give me a threshing with a belt when I got home. Sometimes, Mom would send Lauren or Eunice after me, and they'd tell me all the way home how mad Mom was and how hard she was going to beat me. This was worse than the spanking I got later. One winter's day, I borrowed Lauren's two hound dogs and ran off over to Rush Creek, a couple of miles from home. I was having a lot of fun, but along in the afternoon, all of a sudden, it started snowing and a cold wind started blowing the snow horizontal. I headed for home, but in just a few minutes I couldn't see forty feet ahead of me. For awhile I followed the dogs, but they soon went off and left me, and I was lost. I was very lucky, as a couple of cowboys had heard about this blizzard on its way, and while rounding up some cattle for this rancher they about ran over me. One of them pulled me up behind his saddle and took me home. I know that I would never have made it by myself. Mom was so happy to see me that she never spanked me that time.
    I loved to take my slingshot and a pocket full of that railroad slag, for ammunition, and roam the prairie. I would take some salt and matches and would kill a bird or rabbit to cook over a fire made out of dead sagebrush, and play like I was an Indian or some famous pioneer. Sometimes I'd take along some chunks of cottonseed cake that we fed to our cattle. I would gnaw on it, and it would give me strength. It tasted good if you didn't care what you ate. We kids had hunted arrowheads on every old blown-off field for miles, but every wind storm would uncover a few more, and we spent a lot of time hunting them.
    There was an old silo, dug in the ground, at an old homestead whose buildings had long ago been burned down or moved away. It was about twelve feet wide and twenty feet deep and caving in around the edges, We kids would lie down with our heads over the edge and watch rattlesnakes that had fallen in and were living under boards. We could have fallen in and been down there with those snakes. It's a good thing that Mom didn't know everything that we did. Lauren was playing and pointing a .22 rifle out a window one day, and it went off and broke the window. He went to a lot of work, picking the glass up and throwing it on the floor inside the house and bent the edges of the hole in the screen inward and even dug a hole in a door facing across the room. When Mom came home from town, he told her that some kids walking by had shot the hole in our window.
    We had an old milk cow named Feisty, and for good reason, especially when she had a new calf. Lauren loved to tease her, as if she wasn't mean enough already. He would jump on her back while she was lying down and she'd get up and whirl round and round, trying to butt or throw him off. When he did get off, he'd have to run for his life. One day while I was letting the cows out of the corral she surprised me by doubling back behind the wooden gate I was holding open and chasing me to the house. Just as I was starting to dive under our barbed wire yard fence, she butted me in the seat of the pants and I slid the rest of the way under on my belly. It seemed like we always had a mean rooster that would jump and hit us from behind with his spurs, and it would really hurt. We also had mean geese or turkey gobblers sometimes.
    I remember some real scary lightning storms. This one time, a big storm, with real blinding flashes of lightning and loud claps of thunder, came along while Mom was away. Eunice and I hid in the closet under the stairway where we kept our dirty clothes until it went on by. We lost several cows and horses from being hit from lightning while I was growing up. If they were standing along a barbed wire fence, the lightning could strike the fence a mile or two away and still kill them. We had cattle or horses bitten on the nose by rattlesnakes, and they would swell up so bad that they couldn't eat or drink and would starve to death if we didn't find them and lance the swelled place and doctor it with kerosene or turpentine. One of our best work horses got kicked by another horse and it broke a front leg. We put splints on the leg and made a sling in the barn to hang the horse in to take the weight off the leg. We ended up having to shoot the horse anyway.
    We had a riding horse, Brownie, that we were especially fond of, and he was born the same year that I was. He was so high-spirited that I didn't ride him till he and I were twelve years old. He had thrown several good cowboys when he was younger. He was what they called a cutting horse and would turn so quick with a cow that you would be thrown if you weren't really alert. Sometimes he'd bite a cow real hard on the tail bone. My sister Nelle rode him in the cow pony race at the Eads fair one year. He stopped to buck in the middle of the race, but Nelle got him straightened out and they caught up and nearly won the race after all. The first time I rode him, he got the bit between his teeth so I couldn't control him, and ran all the way home with me, jumping a four-foot-high fence on the way. He took big long jumps when he loped, so that other kids riding along with me would have to make their horses run to keep up. I can still remember the names of all the many horses we had when I was a kid. We even had names for our milk cows and their calves. Our big work horse, Victor, didn't come home for water with the rest of the horses one day and we found him dead out in the pasture with a bullet hole between his eyes. Years later, a neighbor kid told my sister that he had been playing around, aiming his .22 rifle at our horse, and it went off accidentally.
    We did a lot of jobs the hard way. Like the old saying, "Poor people have poor ways." Mom did all our washing on a scrub board in a galvanized tin tub. First she had to heat the water on the wood stove and used homemade soap from cracklings left from the lard rendered after we butchered a pig. She even did washing for several cowboys, to make a little extra money.
    The cream separator had to be hand turned and had to be washed and scalded after each use. We also had a hand crank corn sheller and a grinder. Using these was my job. Dad would have me turn a big old grindstone for hours at a time, while he sharpened every tool on the place. Axes, hoes, scythes, shovels and mowing machine blades all had to be sharp.
    I'd turn with one hand till it felt like it was going to fall off, then with the other hand. I always dreaded sharpening day. I didn't know then that these chores, plus milking cows, carrying water and hoeing weeds, were building up my muscles for falling and bucking timber out in Oregon later on in life.
    This neighbor rancher was a pillar of society in our community. Especially after the bank in Eads went broke and he went into partnership with this banker. They bought a lot of cattle and land right away. A lot of people had lost a lot of hard-earned money in that bank and suspicioned where all this sudden money came from, but no one did anything about it. The federal government didn't guarantee the banks in those days. This neighbor, Shorty I'll call him, tried to rape any young girl around the country. One woman, whose husband worked for him, came crying to my sister one day and said Shorty had raped her and she was expecting a baby any day. Her husband was a small, timid man and was afraid he'd lose his job if he did anything about it. If anyone had ever even tried this with my wife, I'd have been a murderer. All through the years, I heard what a great man this Shorty was and it would make me sick. He should have been in prison.
    Several of the young fellows around the country would drink bootleg whiskey and get into fights at most every dance. Some of them got religion later and were just as radical about that as they had been hellions in their younger days. One of them became sheriff at Eads.
    A lot of the local men would hunt coyotes in the winter time. They would have their greyhounds in a box on the back of a stripped-down Model A or T and drive around on the prairie until they jumped a coyote, then stop real quick and let the dogs loose. The chase would be on. What was called the lead dog would grab a coyote by a hind leg when he got close enough and flip him, and before he quit rolling, the other dogs would grab and stretch him out, while the lead dog would get him by the throat. Some of those coyotes had to be chased for miles, and a few outran or ditched the dogs in some way. The men would have to cut fences to keep up with the dogs and then go back and fix them later, as the ranchers didn't like anyone who cut their fences or left gates open.
    One cowboy stopped by our place and had a coyote that he'd shot with his pistol strapped onto the back of his saddle. While I was standing there looking at him, he opened one eye and looked real mean at me. I about fell over backwards, and the man had to finish killing him. Another cowboy stopped by with a fresh coyote tail hanging from his saddle horn. He said he had chased it and had leaned out of the saddle on a dead run and cut off its tail with his knife. I believed his story at the time, but it seems preposterous to me now. A coyote would look really funny running on the prairie with no tail.
    A lot of these cowboys would ride around on half-broke broncs which they'd have to re-break every morning before they started their day's work. One of our saddle horses would swell his belly up when we started to tighten the cinch, and later when we'd be riding along the saddle would turn and dump me off. We had to give him a kick in the belly and tighten the cinch real fast before he swelled up again. This same horse was good at clamping the bridle bit between his teeth and then he'd run away, with us at his mercy. For no excuse at all, he'd buck or shy to one side so fast that we'd be rolling on the ground. Several horses that we had were hard to catch and get a bridle on even after we were lucky enough to get them into the corral.

    When I was just through the 6th grade at the Chivington school, my mom separated from my dad and moved over to the place that she had inherited from her dad. Her sister had taken all the stock and furniture and sold off all but 80 acres of the 160-acre homestead. I went with my mother and started to school that fall in the little town of Brandon, which was only about five miles from Chivington. There was a small house, barn, and some other sheds on the property, and it was only one mile from town if I took the cutoff on foot. My brothers, Art and Lauren, were out on their own by this time, and a year later Lauren was killed, at only 19 years of age, in a highway accident near Santa Barbara, California.
    When I started to school at this new-to-me town of Brandon, I had a lot of fights the first few weeks. It seemed to be the custom in those days for a new kid to prove himself. I was small but wiry and soon gained respect and made friends. We played a lot of baseball, and I liked to play shortstop or second base, as I liked the action there. We competed with six other schools in our Kiowa County in baseball, basketball, track, wrestling, and boxing. In any of these sports we loved to beat the biggest town, Eads, which was the county seat. After I got in high school, the principal was also our coach in all sports. Amon A. Hall had been welterweight golden glove champion all four of the years he went to college in Colorado. He taught all of us boys how to defend ourselves. Later on, one boy, Wallace Call, was picked as one of the ten top boxers of the whole navy, and I have never had to allow anyone to bully me to this day.
    Our closest neighbor boy and I got to be close buddies. We each had a horse to ride and had fun roaming the prairie together. Russell's folks had a forty-acre square pasture, and on several moonlit summer nights we'd get on our horses, bareback, no bridle, and let them run around the pasture with us any way they wished. We would whoop and holler and play like we were wild Indians, and our horses would kick up their heels and get into the spirit with us.
    Russ's dad would let him drive his old Model T pickup, and in the winter we'd take some more kids and go down to the Brandon Lake, ice skating. The lake was about a half-mile across and would be frozen over so thick that everyone would drive their cars out on the ice and we'd have a big bonfire to gather around. We went on moonlight nights and could see nearly as good as day. I rode home several times in the back of a pickup or truck and would have icicles on my nose. Some nights it was probably down to zero when we'd come home after midnight. I'd be black from skating through the smoke from the bonfire, which we made out of old tires and railroad ties. I would have to build a fire in the kitchen stove and heat water to take a bath in a washtub before jumping into bed.
    Our school principal, Amon, took my friend, Beach Cline, and me down to this lake duck hunting one winter in his Model A. I shot down one duck and it fell out in the lake a ways. I didn't want to lose it and started wading out to get it. A breeze kept blowing it on out further and I waded out to my neck in that cold water before I finally gave up. It's a wonder I didn't get pneumonia from a stupid stunt like that. That lake was muddy and stunk in the summer and not fit to swim in, but was all right for ice skating or duck and goose hunting. On the way home from this trip, Amon gave this old man Phillips a ride. He was a dirty old man with a long beard, and he chewed tobacco which always ran down his chin and whiskers. I guess he couldn't see very good and thought the window was rolled down and tried to spit out it. This tobacco spit covered half the window and Beach and I nearly got sick, cleaning up the mess.
    There was a good-sized prairie dog town a short ways out in our pasture. I wrapped the jaws of a small jump trap with cloth and caught a young prairie dog, without breaking his leg. I kept him in a cage for awhile with one-inch mesh wire over the top. A neighbor's fox terrier dog found the cage out in our yard one day and tried to get at my pet through the wire.
    The prairie dog reached up and bit into the dog's nose, and he had to tear the partition out of his nose to get loose. He went yelping all the way home and never came back again. After the prairie dog got bigger and tamer, I let him run loose around the yard and he dug a hole and built a mound around it, just like the wild ones. He would follow me all around the yard, and although they are a daytime animal, I could thump on the ground and he'd come up to me in the middle of the night. I took him to school with me one day and he got inside of my bib overalls and then came out my fly, and the kids on the bus all got a laugh out of that. He caused so much commotion that day and the teacher said, "Never again." But after he got full grown, he started getting mean. He'd climb up on the bed while Mom was trying to take a nap and dig in her hair and she'd slap him away, but he'd keep coming back and get real mad. By this time I had a stepdad, whom I didn't like, and he made some homebrew beer and my prairie dog liked it and would drink out of a saucer until he'd get drunk and act real crazy. He got so mean that Mom finally told me to get rid of him. I gave him to some people from Chicago that were visiting a neighbor of ours. A few months later these people gave him to the zoo, as he had gotten into a clothes closet and ruined several hundred dollars worth of clothes for them.
    A cute little stray dog came to our place, and I pleaded with Mom to let me keep him and she finally gave in. A few days later, we took our cream to town to ship to Denver on the train. When we came home in the wagon, a few hours later, there were chickens lying dead all over the place. This dog had killed about fifty hens and fryers, and one old tough rooster was all that survived. I went into the house and got the 12-gauge shotgun. He had a guilty conscience. He took off up the road on the run, and I was only able to get some shot in his rear end at long range. His bad habits was probably the reason he came to our place to start with.
    This stepdad that Mom had acquired was a short, heavy-set, bowlegged Dutchman. I never liked him from the start. He had always been a bachelor with no kids of his own, and he let me know from the start that he was going to be the boss and that I had better toe the mark or else. He was a lazy old guy, but the busiest and got less done than anyone I've ever known. Mom was blind to his ways and thought she was in love, I guess. Mom had bought this used windmill for our well, but old Pidgy, as I had nicknamed him, let it lie and be covered up with sand from the windstorms. He liked to see me pump water by hand to water about forty head of horses and cattle besides irrigate the garden and for all the house use. We had a tank about four feet wide and three feet deep, which I was supposed to keep full. I'd start pumping when the two dozen head of cows came in thirsty on a hot summer afternoon, and they drank faster than I could pump. I'd have to pump for an hour after they drank their fill and left to get the tank full again. Then here would come over a dozen horses, and they hold more than cows. The pigs and chickens used quite a bit of water besides.
    One day I got off the bus, home from school, and started to peel a boiled egg left in my lunch bucket. Old George said don't eat that egg before supper, but I kept on peeling it and he grabbed me in a bear hug and started squeezing me real hard. I was a little guy but wiry and reached up with this egg and mashed it over his face and slipped out of his grasp and ran over to some neighbors until Mom got home.
    This neighbor boy, Russ, and I had a lot of fun together, and he had a cute little sister that I liked. Russ, I, and several other boys rode down to the Brandon Lake one day and I saw a big blue heron standing on the shore. To show off a little, I rode up real fast and roped this big bird, which was close to six feet tall. Herons can't gain altitude very fast so it was easy to catch. We all dismounted and was standing around looking at him and talking when all of a sudden this heron made a peck at the nearest kid, just missing an eye with that big sharp bill of his. I was glad to turn him loose after that.
    A carnival came to town which caused some excitement for us kids. They had a small string of horses they used in their show. As I was fooling around watching them put up their tents, a man offered me a free pass to the show that night if I would ride this pretty black horse and lead several others to water across town. I was glad to get a chance like this and had no trouble at all doing the job. That night at the show, a man got on this same beautiful black horse and had him-stand on his hind legs, dance and do a lot of tricks. After that, he offered any man in the audience a fifty-dollar bill if they could ride him. I got to tell all the kids that I had ridden that horse.
    Another carnival stopped in town one day and a kid I knew lifted up a canvas to pet a black leopard in a cage, and it about chewed and clawed his arm off before the carnival men could pull him free. The kid nearly lost his arm from infection over that stupid trick. I saw several of the town ladies gathered around this one cage and laughing and really interested. They didn't know anyone else was around, until I peeked in between them and saw this big monkey playing with himself. These women were embarrassed and left there in a hurry. I took a stick of gum out of a wrapper and replaced it with a piece of rubber, and handed it to this monkey that was chained to a post in a tent. He shucked the wrapper off and put one end of what he thought was gum in his mouth and stretched it out about six inches before it snapped back and hit him in the nose. He was mad and made a lunge at me, and I was lucky the chain wasn't a few inches longer and that it was a strong one. That taught me not to tease animals.
    One summer day after a hard shower, all the barpits [borrow pits?] in the low place along the county graded dirt road by our place were full of water. My friend Russ and I decided to go swimming in one hole. In those days, there wouldn't be a dozen cars come by all day along on that road. We looked up the road both ways and no cars in sight, so we shucked off our clothes and jumped in. We were having so much fun that we forgot to watch and all of a sudden there was an old Model T, real close. We both dived in and held our breaths as long as we could in this muddy water. A few days later, one of our neighbor ladies told my mother about the funniest thing she had ever seen. She said they had came over this little rise in the road and these two naked boys had dived into this mud puddle and just their bare butts were sticking above the water as they went by.
    One morning, a young fellow we knew came by in a hay truck, going from house to house, picking up all the men, women and kids he could find to take to a ranch up near Eads. They were to take part in a big rabbit drive. The rabbits were especially thick in that area and were eating up the crops. This rancher had put chicken wire over the top of a barbed wire fence for a quarter-mile each way from a corner. Right in the corner, he had left a narrow gate into this big pen, made of twelve-foot-high chicken wire. All of these, over two hundred people, went out on the prairie about two miles away and formed a big arc, with people about fifty feet apart to start with. We all started walking toward this pen in the fence corner. Soon, rabbits started jumping up from behind every sagebrush or clump of grass. It wasn't long till hundreds of rabbits were running every direction and would try to break through the line of people in this big fan. Everyone had a club of some kind and would try to hit any rabbit that tried to break through, and some would get excited and throw their club. I just ducked in time to keep from getting hit a couple of times. Several times a coyote got up, and no one had the nerve to try and stop them. Several men with 12-gauge shotguns, behind the line, would shoot the coyotes or rabbits that broke through. Finally we closed in and drove most of the rabbits into the pen. There were so many rabbits, probably thousands, that even as high as this pen was, quite a few climbed over others and escaped over the top. Several men had gotten into the pen with the rabbits before the gate was closed, and they began the bloody job of killing them with clubs. A few ranchers divided all these dead rabbits and took wagonloads of them home to feed to their hogs. They would grind up and mix with grain to make what they called tankage. They could also sell the hides for a few pennies each. This rancher fed all of these people a good meal before they went home and everyone had a good time and visit. I went to a couple of other rabbit drives later, but none compared to this.
    One winter when it happened to snow about a foot deep evenly on the prairie and the wind hadn't blown it all up into drifts, Mom and my brothers and I took the team and wagon and started out across the prairie. Every little ways there would be a yellow spot in the snow, where a rabbit had denned up and let the snow cover him. His breath would discolor the snow and give his hiding place away. We had a couple of greyhounds with us and they would catch a rabbit before he made over a couple jumps, as they were stiff from sitting so long under that snow and didn't have a chance to get limbered up before the dogs had them. Any that got away from the dogs, my brothers would shoot with a shotgun. We kept going till we had a foot-high wagon box full that day. We skinned and gutted and hung the carcasses up under the eaves of the house to freeze. Later on, they were ground up for hog and chicken feed. Hogs would choke to death easy if you let them tear off chunks of meat by themselves. One of our big fat hogs choked to death when we let him eat off a dead cow.
    A neighbor boy from a Hungarian family that lived a mile from us and I used to visit each other a lot. He rode an old skinny gray horse over to see me one day. I told him about a big rattlesnake that I had killed the evening before while bringing our milk cows home. I hadn't cut the rattles off as usual, as I didn't have my pocket knife along. He said he was saving rattles, so I told him just where the snake was so he could get them on his way home. A few days later I saw him and asked if he had found the snake. He said, "Boy, did I!" He said when he saw the snake, he rode up alongside of it, and started to slide off. Another big live rattlesnake, right under him, started buzzing and striking at his feet. He said that old deadheaded horse wouldn't try to move out of the way, and if it hadn't been so skinny and had such a sharp backbone, he would never have been able to claw his way back on top again and would have been down there on top of that big snake.
    I remember this Hungarian boy's mother made hot bread and soup like I had never tasted before. She would send back to Hungary for spices and special flavoring. It tasted strange to me but very good. This woman was real fat and crippled and she'd sit out in the yard in the summer and bark orders like a general to all six of the kids and her meek little husband, to keep them all working. She would let the younger kids, boys or girls, run around naked all summer long and they were brown as any Indian. One girl, who was a little retarded and about my age, was squatted down, going potty right alongside of the county road, one day as I happened to be riding by in a car with some people. She recognized me and raised up, with her pants still down, and waved, hollering my name. I sure got teased about my girlfriend for a long time after that.
    These people had a collie dog that chased every car that came by. One day while I was over there, a car came down the road with a burlap sack tied on to the hub of a back wheel. The kids tried to call their dog back in vain. When he got his teeth into that sack he couldn't let go, and his head was only hanging to his body by a little bit of skin when he finally fell free. The kids gave him a sorrowful burial. That was the surest way I've ever seen to break a dog from chasing cars.
    My stepdad started making moonshine down in our basement beneath the house. I used to steal some of it out of the gallon jugs he would have lined up ready to sell and trade it to kids for anything they had that I wanted. I'd drain a pint or quart out of each gallon jug and replace it with water. It was such powerful stuff that he never knew the difference. A lot of people around there made moonshine to make a few cash dollars. The local law seemed to look the other way.
    A friend of mine, Beach Cline, and I were hunting arrowheads in this old abandoned field that was grown over with tumbleweeds. All of a sudden, this woman raised up with a shotgun in her hand and yelled at us. We took off running and never looked back till we were quite a ways off. We had stumbled onto their still. I saw this woman and her husband on their way to town one day, so I slipped over and found the still, which was in a hole in the ground with a few boards, dirt and tumbleweeds over the top. I stole a couple of gallons of whiskey that day but was afraid to ever venture back to get any more. I might have gotten shot if they had caught me. This man, Jack Dennison, had the name of selling rotten moonshine in it, from not being made right, and it could poison or make anyone go blind if he drank very much of it.
     One time I fed some of the mash that was left from a batch of moonshine my old stepdad had just run off to our pigs and chickens and they all got drunk and acted real crazy. I took a pint of this booze to school one day, and a bunch of us boys were drinking some of it while this cute young teacher was having us practice a play. She didn't know why we were being so ornery and got so frustrated that she started crying. She was so cute that we all gathered around, put our arms around and loved her and apologized and tried to be good. Her name was Billy Glen Wood and only a couple of years older than senior students she was teaching. I remember the first day she started teaching at our school. Some of us boys caught a live medium-sized bull snake and put it into her top drawer. As soon as school took up, we could hardly wait until she opened that drawer, screamed and fell over backwards. Much to our disappointment, she picked this snake up, put it around her neck, and started walking up and down the aisle. She asked, "Who do I owe thanks for this cute little pet?" She had our respect from then on.
    I found out that if you ground up chalk, put it in an inkwell, and put the cork in real tight, that it would build up a gas and would blow the cork out in about a half hour's time. I did this to our red-headed schoolmarm's inkwell that was on her desk. When it blew up, this poor woman about had a heart attack. I was sorry I did it, as the cork made a big ink stain on the ceiling, and there was ink all over her nice dress. We had to go to a quart bottle in a corner to fill the inkwells on our desk. On the way back to my desk from filling mine, a kid who sat right behind me acted like he was going to trip me as I walked by, so I acted like I was going to pour ink down the back of his neck. He hit my arm and sure enough, I poured the whole bottle down the back of his shirt collar. The teacher made me go down to the lavatory and help clean him up as best we could. About one hour later, I dropped my pencil on the floor and instead of getting up and going around to pick it up, I leaned over as far as I could and still couldn't reach it, so I tipped two legs of my desk up off the floor in order to reach a little further. The kid behind me, seeing his chance to get even with me for the ink deal, put his toe under the desk leg that I had off the floor and nudged upward. Over I went, desk and all. I must have had gas on my stomach, as just as I went over, I let a real loud wind. All the kids in the room were quiet and studying for a change, but when this happened there was pandemonium for quite awhile, and even the teacher went hysterical with laughter and didn't even punish me. I guess she thought my embarrassment was punishment enough. All the rest of the day, some kid would burst out loud with a snicker.
    We had one teacher, Dorris Hooker, for history class and she had this theory that anything you wrote down, you were more apt to remember, and she was right. It was pretty tedious copying a whole chapter out of the history book every day, though. One day, she said, "Harold, get up and say the Preamble to the Constitution." I got up and real fast like, I said, "The Preamble of the Constitution" and sat down again. Well, I got up real fast again, as she raised me up out of my seat by the hair and slapped me several times. I never tried to be funny with her again. She had gained my respect.
    Another kid and I got to wrestling in the back of the auditorium one day and knocked over the next to the back tier of seats. It knocked over the next one and on down the line, like dominoes. Every one of the seats in seven-seat-wide sections, clear to the front of the auditorium, went down with a roar that could be heard for a mile. Kids and teachers came running from every direction to see what that terrible noise was. It took this kid and I all of an hour to set them all back up again, and we had to stay in and study all recesses and athletic periods for a week.
    We had to use the wood shop to change clothes when we suited up for basketball practice. One day we were clowning around, acting like we were going to turpentine this kid. He made the mistake of saying we couldn't, and we ended up spilling about a half a quart of turpentine down between his legs. He shrugged it off and went on to practice. It didn't bother him for a few minutes, until he got to sweating and that turpentine got in the open pores in his skin, and then he about went crazy in pain.
    Our high school basketball team would play a town team for practice. I was real small for my age, and one fellow on the town team was about six feet four. He jumped in the air to guard me under our basket and I dribbled between his legs and hooked one in. The crowd roared with applause. I think that was about the most spectacular thing I ever did in sports. When I was five foot one, I high jumped my height, but that wasn't near good enough, as a kid from another school jumped six one at the track meet that year. This one time, I was glad that I was short, as a kid at a baseball game threw his bat and it just cleared my head and knocked a tall kid out that was standing behind me. He didn't come to for awhile.
    We would have boxing and wrestling tournaments with other schools every year. I won every boxing match I was ever in but one time the coach talked me into wrestling a kid that was over twenty pounds heavier than I was, and he got on top of me and sat there. I still have the red ribbon from that match. I did take second in oratory, first in spelling and third in arithmetic in a county contest one year. A girl beat me out in oratory and got to go to a state contest in Denver. My sister Eunice got to go to Denver a few years before and I would have liked to tie her.
    We kids read a lot at home by the light of an old kerosene lamp. If Mom would let me, sometimes I'd stay up till midnight and read a whole book through. I remember my eyes burning from reading by that dim, red light for so long. I think I read every book in the school library. I was real popular when it came time to make out book reports in English class. My friends would have me make theirs out and copy them off. I could read a whole lot faster then than I can now, although I am still a reader, in spite of TV. One evening Eunice and I were on each side of a kerosene lamp reading and Mom kept telling her to quit leaning back in this old kitchen chair with the front legs off the floor. I got my toe under a leg and nudged upward and over backwards she went, turning a back flip when she hit the floor. I broke her of leaning back in chairs around me but it's a wonder I didn't break her neck.
    There were no movies in our town. A teacher took our class to a movie in Eads, the first one I had ever seen. It was a silent movie, "All Quiet on the Western Front." She also bought all of us a milkshake, which we couldn't buy in our town. That teacher made a wonderful day for me. A kid brought a radio to school one day, and we all gathered around close to listen to a World Series baseball game and another time to a Jack Dempsey fight. The static was so bad that we could just make out a word now and then. We worked a lot of jigsaw puzzles and would trade them around for a change. We also played a lot of pinochle, pitch and dominoes in winter. We would make big bowls of popcorn with homemade butter on it. We'd pop it in an iron skillet on the wood stove, and you'd have to keep shaking it back and forth to keep it from burning. We raised peanuts several years, and Mom would make huge batches of peanut brittle on a sheet of tin. Sometimes we'd make batches of fudge or white divinity candy, and people were always having taffy pulls at a party. We seldom ever had boughten candy. At Christmas time, the school would give each kid a small sack of hard candy with a few peanuts, a couple walnuts and a dried-up orange thrown in. One year the school had a real Christmas tree and had it lit up. It was the first fir tree I had ever seen. The Brandon school had their own generator and electric lights, which was a novelty to me.
    We used to cut thin slices of beef off a quarter we had hanging up under the eaves, on the north side of the house in the winter time, and it would be frozen solid. We'd sear these slices on top of the hot stove, and it was real good with some salt on it. Several times, people would go down to some muddy lakes along the Arkansas River, near Lamar, and seine a bunch of catfish and carp. They would taste so muddy that we would have to put them in the stock tank for a week or two and feed them corn, to sweeten them up. They would always bring them home alive on this account. They were always a treat to us, as that is the only kind of fish that we ever were able to have. Mom would salt cure a bunch of them for later on in a big crock. Us kids would get bones stuck in our mouths or throats sometimes from eating those bony carp.
    There was a D. V. Burrell seed farm about one mile north of our place. They had several deep wells drilled and was the only place around that had irrigation until you went thirty miles south along the Arkansas River. They raised squash, cantaloupe, watermelon, cucumbers, honeydews and also zinnia flowers for the seed. I worked there every chance I got in the fall to make a little money to buy school clothes. Everything was done by hand, as they hadn't come out with all this modern machinery yet.
    We went along picking the dry zinnia flowers and drag a sack to throw them in, like picking cotton. Sometimes the squash and melons would be frozen solid by the time we would get around to taking the seeds out of them. A man would hack them in half with a big knife and I'd about freeze my hands off, raking the seeds out with a big spoon. Then they had to be dried real good before they could package and sell the seed.
    One time we were all sitting down to eat our lunch in this zinnia patch and a kid offered me a chew of tobacco. I didn't want to be a sissy, so I accepted. I was doing fine until someone told a funny story and I got to laughing and swallowed some of the juice. I got sick and wasted all that chaw of tobacco and also the lunch that I had just eaten. I've always been glad that this happened, as I've never been tempted to take a chew of tobacco or "snoose" to this day. I smoked roll-your-own cigarettes several times, which would make me dizzy. Now I wish they had made me sick too, as later on I smoked for twenty years, two packs a day at the last, before I had brains enough to quit. That is a stupid, nasty, expensive habit, and I doubt if I would be alive today if I hadn't quit when I did, as I was getting a chronic cough.
    I was out in the cornfield, hoeing weeds with my mom one hot summer's day. The sun was bearing straight down on us in that shoulder-high corn and I asked Mom if I could go to the house to get a drink of water. On the way to the house, my stepdad stepped out of the barn and asked me why I wasn't out there hoeing weeds. I told him that I had Mom's permission to get a drink, but he said, "You get right back out there to work." I told him that I was going to the house anyway and he came towards me with a bridle rein in his hand. I unslung my slingshot that I always carried around my neck and loaded it with a heavy piece of railroad slag and said, "George, if you come one step closer, I'll let you have this piece of slag right between the eyes." He had seen me knock birds off the fence and kill rabbits with that slingshot, so he started shaking and walked back into the barn. I went on into the house and gathered up what few clothes I had and left home.
    I got a job for a farmer about four miles away and worked the rest of that summer and most of the winter. He gave me twenty-five cents a day and my board and room and worked hell out of me, but that was better than staying home with old George. I had just turned fourteen years of age and was a skinny but wiry little guy. My chores were to help milk thirteen cows by hand, morning and night, turn a huge separator by hand to run all of that milk through, feed and slop about forty head of hogs twice a day and gather the eggs from a hundred chickens every evening. I had to ride a horse about a mile out in the pasture to bring the milk cows in every evening, lock them in the stanchions and feed them their hay and grain. There was always a half dozen or more calves to be weaned from their mothers, and I would have to feed them skimmed milk out of a bucket. In summer, he had over a hundred head of beef cattle that ran out on the open range, and I'd have to ride around on this pony and watch all day long, so that they didn't break down a fence and get into someone's field, until they would bed down for the night.
    I was chasing a steer on this pony one afternoon, riding bareback as usual, when the pony stumbled and fell. I landed on my head, and when I came to, a couple of hours later, it was pitch dark. That little pony was standing near by and I managed to stagger over to her and mount and let her take me home. When we'd come to a closed gate, she would stop so I could get off and open it and then go to the next gate. I finally got home with a bad headache. I never did go to a doctor, but I probably had a concussion.
    One cold morning in winter, I was feeding the calves their milk out of a bucket, and this one calf that I'd already fed kept coming up and slobbering on the back of my pants. I ran him off with a kick several times, but he wouldn't take "no" for an answer, so finally I threw a big chunk of frozen cow manure and hit him square between the eyes. He fell down and started kicking and never got up again. I was scared but went to tell Bill what I had done. Before I could confess, he said, "I told you if you didn't skim the foam off the milk, it would bloat and kill a calf." I let it go at that and never did tell him the difference.
    To kill time while I was riding herd on these cattle, I would ride around in the heat of the day, hunting rattlesnakes. They don't like the direct heat of the noonday sun and would coil up in the shade of fence post, sagebrush or soapweed. I killed six rattlesnakes in one day once. By the time I quit working for this man, I had saved up nearly a pound coffee can full of their rattles, of all sizes, from a button to thirteen rattles and a button. When I quit, I was mad and forgot to take them with me. That winter, Bill made me quit playing basketball, as he was afraid I would use too much of my energy and wouldn't be able to do as much work for him. He'd get me up at 3:30 every morning so I could be sure and get all my chores done before going to school.
    One evening, while Bill and I were doing the milking, a young heifer came into the barn and while standing with her tail end to Bill let go a thin, green, hot stream of manure, which knocked off his hat and ran down his hair and neck and into his milk bucket. Well, I got to laughing so hard that I fell off my milk stool. He didn't think it was funny at all, and I had to do the next several milkings all by myself.
    The best thing about working for these people was that they fed me better than I had ever eaten in my life. They were Germans and put up their own sausage in "guts" they had cleaned themselves and made what they called head cheese from the pig's head. They butchered several hogs and beefs while I was there and cured their own hams and bacon. They made something out of every part and never wasted anything. They also made the best sauerkraut and pickles I had ever eaten.
    There were five or six of these German families within a ten-mile radius, and all were Catholics. After church every Sunday, we'd always go to one of their houses for dinner or one of them would follow us home. What bountiful feeds they would put on. I wasn't a Catholic or anything else, so they would let me run around town while they went to their church.
    All of those families made the best homebrew beer that I've ever tasted since. One hot summer's day, Bill's wife had me take a letter he had been waiting for to come in the mail over to where he was at one of these German neighbors. When I rode up, bareback, on this pony, they were all sitting around drinking homebrew and in a gay mood, so they handed me a big tomato can full of this cool, good beer. I was real thirsty, so drank it down real fast and jumped on the pony and headed back home. All went well till I had ridden a ways in that hot sun, and all of a sudden I fell off of the horse. I couldn't figure out what was wrong and couldn't jump back up on the horse as I usually did with ease. I finally had to climb up on a fence to get back on and rode lying down and holding on to the horse's mane the rest of the way home. This was the third time in my life that I had been drunk.
    Another time I was drunk was in the cold winter time when this Hungarian neighbor kid and I drank about a quart of cider out of the unfrozen center of a barrel, sitting on their screened-in porch. We both got sick and puked a lot. We figured out later that it was pure alcohol, and that was the reason it wasn't frozen. Before that, a couple of other boys and I found this case of home brew beer under an old house that hadn't been lived in for years. We all tried to outdo each other and figured we had to drink it all in just a short time. It was a hot day and the beer was warm and tasted awful. We ended up having another contest, out-puking each other.
    Once when I was with this German family Bill told me to go to the barn and saddle up the bay horse and ride into Brandon about four miles away, and get something he needed from the hardware store. That was when I had only worked there a few days and wasn't acquainted with their horses yet and found out later that I had saddled the wrong horse, one that was halter broke but had never been ridden before. I thought he acted pretty wild when I was putting the saddle on and leading him out of the barn. When I swung up on him, he bucked a little and I had to fight him all the way into town. On the way home, he was hard to hold back, so I let him run as fast as he wanted to.
    Bill was worried when he found out which horse I had ridden and was surprised that I hadn't been thrown. I would never have had the guts to get on him if I had known.
    Bill's wife got tears in her eyes when I quit and left there. She had four little kids to take care of, besides all of her other work and said I was the only kid that had ever worked for them that had helped her with the dishes and a lot of other housework without being asked. A short time before I left there, I went to a dance in an old building in Brandon one Saturday night. I didn't dance, but while I was standing around listening to the music, a buddy of mine shot over my shoulder with a little slingshot and hit this big kid standing in front of me behind the ear. This kid turned around and socked me, and I had to fight him. My skill at boxing came in handy, as I soon had his nose bleeding and he wanted to stop. I took him into the back of a cafe next door and helped him get cleaned up. The next day after church, Bill and his wife took me with them to these people's house for dinner. I was surprised when it turned out to be this kid's house. "Well," he said, "You can't whip me again," and I said, "Let's go out behind the barn and find out, if you're not satisfied." He backed out, and I was glad as he outweighed me by at least twenty pounds. We got along good the rest of the day and became friends.
    I went back home for a few months and old George treated me a little better as he had found out that he couldn't bully me. My brother, Lauren, came home for a visit from working on a farm. I never did know how the fight got started, but I guess George started telling Lauren what to do. I heard this scuffle in the next room, and when I opened the door, George was trying to get a bear hug on Lauren but was getting the hell beat out of him in the process. Lauren had both of George's eyes about swelled shut and his face was beginning to look like raw beefsteak. Mom came in and broke it up. I had been enjoying the show immensely. I guess George hadn't heard that Lauren was one of the toughest kids in the country.
    Once I was bringing the cows in to be milked late afternoon. There was just this one real black cloud overhead, and just as I had the cows all strung out in single file in this cow path, and getting ready to enter this barbed wire corral, a bolt of lightning came out of that cloud and sounded like a shotgun had gone off right by my ear. The next thing I knew, I was picking myself up out of the dirt in the cow path with a mouthful, and several cows that had been knocked down were also getting up. I could never figure out how it had knocked us down without killing some of us. It must have just snapped in the air above us and just the concussion from it flattened us. I was also temporarily blinded from the bright flash it made. I tried to let out a yell but couldn't utter a sound for several minutes. Everyone came running out of the house to see what that loud bang and flash was about.
    Mom sent me to an old widow woman's house, a mile south of our place, to clean the dirt out of a cellar that had caved in. I pushed our little iron-wheeled barrow with me to use. When I had finished the job in late afternoon and was about halfway home, a thundershower overtook me. Lightning started flashing and cracking all around me, and torrential rain and hailstones as big as golf balls started falling. I was glad to have that wheelbarrow with me, as I turned it upside down and got under it for protection. The noise the hail made on that tin about deafened me, and I could see the barbed wire fence only twenty feet away glow with lightning playing up and down it. This shower went over and was gone in about a half hour and the sun came out again and all was peaceful. It was really scary to me, and I was happy to get home safe.
    Another time, Mom sent me on an errand over to Chivington, five miles away. I jumped on old Brownie, bareback, and about a mile before I got there this storm caught up with me and it started to rain hard and lightning striking all around. Soon, scattered hailstones as big as golf balls started hitting me.
    I made Old Brownie run that last mile as fast as he could, popping him with the ends of the bridle reins on the rump at every jump to make him run even faster. By the time I laid down to run him under a low, corrugated, tin-roofed shed, behind the store in Chivington, I had welts all over my back from the hail, and I had an awful time controlling old Brownie and keeping him under that shed. The hail on that tin roof was making a terrible roar. It sounded like a hundred men were up there pounding with ball-peen hammers. Mom had always warned me not to take shelter under a lone cottonwood tree out on the prairie, and I could see why. Most of the ones I ever saw had been split open by lightning sometime or other.
    Every fall we'd go around and take the bottom strand loose on a lot of our barbed wire fences and staple them up higher with the second wire, so the tumbleweeds could blow on under the fence and keep on going across the prairie. If we didn't do this, the sand from the dust storms would keep building up in the weeds that lodged in the fence. Then the cows and horses could walk right on up and over the top. The dirt would drift so high behind the shed that we used for a barn, that I could walk up it and step on the roof, ten feet high.
    I'll never forget that first bad dust storm I saw, about 1930. Here came this awful-looking brown cloud, rolling across the prairie, reaching from horizon to horizon and several hundred feet high. I was quite a ways out on the prairie when I saw it, and I ran for our house as fast as I could. It looked to me like the end of the world had come. When it got to our house and enveloped us, it became so dark that we had to light the lamps to see. There was not a bit of wind at first, even though we were enveloped in dust. This fine dust cloud was being pushed ahead of the wind. It blew so hard in some of these dust storms that you could have to lean away over, to walk into it. I was going out to do the chores in one of these storms, and just ducked in time to keep a big piece of heavy tin that was flying horizontal through the air from cutting my head off.
    Once we had an early fall blizzard which drifted snow behind and to the top of a board fence behind our house. Nearly a week later, I saw this yellowish-looking hole in the snow and dug down to see what had caused it. This banty hen with her three half grown chicks had been covered up with snow in a nest she had under a tumbleweed. They were in good shape, except for being hungry. We had this huge tomcat that would kill full-grown jackrabbits. I went out in the pasture, fully a mile from our house, to bring our horses in one morning. It had snowed several inches that night and I saw where our cat had caught this rabbit. There was blood and hair over a wide area in the snow where they had struggled, and I tracked the bloody trail all the way back to our house where he had dragged this big rabbit. It must have weighed about as much as he did, and places in the snow showed that he had stopped to rest on the way. I saw this same big cat fighting with a weasel one morning, and this little critter was so aggressive and mean that he backed the cat off.
    I had set this steel trap in an old badger hole to try to catch a skunk but caught a big jackrabbit instead. I thought I'd take this rabbit out of the trap and take him home alive, for what reason, I don't know. I got ahold of him with one hand and held him tight and sprung him free of the trap with the other. That rabbit went crazy and kicked so hard that he tore my clothes and scratched me really bad. I was glad to turn him loose and he loped across the prairie--free. Another experience I had with a jackrabbit: I saw this neighbor's greyhounds chasing one, and they were headed right towards me with the dogs only about fifty feet behind, and the rabbit was running hard with his ears laid tight to his back. I got a stupid idea that I would get right in line and catch this rabbit. He was half blind from running with the wind in his eyes and didn't even try to dodge me as I squatted down with my arms all stretched out ready to grab him. He hit me hard, right in the pit of the stomach, knocking the wind out of me, and before I could recover, these five or six hounds ran over the top of me. I went on home, and bleeding, with torn clothes, and wiser.
    My sister Elsie and husband Ed came home for a visit from where they lived in McGill, Nevada. Elsie walked with me after the milk cows one evening, and as usual I had my slingshot slung around my neck and a pocket full of that railroad slag for ammunition. I amazed my sister by killing a big rattlesnake and two cottontail rabbits with it before we got home. A cottontail would be squatted near the cow path I was walking on, and as long as they didn't see me looking at them, they would think they were hid and let me walk right on by. Just as I got even with them, I would wheel and shoot, before they had a chance to run.
    Mom bought a horse, Topsy, for Eunice to ride. After Eunice went to Nevada, Topsy was my horse to ride. She was an aggravating horse to handle and was full of tricks. She had this habit of suddenly shying to one side as we were loping along, and I would be picking myself up off the ground. She was hard to catch and to get the bridle on, even after I was lucky enough to get her into the corral. She would start jerking her head in the air while I was trying to get the bridle on and the bit in her mouth, but I finally broke her of this little trick by leading her back under this low-roofed shed with a rope around her neck first. She about knocked her brains out a few times, and then she learned to cringe down with bowed head and meekly let me bridle her.
    One summer, this gang of about two hundred colored men were camped in Brandon. They were replacing steel and ties for the Missouri Pacific Railroad. They entertained the whole town all the time they were there. They stayed in a bunch of tents and some boxcars on the siding. They loved to gamble with cards and dice, with each other or some of our local men. Our local men would have some lively baseball games with them and, generally, lose. They were playing music, singing or had something going on all the time. They bought up every hound dog or any kind of old gun they could find and chased jackrabbits across the prairie on evenings or weekends. It was fun to watch them, hollering and shooting, and some of those tall, skinny, black boys could outrun the dogs. They were really afraid of snakes.
    I used to go up along the railroad tracks and watch them for hours at a time. Many times I saw them drop a tie they had just started to pick up and run. There would be only a lizard or some non-poisonous snake under it.
    One time, Russ and I killed a big bull snake and sneaked in one of their tents and put this snake under the top blanket of one of the beds just before they were due to come home from work. We hid behind a chute in the stockyards nearby and waited. Sure enough, one of these men sat down on the bed as soon as they went in the tent. I guess he felt a lump and threw the blanket back as they about tore the tent down, both hollering and trying to get out the door at the same time. Russ and I very carefully sneaked away and went home, laughing all the way.
    We boys would eat wild garlic that grew on the prairie in the springtime just to stink up the schoolroom. One boy brought the stinkbag from a skunk he had killed and skinned out to school in a jar and put in an air vent. The teacher would have expelled him if she had ever found out who did it. Before the dust storms got so bad, there would be a lot of beautiful wildflowers. Wild primroses, big clumps of pinks, pickle plant, and lupine, blooming all over the prairies in the spring. Even the soapweed would bloom pretty. Several kinds of cactus would have blooms as pretty as any rose but didn't have a nice smell. There were gourd vines, ten feet across, with the fruit on them about the size of baseballs and bitter as gall. We boys would have fights, throwing them at each other. Then there was what we called a devil's claw plant and the claws would stick to the cattle's feet and that was nature's way of scattering the seed. There were also lots of prairie chickens and quail before the dust storms came along. I think those storms were the cause of a lot of prairie dog towns perishing.
    The sandy soil in that country should never have been plowed up in the first place. It made wonderful pasture for the millions of head of buffalo and later on for the range cattle. That short, curly buffalo grass would fatten cattle about as good as grain. A few years when I was small, I can remember my dad cutting wild prairie hay from the gramma grass and wild timothy, which would grow several feet tall and head to grain. After the dust storms came along and the pasture would get low, our horses would eat loco weed to fill their bellies and get real crazy from it.
    I came home from school one day and Mom was skinning several of our milk cows that had got into our cane field and gorged on it. It formed a poison gas that made them swell up and killed them. We had horses that had got to a barrel of grain and ate so much that it foundered them and they were never very useful after that. There were a lot of things to contend with on the farm. Some new family would move into the country, and some of them would starve out the first year and leave. Several families even left their furniture and some machinery behind, and no one heard from them again.
    In later years, the government started subsidizing the farmers, paying them not to farm, every other forty-acre plot, like a checkerboard. As usual, the well-to-do people that didn't need the help were the ones that profited from this deal. They would buy or lease up a lot of ground and make a fortune out of the government paying them not to farm half of it. About every twenty miles you'd see a big fancy home with a swimming pool and the owners would spend the winters in Florida or California and hire a caretaker for their fancy place, while the poor little farmer that really needed the help was starved out and had joined the road of the "Grapes of Wrath." I noticed that most of the people that I knew who had starved out back there moved to a flat, wide valley in some other state, as near resembling as possible the country they had left. They didn't seem to want to be where there was a mountain or trees in the way to ruin their view.
    You could see for all of twenty miles in any direction in the country where I spent the first sixteen years of my life, and all you would see was a jackrabbit or a tumbleweed or a whirlwind moving across the prairie. I have called that country the rear end of creation, but it wasn't all bad.
    I can remember a few pretty sights. In good years a field of corn, maize or cane, waving in the wind, and I really appreciated when the buffalo grass started getting green and the meadowlarks would sing again and I knew I had made it through another winter. I have never met a better grade of people since in all of the places I've roamed. They had to be made out of good stuff to survive. I have only been back three times in all the fifty-two years since I left, but I still have a yen to go back one more time to see the land of my boyhood. I have a lot of good memories, along with the bad. It could have been a lot worse; I could have been born in the slums of some big city.

    All of a sudden, in the spring of 1933, a big change came into my life. My sister Eunice, who had stayed with our sister Elsie in Nevada for a year to finish high school, had gone on out to California, where two of our oldest sisters lived. She had stayed with Edith for a short time when she met a boy, Andy Ballard, and married him, much to both Edith and Inez's disapproval. Andy had a bad name around Ventura, as he was known to beat slot machines, or one-armed bandits, as we later called them. Well, Andy and Eunice started running all over the country making a living hustling these machines and came by Brandon, with another couple, to visit Mom and me. The first thing that happened, they were arrested in Lamar, which really made them famous. The F.B.I. had tailed them all the way from the town of Pinole, California, where two couples with the same kind of car had robbed a bank. They spent several days in jail before the bank robbers were caught, and the authorities had to turn them loose. Then Eunice bought a diamond ring, real cheap, from a local boy and they nearly got into trouble over that. As it turned out, the ring had been stolen. Eunice told the police who she had bought it from and gave the ring back to the owner, and the boy went to jail.
    Some months later Andy and Eunice took another couple with them on a trip clear back to the East Coast, and on the way back to California they stopped by Brandon again. I had just turned sixteen years of age and finished my junior year of high school. I still wasn't happy living in the same house with old George and jumped at the chance when they invited me to go with them. From the first day on the road with them, life was one big adventure for me for many years to come. I started out the first day going in joints along with them and watching their technique of beating these one-armed bandits without the victims knowing that they were being taken. I felt rather guilty at first, but soon got the feeling that we were just thieves beating thieves at their own crooked game.
    Andy hadn't been beating machines very long before he met Eunice, so some of his methods were rather crude. He kept learning new angles the first couple of years and got smoother with practice. On the way out to California with them, the very first machine I helped them beat had a brake on the reels so Andy couldn't spin them to line up pay numbers and he had to "rap it out." This was a noisy operation and drew considerable attention to us. We had to wait for each of the three reels to stop, one at a time. Each made a click as they stopped, and on the third click, he'd have to hit the machine a hard blow with the heel of his hand, on the lower back side, opposite of the payoff slides inside, letting his fingers go behind the machine. If it were timed just right, exactly on the third click with a hard enough, jolting blow, twenty coins would be jarred out of the payoff chute, no matter what it said on the reels. Some old machines would also dump the jackpot at the same time. We would pull the handle again real quick if some bartender would come running over, as we didn't want him to know that it had paid without the three bars showing on the reels. We'd always act real dumb and say we'd pulled it off the three bars in our excitement and that it was stuck and the handle wouldn't pull down; that was the reason we had hit the machine. Some people would get real suspicious and mad but were afraid to raise too much of a row, as the machines were illegal and they were in fear of the law confiscating them. I think a lot of people were afraid that we might be real tough. If we were gutty enough to beat their machines right in front of their eyes they were afraid to jump us.
    Andy could trip the jackpot on some machines with a big fingernail file. He would wedge the file in by a paper that told how much and what combinations it was supposed to pay on. It would trip the same lever that made it pay when anyone lined up the three bars.
    He would run his fingers up the chute and let the jackpot down easy so no one would know we got it. Then there were machines that had a pin worn in the neck of those old machines that had a bull's eye glass over on the left hand side that you put the coins in. This enabled the bartender to see a couple of coins if he wanted to have a look to see if anyone was slugging. Andy would always save any thin, worn coins and he could see in this glass how to wedge the edge of one coin over the other. This would hold this worn pin back and would let him have control of the reels. Then he could spin them and line up any pay combination he wished. If he pulled the handle too far down or let it up too far, he'd lose control and have to catch it on the pump all over again. Andy also used a fine piece of piano wire, about six inches long, with a loop in one end to put a finger through and a half loop in the other end. He stuck the half loop down the neck of these old machines and held that same pin back that he did with the thin coins, thereby gaining control of the reels. Some of these machines had a cast iron brake inside the machine just behind the handle. This would stop him from spinning the reels, even after he had it on the pump. Andy would catch these machines on the pump, and when one of these brakes stopped him, he'd drop his weight on the handle and snap this cast iron brake, so he could go on about his business. It would make a horrible loud noise when this brake snapped, and sometimes the bartender would come on the run, as he thought we had broken the machine all to pieces. We'd have to try to calm his nerves by saying, "The handle wouldn't pull down, but it's all right now."
    In the mid-Thirties they started coming out with the escalator-type machines, and we had to use some new methods to beat them. We couldn't rap, trip, or stick a wire down the neck of these machines, so we started drilling holes in them. They had about the same guts in them as the older machines, but we had to get the control in a different way. First, we found several places in the wooden right-hand side of the Mills make of machine to drill, and we'd use a short, heavy piece of piano wire to hold an arm back inside the machine. They put brakes on a lot of these machines to try to keep us from spinning the reels, but we discovered a place to drill that disconnected the brake and gave us control of the reels all in one operation. One Mills machine would spit when you caught it on the pump. Andy would spin and get three oranges; that paid ten coins, then it would keep paying ten every jiggle until the tube went dry. They called this make of machine the silent Mills, but it sounded like a threshing machine when Andy was pumping the money out of it. He'd pump it three or four times real fast and then spin and get the three oranges again, pump again and so on. The reason he didn't line up a bigger pay, like three plums or bells, was that it would jam the slides and the machine man would have to take the back off to fix it. That way he might find our hole we had drilled, if he looked at it from the inside.
    Anyway I watched them beat machines in dozens of joints in Colorado the first few days on our way to California. They beat several different makes of machines by whatever method it happened to require. We didn't find any machines in Utah, and Andy knew better than to beat machines in Nevada, as they were legal there then, just like they are to this day. This could give you time in jail, the same as if you had beaten a cash register. I remember we arrived at North Shore of Lake Tahoe, on the California side of the line, early in the evening and started right to work without delay. There were dollar-and-half-dollar machines in most of the joints in this beautiful resort area.
    We didn't take many jackpots there, as people were more apt to remember us and we wanted to take good care of that nice area. Those big joints took in so much money that we could come back every few weeks and beat them again, without the money being missed if we were careful about getting heat. If a joint acted the least bit suspicious, we'd skip it for a trip or two and let it cool off.
    If the tubes were full, which they generally were around Lake Tahoe, a dollar machine would hold from eighty to ninety dollars. A half dollar would hold about sixty, a quarter about thirty or forty, a dime about twenty to twenty-five, and a nickel about six to eight. A full jackpot on each one of these would hold about half as much as the tube. Andy could drop a coin in a machine and listen as he pulled the handle down slowly and tell you how full the tube was by how far the coin dropped. Sometimes, coins would stack up on top, after the tube was full. Andy would treat the machine real gentle till he got a few pays. This way he wouldn't jar this extra money off into the cash box in the bottom beyond his reach.
    I think we made about six hundred along Lake Tahoe that first time I'd been there. This was more money than I'd ever seen before. Besides making all that easy money, I loved that beautiful country. The wonderful smell of those pines caused me to inhale deeply to get more of it. From there we went on to San Francisco, where they shared a big apartment with Andy's sister, Alice, her husband Charlie and their two kids. Andy and Eunice also had a little year-old girl who they had left with Alice while they were on this trip. Their girl, Laurene, was named after our brother, Lauren, who had been killed in a highway accident a couple of years before.
    All that summer we were all one big happy family. Charlie had a younger unmarried sister with them, and she got to do a lot of baby sitting, while the rest of us kept pretty busy beating those slot machines all over California and Arizona. I got to see a lot of country in just a short time. There were a lot of machines right there by us in 'Frisco to beat. They were all in, supposedly, hideouts, in back rooms, and in joints they called blind pigs. You had to know just where they were located to start with, and a man would look at you through a peep hole when you knocked on the door. After they let you through a couple of locked doors, they'd lead you into a sumptuous bar with thick rugs on the floor and, of course, a lot of gambling tables and, best of all, slot machines. It was kind of spooky, beating those joints where you were locked in. We'd heard that they were run by gangsters from back East. We used to beat Butchertown, down on the waterfront, by the Fisherman's Wharf, which was a tough area. I recall beating one joint one time too often down there, and when we started to get in the car to leave, two policemen pulled their guns on us and robbed us of what cash we had in our pockets. When we asked if they were going to take us down to the station, they said, "Wise guys, huh," and told us to get the hell out of town. They were a lot bigger crooks than we were and didn't want to share the money they had stolen from us with those other crooked cops downtown.
    I really enjoyed San Francisco. All of a sudden I had plenty of spending money in this exciting big city. This was such a far cry from Brandon, Colorado. It was heaven to me. I had all of this spending money and such a variety of fun things to spend it on. The big grocery markets astounded me, and I was overcome from all the good smells coming from the fresh fruit, bakeries and delicatessen stores as I walked down the street. I would be sent to the store, and anything I happened to be hungry for, I could buy. One time I bought a Boston cream pie with fresh strawberries on top. It tasted so good that I ended up eating the whole thing by myself and got sick. I have never been hungry for Boston cream pie since, to this very day.
    We lived in the Mission District, at 24th and Guerrero and then moved to Elizabeth Street, which was only a few blocks from five or six movie theaters. I remember the El Capitan, Rialto, State and several others on Mission. Sometimes I would go to three shows in a row, out of one theater and into another. Then I learned the numbers of street cars and where they all went to, and for only a nickel I could ride for hours all over town by getting transfers from one car to the next. The grinding noise these cable cars made going up and down those steep hills really thrilled me. Several times I went out to the Fleischhacker Zoo and Park and spent the most of a day walking around with utmost enjoyment of all the many new things to see and things to ride on, especially the roller coaster. One morning, Alice got me up really early and took me out to a high place overlooking the Golden Gate. Later one end of the Golden Gate Bridge was built on this spot. We watched about thirty big Navy battleships and cruisers in single file sail into the harbor, just as the sun was coming up. They spread out and dropped anchor. What a beautiful sight that I shall never forget.
    Everything that summer was one big adventure to me, and there was never a dull moment. Besides the excitement of living in the city, I went on several slot machine trips.
    I had one more year of high school to go, so that fall Andy and Eunice put me on one of those limousine buses and sent me down to Long Beach, to stay with my sister Nelle and to finish my senior year. A big earthquake in June had leveled Long Beach Poly High, where I was to go to school, and they hadn't quite gotten all the mess cleaned up yet by the start of the school year. The school pitched hundreds of tents to be used as classrooms, and this made school all the more interesting to me. School was rather lax, on account of all the uproar the quake had caused, so I just coasted and had fun. I only had one and a half credits to make to start with in order to graduate. I didn't learn much, but sure had a ball.
    I soon got acquainted with this boy, Virgil Jones, that lived next door. Virgil's dad worked in the oil fields on Signal Hill, and spent most of his off-the-job time getting drunk. Consequently, Virgil and his younger brother did just as they pleased, and Virgil pleased to do a lot of things that should have gotten me into trouble, too. We would jump on the wide, back bumpers of those big Lang city buses, and steal rides to any place in town that we wished to go, especially down to The Pike on the beach. On weekends, I loved to lie on the beach in the sun and listen to the Long Beach Municipal Band play. I got a terrible sunburn the first time and found out I could get sunburned on a cloudy day. The Pike was several blocks long and was an exciting place to me, as it was made up of several movie theaters, all kinds of concessions, things to ride on and one big carnival the year round. They had a real scary roller coaster, built on a pier, out over the water. That winter, my brother Art came out from Colorado to visit us. He had never had much excitement in his life, so I took him down to The Pike and, of course, for a ride on the roller coaster. As we rode up the first steep slope at a slow pace, Art said, "I don't see anything so scary about this." All of a sudden, the bottom dropped out from under us as we sped nearly straight down and went madly around curves, up and down and around. As soon as Art was able to catch his breath, he hollered, "For God's sake, hold on or it will throw us clear out in the ocean!" and his fingers were white from holding on to the bar in front of him so tight. I couldn't get him to go for another ride.
    The first few days at Poly High, kids two different times tried to take a ball or something away from me in physical ed class. When they couldn't, both times, they started a fight with me. I poked them in the face a few times without getting hit, and the coach broke it up. They said, "I'll meet you at the south gate, after the eighth period," and both times I waited for them to show up for a half hour and no one came. I was glad, as I never did like to fight, even when I won. That settled it, and no one tried to bully me the rest of the year.
    Nelle had two boys, ten and eight years old. The oldest one, Duane, or Duke as he was later called, was quite a fighter for his age. He was a cocky little guy and some older and bigger boys were always picking a fight with him. Every time, he would beat hell out of them, much to their surprise. When he grew up, he fought professionally around L.A. on TV for several years.
    This Virgil and I did a lot of things that, as ornery as I was, I would never have thought of doing by myself. We could go to a show for fifteen cents, so we'd steal five milk bottles apiece, off of someone's porch and cash them in at three cents each at the nearest grocery store any time we felt like going to a movie. I would borrow one of Virgil's "probably stolen" bikes, and I got good at riding up to the right rear end of a pop truck, lift a case of pop onto a basket on the handlebars and make a right turn at the next street. We'd put it in Virgil's refrigerator and always had a good supply on hand. When a milk truck would pull up in front of a store to make a delivery, we'd be stationed directly across the street, and as soon as the man went in the store, we'd run across, using the truck for a screen, and steal us each a quart of orange drink or chocolate milk out of a compartment behind the driver's seat. We always had a supply of fresh fruit out of people's backyard orchards.
    We were walking down an alley and spied a whole garage full of watermelons behind this big vegetable market. The only trouble was that a six-foot-high cyclone fence was between them and us. We brought a tire iron with us late that night and dug a hole under the fence, out of the dirt, just big enough for us to squirm under. We got a couple of big melons and filled the hole level full of pea gravel from the alley. We went back every night for several nights and was gloating over what a good thing we had going. I was lucky, as this night it was Virgil's turn to crawl under the fence and hand the melons out the hole to me. The people must have missed the melons, for just as Virgil was halfway across the yard, with a big melon under each arm, a dog started barking and a bright yard light came on. They let a mean little fox terrier out the back door, and before Virgil could get to the fence, this dog was chewing on an ankle, causing him to drop both melons. The dog tore his shirt and pants about off, besides the hide on his back when he tried to squeeze through this small hole so fast, on the twisted wire on the bottom of the fence. He nearly dragged the dog through the hole with him, as it was still chewing and made a bloody mess of his ankle. We didn't take time to cover the hole that night and didn't even walk down that alley again for a long time.
    Virgil and I and several other boys were playing football in an alley, and a couple of men came out and ran us out of there. "Well," Virgil said, "I'll fix them." We went home and Virgil made a skeleton key in just a few minutes out of the handle of a tablespoon. We took a burlap sack, which I held, back with us while Virgil unlocked the padlocks on every garage door for the whole block, on both sides of the alley, and dumped them all in the sack. Then we shook them all up, went back and re-locked all those doors again with these mixed-up padlocks. I'll bet it took quite awhile for all those people to get in their garages and segregate all of those locks.
    One night, Virgil invited me to go with him and several other kids over to the Ascot Speedway in L.A., to watch the midget car races. I jumped at the chance and walked several blocks, and we all piled into this big Buick sedan and got on our way. We all had a wonderful time and came back late that night. The kid that drove parked the car in the same place, got out and walked away with us. I found out the next day that I had gone to the races in a stolen car. Five of us boys pooled our money and bought this old Oakland car. Virgil was the only one of us that had a driver's license. He said he knew how to drive, so we let him drive us down to The Pike. The last block leading down to The Pike was pretty steep, and Virgil parked the car at an angle, just as we started to go down. We all got out and had fun for a couple of hours, but when we came back to the car, it wouldn't start. It took all of us, with all our strength, to push it uphill, away from the curb far enough to clear the car below us. When we finally got it pushed far enough, and Virgil straightened the front wheels, it took off so fast that he didn't have time to get in, so he stood on the running board to steer it. There were a solid mass of people walking across this street at the bottom, and how they all managed to get out of the way and no one got run over was a miracle. Virgil rode and steered, at probably twenty-five miles an hour, through all those people, and had enough momentum to carry him quite a ways out on the beach. There it sank to the axles in the sand. Virgil jumped off and ran, and none of us ever went back to retrieve the car. We lost this fifteen-dollar car on the very first trip.
    Virgil and I would go to the wrestling matches on Thursday nights in the municipal auditorium. We only paid to get in a couple of times until we figured out a way to get in free. The matches were on the top floor, and there was a flight of stairs leading up onto the flat roof, where people would go up to have a smoke or get a breath of fresh air between matches. We sneaked in a rope with a bunch of knots tied in it, tied one end to a pipe on the roof and dropped the other end to the ground behind some vines that grew up the wall. This was our free pass for the wrestling matches from then on. Every weekend, we'd practice imitating these wrestlers. We got so good at it that some of the smaller neighbor kids would think we were really fighting and would gather around for the show. We'd make faces, throw each other around and moan with pain, just like those phony wrestlers. I found out in later years from Duke, who worked out for boxing in the same gym as a lot of the wrestlers, that they would practice for the match that night and rehearse, and it was fixed who was going to win. They take dramatics, like the movie stars do. They could hurt each other though, and sometimes accidents do happen. One wrestler that I saw being interviewed on TV said his worst fear of being hurt was from women at ringside with pop bottles.
    A few times when some of us kids would be on the lawn, wrestling, an aftershock from the big earth quake would come along and would give us a funny feeling. When you had your ear close to the ground like that, you could hear a noise like wind makes and know one was on the way. We lived in this old duplex, with the garages underneath. All the nails had been loosened by the big quake, and any small tremor would shake it enough to give you a thrill. When I first came down to live, several of the big neighbor boys had fun turning our lights off at night, hollering earthquake, and they could rock the whole building by grabbing ahold of a corner and pushing and pulling with all their might. They did scare me the first time before I caught on to their tricks. Nelle worked night shift in restaurants a lot, and her husband, Kelly, was in the Navy, and only came home on furloughs, so I babysat with the boys a lot. Quite a few times, I'd be home alone at night with the boys and a real earthquake would come along and shake the building and rattle the dishes. A harder-than-usual one nearly rolled me out of bed this night, and it took me a long time to go back to sleep.
    There was always a dozen or so navy battleships, cruisers, and other ships, anchored nearby in San Pedro harbor, and they'd have a smoker on some of these on Friday afternoons. They would have wrestling and boxing matches between sailors from the different ships. There was nothing phony about any of these matches. Some of them looked like grudge fights. Besides, they would have movies on deck and tubs of cookies and other goodies sitting around for us to help ourselves to. Every chance I got I'd catch one of their shore launches out to visit a ship. I must have gotten to go on a dozen ships, and sometimes the water would be rough and people would get seasick before they could board a ship. One time it was so rough and the waves were so high that they wouldn't try to let anyone on the ship, and half the people were puking over the side before we made it back to shore. Kelly was a machinist mate on the Colorado, and he gave me a tour through his ship one time when it happened to be in port. He took me down in the engine room and also to his machine shop, which was all very interesting to me, a country hick. He gave me an aluminum lighthouse with a blinking light in it that he had made. I can't remember whatever happened to it, and I would treasure it now.
    Virgil and I would go to baseball games to see how many baseballs that got fouled over the fence we could steal. I remember this one game especially. We caught the back bumper of a bus and went to a game at Huntington Beach. We had about six balls already and had them hid and came back for another one. Finally we had their last ball, and it stopped the ball game. About six players busted out of that ball park and took out after us. We outran all but one mad, persistent fellow, who was gaining on us. When he'd just about catch one of us with the ball, we'd throw it across the street to the other one. Finally he was so mad that he didn't care about the ball any more, he just wanted to get a hold on either one of us. I saw this bus pulling away from the curb and jumped on the bumper, and it barely picked up speed enough to keep that mad man from getting hold of me. We waited quite a while before we had nerve enough to go back and get the balls we had stashed, and we never went back down there to a game again.
    Kelly made a batch of home brew beer while he was home on leave. He had it all bottled and capped and sitting on the garage floor down under our duplex. One hot day we heard this terrible noise, like machine guns, and it sounded like the whole place was about to blow up. We were all scared and ran outside to find out that every one of Kelly's bottles of home brew had blown up and the caps were hitting under the floor. What a mess that was to clean up, and what a waste of beer.
    Virgil and I decided to celebrate his sixteenth birthday. We got a gallon jug of his dad's dago red wine and a couple of Kelly's White Owl cigars. The wine was real sweet and tasted terrible to me, and I think it still had seeds in it. It wasn't long until we were both drunk and sick. The last I remember,Virgil crawled up to the toilet on his hands and knees and had his head away down in, trying to puke up his guts. The sight of him finished getting me sick, and I made a run for the kitchen sink. I made it as far as the door, still about six feet from the sink, when I let go. I puked in a big arc with such force that a lot of it went in the sink from that far away. I passed out on the sofa in the front room, and when I awoke the next morning, Nelle was on her hands and knees in the kitchen, cleaning up that stinking mess. Just the smell made me sick again, and I headed for the bathroom. If I'd have been Nelle, I would have killed me. I've never been very crazy about any kind of wine to this day.
    Andy and Eunice would drop by on one of their trips pretty often. Once when they were down, they went out on the gambling ship Rex, which was anchored a few miles offshore, to make it legal, as gambling has always been legal federally. They beat a few machines and got to thinking that they were at the ship's mercy, because they had to take the ship's shore boat back to their car. It didn't look too safe, so they never went back out there again.
    My oldest sister Inez's boy, Ray, that lived in Arcadia, came over to see me a few times. We went out on this live bait fishing boat, which was anchored a mile out from shore. We were running a race to see who could catch the most mackerel. We were just nip and tuck, hauling them in as fast as we could bait our hooks and get our lines back out in the water again, and Ray jerked one up out of the water so hard that it flew over his head and out over a line down the center of the ship that had flags flying from it. There was only one man on that boat that was dressed up in a suit, tie and a hat, and this was the man that the fish came down on and hit him on the side of the head. His hat was knocked off and the juice ran down his neck. He wouldn't accept our apologies and would have been real mean, if there hadn't been two of us.
    The boat furnished these live minnows in a tub of water, a bamboo pole with about sixteen feet of line and a hook. It was fun to watch people, elbow to elbow, leaning over the rail, getting their lines tangled with each other. These mackerel had a habit of swimming in short circles, and if you didn't jerk them up out of the water real quick they would swim around a half dozen other lines, and [it] caused a lot of arguments and even one fist fight. Everyone blamed someone else, but no one knew for sure who had caught the fish till maybe a half an hour later when they got their lines untangled. The pelicans would try to grab your fish out of the air while you.were bringing it in. We tied a fish on each end of a short piece of line and threw it down in the water. In a few seconds, pelicans had swallowed the fish on each end and flew off until they hit the end of the line. They fell floundering into the water, until one had regurgitated his fish. I thought that was fun then but would think it a cruel joke now.
    Ray was two months older than I, his uncle. He would walk up to me and say, Uncle Harold, could I have a penny? Ray and three of his school buddies took me on a several-day camping trip, back in the mountains past Mt. Wilson. I had never done anything like that before, and it was a lot of fun. The first morning when I awoke and crawled out of the tent, there were eighteen head of deer, standing there looking at me. We went swimming and caught some trout in this clear, cold mountain stream. What a change this was from the prairie and the muddy creeks where I had been raised. In later years, Ray emerged from World War II as a major in the army air corps. He had been with Captain Doolittle on the first daylight bombing raid on Berlin. I had this picture, which covered the whole centerfold of a Life magazine at the end of the war. It showed all thirteen bombers on the ground, with Doolittle and the hundred and thirty crew members, standing in front or sitting on the wings. I lost that magazine, but think I'll still try to find a copy after all these years. Ray got through all that war in good shape and then died of cancer, in his early fifties. He had been a test pilot before going overseas at the start. Later he and his crew had to be rescued by a flying boat when they had to make a forced landing at sea off the west coast of Dakar, Africa. Another time, he had to make a pancake landing on a field in England after the Germans had fouled up the landing gear.
    Let's go back to my school days in Long Beach. Before I knew one kind of ocean fish from another, I went out on this fishing boat by myself one day and brought back a whole sack of fish. I was so proud, but Nelle took one look at them and said those are tomcod and that they were a scavenger fish and always wormy and no one eats them. I started to dump them in the garbage can when a Mexican man that lived across the alley asked if he could have them. I smelled fish frying back there for several days, and they sure smelled good. I saw some ripe pomegranates on a bush in the yard next door, and knowing no one was home that day, I hopped over the fence to help myself to a few of them. Before I got halfway back, a bulldog who hadn't barked or growled once grabbed me by the pant leg. It didn't do any good to drop the fruit. He kept a firm grip. It must have been a half hour before I could notice that he had relaxed his grip a little so I stepped as far as I could with the other leg and after another minute or two I drug the other leg over, dog and all. It must have taken me all of another hour, repeating this process, to work my way over to the fence. Finally, I got both hands on top of the wood fence post and waited again till I could feel the dog's jaws relax a little, and with one supreme effort, I vaulted back over the fence, ripping my pants out of his teeth. That was the first and last time I ever tried that.
    Nelle's boys, Duane and Dallas, were ornery little rascals, and I was supposed to make them behave while she was away working. This day they had been tormenting me, so Virgil and I tied them to the clothesline post with some cotton rope, and we hopped on the back bumper of this Lang bus to go down and have some fun at The Pike for an hour or so. We had just arrived and were walking along, trying to decide what to do, when we spotted Duane and Dallas, sitting on a curb eating their ice cream cones. They had got untied, caught the back bumper of another bus and beat us down there. I used to be good at thumping a marble, clear across a room and putting knots on Dallas' head. Now, fifty years later, here in Oregon, I tell him that he would have never been smart enough to run a tire shop if I hadn't put all those smart bumps on his head.
    On June 12th, 1934, I graduated from Long Beach Polytechnic High School in the Municipal Auditorium with a class of 617 kids. There were 3700 kids in the three grades of high school. Quite a difference from the Brandon, Colorado, school that I had left. I think four or five kids graduated back there that year out of a total of twenty in the four grades. Instead of buying a class ring with the ten bucks Andy and Eunice had given me, I used the money to chip in to charter a big ship for the senior class to take a trip over to Catalina Island, twenty-some miles off shore. We all caught the ship in the dark, real early in the morning. It had a big swimming pool, also a dance floor with a live orchestra playing. I had heard and seen pictures of ships like this, but never dreamed I would ever get to be on one.
    On the way over, I stood at the rail and watched the silvery flying fish coming out of the wave the bow made as it cut through the water. They would wiggle their tails, spread a couple of winglike fins and sail for several hundred feet, before they plopped back into the sea. A kid standing next to me that knew I was a landlubber from Colorado said, "Boy, are you going to get sick, if you've never been on a boat before." He said he'd made several trips on the ocean and had never been sick. It wasn't five minutes after he had said that, that he was leaning over the rail, puking up his guts, and I never did get sick. As we neared the island, the sun was just coming up and it was beautiful. A deckhand let me look through his binoculars to watch a herd of goats on a green hillside. He said some of the old sailing ships of the Spaniards had introduced them to the island and they had gone wild, multiplied and prospered ever since. There were a lot of interesting things to see and do, after we landed. We rode on a glass-bottomed boat and, looking fifty feet deep into the crystal clear water, we could see schools of many kinds of brilliantly colored fish. A big barrel-chested man would dive overboard, and we could watch him gather some abalone shells and bring them up and try to sell to some of us passengers. It seemed like he would stay down for all of five minutes before he'd come up for air. The marine plants were also colorful. The boat took us down to the south end of the island, where hundreds of seals were up on some rocks, making a lot of noise with their barking. They started diving into the water as we drew near.
    There was a huge aviary with hundreds of tropical birds flying around in it. We got to watch the Chicago Cubs practice from there spring training, from Wrigley Field. Then we went to the big, round Avalon ballroom on the top floor. It was probably a hundred and fifty feet across. The acoustics were perfect, and they demonstrated that you could hear a penny drop from clear across this big round room. We got to dance to Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadian band that was playing there. I didn't think much of it at the time, but later on I heard what a famous orchestra it was. I wouldn't trade the memory of this trip for the best class ring that money could buy. In later years, I wanted to take our two kids on that trip, and still later, my six grandkids. I never did, so now I'll have to take some of the great-grandkids.
    By the time I had graduated in June, Andy and Eunice had moved from Frisco to Ventura, and I went up to live with them again. I had thought of joining the navy, but I got started going on those slot machine trips with them again and forgot all about the navy. I had just turned 17 years of age, but was very seldom turned down from buying a drink in the joints. They had juvenile laws in those days, but they were seldom enforced if you had the money to pay for a drink. I soon got in a lot of miles on these trips and was always glad to get home again and relax a few days. Most counties and a lot of towns in California and Arizona had machines at some time or other. In the next twenty years we exercised this racket and we always kept track of where they were. Some were in hideouts in back rooms, and the law wasn't supposed to know about these. We had good ears for hearing the faint sound of these machines being played in the distance. We would go back and start playing them like we had always known where they were. In strange territory, we'd act like we were half drunk and stumble around, trying different doors, like we couldn't find the rest room. We called this "shaking the joint down." Once I found a quarter machine in a bedroom and Andy sat on the bed to beat it. When we crossed over the line into a different county, they would let me go into a joint first to save time. If there were no machines, I'd just buy a pack of cigarettes or some matches and come right back out, but if there were machines, I'd order a beer and stay till they came on in.
    I learned more about politics in a short time than I could have taking a four-year political science course in any college. Every town, county or state that had illegal gambling, such as poker, punchboards or slot machines, were run by crooked politicians. Sheriffs, mayors, the cop on the beat were all getting a cut out of the money from this illicit racket. Most times, the owner of the joint would get the smallest piece of pie. It was all divided first by the slot machine man and all these crooked lawmen and politicians. After witnessing all this graft in my younger days, I find it hard to take politics seriously. A lot of honest men, when they first get into office, have so much pressure against them that it's hard for them to stay honest for very long. It is like a man swimming upstream. Before long, he gets tired and starts drifting with the current.
    I had fun in Ventura, going to the beach, to movies, or roller skating. I didn't have a car of my own yet or go with girls. My sister Edith's family lived on a little four-acre ranch near Ojai, a little town about thirteen miles inland from Ventura. I would go up there to visit them pretty often. They had some big walnut trees, apricots and several other kinds of fruit trees, a big garden, and different kinds of berries. Those fresh strawberries with cream on them from their cow were out of this world. I would sit under their apricot tree, eating that tree-ripened fruit, and leave a big pile of seeds. I couldn't get enough of the navel oranges, picked fresh and ripe off the tree. This was the first time I had ever been exposed to all this good stuff. When I left Colorado, I weighed 95 pounds and was five foot two. A year later, I had gained forty-five pounds and was six inches taller. This change of diet had a lot to do with it, I'm sure. I don't remember of ever having gone hungry on the farm, but we didn't have all this variety.
    I especially remember around Lake Tahoe, California, which we beat regular for a lot of years. It was such beautiful scenery, and the smell of those conifer trees and that clean, high-altitude air was so delightful. Sometimes we would see movie stars or important people in those big high-class joints. Some of them would be drunk and make bigger asses out of themselves than any poor person could. The management would put up with them, as they spent so much money in their joint. Those people would entertain the bartender for us while we beat the machines.
    I will try to remember some of the happenings in some of these many hundreds of joints we beat, down through the years. We loved to beat Italian or Chinese joints. The Italians were such poor sports and the Chinese so smart. You could always beat a Chinaman the first time, but there was no use going back for seconds, as they always knew they had been beat. I've read the Chinese are the ones that invented gambling. One Chinese joint we beat in L.A, up over this big vegetable market, was run by this little short Chinaman. He was real suspicious, so got him a box to stand on and would try to look over our shoulder to see what we were doing. I would keep kicking the box out from under him and told him to go away as he was bad luck to us. Then I heard him talking real loud on the phone, around a corner from us. So I walked over and peeked around the corner and he was saying, "Some people are beating my machine. You come down right away, arrest them, put them in jail. Hurry." I could see that he was holding the lever down on this old wall phone and trying to scare us. They don't like cops in their joint and won't call one short of murder. Italians would keep calling in more people. When they had gathered about four men to our one, we'd better leave in a hurry. I remember one big Italian in a joint near Walnut Creek that I bluffed out by shoving him back while Andy raked out the jackpot on a quarter machine; he had just spun the reels to get it. Andy put that jackpot in his pocket and we didn't try to cash it in for bills. We got the hell out of there. Andy, Charlie, and I were on this trip without the women along and beat this Italian joint in the town of Portola. It got hot, and about eight Italians were getting ready to beat up on us. We backed down a flight of stairs, each with one of their stools in our hands. We left those stools on the sidewalk and dug out of there fast. We had beat that town so many times. They got so hot that we didn't go back there again for several years. Then we'd just beat one joint and leave fast. The ideal crew with which to beat machines was two couples, dancing and having a good time on the side. We always got more heat when just we men went on a trip.
    Charlie was a good-sized man and quite a fighter, and Andy told me about the time in Pismo Beach before I came to California. About a dozen Italian men had Charlie surrounded and weren't going to let him get in the car to leave till their Italian police got there. Every time Charlie would get within arm's length of one, he'd hit him so hard that they would crawl away on their hands and knees, spitting teeth. In just a few minutes they were glad to let Charlie get in the car and leave with Andy.
    We used to beat Tracy and Manteca on schedule, every couple of weeks, so they wouldn't get used to making too much money out of their machines. The bartenders in several of the joints would always buy us the first round of drinks and thought we were big-spending salesmen from Frisco. If we thought any of the joints were even slightly suspicious, we'd leave and skip it for a trip or two to let it cool off. That was too good of a territory to ruin. We'd always buy a lot of change, to make them think we were losing it in the machines.
    Kern County, all around Bakersfield, had open gambling for a year or so, and we gave them a fit. The Green Lantern, a few miles out of town, I guess, got tired of our beating them, so one afternoon they put knockout drops in Andy's drink. Charlie and I saw he was acting real crazy and got him in the car, but before we had gone very far he tried to jump out of the car while we were going sixty miles an hour. Charlie slammed on the brakes and I just barely hung on to Andy till he got the car stopped. Andy seemed to have superhuman strength and went running across the prairie, tearing his clothes off as he went. It was starting to get dark and I lost sight of him and wouldn't have found him till morning if I hadn't heard a barbed wire fence squeak as he ran into and over it. Then I saw a horse looking toward him. We finally found him, hiding in a ditch from us, and it took Charlie and I quite awhile to wrestle and half-drag him back to the car. He passed out on the back floorboard and finally got cold and drug the seat out on top of him. We got back home to Ventura late that night, and Andy had a bad hangover all the next day. This is the only time any of us had ever been doped in a joint. A lot of bartenders had this little trick of making each drink a little stronger, trying to get you drunk so you would spend your money more freely.
    We got acquainted with quite a few other slot machine hustlers, but none of them were nearly as good at it as Andy. They had a hard time making a living out of it on their own. Any time Andy would let them, they would go on a trip with us to make some real money. I can still remember the names of a few of these men, such as Bob Level, Johnnie Nutter, Jimmy Blackwell and Bobbie Barr. The last two were lightweight boxers and fought professionally around Frisco and San Jose. They sparred with me a few times and told me that I had a good potential as a fighter. I am glad that I never got started at that game. I've seen so many old fighters cleaning up pool halls, so punch-drunk, with cauliflowered ears and noses, their brains rattling around in their heads like marbles. I think more of my body than to abuse it like that for money. Bob Level was an alcoholic and would call up his bootlegger every morning for a fifth of white lightning and then would run out of it before that evening was over. He died a few years later with hardening of the arteries. Bobbie Barr was the little fighter that smoked marijuana. He got on the hard drugs later on and ran around with hardened criminals. A few years after we had known him, I was shocked to see his picture in a True Detective magazine in the ten most wanted men lineup. He and a man they called Red had robbed this grocery store in Yreka and were hitchhiking out at the edge of town. The sheriff, not even knowing the store had been robbed, pulled up across the road from them to check them out. Red walked over to the car and shot the sheriff. This sheriff was well-liked and a mob started a manhunt and caught him that night. They strung him up to a tree a couple of miles south of town on the old 99 highway. Bob got away, but the law caught him a year later down in San Pedro, after he had shot and wounded his girlfriend. I never found out how many years sentence he got for that. All these people were a good education to me. A lot of people I know in my old age will argue that pot is harmless and should be made legal, but I can't agree with them as pot is a drug that leads to the hard drugs. A pusher will come to a pot party and while the kids are high will say, "Try some of this good stuff."
    Several times, Andy would let some big tough guy go on a trip with us, and every time they would get us into unnecessary trouble. This big Benny Coronada, who was about six foot six and weighed at least 225 pounds, went with us on this one trip. We were beating this big Silver Bowl night club, between the oil towns of Taft and Maricopa. We had already beat two quarters and a half-dollar machine and Andy had the second half over half dry when this big bartender and owner of the joint came over and said, "Don't you think you've got enough money out of these machines?" Then he said, "Come on over to the bar and I'll buy all of you a drink," but Benny wanted to show us how tough he was by shoving the man back, and said, "Andy, go ahead and finish draining that half." The man went behind the bar and came back with a big pistol about the size of Matt Dillon's and shot a hole in the floor as big as a half-dollar right beside Benny's foot. Then his big brother raised up a baseball bat, but before he could swing it, the one with the gun hit Benny on the forehead with the gun held flat in the palm of his hand. Benny staggered back against a wall to keep from falling, bleeding like a stuck hog from a long, deep gash over one eye. Andy and I handed him a handkerchief to hold over his eye and led him out to the car. We drove on over the ridge route to Lancaster and woke a doctor up in the wee hours of the morning. I sat in the car while the doctor was sewing Benny up, and pretty soon I saw Andy come out the door and start puking up his guts. Watching the doctor poke the needle (it would stretch the skin a half inch before popping on through) was more than Andy could bear .
    Earlier on this same trip, Benny saw this good-looking girl in a real estate office while we were waiting next door to have some work done in a garage. I walked by this door several times, curious-like, and saw that Benny had this girl in the palm of his hand, about ready to date her out. Well, I did some fast thinking and then went in and said, "Hey, Pa, Ma wants you out in the car." Benny said, Pa--Ma?" and ducked his head and ran out of the place. He said, "Nothing but hamburgers for you, Harold, on the rest of this trip." It was hard for me to believe. We stayed all night at the Tahoe Inn, at the north end of the lake, and when we got up the next morning it was snowing hard. When we walked outside, Benny held out his hand, catching some of the snowflakes, and looked at them in amazement. He picked a handful up off the ground and examined it closely. He had been raised in L.A. and had never seen it snow before. The only time he had ever seen snow was at a distance on a fender or top of a car that had been up to Big Bear or some high altitude.
    Quite a few times while beating machines around Lake Tahoe, in the wintertime, some of the joints would have over ten feet of snow in front of them and would have a tunnel dug to the front door. Those big rotary snow plows would be kept busy, keeping the roads open for the winter sportsmen. We couldn't run off the road, as we could roll down our window and look up twenty feet to see the top of the snowbank on either side of the road. The snow plows had piled it up even deeper.
    As the new slot machines came out with the escalator across the top, we had to come up with new angles to beat them. That's when we started drilling holes in the wooden right-hand side of machines. We would use a short, stiff piece of piano wire for a tool to hold back different arms inside. We then got control of the reels so we could spin them and line up the different combination of pays, just like we had done on the older machines.
    The guts were basically the same. We just had to keep finding ways to get at them. After Andy would line up about a dozen big numbers like three bells or three plums in a row, the tube would go dry and we would always put ten of fifteen coins back in so that if some lucky person that played the machine right after us would hit a good pay, it would pay him full count. Some machines would keep paying on the up-and-up after we had beat them. We'd have to pull the handle quick, before they could pay, to get any money back into them.
    Charlie and Alice was along on this trip, and we had just beat a half-dollar machine in this joint away up the Feather River canyon. We had already beat their quarter machine, and when Andy finished draining the tube on the half he said, "I might as well take the jackpot, too, as they are so hot that we won't be able to beat them again for a long time." This made the people mad, but while Alice was trying to put a few coins back in, she won the other reserve jackpot, on the up and up. The people really got mad then, and we got the hell out of there before they got a gun to shoot us.
    We had beat this cafe and gas station joint a lot of times, just outside of Palo Alto. This time we came back and ordered some hamburger sandwiches [that] they had to go back in the kitchen to fix. Andy pulled the thumbtack out of the hole we had drilled in the side of the machine the first time we beat it. We'd stick the thumbtack in the hole with gum every time we would finish, so they wouldn't find the hole. The thumbtack pretty well matched the rivets on the side of the machine. This smart man, I guess, had found our hole by looking on the inside and had rigged up a bell in there which Andy contacted with his wire. It was rather embarrassing to us when that bell started ringing and wouldn't shut off. The man came out of the kitchen, pointing a P38 Italian pistol at us. He was shaking like a leaf and white as a sheet, and I was afraid he was going to shoot one of us accidentally so I started talking fast. I said, "Are you going to murder us over a few dollars out of this illegal slot machine?" He finally cooled down a little and said, "Well, you're going to pay double for the hamburgers." We threw a five-dollar bill on the counter and let him keep the sandwiches and were glad to get out of there. It seemed funny a while later, but it wasn't so funny at the time, as we could have been shot by that nervous, mad man. Another time we hit a bell up near Pasco, Washington.
    We had at least four places on the right hand side of a machine that we could drill and get control of the reels. Some of the men that operated the machines, would find the holes and plug them with screws or hang loose plates inside that we couldn't drill through. We'd have to drill a different place every time we came back. Most of the joints thought we were just free-playing the machine and didn't dream that we were spinning the reels and draining the machine in just a few minutes. Free playing would have taken too long. We would have to wait for the machine to decide when it wanted to pay, like the people that went around slugging them did. Finally we started drilling through the metal front with high-speed carbon bits. I'd tell Andy that he was unlucky and to let me pull the handle a few times to change his luck. One of our women would open her purse and he would reach in and get the drill and have the hole drilled while I was pulling the handle three or four times. He'd drop the drill back in the purse and I'd hand him the wire tool and he'd reach in and hook an arm inside the machine, catching it on the pump and then hand the wire back to me. As soon as the machine clicked dry, I'd hand him a wooden match that he would cram the butt end of into the hole and break off flush. Then I'd hand him a short piece of crayola as near the same color of the machine as possible and he'd paint over the wood match. A few times we had covered up so well that we couldn't find our hole when we came back and would drill a new hole right beside it. All the time that we drilled machines through the side, we used a little short wooden drill with a chuck on it, but at first we.used a ratchet Yankee drill for the front. Then they started making harder metal and even chrome steel in hopes of discouraging us.
    Several times, they came out with machines that they advertised as unbeatable. That really helped us when the joints thought that their machines couldn't be beat. The newer a machine was, the smoother and quieter and easier to beat. It was the same difference as driving an old or a brand-new car. We finally started using a drill with a gear and crank on the side. It was similar to an egg beater, and that is what we called it. We had to have teamwork. We learned to stand rather loose around the machine but still cover up so no one over a few feet away could see what we were doing. I'd stand on the handle side, kind of sideways, and watch the room behind out of the corner of an eye, and one of our women would do the same from the other side, and we'd tell Andy when it was safe to go or to hold it. If a curious bartender walked up behind us, Andy would pull the handle all the way down and play on the up and up until he walked away and all was clear again. Then I'd hand Andy the wire so he could catch it on the pump all over again. Most times, he'd drain a machine by only catching it the first time.
    Some of the worst trouble we had was from some curious yokel or gunsel, as we called them, standing around looking over our shoulders. I wore those Cuban-heeled shoes that were in style those days and loved to step back on their toes and wheel at the same time. I would say, "Oh, excuse me," and then if they didn't back off, I'd do it harder yet the next time or two. Quite often we'd run into some other hustlers in a joint. If we didn't already know them, we'd soon recognize them as being hustlers by the way they would go about their business. One set of hustlers we met in a joint in Concord said their mechanic was really fast taking the money. We lined him and Andy up side by side on two different machines to have a contest. Andy had his machine dry before their man had lined up over three or four pays.
    Another set of hustlers that we met over in Boise, Idaho, were drilling on top of the escalator with a little drill that they would wind up and hold in the palm of their hand. When they pressed the trigger, presto, the hole would be drilled. They were cowboys that were following the rodeos and beating machines on the side. We kind of liked the idea of the drill they used but not the high-up place on the machines where they drilled them. We were about to have one of these drills made up when these hustlers told us of what had just happened to them in a joint. One of them had this drill all wound up and ready to.go over and drill a machine, when it accidentally went off in his pocket and kept drilling holes in his leg. He went wild with the pain and ended up down on the floor, writhing around like a snake with its head cut off before it got wound down.
    The bartender thought he had gone crazy, having a fit or something, but they managed to get the hell out of there before the cops or an ambulance arrived. So we decided that we didn't want a drill like theirs.
    A lot of people we knew wanted to go on trips with us, for the excitement and to make a little money. Jobs were scarce in the 1930s and low pay for most jobs. They all thought this was easy money, but we knew better. At any time some stupid, poor loser might shoot us. We had to drink in every joint, to keep up our nerve, or "artificial inspiration" as I called it. It didn't look good to go into a joint and just start playing their machines, but you had to be careful not to drink too much and get careless. Some days I'd drink several cases of beer and dozens of mixed drinks. In big fancy night clubs, we'd dress up and order their expensive mixed drinks. The trouble was with mixed drinks in those days the bartenders didn't have to be licensed and you'd never get two drinks alike, even from the same bartender. I hated it when they would make the drinks too sweet, as a person could get sick on them real easy. A nice thing was that most of the ordinary joints had spittoons. I got rid of a lot of bad drinks by dumping them in spittoons. Then I'd say, "Boy, that was good; mix me another one." This would keep the bartender busy while the rest of our crew were beating the machines.
    If a bartender didn't have any other business to keep him occupied, I'd go sit at the far end of the bar and try to entertain him. I got good at fishing around until I found some subject the man was interested in, and then let him do the talking. I'd just butt in often enough so the man would try to out-talk me and keep his mind off the machines. I got so I could read a person's mind, whether he was curious, suspicious or getting mad, by watching the look in his eyes. Sometimes I'd tell a bartender that Andy had just inherited a bunch of money and was just throwing it away, drinking and gambling, and wouldn't listen to me. We tried never to show fear when some joint got real hot.
    That made the people have doubt about how tough we might be or if we had something to back us up. We had advantage. Their machines were always illegal, and some of them were having a hard time keeping them anyway without any trouble over them. In most areas, the churches and a lot of the good citizens were complaining about gambling. Charlie had an air about him that made people think he might be an inspector or a lawman of some kind. He would keep the business on edge long enough for us to get the machines beat and be on our way. If a joint along a highway in the country got hot, we'd skip the next joint or two on down the road, in case they'd phoned ahead. A lot of times, we'd go on up the road a ways past a joint, then turn around and stop on the way back. That way they'd think we were headed the other direction.
    Our license plate and car would get hot pretty often, so we'd change cars as often as possible. Another thing, we put a lot of miles on a car in just a short time, so we'd save money by trading them in before they needed a lot of expensive overhaul. In those days, there weren't so many body styles or colors in each make of car, so it was easier to spot a car that might be following us from joint to joint. Of course, it was easier for them to spot our car. Once, when we thought this big night club might be hot, I stayed out in the back seat of our car to watch for anyone that might be following us. Sure enough, this lady came out of the joint and was kneeling down with a flashlight and writing down our license number. I couldn't stand not to have a little fun so I yanked the back door open and hollered, "Hey," at her as loud as I could. I startled and scared her so bad that she fell over backwards and had an awful time getting to her feet. She ran back into the joint, leaving her pencil and pad behind.
    Sometimes, we'd run into an area that only had chip machines. You could put coins in the machine but only would get out these brass chips with holes in them with the joint's name. You couldn't trade them for cash and could only trade them for merchandise in this same joint. We all smoked at that time, so we'd come home with dozens of cartons of cigarettes and anything else we could use. Andy liked to beat these little midget Duke or Duchess penny machines that a lot of restaurants would have on the counter. He would pass away the time that way while we were waiting for our meal and we'd take the pennies home for the kids' banks. We were going across Texas on this trip and hadn't found any machines in several counties in a row. Andy was getting restless, as we were spending money and not taking any in. We stopped to eat at this restaurant and they had a cash payoff marble table [pinball?] and Andy said, "Let's beat it while we're waiting for our dinner." He went out to the car and came back with a piece of stiff piano wire about two feet long up his sleeve. We all gathered around this machine, and Andy drilled a hole in the back end of it and stuck this big long wire in and shorted out the dollar hole in the middle of the machine. It paid off all twenty nickels, two at a time, with a loud clankety clank, each time. Every time Andy would put in a coin to play it, he would short out this dollar hole, and the machine would make all this terrible racket and would take a couple of minutes to pay off. After several pays in a row, the customers would stop eating and look our way and we had the cook and waitresses all looking our way. Finally a man came over to see how come we were so lucky, and I told Andy to hold it. When he jerked that long wire out through the hole in a hurry, it made a terrible noise, first hitting the wood and then the glass above several times, before he got it clear and stuffed it up his sleeve. We were the center of attention before that machine went dry, and we never went to all that trouble to beat another one. We had a shim steel that we could free play marble tables with, but it took so long for the machine to pay itself dry that you had to get a stool to sit down. You'd be there for hours to beat one machine, so we never took the time.
    We beat Arizona hard for several years, and it really got hot. A half dozen other sets of hustlers out of L.A. were beating it at the same time, and the joints weren't realizing much profit out of their machines. One joint, away out on the desert in Arizona, where we stopped, had outdoor privies and I'd been drinking a lot of beer as usual, so I immediately headed out back on a fast walk. On the way, I had to pass by this house foundation with a subfloor over it. Just as I passed the crawl hole under it, a huge bear lunged out of that hole, and if the chain had been even two inches longer he'd have got me. I looked back at the joint and all the people, including my bunch, were at the windows watching and having a good laugh. I slowly walked back into the joint and said, "That's all right folks, I probably wouldn't have made it anyway." That was part of their recreation, waiting for the next tourist with beer pressure to come along.
    We stopped at a trading post on an Indian reservation and there were so many people gathered along the counter that I couldn't get close enough to buy anything. I found out that they were having an ant fight to the death on the counter, and people were betting money on the outcome.
    This bartender had his right index finger cut off, the same as I did, but he said it didn't bother him. He had kept the cut-off finger. Then he pulled the dried finger with a long nail on it out of his pocket and scratched his ear with it. It was hard to get used to the dips in those desert roads. They took the place of culverts. They handled cloudbursts that would sometimes send a torrent of water down from the hills and across the road. Andy loved to hit these dips at high speed if anyone happened to be asleep in the car. It would give us a very funny feeling at the pit of our stomachs, and we wouldn't be sleepy again for quite a while. We came along one night, not very long after a big truck had hit this Hereford bull that had bedded down in one of these dips. An expensive bull was killed, the truck demolished, and the driver was very fortunate not to have been killed.
    Several times at night in Arizona and New Mexico, as we were rolling along at our usual seventy or eighty miles an hour, we'd overtake a wagonload of Indians with no taillight, and it's a good thing our reflexes were working or we'd have run clear through over or under one wagon. Just as we were feeling fortunate of getting by, a big dog stepped out from under their wagon. We hit him with the middle of the bumper, and the last I saw of him he was airborne about twenty feet in the air. Then he was out of range of our headlights. We didn't dare stop, as those Indians would have killed us for killing their dog. We were lucky that it didn't cause us to wreck the car.
    All the gas stations had those old glass pumps, and they would have a lot of different colors of gas in them. I asked the attendant, "Why so many colors?" and he said, "The more colors, the more Indian trade." One time, just as we were pulling out of a station, a young Indian boy started putting air in his tire on his Model A Ford and while he was looking up in the sky the tire blew out and knocked him back on his butt.
    Andy always wore very expensive Dobbs hats, so I figured that I'd like to wear them, too. It took me several years to give up the idea, as I'd keep forgetting and leaving them in restaurants or hotels and wouldn't miss them till we were a hundred miles on down the road. I think the last one I bought blew off on our way across Texas as we were changing a tire. As usual, the wind was blowing hard, and every time I would about catch up with my hat the wind would catch it again and keep it just ahead of me. I must have chased it over a mile from the car before I gave up, all out of wind and getting farther behind it all the time. I'll bet that hat ended up in the Gulf of Mexico. Every time we drove across Texas, those long, straight stretches would get so monotonous that we'd keep driving faster and faster to get on across. Then, when heading west and for home, we'd still have to cross New Mexico, Arizona and the Southern California desert. Every time you'd come to the end of a twenty-mile straight stretch and go over a rise, here was another twenty-mile ribbon of road showing ahead again.
    Andy had infantile paralysis when a baby, and his left arm and leg were smaller and shorter than his right side. I can still see a picture of him in my mind, rocked back on that short leg, his Dobbs hat pushed back on his head, a cigarette dangling from his mouth and spinning the reels on a slot machine. I'd like to have a movie made, and Kirk Douglas or Paul Newman, either one, could play Andy's part real well, I think. His right arm was extra strong, and working those slot machine handles helped build it up even more. He loved to arm wrestle and was real good at it. Very few men did I ever see put him down. We were beating these machines in a joint in the little town of Dorris, California, and a big Swede logger was at the bar, putting one man after the other down with ease. After we got through beating the machines, Andy couldn't resist challenging this Swede to arm wrestle, for a ten-dollar bill, just to make it interesting. This Swede was happy to make this easy money, he thought. Andy just barely put him down the first time and bet him a twenty the next time. That Swede's face started getting red when Andy put him down again for the second time, and all these men that he had been putting down before started laughing at him. Andy cracked this Swede's knuckles on the bar real hard for one more twenty and made his face beet red this time. I grabbed Andy by the arm and got him out of that joint as fast as I could before that big Swede killed us. One of the other few men I ever saw put Andy down was another paralysis victim that tended bar in another joint in that same little town. He was shriveled from the waist down, but strong above.
    This joint, out in the country on old Highway 99 south of Sacramento, had this Wolfhead Mills dime machine sitting on a low counter. Andy got it on the pump and found out that it spit. Every time he'd wiggle the handle a short distance back and forth, it would spit out eight dimes after he had already spun and had it on three oranges. It was a real noisy machine and sounded like a threshing machine. Every time Andy would wiggle the handle, the lady came running up to see what was the matter. She had never heard the machine make that kind of a noise before. She got real mad and said, "Quit wiggling that handle." Andy said, "Do you mean like this?" and wiggled the handle about six more times real fast until he heard the machine click dry. The lady was very excited and mad by that time. We left before we had even finished our drinks.
    One make of the new machines that came out in the late '30s was called, the Silent Mills, and was the only escalator-type machine that would spit when you wiggled the handle. The only trouble was that it was anything but silent when you did this, so Andy would make it spit three or four times until people started gawking at us. Then he'd spin and get three oranges before he made it spit again. Every new machine that came out, the company would say they were beat-proof. This would make us happy, as most of the joint owners would believe this story for awhile. The Jennings Company came out with this new machine with a big shiny Indian Chief head on the front and a gear-shift ball on the end of the handle. Andy could spin the reels on this new Chief, but they would come around jerky-like and it took three times as long to line up big numbers as it did on a Mills machine. We got ahold of one from a joint owner we knew and got to look inside. We found this hole that the factory had left in the metal plate inside the right-hand wooden side and directly opposite of the pin that worked the twenty-payoff slide. This is the payoff that is a bonus along with the jackpot, if you are lucky enough to get the three bars. We drilled a hole from the inside out and then measured over from a rivet on the lower back side which happened to be the width of a penny box of matches. We'd go straight in with a short, stiff piece of piano wire and hit the end of this twenty pin which was no bigger around than the head of a six-penny finish nail and hold the pin in. We'd let one of the women play the machine and it would pay out twenty coins every play, no matter what showed on the reels. They would have to stick their hand up the tube every time to let the money down easy and muffle the noise so the bartender couldn't hear it paying all this money. It was especially fun to beat a half-dollar or dollar machine, as it would only take seven or eight pulls of the handle to drain a machine even if the tube was running over to start with. Of course, we couldn't get the jackpot, but we didn't like to take many of those anyway as that would cause people to remember us and the joint would get hot a lot sooner and we wouldn't be able to beat it at all.
    In 1935, the state of Wyoming had voted gambling in legal for a trial period. Every town and county were loaded with slot machines, but we were afraid to touch them, being legal like that. As we stopped in Cheyenne on our way home from a trip back East, we heard that they were taking the machines out of the whole state at midnight the next night. Oh, boy, did we get busy. We rented a motel room in Cheyenne for headquarters and practically ran from one joint to the next for the next 36 hours.
    The next day at midnight a policeman nearly had to pry Andy's hand loose from a handle as they were closing the machines down. Every two or three joints we'd make a trip to the car to dump our change, and the last few hours we didn't even take time to buy a drink but just go over and start in on the machines. I overheard one bartender say to another, "I think those people are beating that machine," and I heard the man answer, "I don't give a damn if they are. They're taking all the machines out in a few more hours, anyway." We must have made over a thousand dollars in that short time that we had. We got back to our motel room in Cheyenne in the wee hours of the morning, and I was still pretty drunk from drinking so much. I hadn't taken time to eat. When I got in bed, the ceiling kept going around and round and I got sick and headed for the bathroom. It happened that I got the runs, was puking and got a nose bleed, all at the same time. While I was on the pot, leaning away over to puke in the lavatory with my nose bleeding, I also took a fit of sneezing. I still had too much of a nauseated feeling the next morning to be able to clean up that awful mess I had made. I wished later that I had left a good-sized tip for whatever poor soul had to clean up that bloody, pukey, stinky mess.
    We had never found many machines in the state of Nebraska, so were surprised to find this lone dime machine in a roadhouse, a few miles out of this little town. It was sitting in the middle of a high bar, and I was standing on the bar rail and leaning over the bar as high and far as I could so the bartender couldn't see the strange way Andy was wiggling the handle while lining up pay numbers on this machine. I was talking to this man when all of a sudden, without any warning whatsoever, he came over and brushed me aside, pointing to a brass screw head on the side of the machine, back of the handle. He said, "I was just checking, there was some people in here a few days ago, that drilled a hole in the side of my machine, trying to beat it." He said that he put the screw in the hole and you people are O.K., but you never know who you can trust. He got busy cleaning behind the bar and never paid any more attention to us. Andy went right ahead and finished draining the machine through this hole he had drilled in the front.
    We found one more, just a nickel machine on the edge of this little town, in a drug store and confectionery. It had two full jackpots showing and four gold award tokens, which were worth five bucks each. This young boy was running the place all by himself. He said his folks had gone to vote. It didn't take Andy long to drain the tube and then he lined up a jackpot. The kid was tickled that we had been so lucky and cashed it in for us. He was still happy for us and cashed in the second jackpot a few minutes later. In a couple more minutes, Andy took the first gold award token over and acted like he didn't know what it was. The kid was overcome at how lucky Andy was and gave him a five-dollar bill for it. We told him that this was the first slot machine that we had ever seen or played. By the time Andy cashed in the last of the four gold award tokens, the kid's elation at our luck had subsided and he had a worried look on his face. I'd have liked to have seen his folks' reaction when they came home and the kid told them about those lucky people. I don't think that we even put one nickel back into the tube. We had made about thirty dollars off that machine, when ordinarily six dollars was all we'd get out of the tube, but then we hardly ever stooped to beat a lowly nickel machine.
    One time we were coming back through Nevada from being down in Arizona and stopped in this old Minden hotel in the town of Minden to get something to eat. While we were waiting for our meal to be ready, Andy spotted this old antique half-dollar Jennings machine. He came back to our table all smiles and said,"That machine slips," which meant that he could beat it without drilling a hole or using our wire tool on it. We always hid our tools while passing through Nevada so felt safe in beating this machine, as it would have been hard for anyone to prove that we had beat it. Just in case, to be safe, we took a dirt road up a mountain to get over the line over into California as quick as we could. We had a powerful, straight-eight Auburn car at the time and knew no one could catch us going up that steep, winding road, even discounting the dust we made. That was a fast car, but it got terrible mileage and we didn't pass up many gas stations. We made it a point to beat this same joint several times after that, but that is the only machine that I ever helped beat in Nevada. We took cigarettes to a couple of hustlers that had gotten caught beating machines in Sparks. They got a heavy fine and six months in jail. This made quite an impression on us.
    We moved over to Bakersfield for a few months in the summer, to be closer to a bunch of machines, as they had just opened Kern County up to gambling. This apartment we rented in East Bakersfield had a swamp cooler in a window and sprinklers on the roof, running night and day, which helped some. It was hard to sleep at night, as sometimes it wouldn't get under 100 degrees all night long. We would get up and wet our sheets in the sink, and the next time we woke up, less than an hour later, we'd be wet with our own sweat.
    I was really glad when we moved back to Ventura again, where it was cool. We rented this little house back in an alley and got acquainted with this widow woman that lived across the alley from us. She raised some beautiful fryer chickens in her yard. Her brother came to live with her, and she didn't know that he was a wino. He was afraid to ask his frugal sister for money to buy wine with, so he'd bum Eunice for fifty cents at a time to buy a cheap jug. His sister finally got wise to his ways and kicked him out, and he owed Eunice several dollars by this time. She said it was Eunice's own fault for loaning him money and wouldn't pay off. One day I went to the store a few blocks away. When I came home, Eunice was in the bathroom, hollering help. One of the old gal's fryers had got out of her yard and Eunice had coaxed it into the kitchen with some bread, shut the door behind it and grabbed it around the neck with both hands. It kicked so vigorously that it had Eunice scratched up and about pooped out as she was trying to choke it to death. I don't know what would have happened if I hadn't gotten home when I did and wrung its neck for her. We were afraid this woman would count her chickens and smell it frying over at our place.
    This steep hill up behind us had grass two feet tall growing on it. It was brown in the summertime. I'd take Charlie and Alice's kids and a few more and climb clear to the top, then we'd all slide down on washing machine lids, boards or anything we could use for a sled. It seemed like we were going sixty miles an hour by the time we got to the bottom. It could have been dangerous too if we had run into a hidden rock or something in that tall grass.
    I never did get very good on roller skates, but I'd take the kids down to the skating rink. I thought I was getting pretty good till I hit a wooden match that someone had thrown out on the floor, probably on purpose. I had up a pretty good speed and landed on the back of my neck. My skating ability never did improve much after that. This kid that was learning to skate that same night got to going real fast and, being about as graceful as I was, lost control, went under this rail, through some swinging doors into the ladies' rest room and slid up to a girl that was sat on the pot. He came back out of there on his hands and knees with several girls chasing and hollering at him. He took off his skates and headed for home as fast as he could.
    My sister Edith's boys that lived near Ojai had this dog by the name of Spunk. He was part pit bull and really hated cats. Every time he'd run a stray cat up a tree, the boys would shoot it down with a BB gun or a slingshot, and the instant it hit the ground old Spunk would grab it and crush its back with his powerful jaws. This dog licked me in the face one day and I told my nephew, another Harold, "Look, that dammed dog licked me in the face and now he's over there licking his butt." This smart kid said, "Can you blame him? He's just trying to get the taste of you out of his mouth." The boys had left their Benjamin BB gun, all pumped up ten times, leaning against a tree out in the yard. Their little sister, Joan, had been practicing aiming at me, and while I was all bent over tamping a post I had just set, she pulled the trigger. I never straightened up so fast in my whole life. They had to pick the BB out from under the skin of my rear end with a sharp knife. It scared hell out of Joan when she saw what she had done. When I said, "Why don't you go in and get the shotgun and finish the job?" she burst into tears and ran up to her room and was sobbing when I went in to console her. I told her it didn't hurt and that I wasn't mad at her and finally got her tears dried up.
    My brother-in-law was a good welder and worked for Associated Oil Company. He couldn't resist picking up any kind of a tool that was lying around loose on the job. I asked where a shovel was, and when I opened the door to this four-times-four-foot tool house, about a half dozen shovels fell toward me. There were a lot more, like several big pipe wrenches with handles four feet long, picks and other things. The funny part of it was that my sister could never get him to use any of these tools around the place.
    My sister is a big woman, and when Merle would come home, drunk as a skunk, sometimes she'd grab him by one arm and give a jerk, which would throw a weak collar bone he had out of place. Then he was at her mercy. I would go out to the barn to watch Harold milk the cow sometimes, and I'd notice that he would never strip the cow clear dry. When I'd mention it, he'd say, "I'll get the rest of it the next time I milk." He didn't like to milk so he'd dry the cow up a lot faster that way.
    Charlie took me and a Ventura barber, Mickey, on a fishing trip down by San Clemente. They both started drinking whiskey and were drunk before we got very far down the road. We got a thirty-five-dollar speeding ticket in Malibu, and it's a good thing they didn't give drunk driving tickets in those days. When we drove out on the beach at San Clemente, Charlie was sick and had to puke. I don't know why but he had the fishing poles tied on the driver's side of that little PB Plymouth sedan. He dove out the window, head first into the sand and lit on his head. We finally got aboard this seventy-five-foot fishing boat that took us out to sea a few miles to do some troll fishing. On the way out, Mickey pulled this pistol out of his coat pocket, that I didn't know he had, and started shooting at sea gulls, seals, or anything he could see, until the skipper on the boat took the gun away from him and threatened to make him walk back to shore. I managed to catch a few fish that day in spite of being with those two drunks. One man on the boat hooked about a 300-pound yellowtail as we were coming back into shore. He fought it for a half hour but lost it, right up alongside the boat.
    This Mickey, the barber, took me to my first and last rooster fight. It was illegal, so people they didn't know weren't welcome out in the country at this farm house. I used to watch our roosters on the farm in Colorado fight and enjoy it, but these bloody fights between fighting cocks with knives on their legs disgusted me. I have never wanted to see a bullfight either, just from the few pictures I've seen of them.
    We were down to San Diego and decided to go over to Tijuana, as I had never been there before. I had to try some of this tequila that I had been hearing about. I had several drinks of it in this bar and couldn't feel any buzz from it at all. Pretty soon, I had to go to the bathroom. I slid down off the stool and had only taken a few steps when I fell on my face. I felt silly, as I didn't feel like I was drunk, but when I got up, down I went again. People were laughing at me and finally I made it to the bathroom and stayed in there for a long time before I'd venture out again. I've never tried any of that stuff since.
    A couple of single guys that went on a few trips with us smoked marijuana. In those days, mostly colored people, Filipinos or Mexicans were the ones that smoked that stuff, and this was the first contact I'd.had with it. They got me to take a few drags off of one of their sticks, as they called cigarettes made out of it. I must not have puffed the right way, as I didn't get a buzz of any kind out of it. Later on, as I was riding in a little Chevy coupe with them I got high, just by breathing their exhaled smoke. I felt like I could step over a tall building. I'm glad that I never got to using that stuff, as both of those guys came to a sad end. One wrecked and burned in a plane he was flying while he was high on it, and the other got on the hard drugs and into crime, which led to a long prison term.
    Just Andy, Eunice and I headed down through Arizona on a trip across the southern states. Away out on an open stretch of road, we overtook this real old car that was traveling at a slow pace, with a lot of smoke coming out the exhaust. Just as we stared to pass, Andy recognized the driver and we pulled him over. It was Johnnie Nutter, another slot machine hustler, and his wife Joan. They were really glad to see us, as they were about broke, and it didn't take them long to throw their suitcases into our car and abandon their old car alongside the road. We were a little short-handed, so figured we could make more money even if we did have to cut the money into thirds, instead of halves.
    We beat Odessa, Texas and didn't find any more machines till we got to Galveston. We had heard that it was a tough town, with the equivalent of Eastern gangsters in charge of all the gambling and other rackets. All the joints were wise to our racket, as some other hustlers had been beating them hard. One tough joint that we had just beat was so hot that we had Joan go out back in the dark and ditch about a hundred dollars in change and our drill and other tools in case they shook us down. We left town in a hurry and never came back to retrieve the money or tools. People had been killed down there for less than what we were doing.
    I remember staying all night in a cabin in Beaumont, and it rained all night long so hard that I didn't get much sleep. It sounded like we were sleeping under Niagara Falls. In one motel we stayed, Andy forgot and left a tieup of about a hundred dollars worth of all dimes under his pillow. He didn't think about it until we were ten miles down the road, and all of a sudden he dogged the brakes, made a fast U-turn in the road and headed back at a high rate of speed. The rest of us wondered what the hell had come over him for a few minutes till he took the time to tell us. When we got back to the room, this cleanup girl was sitting on the bed, holding hands full of dimes up high and letting them trickle through her fingers, back onto the bed. Andy grabbed them away from her,.saying "Gimme," tied them back up and we took off again. It's a wonder they didn't call the law and have us stopped on down the road, thinking we were bandits of some kind. If it had been I, I'd have given that girl a small handful of those dimes.
    On one short trip we took, just Andy, Charlie, and I were beating machines around Bakersfield. It was really a hot day in the summertime so we stopped at a Kern River park to go swimming and try to cool off. I still didn't know how to swim much past a mud crawl, but I got wet. After awhile, I climbed up on this high platform that they had been diving off of. We had all been drinking quite a bit, and to have some fun they pushed me off of this, about twenty-foot-high platform. I went clear to the muddy bottom of this deep hole and swallowed a lot of water before I somehow struggled to the surface. I was lucky that it was only a few feet to the shore or I would never have made it. I hung on to some willows and gasped for quite awhile. They were laughing so hard that I don't think they could have saved me.
    Another hot day, Andy and I stopped at a spot in the road called Greenfield, about halfway between Bakersfield and where you start up the Ridge Route. We had been drinking a lot of beer and decided to stop at a carnival there and got on this giant stride ride. It was a bunch of swings and the faster they speeded up the machine, the further we'd swing. About the second time around, out in that hot sun, I started getting sick. I started hollering, "Stop this thing!" as loud as I could. Well, I couldn't hold it any longer and started puking. There was a circle of people about ten deep clear around, and as I sprayed the ones in the front row, they'd run into the ones in back of them, trying to get out of my range. It was several more complete turns before the operator brought the machine to a stop and I didn't lose any time getting away from there, as there were a lot of mad people in that crowd. The ones that weren't wiping puke off their clothes had been run into or knocked down. I still don't ride on anything that goes around and round.
    A lot of times when we headed down towards L.A., we'd stop at a pool hall in the town of Compton before we got to Long Beach. This was a hangout for all kinds of hustlers, cards, dice, punchboard, slot machine--you name it. When the pool hustlers couldn't find a chump to take, they would practice on each other. I learned a lot by watching them. "Never bet on another man's game." They would make some unbelievable shots. A couple of Andy's brothers were card sharks, besides being pretty fair at beating slot machines. I can still remember some of their card language, such as dropping the shook, cold deck, dealing seconds or bottoms, using an odd and even or a tinted deck, that they would slip into the game. You would still run the risk of getting killed in the '30s, if they caught you cheating in a poker game. Sometimes, they'd file a sharp tit [sic] on a fingernail and have their favorite cards marked on the back before many deals had gone around. You could tell a hustler by the looks of his hands, as they never did any hard work. That would have been a disgrace to their trade, and they had to have their hands soft and agile.
    I think sometimes that we avoided a lot of suspicion by having callouses on our hands, as the cops and a lot of joint owners are wise to looking at hands. I learned a lot of things on the slot machine trail that I couldn't have learned in an expensive four years of college. I got so I could read eyes and tell when a bartender was relaxed, curious, suspicious, warm, or getting hot.
    Andy's one-eyed brother, Bill, went on one of our trips down through the southern states. We stopped in the town of Paris, Texas, where Andy had been born. His mother had died when he was less than a year old, and his brothers, Bill, Frank and Jim, had raised Andy and Alice. When Andy got infantile paralysis, his brothers would take turns rubbing him, or he would have been a bad cripple or have died. Their mother was buried at a little country cemetery just outside of Paris. We drove around awhile and Bill finally located the old house that they had lived in when Andy was born. It was all run down and not much paint left and a Negro family was living in it. This Negro woman took one look and said, "Well, Lawd a'mighty, if it ain't Bill Ballard!" She had only been thirteen years old when she had last seen him twenty years before. Her folks had sharecropped for their dad.
    This woman had gone to their mother's funeral and found the marker, a bodark wood stake at the head of the grave. When we took her back home, there were kids running all over the place. A bunch more were getting off a school bus. She said that they were all hers, and when we asked how many, she said, "I've got fourteen and I sure don't want no more." Andy gave one of her cute little boys a pair of dice out of a gum machine, and the kid immediately rolled them out on the ground like a professional. They had a stack of cornpone cakes about a foot high and a foot in diameter on this cold monkey stove [a laundry stove], and every few minutes one of these kids would flip one off the top as he walked by and go outside, eating it. It was probably all they had to eat in the house.
    On the way home, we stopped by an uncle of Andy's, near Cleburne, Texas. They lived in an old shack with cracks a half-inch wide between the one-by-twelve boards on the floor. It was all open and their hogs would lay under the house in the heat of the day to keep cool. Every so often, a big old sow would get to rubbing herself on one of the pier posts and would shake the whole house. You could see the pigs, chickens, or a dog walking back and forth under there all day long through the cracks.
    They had a sad-looking cotton patch on a hillside behind the house. You could see the red clay soil was all worn out and eroded. Their one old milk cow was skinny and they only milked her once a day while we were there. I know they had to be bootlegging whiskey as they couldn't possibly have been making a living farming. Andy had made some cracks about Eunice and my relation in Colorado, but he didn't have any more to say after we left there.
    We had beat machines as far east as Biloxi, Mississippi on that trip. In one joint, Andy spun and got the jackpot on a dime machine and I reached over and rapped the front with the heel of my hand, which caused the reserve jackpot above to also drop out. This made the proprietor mad and he called in a cop. The cop wanted to see the pink slip or ownership title to our car. All we had was the contract that we were making payments on the car but he wouldn't accept that. Finally he spied a pink bill of sale on some tires we had bought and the cop said, there's what I wanted to see all the time, and let us go. The man couldn't read. We were glad to get out of there as we had seen gangs of prisoners working on the roads. Guards with dogs and sawed-off shotguns stood over them. We had heard that they arrested people to put on these road gangs on any pretext just to get their roads built cheap.
    The best thing I liked about these southern states was that they served good food, and cheap. I'd have prawns, shrimp, oysters, frog legs or catfish three times a day. I soon got tired of their serving rice instead of potatoes like I was used to. Another thing, a lot of the machines wouldn't have full tubes or have a lot of slugs in them. There seemed to be a lot less money down in those states for people to gamble with. We were always glad to get back up north where we could make a lot more money. We'd get to talking their southern drawl, imitating them so much, that when we'd get back up north people would ask us what part of the South we were from. Several times, down there, people would ask us where we were from. And they wouldn't know as much about the West Coast as I would about Asia or Europe. A lot of them had never been out of their county or town. When we'd ask directions we had better luck to ask some colored man. When we'd go into a restaurant to eat, most times some young colored boy would be right there to pull your chair out and help you get seated or would be out front shining your car, hoping to get some kind of a tip. They would be real happy if you only tipped them a dime.

    Another major change in my life happened in the spring of 1935. We made a trip on into Oregon and stopped by to visit Charlie's brother's wife's folks, between Grants Pass and Medford. They had a cute, ten-acre place on Evans Creek, a few miles north of a nice little town of Rogue River. Bert Cook was a retired shop foreman from the Don Lee Buick agency in L.A. They raised a big garden, had a milk cow, pigs and rabbits. I immediately fell in love with the country. Every direction one would look was so beautiful with those evergreen-wooded hills, clear sparkling water in the creek and the mighty Rogue River flowing by the cute little town. It was like a Garden of Eden compared with Eastern Colorado where I was raised, or the dry desert country of Southern California.
    Andy and Eunice loved it also and bought a three-acre plot of ground inside the city limits of Rogue River. I helped them build a two-bedroom house on it. Charlie and Alice bought a big lot from Cooks and we also built them a house. None of us were carpenters, but we got the job done and had a lot of fun doing it. Charlie and Alice's girl and boy had a big swimming hole in the creek, right behind their house, and it wasn't long before they could both dive and swim like fish. There were wild blackberries growing everywhere. They made the most delicious jellies and cobblers I had ever tasted. There were lots of blacktail deer, and the creeks and river were loaded with salmon, steelhead, trout and even catfish. You could get a lot of different kinds of fruit free, by just asking, as it would just drop on the ground and go to waste if someone didn't use it.
    Andy and Eunice had three different varieties of pears, three kinds of cherries, two kinds of plums, and several kinds of apples on their three acres. There was a good well and irrigation from the Savage Rapids Dam in the Rogue River, and their soil was black and fertile.
    Andy bought a beer joint in Rogue River, but hired someone to run it most of the time. We'd still go on a slot machine trip every few weeks. Sometimes we'd just run over to Klamath Falls, which was a hundred miles away, and be home the next night. That town nearly always had machines, and we could pick up two or three hundred bucks in a short time. Some years they would have them in back rooms, supposedly hideouts, which would make it easier for us to beat them. We also made several trips back East that summer, and on one trip we stopped by my old home town of Brandon, Colorado to see my mom and old George. How terrible that country looked after being out in Oregon. They had kept on having worse dust storms yet since I had left there two years before.
    I visited my old school, and most of the kids I knew were still around and I really enjoyed talking to them. I met this pretty girl, Ellen [Laura Ellen Stinchcomb], that had started to school there after I had left, and dated her a couple of times. My mom and old George were still trying to eke out a living on the farm, and it wasn't hard to talk them into moving out to Oregon where we were. They had a quick sale to dispose of their livestock. They loaded all their personal belongings into a four-wheel trailer, which we hooked onto the back of this Plymouth car we were driving, and we headed for Oregon. On the way we'd rent a couple of rooms in a motel for a day or two and beat any machines that we had found. Then we'd load up Mom and old George, hook onto the trailer, and head toward the next area that we knew had machines.
    Mom thought she was in heaven in Oregon, as she had never had it so good. There was an old house on the back of Andy and Eunice's property, and Andy bought a good milk cow for Mom, and she planted a garden right away. She raised a beautiful garden without worrying how to water it or the wind or hail destroying it. Andy and I even bought their little girl, Laurene, a pony to ride. Mom and George lived in this old house for a couple of years until they were able to sell their eighty-acre place in Colorado and bought a forty-acre piece of land with a house on it near Grants Pass. Mom got to babysit a lot with granddaughter Laurene, as we were gone from home half the time on these slot machine trips.
    I seldom drank much when we were home from these trips like Andy and Charlie did, but this one time several of the local Rogue River boys went with us to a night club along old 99 Highway about halfway to the town of Gold Hill. We were all pretty drunk when we arrived there and I guess obnoxious. A girl in our party tried to walk up on top of the back of our booth and the management ordered us all to leave. I went out front, where Eunice was already sitting in our car, and was cussing these people that had ordered us to leave, when this big, redheaded man with a girl on his arm came out the door. He said, "Quit talking like that in front of my girlfriend," and I said, "P--- on you," and the fight started. He made the first swing at me but missed and I knocked him down. Well, he didn't stay down. We were along this chicken wire trellis for vines to grow on along this big front porch. The next think I knew, a sound like "Boing" would ring in my ear when he'd hit me and knock me back into this trellis. It would spring me right back into him and I'd hit him again. Then I'd hear this boing, and be back into the trellis again. I must have been too drunk to be knocked out, and when some more of our gang came out the door, a man was holding me over the hood of a car and this big guy was beating on me. That's when the gang fight started. A half-dozen guys from Gold Hill and our bunch had at it. I never did see this redheaded man again, but there was plenty of action without him.
    I remember that some man had Andy down and was beating on him, and I pulled this man off and while I had him down, beating on him, this guy put his thumb in the corner of my mouth, trying to pull me off. I bit down and heard a yelp and tasted blood and then a woman tried the same thing and I tasted blood again. One of our guys, Roy, tried to console this poor woman with the bloody thumb. While he had his arm around her the boyfriend hit Roy, and then they got into it. We must have had the best of the fight, as one of these guys said, "We're going to Gold Hill to get some more guys and we'll be right back." Andy had sense enough to know that we'd better get the hell out of there, but he had lost his keys. It took all of ten minutes of lighting matches before he found them on the floorboard. Just as we started to pull out, here came this carload of guys to resume the fight. I was in the middle in the back seat and tried to get out, but I was lucky that they held on to me, and we all went on home. The next morning I woke up, I was sore all over and had a big, bloody knot on my lower lip and I didn't eat anything but soup for a couple of days. One of our guys said, "Do you know who you picked a fight with last night? That was Pinky that wrestles over in Medford every Thursday night."
    The next day we were all still about half drunk and Roy was driving Andy's new 1936 V8 Ford, and Andy told him to ford the creek instead of going a couple of miles further to where we were going. Roy said the water was too deep and Andy said, "By God, this is my car, and I say drive it across." Well, we plunged into the creek and the water was about four feet deep and we started floating downstream. We all rolled down our windows and climbed up on top like a bunch of rats leaving a sinking ship. We were lucky and stopped on a sandbar about forty feet downstream, and a man that lived close by was glad to pull us out for five bucks with his big team of horses. We had to drain the oil and put in new. It took a lot of work and time to wash all the mud off the seats and floorboards and get them dried out again.
    I still have this big lump on my lip, 50 years later, from that fun night. Another time, I was drinking at a dance in a grange hall in the little town of Wimer, about eight miles up Evans Creek from Rogue River. I was starting to pick a fight with about a dozen CCC boys, most of whom had been imported from the slums of New York and Chicago. Roy grabbed me by the arm and took me for a long walk. When I think back about it, he probably saved my life.
    I didn't forget that girl, Ellen, that I had met on that visit to my old home town of Brandon, and we wrote to each other often for the next year. The spring of 1936, Andy and I bought a big lot and started building a forty-by-eighty-foot dance hall on it. After we got to building, Andy's brother Bill and wife Jo came along and were about broke, so Andy and Eunice took them on a slot machine trip back East. We could use some extra money to help pay for the dance hall, and I stayed home to help and oversee a carpenter; we kept building it while they were gone. In a couple of weeks, I received this telegram from somewhere in Nebraska, saying, "Do you want us to swing through Brandon and bring Ellen out to you with us?" I sent a reply, saying, "Bring Ellen if you can." In a few more days, they drove in and Ellen was with them. Her dad wasn't going to let her come, but she had just graduated from high school and was 18 years old, so she grabbed a suitcase and came anyway. We were married in Medford by a justice of the peace a few weeks later, June 30th, 1936.
    A few days later we got the dance hall finished and had our first dance on the 4th of July. We were always a busy bunch, and I guess we caused a lot of excitement in this little, sleepy town of Rogue River. Most people thought we were rich, as we always drove new cars, dressed good, built things and had plenty of money to spend. For this reason, whenever we had a car worked on or hired anything done, it generally cost us double. We made a lot of good and lasting friends. I've found out that there is about the same percentage of good and bad people wherever I go. Ninety-nine percent good nationwide, and people will nearly always treat you as good or better than you treat them.
    It wasn't long until Ellen was a real pro at helping us beat these machines. She had been raised in a large and poor family, very similar to the way I was. Her dad had always tried to eke out a living on those dryland farms also. She loved making this money and being able to buy nice clothes and spend money for the first time in her life. A few months after we were married, we bought an acre and a half a couple miles from Rogue River. It had a cute little two-bedroom bungalow house on it and was right on a high bank of Evans Creek. The hand-dug shallow well had caved in, so I had to carry all our water the first year up this twenty-five-foot bank from a spring.
    I finally hand-dug a new shallow well, put in an electric pump and got the house plumbed. I also dug and put in a septic tank. The house was all one big room and hadn't been sealed, so we had a lot of fun working and fixing it up between trips. We soon leased the dance hall out to the orchestra that had been playing for us, and Andy had trusted bartenders to run his beer joint for him when we were away.
    A lot of young people around town were always wanting to go on trips with us, to make a little money and for some excitement and to see some country. This part of Oregon didn't have much of a payroll yet in those days. It was a lumber and logging country, but there wasn't much of a demand for lumber, as the whole United States was still in a depression of the thirties. No one had much money and did a lot of trading of work and produce. We took this one friend, Roy, and his girlfriend on a trip to Lake Tahoe with us. This girl stood right behind us and watched while Andy beat these two quarter and a half-dollar machine. While we were finishing our drinks, she leaned over to me and whispered, "When is Andy going to beat the machines?" She didn't notice anything unusual the way he was playing them, right in front of her eyes. He'd make a pass at the neck every time like he was putting money in and spin the reels so smooth to line up pays, and when he lined up a big pay he'd let the money down out of the pay tube real easy with a couple of fingers, so no one could hear it pay. One of our women would have her purse opened by his side so that he wouldn't have to go to his pocket with each handful of change. Every time he'd line up a number, which was generally three bells or three plums, he'd have to let the handle up a ways for it to pay off. Then he'd have to pull it down just the right distance again, which would release the reels. Then he could spin to line up the next pay number. If he let the handle either up or down too far, he would lose control and have to stick the wire tool in the hole we had drilled and catch it on the pump all over again.
    Down through the years, I've got a kick out of people thinking you can make a machine pay by pulling the handle fast or slow; or they will think that a machine is due to pay after so many times. It's true that some machines pay better odds than others, as the slot machine mechanics can set them at any odds they wish. If a machine is paying too often, the bartender will call the man and he'll reduce the odds real quick, or if a machine isn't paying off often enough, they will increase the odds to get people to play it more. Andy could hardly ever control himself when a bartender would shill him by saying the jackpot was due to pay. Sure enough, the man would be right. They would get a sick look on their face when we'd pat them on the back and thank them for the good tip. A lot of the machines would have a skipper or weight on the last reel so that the bar would just about stop, but slide on by. Andy could ease that last bar around and stop it on the bar anyway and let it pay the jackpot. He'd always hold onto the handle and make sure the bartender or some witness saw the three bars in a row, as if he let go of the handle, the bar would slide on by. Some of the bartenders would say, "That jackpot isn't supposed to pay," before they thought.
    I've read several stories in magazines down through the years about people beating machines, but the way they described it, I knew the writer didn't know what he was talking about, and his story was all fiction. Quite a few years ago, I got a kick out of a story in the Nevada papers about these two guys going through the country beating machines by the rhythm system. It was supposed to be just the way they would pull the handle down. They had a big crowd of people following them from machine to machine witnessing them winning all this money by this system. I'll bet my last dollar that the machine owners went ahead of them and set the odds away up on certain machines, so they would pay off when these guys played them. They were working for these people to get more people to play the machines. I'll bet their take went away up with thousands of people playing, trying to stumble onto this rhythm system.
    Every few joints when we were making good money, we'd stop and stash our money in the car, so that if we did get heat and got shook down, they wouldn't find a whole lot of change on us. This 1935 Oldsmobile we drove for awhile had these big bullet-shaped headlights on the fenders. It just took a minute to loosen a screw, pull out the reflector and we could throw several handkerchief tie-ups of change behind each one. We had a tailor make us up a bunch of long, narrow, heavy sacks. We'd fill them full of change, bounce them up and down a few times before we tied them shut, so they would never rattle, then we'd unsnap the upholstery on the inside, bottom of the doors and throw these sacks behind the metal crossmembers and re-snap the upholstery. Sometimes we'd let the air out of our spare tire and pour loose change inside, then air the tire up again at the first station.
    We could still limp in, using it as a spare tire in case we had a flat. A few trips, we had over a thousand dollars worth of change. We would pour it loose into our gas tank. It was quite a job taking the tank off and pouring the change back out the spout when we got home. but it was worth it to have it in a safe place. We had our car shook down several times down through the years, and no one ever found our change except for one tie-up under our front seat that we hadn't bothered to hide yet.
    We beat several machines in this one joint, over in Idaho, and Ellen's purse got so full and heavy with change that her arms got tired of holding it, so she set it on top of a piano, alongside of the machines. We left this joint and were on down the road twenty miles or so when Ellen hollered, "Stop the car!" She just missed her purse. We were nearly afraid to go back and get it. Along with all that change, the big "eggbeater" drill and some of our tools were also in that purse. I was really relieved when I ran back into this joint and the purse was still on the piano, right where she had left it, and no one had even noticed it yet.
    This big fancy joint, the Airport Inn, at the airport just out of Omaha, Nebraska, was a gambling joint, and besides a long wall lined with slot machines they had eight or ten blackjack, dice and roulette tables. We arrived there early in the evening, and the place was really quiet, without much business, and all these dealers were sitting around talking to each other. We started out by beating a couple of quarter machines, without anyone paying any attention to us, and had the second half nearly dry when I walked over to the bar to buy another ten-dollar roll of halves to make it look like we were losing money. When I came back behind Ellen, she had her purse under an arm, trying to rest from it being so heavy with all this hundreds of dollars of change. I must have bumped her purse, as it slid out from under her arm and crashed, upside down on the floor with a terrible clatter. We thought the jig was up, but to our surprise , several of these dealers came over and helped us pick all this change up and they seemed to think nothing of it. It took all of us several minutes, down on our hands and knees, to pick all this change up, as it had rolled far and wide over this big floor. We thought that because these gamblers were so nice to help us, we would go ahead and finished beating the half and a couple of dime machines. I can't remember ever beating a cooler joint than that was. We were lucky that Eunice had the eggbeater drill in her purse or Ellen would have dumped that on the floor, also. Along with all that change it could have aroused suspicion from some of these gamblers. These people must have never heard of slot machine hustlers.
    East Dubuque, Illinois, was one of our favorite towns back East. About every other door was a beer joint with slot machines. They got a big play from the big Dubuque, just across the river in Iowa, which I think only had 3.2% beer and no gambling. These machines got a good play, and the tubes and jackpots were always full. I can still remember two of the fanciest clubs in that town, the Hilltop and Circle Club, and I have a menu from the Circle, for a souvenir. .
    We tried to be more careful around Chicago, as we knew the gangsters controlled the gambling. One of Andy's brothers, Jim, had got caught beating machines in Fox Lake, and they beat him and a couple of guys with him up so bad that they couldn't drive their car. They had to take a plane back to California. While we were beating a quarter machine in a joint in Chicago Heights, I told Andy to hold it, as this bartender was coming over to have a look. He stood there, looking over our shoulders, watching Andy play the machine on the up and up, then said, "I guess you people are O.K.," and then he bent over and pointed to a couple of holes in the wall, under the case that the machines were sitting on. He said, "See those holes--I had to shoot some people in the legs last week that were putting slugs in these machines." We weren't using slugs, so thought it was O.K. to go ahead and finish beating the quarter machine and also a dime, after that. I guess that bartender thought that if we were up to something that he had chilled us, and never paid any more attention to us.
    On our way up to Green Bay, Wisconsin, every road house for a long ways in that county before we got into town had a woman's name in big red letters out front. They were all whore houses. Our women were rather squeamish about going into those places, and Andy and I had to talk quite awhile to convince them that these people's money spent as good as anyone else's money and that we would go in and beat them by ourselves if they didn't want to help us. We made a lot of money in the towns, surrounding Chicago. Calumet City and Michigan City in Indiana were extra nice. I forget what the law was, but on one side of the state line between Michigan City in Indiana and in Michigan, you had to sit down and have some kind of food with your drink, and the other side you had to stay standing while you drank. It didn't make any difference to us, as we never tarried long in a joint after we had the machines beat, anyway.
    We also beat a lot of machines around Detroit, outside the city limits. All along Cheyenne Road, Mt. Clemens and Flint was exceptionally good country. One of Charlie's brothers lived out that way. He was building a new house by this pretty little lake when we came to see them. Charlie told me about the time that he took this brother, George, and his wife on a slot machine trip. He said there was no business in this joint and the bartender kept watching them so close that they couldn't beat the machines. George told his wife to try to entertain the bartender and keep him away from the machines. She did such a good job that they were able to go ahead and beat all the machines with no trouble. After they got in the car and started down the road, George said to his wife, "Honey, you sure did a good job of keeping that man away from the machines--how did you do it?" She said, "I had to go in the back room and have sex." George was madder than hell and told her he didn't mean for her to entertain that way, and they had one hell of an argument. She was either awful dumb or real smart.
    It seemed like something scary, funny or exciting happened every day on those trips to talk about before going to bed, generally in the wee hours of the morning. Most times, luckily, it was something to laugh about. This one trip, we put 16,000 miles on this new 1937 Ford I'd just bought. We were in thirty-two states and gone from home over a month. That was one of the best trips that we ever took and made $3700 clear. We cashed in $2400 of rolled change in one bank in Grants Pass. It was pretty heavy for Andy and me both to lift the tool box with this rolled change, and set it in a teller's window. We'd pour all the change in a pile in the middle of a table when we'd get home from a trip and would take hours counting and rolling it. The banks were always glad to cash it in for us, as it saved them from having to pay freight and insurance on change they had shipped in from San Francisco. We told the bank that we had marble tables and slot machines over in Idaho. Some of the tellers knew what we really did, but they didn't care.
    On this same long trip we beat machines all the way across Idaho, Wyoming and a few in Nebraska. Iowa was supposed to be a clean state, but we even found a few in hideouts on the way across there. Then we got real busy again in Illinois, Indiana and Michigan. They had machines on the outskirts of Cleveland, also Toledo, Warren and Youngstown. We kept on going east, but only found one lone dime machine, sitting up high on a counter in an athletic club in Syracuse, New York. Women weren't allowed, so Andy and I had to beat this machine by ourselves with out enough cover up. We didn't get any gawk from anyone, but I was glad to get the place beat and get out of there, away from all those tough-looking people with cauliflower ears and noses.
    All the way across Massachusetts, we only found one lone nickel machine. We heard it being played, faintly, in the distance. It was in a back room of this restaurant. On that poor machine we drained the tube, both jackpots, and a gold-award token, worth five bucks. We knew we'd never come back there again, and it helped out on gasoline, food and lodging bills, until we could find some more machines on down the road. We would start a conversation with anyone we could and ask silly questions, like if they knew where slot machines were. Once in awhile, we'd find out where a good territory was in this way. We cut through a corner of New Hampshire and went a little ways north, as far as York Beach, Maine, without finding any more machines, so we headed down the coast and kept on going south. It's a good thing we had picked up a hitchhiker to guide us through that wagon wheel mess of streets in Boston.
    We knew an ex-sailor that lived in Manhattan and stopped by to visit him for a couple of days. He was Jewish, Isadore Glazier, and he took us downtown New York, by subway, to see the sights at night. We got to see Times Square and Broadway, the Great White Way all lit up and lots of tall buildings. It was the first time I'd ever eaten in one of those post office-like restaurants. The next morning, as we were driving along the Hudson River, I saw a lot of people looking skyward, so I rolled down my window and stuck my head out to see what they were looking at. It was this big German dirigible, the Hindenburg, going over. It had just arrived from across the Atlantic. About an hour later, as we were up in this Lizzie's apartment, I heard this kid down on the street, hollering, "Extra, Extra," about this big ship that had blown up at the mooring mast about thirty miles away at Lakehurst, New Jersey. Once in a while, now, nearly fifty years later, I see an article about this in a paper. It happened on May 6th, 1937, and I know what day we were in New York City.
    Andy and Eunice and another couple had taken a trip back to New York City right after they were married in 1931. They told me how disappointed they were when they found out that the city had made a raid to clean up the gambling just before they got there. They had broken up and dumped thousands of slot machines into the harbor. A lot of the joints had put them out front, on the sidewalks, for the public to play. From New York, we kept on south on old Highway 1. We didn't know what a freeway was in those days. Some people had told us that Florida was loaded with machines, and they were right. They had just taken a lot of machines out of Atlantic City, New Jersey, when we stopped by there on our way down the coast. We were getting real anxious to make some money again by the time we reached Florida.
    I remember a few miles before we crossed the Florida state line, a small Buick, with Oregon license, passed us when we were already doing 75 miles per hour. Just as they passed, a man rolled down his window and hollered, "We'll beat you into Florida." Andy was driving my Ford and passed them before we got to the line and our speedometer said 98. It makes me shudder, even yet, to think how fast we used to drive, day in and day out, on those old narrow and crooked roads. That '37 Ford was light and wasn't as big as a lot of the cars we call compacts these days. We drove from 70 to 80 miles an hour any chance we had, to make time, and I'd drive that way around home, just from habit.
    Florida had more machines than I had ever seen, outside of Nevada, but they had voted them in legal, for a year, on a trial basis. We saw a lawyer before we started in and he said he could probably keep us out of jail, for a price, in case we got caught and the most time we could get would be six months, as he knew the machines were going to be taken out of the state by that time. The chance of even doing six months in jail didn't appeal to us. We had just recently found out this new angle of how to beat some machines without drilling them or using any tools. Any machine that had what they called a gum box on the side, behind the handle, we could beat by just pulling out the little drawer at the bottom where it was supposed to pay you a roll of mints every time you pulled the handle. I'd pull this little drawer out till it clicked and then squeeze real tight, by locking my fingers together with the heel of one hand on the front of the drawer and the heel of the other hand behind the gum box. If I squeezed tight enough, it would hold an arm back on the inside of the machine and Andy could get control of the reels, the same as when he drilled and used his wire tool on a machine. If I didn't hold this drawer in tight enough, it would let this drawer snap back in with a terrible noise that would startle and make anyone in the joint jump, about like a firecracker would going off. About half of the machines had these gum boxes on them, so that is the only ones we played. The only reason the slot machine factory put these gum boxes on machines in the first place was that it was supposed to make the machine not a gambling game. As you wished, you could pull out this little drawer and get a package of mints every play. You were getting something for your money, and that was the only way that they could get by having the machines in a lot of areas.
    We were only in Florida about four days and made about $2000. If a bartender looked at all like he was suspicious of us we'd leave, and we were careful to just beat the ones that were in an easy place to cover and not apt to be caught. We went on down the coast to Miami, then across the Tamiami Trail to Tampa and back north through Ocala to Atlanta, Georgia. Florida was very interesting to me, besides their slot machines, as I had never been there before, and it is a beautiful state. Before we got into Miami, we had a flat tire right in front of Al Capone's winter home. It looked to me like crime had really paid off for him. We had stayed at the New Michigan hotel in Chicago one time, I remember, right across the street from the Metropole, where he had the whole top floor rented as his office. But I had also seen Alcatraz prison in San Francisco Bay, where he later spent a lot of years.
    Back to Florida. We stayed one night at Palm Beach and another night in a hotel overlooking a lot of the city of Miami. We took a short walk on Daytona Beach and went through the old Fort Lauderdale. We drove across the Tamiami Trail at night and saw all those fireflies lit up among the moss-covered trees. We could hear frogs croaking any stop we made. Andy talked a Seminole Indian, where we stopped at a little country grocery store, into selling him the shirt off his back. It was made of many colors of material and nearly solid rickrack trim. The next day, Andy found a trademark label on the collar that said "Made in New York." We stopped at Silver Springs, near Ocala, and rode in a glass-bottomed boat. You could see bottom in the crystal-clear water that was fifty or sixty feet deep. There were schools of many-colored fishes and one huge yellow catfish. Then we visited the snake farm. I thought we had big diamondback rattlesnakes in Colorado, some of them six feet long, but those swamp rattlers would have made them look like babies. Some of them were eight or nine feet long with heads on them the size of a man's fist and big wide rattles that stuck up nearly six inches above their coiled body. A man demonstrated how they milked poison out of them for medicinal use. They also had a lot of big alligators in a pool. Andy and I each bought a baby alligator and kept them on a wet sponge in a box. We gave one away in Detroit on the way home but got the other one safely home to Oregon with us. We would put a couple inches of water in the bathtub every motel we stayed in. After we got a ways up north again, a boy brought us some towels to our room one night, saw those alligators in the bathtub, dropped the towels on the floor, and left the room in a hurry.
    We kept going north after leaving Florida and didn't find many machines for a long ways. On the way I can remember driving up on top of Lookout Mountain in Tennessee, and Ellen bought a pretty wine-colored dress in Chattanooga. It had black fur trim around the bottom, the collar and up the front. It buttoned clear down the back, and I'd have to button or unbutton all those dozen of buttons for her every time she wore that dress. We bought a whole new set of tires for my Ford in Harlan, Kentucky, and we stopped at a big tree along the road and read a sign carved on it that said, "Danel Boon killed a bar har."
    We hadn't made much money north, so were eager to get to work again. We started finding machines around Warren and Youngstown. Every joint had a nickel and a dime machine, and we beat the dime machine in all these joints from there and along the thirty miles of highway on into Euclid Heights, just out of Cleveland. As we were about finished beating this dime machine at the edge of Euclid Heights, I noticed this man that kept pacing up and down the floor back of us. I didn't get too alarmed, as he never did come close or try to watch us play the machine. We thought everything was lovely, but when we stepped out a side door to get in our car, several men were standing there and we noticed our right rear tire was flat. One of the men pointed a snub-nose pistol at us and ordered us back into the joint. Another man had his hand on a gun in his hip pocket. They took us into this big private party room and started questioning us. We had left our drill in the car, as we had beat this joint before and knew it was already drilled, but they did find a wire tool on us and crayolas that we used to hide the holes with, and all the dimes we had just taken out of their machine. They said they had paid an expert from the Mills slot machine factory thousands of dollars to hang out in a lot of joints and listen to the sound of machines being played, to try to catch whoever was beating their machines.
    We tried to give them a hard luck story. Andy told them that we had just paid out a lot of money to learn how to beat these machines and that we hadn't even been breaking even so far. Andy had noticed that all the machines in that area had the brakes disconnected on them and said that was the only reason we were able to beat them. They seemed to think that we had been hired by a rival gang from Detroit that were trying to muscle in on their territory. They would probably have killed us if we hadn't had enough proof in our billfolds to make them believe we were from Oregon. They started calling different joints on the phone and waited for four or five bartenders to come there to identify us if we had ever been in their joints. We recognized several of these men and I think they did us, but I think they felt sorry for us as none of them said they had seen us before.
    After about an hour in the room, one of them acted like he was going to poke Andy in the eye with the wire they had found on him. Then they took us outside and two of them made the women get into a Chevy car with them and two men took Andy in the middle in the front seat of our car and two had me in the middle in the back. They had someone put our spare tire on, and whoever did that had found a big sack of dimes under our front seat and had kept them for themselves. The Chevy took off and we followed behind and headed out into the country. They had a sack over their license plate and poked along pretty slow for about five miles out in the country. It reminded me of a funeral procession, as I wasn't sure whether they intended to kill us or not. I'd read in a paper, just a couple of weeks before, where they had found a couple of guys that had sacks over their heads lying in a ditch south of Chicago, and they had been shot. They had been caught with some slot machines they had stolen out of one of the gangster's joints after breaking in.
    When we finally came to a stop, one of the guys by me reached up and hit Andy in the back of the head, real hard, with a sap. Then they opened the back door, and as one of them pulled me out the other hit me on the top of the head so hard that the sap split wide open and I could feel the blood running down the back of my neck. I could hear the thuds as they beat on Andy and I could hear him moan. Two of them were holding my arms out while a third was trying to hit me in the face with his fists. I could flip those men around like they were flies on my arms and caused this one to hit me on an elbow so hard that it made my whole arm numb, but he broke his hand and quit beating on me. They'd concentrate on beating Andy for awhile and then back on me, hitting us with some kind of hardwood club and kicking us when down. One stayed by the women, with a gun in his hand, in case we should try to break away and run or fight back. I felt like I could have whipped all six of them by myself if they hadn't had those guns and clubs. I think that they just got tired is the reason they didn't beat on us any longer, as they were all breathing hard.
    I played possum and went limp so they had to hold me up to get a good lick at me. Just when I'd think they were all through, one of them would come by and kick me one more time. Finally, they let the women get back into our car, and I heard them tell Andy to put me in the car. I was relieved to know they didn't intend to kill us. As Andy was dragging me over towards our car, someone would hit him again and he'd have to drop me, and I was afraid to act like I could get in the car by myself as they would have started beating on me again. Ellen opened the back door, and one of them helped Andy throw me in on the back floorboard. My face was a bloody mess and Ellen was crying, so as soon as they moved away and the door was shut, I reached up and squeezed Ellen's leg and whispered that I was all right. They told us before we left that if we tried to report anything to the law that they'd send someone clear out to Oregon to knock us off. We didn't think it would do any good to go to the law anyway, as there were two harnessed bulls in that joint when they took us out of there. Those men were all pale-faced Polacks that looked like they had been living underground and never got out in the sun. Ever since those guys beat up on us, I've really enjoyed Polack jokes.
    Andy roared out of there at high speed in every gear, and just as he got into high, about a mile down the road, we came to a dead end and we had to come back nearly to where we'd started to find a side road to turn off on. Their car was still sitting there, and they followed us clear through Cleveland and out the west side. We drove about eighty miles on over to Toledo and stayed all night. We were both real sore the next morning and had black eyes, and I'm sure my nose was broken, but neither one of us went to a doctor. That afternoon and night we were beating machines again, around the outskirts of Toledo. We'd tell the bartenders in the joints that we had got drunk the night before and that Andy and I had got in a fight with each other. They'd laugh and thought that was funny.
    Those gangsters had got about $300 in change from us that we hadn't stashed yet but never found the money we had hidden in the doors and poured into the gas tank. That was the trip that we had more than $3000 more when we got home than what we started out. We never counted our expenses on a trip as profit, such as gas, car repairs, food, rooms or entertainment of any kind. We'd each show how much money we were starting out with, which we called the nut, and when we got home we'd each count this out and cut the rest.
    We thought nothing of heading clear across the country, on our way back East, even in the middle of the winter. On this one trip, kids were ice skating in pastures along the road in Illinois. They had what they called a silver freeze. It had rained and then froze, and we had to take a corner at just the right speed or we'd end up in the ditch. The cold weather in those northern, Midwestern states didn't seem to slow the natives from drinking a lot of beer. A lot of the taverns served beer in those big 32-oz. containers and a gallon can of popcorn to go with it and always big dishes of pretzels on the bars. For two bits I could buy all the delicious white fish, hot on a plate, I could eat. This way, the customers didn't have to go home to eat and could stay there and drink, day and night.
    One thing I remember about all those towns in the Northeast was the smell of coal smoke in the wintertime. It would be out of all the chimneys from brick buildings in the business districts, and they were smudged with this grimy coal soot. There were huge chunks of ice lying along the banks of all the rivers up north, and when we headed south a ways we nearly got marooned in some flood waters. We got down to Cincinnati and found machines across the river in Kentucky. First, we beat the town of Covington and then found this big Beverly night club. We drove up one of the four roads that led up the hill and paid a man in a monkey suit to park our car for us and paid a cover charge to go in. Of all the night clubs we had been in, I think this was the biggest and fanciest. The cheapest drink was a coke which cost $1.25 [about $29 in 2025 dollars]. It was an outlandish price in the 1930s.
    They had two floor shows going on at the same time, so the patrons could have a choice of which one they wished to see. There were rows of nickel and dime machines along one wall and then six quarter machines in a corner and one half at the foot of this wide, spiral staircase that led upstairs to another bar, dining area and, we suspected, a big gambling casino. We never went upstairs, as there was plenty to satisfy us downstairs. We beat four of the quarter machines and then went over and beat the half at the foot of these stairs. There were people standing, visiting with each other in clumps, all the way up this long flight of stairs above us. It was impossible to cover up the machine from above, so I had to watch people's eyes to see if they were interested in what we were doing. After we drained the half, we went back over and beat the same four quarters over again. They had been played enough by this time that all the tubes were full again. A change girl was sitting at a table right against the other two quarter machines, so we never played them. When we got back to our hotel room that night we counted our quarter and half change on a bed, and we had lacked one dollar of clearing $500 in that one joint in about two hours' time. Not very many years ago, I saw on TV and in the papers that this place had burned down with a big loss of life.
    A little farther, as we headed south, we stayed in this hotel overlooking the Ohio River and saw water marks nearly to the ceiling in our upstairs room. It was hard to believe that the floodwaters had been that high, for at the time it looked to me like it was fifty feet down to the river level below. Andy and I wanted to stop and go through the Mammoth Caves, and we could have seen the Kentucky Derby by laying over a couple of days, but we let the women talk us out of it. They wanted to make all the money we could as fast as we could and get on home. One other time, while in Miami, we had let the women talk us out of parking the car and flying over to Havana and taking a boat back. We had heard that they had a lot of slot machines over there. It's probably a good thing we didn't go, as I've heard they have terrible jails in Cuba.
    We went on down and crossed the river again into Cairo. We drove onto a little two-car ferry with a tugboat for power tied alongside. The river was high and so wide that you couldn't see across to the other side. I asked the ferryman, "What if we drift downstream so far that we miss the landing on the other side?" He said, "Don't worry, there are other landings every few miles clear to New Orleans, in case we miss the first one." They had just nickel and dime machines in Cairo, and we beat every dime machine in town but didn't make much money. Someone had come through and filled them all full of slugs. They had stamped a liberty head on one side of their slugs and kept that side out to show through the escalator glass in case anyone would see the other side was blank. We had about a quart of these slugs by the time we left town and got to thinking that if we should get shook down by the cops and they found all those slugs stamped with that liberty head on one side, they'd get us for counterfeiting. We dumped them all out alongside of the road the first chance we got.
    I think it was down in Louisiana, above Shreveport, that we were beating this joint that had a sign above it that said, "If you slug this machine, we'll slug you." The quarter machine was a brand-new blue-front Mills, and as Andy was drilling it the bit broke in the middle and the broken, jagged end of the bit plowed a furrow, deep, all of six inches long up the front. It left a terrible shiny gash. The end that broke off, flew over and hit a window glass with a loud zing, then ricocheted back over and spun to a stop on the bar right in front of this bartender, who was standing there idle with nothing to do. He picked this piece of drill bit up and thoughtfully rolled it between his fingers a few times and then threw it in the waste basket. I got out a blue crayola, the nearest shade I could find to the color of the machine, and Andy did his best to cover up that awful-looking gash. We put a new bit in the drill, went ahead and beat the quarter and also a dime machine before we left.
    In another joint along that road, I was telling Andy that everything was cool and to "Go, boy, go" on this quarter machine. Then I got a queer sensation on the back of my neck. I looked back and nearly straight up, and this man was leaning away out over this railing, on a darkened upstairs dining room, watching Andy spin the reels. As soon as the man saw me look up he came running down some stairs and ran up behind us, real mad and mean-looking. He said in a real loud voice, "What are you people doing to that machine? The reels are going every direction and backing up." I looked the man square in the eye and said, "Reels backing up? Man, the wheels in your head must be backing up." There were several tables of people dining nearby, so I asked them, "Did any of you people ever see the reels on a slot machine back up?" They all started laughing and that man left with a red face in a hurry. We never saw him again. I had made an ass out of him and made him think maybe he hadn't seen anything unusual after all. We went on and finished beating this quarter machine and then a dime.
    One place we stopped way late at night, on a lonesome stretch of highway. The women were tired and didn't want to go in. There was just this one old-timer dime machine sitting on a high counter, and one young fellow minding the place. Andy had stuffed a Yankee ratchet drill into his waistband to drill it with. I remember [it] making quite a racket when it fell down his pants leg and rolled out on the floor, right in front of this kid. We kept him busy making some sandwiches for us for a little while, and beat the machine. We took the sandwiches back out to the car to eat, and while we were sitting there we could see plain back into the lighted joint. This kid started playing the machine and was wiggling the handle back and forth real crazy-like. He must have been peeking while Andy was beating it and thought he had learned something.
    In another joint that just Andy and I went in to beat by ourselves, I went back over to the bar to buy some change to make it look like we were losing money. This man came in a side door and was sneaking up behind Andy with these iron knucks on his hand. I had turned around just in time to holler at Andy as the man was getting ready to hit him behind an ear. Andy got turned around and I made a run at the man, but he got back out the side door before I could hit him. The bartender acted dumb, like he didn't know anything about it. Andy and I were mad, and we went ahead and beat two machines in the joint, just waiting for someone to start a fight with us. At the same time we kept a close watch on the bartender. A lot of joints down in those southern states would have a pair of knucks, a club or a big pistol lying in plain sight on a shelf behind the bar. These were supposed to scare anyone that had thought of causing them any trouble.
    We beat so many, probably thousands, of joints in the over twenty years that we exercised this racket, that I can't possibly remember in what order of time that we beat them. Dozens of places stand out in my mind, though. We had beat this resort hotel bar in Soda Springs, Idaho, pretty regular for years, on the way or coming home from trips back East. The bartender, Joe I'll call him, was always real friendly and would buy us the first drink, as he thought we were big spenders. This time we stopped and there was a new bartender on duty. We asked him, "Where's Joe?" He said, "Oh, Joe got fired. The boss thought he was robbing the slot machines in some way after he locked up at night. They weren't making any profit for the joint." The poor guy had got blamed for what we had been doing.
    A hamburger joint across the road from a school in this little Idaho town had machines that we had beat several times before. This time we stopped, Andy heard the man behind the counter shilling a bunch of these school kids to play and put their lunch money in them, saying the jackpots were due to pay. This made Andy mad, so after draining the tubes on a quarter, dime and even the nickel machine, he lined up the jackpots on the quarter and then the dime machine. He didn't think they deserved any mercy after hearing them try to take the kids' lunch money.
    We had been down in California on a trip and found machines in Calaveras County (the jumping frog country) that were to us drilled in a new place. They were drilled right in front of the reels. Andy stuck a wire in this hole, experimenting, hooked the side of the middle reel and pulled real hard. This stopped all three reels from turning and he let the handle back a ways and caught the machine on the pump. We were glad to have a new place to drill, and this angle kept the brake from kicking in, if the machine had one. The brake would stop you from spinning the reels. We made up a new, heavier, shorter wire and had enjoyed this new way of beating machines until a few weeks later. While beating a half-dollar machine in the Elks club in Cody, Wyoming, at the east entrance of Yellowstone park, we had this accident. We had been celebrating Buffalo Bill Day with the local people, by eating some of their barbecued buffalo and bear meat and drinking more than usual. Andy jabbed his wire tool into the face of a reel and everything went smooth until just before he had the half dry and had to catch it on the pump one more time. I guess he didn't push the wire hard enough into the reel, as it turned a little and stripped the paper with all the lemons, oranges, plums bars off the reel. They were just hanging by one end. This paper would make quite a fluttering noise as the reels turned around and round. We left in a hurry, in case someone took a notion to come over and play that machine and headed over into the park. I always wondered how long it took them to figure out how that paper got torn off that reel. After that experience we made up a little longer and heavier wire, put a bend in it and would twist the wire against the side of the reel instead of jabbing it straight into the paper on the face of the reel and never had any more of that kind of trouble.
    Some smart machine men would find our holes and hang a loose metal shield inside the machine, so we couldn't get a solid push against it to drill through. Then we'd have to find a new place to drill. One place was about one inch from the slot that you put the coins in to play. It had to be drilled precisely in the right place, as we had to hit the end of a pin inside the machine and push it straight in. Several places, clear on top of the machine, behind the escalator, we could catch one of the two arms that go clear across. Because it was so high, it was hard to cover up while we drilled the hole and while we were catching it on the pump with the wire.
    They put machines in Bandon, Gold Beach, and several other little towns in a county on the coast, only a little over a hundred miles from home. It was so close and handy, we'd run over there about every other weekend to make some quick money. They got wise to our holes finally and kept putting screws in the holes or plates inside the machines, and we'd have to drill a hole some other place every time we came back. We'd always leave the man's joint that owned the machines at Coquille till last. This time, some joint had called ahead on us, and when we walked up to the bar we saw this big sign sitting on top of their cash register that read, (two men, two women, and the make of our car and license number). We ordered a drink and we acted like we hadn't seen the sign. Just to be ornery, Andy went over and dropped a few quarters in a machine. About that time, the owner came charging in the front door and asked Andy and I to step outside with him, that he wanted to talk to us. Instead of getting nasty, like we had expected, he was about to cry and pleaded with us. "Please don't drill any more holes in my machines, they look like sieves now, and you are breaking me." Besides us another set or two of hustlers had also been beating his machines.
    About a month later, Andy's brother Bill and his wife stopped by to see us. Bill asked me if I knew where any machines were, and I told him about this Oregon coast country and how hot they were to holes. He said, "That's fine, I have a new angle and don't have to drill them." He had a tool that was made out of a coat-hanger wire that he stuck up the payoff tube and could hold the slides that paid off open. You had to play it on the legit until you hit a pay then run this tool up and hold the slide open and no matter what the reels said, it would keep paying that pay every time you pulled the handle. Three oranges, which paid ten coins, was the best, as it would drain a machine pretty fast. A bigger pay might jam the slides and hang the machine up so we couldn't play it any longer. Well, we went over and beat every one of these machines again by this method. The only thing, we couldn't spin the reels and line up jackpots, but it wasn't wise to take too many of those anyway. I'd have liked to have been invisible for awhile and watched that slot machine man trying to find the holes that time. We had caused the slot machine factory to take those gum boxes off the side of their machines. After a few years they also got wise to this tube angle and put baffles where the money pays out of the chute, so we couldn't stick anything up into the payoff slides.
    They finally came out with these shiny, chrome-fronted machines that were supposed to be drill-proof, and we were glad that all the joints believed that. The only thing, we had to buy more expensive, high-speed bits, and it was hard to get a hole started in that slick surface. We solved that problem quick though by drilling in a groove against this bright red, shiny diamond that they had protruding on the front of the machine. We would break a butt end of a wooden match off flush in the hole when we finished beating a machine and paint over it with the women's lipstick, instead of a crayon, like we did before.
    After we had built this dance hall in the little town of Rogue River, we ran it ourselves for awhile. This man that lived away up in the sticks and had the name of being real mean came to our dance this Saturday night, wearing a gun on his hip and pretty drunk on some of his homemade whiskey. I was taking tickets and told him he'd have to check the gun with me before coming into the hall. A lot of people that knew him were surprised that he let me take his gun. Late one night, when a dance was over, Andy, Eunice, and a man, Glen Blakely, took this Fred Witt and his son home. Fred acted real nice all the fifteen miles to his home and invited Andy in for a drink before he started back. He let Andy and the son go in the house first and then lit a kerosene lamp on this table, just inside the door. As soon as he got the lamp lit, he reached up over the door and came down with a six-shooter, about the size of Matt Dillon's in Gunsmoke and said, "All right, you sons-of-bitches; I've got you where I want you now." His son jumped behind the kitchen stove, and Andy made for a door that turned out to be a closet. The lamp went out, so they seized this chance to make a run and got out the front door and were sprinting across this open field to get to the car, several hundred feet away. Before they had run very far, old Fred had this seven-cell flashlight trained on them and would shoot a couple of times. They'd fall flat and then get up and run again, faster yet, till he'd spot them and get off a couple more shots. Eunice and Glen heard the shooting and she told him to get the car started, but Glen was shaking so bad that he dropped the keys on the floorboard and had some trouble finding them and into the switch. Andy and this old Fred's son made it to the car without getting hit and dug out of there fast. After that, we believed the stories about how mean and crazy this old man was.
    This old Raymond Stevens was about two-thirds goofy and had come into the Homestead bar one winter night while a bunch of us were in there drinking a few beers and playing pool. He was sitting by the potbellied wood stove, dozing in a chair, and some of our bunch said, "Let's get Raymond drunk and see how he acts." We started plying him with beer, which he greedily accepted. It wasn't long before he was drunk, but he got sick, sitting so close to that hot stove. He was in a stupor and would rouse up enough to take another slurp of beer and then throw up right back into his glass. He kept doing this time after time and wasn't gaining much on that last glass of beer. Most of the guys that had been watching him started leaving before they got sick. Finally, the bartender led the old boy out a side door into the rain, to let him finish being sick outside. After a while he staggered back inside and someone said, "Raymond, you lost your false teeth out there." He went back outside, got down on his hands and knees and started slapping around in the mud. Finally he found both uppers and lowers, and put them back in his mouth, mud and all. That's when I went home. He had the name of being a peeping Tom around town and I think the authorities finally put him into an institution.
    Charlie's youngest brother, called Red, came from Idaho for a visit. He wanted to see some of our big salmon in the river that he had heard about. I took him a couple of miles downriver from town to the Savage Rapids Dam. There was a big salmon run on, and hundreds of them were leaping and swimming up the fish ladders on each side of the dam. We walked to the ladder on the far side, via this four-foot-wide catwalk over the dam, and no one was in sight so I took out my jackknife, held it with blade up in my hand and hooked a big, probably twenty-pound, salmon under a gill and came up and out of the ladder with him. Just as we started to recross the catwalk to get back to my car a state cop, who are also game wardens in Oregon, pulled up behind my car, got out and started walking towards us on the other end of the catwalk. I didn't want to throw that beautiful fish back in the river, so I took off my leather jacket and hung it over the fish that Red was carrying and told him to walk close behind me. This cop happened to be in deep thought about something and was looking off downriver when we met him out in the middle of the catwalk. Just as we got to him, I pointed off down the river and said, "How far do you have to be below this dam, before it's legal to fish?" and kept him in conversation while Red walked behind us, got to the car and threw the fish on our back floorboard. How we got away with it, I'll never know, as it's a wonder he didn't smell it, as close as he was to it.
    Another time I wasn't so lucky. A neighbor came by one afternoon about sundown, and said, "Let's go down to the dam and gaff us a couple of salmon." We parked our car away from the dam and climbed up on a hillside so we could look out over the dam. We stayed up there for several hours, until a full moon came up. We hadn't seen a soul, so figured it would be safe to go down and do our fishing. We missed the first try with the gaff hook, but the next jerk we hooked a big thirty-pounder and had him out of the ladder and was admiring him, flopping there on the rocks, when I felt a hard object poking me in the ribs. It was a gun in the hands of a game warden. We had fallen into a trap laid for some boys that had been gaffing fish regular and selling them from door to door. This warden and a couple of deputies had gone down below the dam early in the afternoon, hid in some tules and waited for them to show up after dark. One of them went and got their car from where they had it hid, threw the evidence in their trunk and hauled us into the Grants Pass jail. Our wives called the jail the next morning, as they had a good idea what had happened to us when we didn't come home that night. They let them into our cell just as we were eating breakfast of cold oatmeal, toast and coffee. They served the coffee in a pound coffee can and had a note on the tray, telling us to wash our dishes. Our coffee was half skimmed milk, and Ellen said, "Do they expect you to wash the dishes in that old dirty water?" I was glad to pay the $25 fine and $4 court cost, as the food was terrible and the bed was hard. Of all the years that I had helped beat slot machines, all over the U.S., and only got in jail once, it hurt my pride to make the "can" right here at home.
    We, or few of the natives ever paid much attention to hunting season. Whenever we ran out of meat we would open the season for deer. I never did kill does and fawns, like the game commission had made it legal to do for a good many years now. They'd open doe season if there was only one deer left in the country to keep that license money rolling in. I always figured the game commission was a worse enemy of the wildlife than the poachers. I haven't poached a deer for many years, as the country has settled up so much. There is only a small percentage of wild game from what used to be twenty years ago. They still have doe season every year, and all these highways with the heavy traffic take a terrible toll. These pot growers that live back in the woods probably eat any venison that they can get a shot at, too. All wildlife has gotten so scarce that I've said for many years I wouldn't kill a bear, coyote, bobcat, gray squirrel or grouse, even if I had a chance. I love to see something wild when I go out into the woods and have learned to appreciate such things in my old age.
    When I arrived here in the Rogue River Valley, in 1935, there was a rather sparse population, sometimes with houses a mile or more apart. People raised a garden, fruit trees, and had a cow or goats to milk, plus pigs and chickens. They probably ate better than most people in the cities did in those bad depression days. Some of them mined gold for some cash and killed deer or fished for a variety of food. Our area got the nickname of Easy Valley.
    We get plenty of rainfall, but not half as much as they do over on the coast, less than a hundred miles away. The Coast Range of mountains to the west, shuts off the excessive rainfall, and the Cascade Range to the east shuts off the worst of the cold weather. About every ten years, some of that cold air from Canada will sneak through and we'll get some below zero readings; or we'll get a warm rain from the coast that melts the snow in the mountains real fast and causes a flood. Quite a few of our winters have been so mild that we wouldn't have had to wrap our outdoor faucets. Some years it is so dry that we pray for more rain. Medford or Grants Pass will have a few weeks of bad fog some years, but our Evans Valley seldom has the thick kind of fog. Several winters it has snowed a foot or more here on our valley floor in the fifty years that I've lived here. I like to see it on our nearby hills as long as it stays up there and I don't have to shovel the stuff. So far, I've never seen a blizzard, over half-inch-size hail, tornado, dust storm, earthquake, or a mountain blow up. Our tall hills and rather narrow Evans Valley shield us from most of the wind, and our hot spells in the summer seldom last over a few weeks. We have just enough variety in our weather, though, that we should be prepared for anything.
    In May of 1938, our first child, a boy (that we named Loy after Ellen's dad), was born in Ventura. This rather changed our pace. I had to think about working for a living so we could be in one place and not be gadding all over the country on these slot machine trips so much. I was getting a little tired of running around so much anyway and welcomed a change. Andy and Eunice had sold their beer joint in Rogue River and had bought the Texhoma club in Arvin, California, near Bakersfield. Work wasn't very plentiful anywhere, so I couldn't be very choosy. I even bought a cotton sack and tried picking cotton (for a half day). I never made enough money to repay myself for the price of the cotton sack. It did make a good dirty clothes bag, though. Ellen's folks had moved down there and were working in the potato fields, so I tried that for a few weeks. My sister Edith and her husband Merle, who still lived at Ojai, had us come over there, and Merle had a friend that helped me get a job in the oil fields. We stayed with them while I worked a few months, till after our baby was born. I had turned 21 years old by this time and could legally tend bar in Andy's beer joint in Arvin, so we went back over there. This was a rough little town. I found out years later that it was the end of the road for the Grapes of Wrath. I soon found out why those Okies, Arkies and Texans got such a bad name. Of course, I just got acquainted with the worst of them, the ones that frequented the taverns. Most of those people were hard-working, honest people, but the ones that came into Andy's place would try my patience. A lot of the men would come into town and act like big shots with their cowboy boots, big hat and belt buckle and cigar. They'd cash in a handful of these cotton checks that their wife and kids got paid ten cents each for picking cotton. Their wife and kids would be out there working in the hot sun, barefooted with raggedy clothes on and living in tents, while these big shots were in town, drinking and playing poker. I told Andy that I hated to cash in their cotton checks, but he said we might as well take their money as they'll just go down the street a little ways and spend it in the next joint. What burned me up worse than anything, was that several times, when one of those Texans would be obnoxious and I'd tell them to leave, they'd say, "I guess you don't know where I'm all from." I'd tell them, "You dumb so-and-so, you don't have to tell me," and I'd pick up the butt-end of a pool cue that I kept behind the counter and start around the bar with it.
    They didn't feel so tough then and would leave. They would have a lot of fights with each other. I never saw them fight with their fists, but would pull a knife or break a beer bottle to fight with. They thought that the mere mention of Texas was supposed to really chill you. I've come to the conclusion that there is about the same percentage of tough, good, or bad people from any state in the union. There were a lot of Mexicans that came in the place, but only a very few that got too drunk ever gave us trouble. I think that just seeing that sawed-off butt of a pool cue, that I called my gentle persuader, kept me from having some real serious trouble.
    I didn't have the right temperament to be a good bartender, so that fall we went up to Bishop, where Ellen's folks had followed the spud harvest. They had a house rented and we stayed with them for a few weeks while I sewed sacks and carted the potatoes to load in boxcars. We came on back to our little home in Oregon, and it looked better than ever to us. That winter, I got a job helping build a new high school in Rogue River. Then in early spring I got my first real taste of working in the woods. This outfit would skid long logs, sometimes over sixty feet long, into the loading landing. Another man and I would have to buck them into short, ten- to twenty-foot logs. The caterpillar (cat) tractor would spread them apart so that we could get a long stroke with six-foot saws. They would load them on these White logging trucks and send them to a mill in Grants Pass. I think that summer of 1939 was the hottest one on record. The yellowjackets were the most abundant of any year, also. They would eat holes in our canvas water sacks, and we'd have to get new ones every few days.
    I stuck this logging job out till they shut down for winter, and I couldn't find another job until the following February. Our daughter, Myrna, had been born in June of that summer, so we were getting quite a family. Ellen went to work that winter in Grants Pass in the Redwoods Hotel coffee shop. She worked there waiting on tables for several months, while I stayed home and took care of the kids. I rather enjoyed it and got so I could fling a mean diaper. Ellen got acquainted with this man when she waited on his table. He was part owner in a big gold dredge that was being put together in Pleasant Creek, a tributary of our Evans Creek, and only twelve miles from home. The dredge master put me to work, swamping behind a cat that cleared brush and trees ahead of the dredge. After a couple of months, they put me to oiling for a winchman on the dredge. It only paid 72¢ per hour, but the overtime from working seven days a week helped some. A lot of men envied me, getting this good job. I was under a roof and could work rain or shine. The worst part was that we changed shifts every two weeks, and about the time I'd get used to one shift, I'd have to change again. I would have preferred working straight graveyard shift, as I could never seem to get myself adjusted to changing so often.
    After I'd worked on this dredge about six months, the partners got into a squabble and shut the dredge down while they had a lawsuit in court. The partners that had the controlling interest wanted to spend a lot of money on new equipment to modernize the dredge, but the little shareholders didn't feel like they could afford to hold up their end of it. I had a lot of fun working on this boat. I oiled for this winchman we called Kewp O'Kelly. He was a good operator, but happened to be an alcoholic. Nearly every night, when we'd be on graveyard shift, he'd come to work drunk. Quite a few times, he was so drunk that he'd go to sleep on the floor of the winch room, and I'd get to operate the boat by myself, which I didn't mind doing. One night while I was fighting bedrock with the bucket line and the whole boat was rocking, Kewp jumped up off the floor, in a stupor and still half asleep, ran out of the winch room door and was ready to walk off the top deck. If I hadn't gotten the winches kicked out of gear just in time to run out and pull him back, he would have fallen over twenty feet off of the deck, down into that muddy pond. He probably would have drowned before I could have run downstairs to the lower deck, gotten into a little flat-bottomed boat and rescued him. One night, Kewp and I shut down the boat for a little while, so we could go out on the shore and move the cables ahead that were anchored to logs with a lot of gravel piled on top. These acted as deadmen to move the boat ahead with or to swing back and forth. We were walking alongside by side out there in the dark when all of a sudden Kewp and the flashlight he had in his hand just disappeared. He had walked off into a pothole about ten feet deep that had a couple feet of water in the bottom. I had quite a struggle getting him pulled up out of there in the dark. The gravel was loose on the bank of the hole. It was in the wintertime and raining, and by the time I helped him back up the stairs to the winch room by the oil stove he was pretty cold, miserable and pretty sober. I oiled for this big Swede on day shift for awhile. He was also the mechanic for the boat. He had tried to give me a bad time for awhile, when I first started to work on the boat, until he found out he couldn't run over me. I knew he was afraid of snakes, so when I caught this little water snake that had managed to come on board, I put it in a paper sack, took it up to the winch room and switched it for this Swede's lunch sack. Then at lunch time I went up to eat lunch with him. When he untwisted the sack and reached in to get a sandwich and grabbed ahold of this snake with his bare hand, he let out a scream and threw the sack hard, clear across the room. When he found out I wasn't afraid of him, he started treating me real nice and. became a friend.
    This one winchman had come over from working on a dredge that had shut down at Breckenridge, Colorado. He, Morris Scholten, and I soon became good friends, and Morris and his wife, Leaf, and my wife and I would visit back and forth and play a lot of pinochle. They turned out to be lasting friends, and we have kept in contact for all of forty-five years. There was also Pete, from Nome, Alaska, that worked as a winchman on the dredge for a while. He and his wife and we visited back and forth some, too. When they shut the dredge down, I had no idea how long, if ever, it would be before it would start up again. I had heard about this Central Valley Project, near Redding on the Sacramento River, that was starting up. Away we went, and I was lucky enough to go to work right away. They were rerouting Highway 99 upriver from where they had started the big Shasta Dam and I went to work, helping build the Antler Bridge. We rented a cabin for the first few months, and then I bought a tent house, to keep from paying that $40 a month rent. We ended up living in it for the year that I worked down there. I helped finish this Antler Bridge in about six months and then worked three months on the Pit River Bridge, and then went on to the Shasta Dam itself. I really liked this big construction work. It was hard work, but so interesting to me that every day passed real fast.
    I moved our tent house into a camp ground closer to my job when I went to work on the dam. It rained 87 inches that winter, but our kids, living in that tent house, didn't have one cold. We had a little sheet iron stove and I'd bring home scrap wood off the job for fuel. We cooked on a three-burner gasoline camping stove and used a gasoline lantern for light. All this had come with the tent house that I paid $12 for. A folding bed also came with it. It was like sleeping in a hammock. It would kill me to sleep in a bed like that now.
    This Antler Bridge that I worked on had two of its piers, the ones on each side of the river, that were nearly 200 feet tall, and it still makes me mad when I cross it to think that they just put a number on it instead of a name. I had a good job there. I worked back in a tunnel underneath where these big-belly dump trucks with trailers would dump gravel onto grilles, into big bins below. I would open chutes underneath and run these four different sizes of aggregate onto a conveyor belt and keep these four bins full so the batch trucks could weigh out their loads underneath to mix with cement. This was poured into the pier forms. It was really hot in the summertime, and some of the men envied me working in that cool place. When they weren't pouring concrete, another man and I would work in the shade with saws, pre-cutting forms. I didn't have it quite so easy on the Pit River Bridge, as I had to run Irish buggies, or wheelbarrows, dumping cement into the pier forms. This was a much bigger and higher bridge. Several of the piers were over 300 feet high. It was a double deck for highway and also trains, and the steel went up another 100 feet higher than the piers. A crane with a lot of ballast on the back would send cement up and dump into a hopper until we got up over 100 feet, and then they ran a skift [sic] up the side for the rest of the height. We'd have to load our wheelbarrows out of this hopper and dump into the pier walls. Every sixteen feet of height, we'd have to wait a few days for the cement to set, then strip the forms and set them up sixteen feet higher and then pour again.
    A man got jarred off this 100-foot boom on the crane and fell, hitting bedrock below. It happened on a pier next to the one I was working on that day, but I didn't hear about it until several hours later at the end of the shift. While I was working there this was the only man that I heard about being killed on that job. Some men were killed on the steel gang after I had gone down to work on the dam. A couple of times a week I'd have to strip forms on the inside of some of these piers. The walls of all the piers were poured thirteen inches thick with heavy reinforcement steel, and there were only about six small air vents in an upper corner. It was so hot that summer inside those piers that we'd work in just our shorts and boots. When we'd come outside to eat our lunch, with our pores all open from sweating, we'd about freeze and put on a jacket for a few minutes and the 110-to-120-degree sun would feel good for several minutes. One hot day the boss sent me and about ten other men down into this hole to finish cleaning it out for another pier footing. It was so hot with the sun shining straight down on us that in less than an hour some of the men started passing out, so they had all of us come on up out of there before some more of us got those heat prostrations.
    When I went to work on the dam, they put me on what they called the cleanup crew. Before they set the forms for each fifty-foot-square and five-foot-high cement pour, we would sand bedrock and wash it down with high pressure air and water. A crew would drill a series of holes in the bedrock about ten feet deep, and fill the holes with dynamite. The blast would shatter the rock. Then, two other men and I would wash it all down into a pile for this huge clam shovel to load onto trucks which hauled it away. One big scoop of this clam shovel would be the load for one of these big twenty-five-yard dump trucks. This high-pressure air and water hose and nozzle was powerful enough so that when we hit a big rock, two feet through, it would go rolling and bouncing along. It was all the three of us could do to control and handle. We came on shift this time and the crew we were supposed to relieve signaled their valve tender up on this rock sidehill to turn off the air and water pressure. Two of the men let go of the hose, and the third man was standing there talking to us with the nozzle still tucked under one arm. For some unknown reason, this valve tender turned the air and water pressure back on. Before this valve tender could get the pressure turned off again, this hose and nozzle reared up like a cobra, lifting this man about fifteen feet into the air and slamming him down on the bedrock. It broke a leg and arm, and he was in the hospital for months. Luckily he wasn't killed.
    There had been torrential rains, and this culvert under the railroad tracks had nearly filled up with rock and dirt which had washed down off the hillside above. Our boss was afraid the tracks were going to wash out, so he sent two men, I and a valve tender, over to clean this culvert out with our hose and nozzle. There was just enough room left for us to crawl back and start washing the rock out of the lower side where it fell about forty feet, straight down into the Sacramento River. After a while, we signaled the valve tender, who was up along this pipeline in the pouring rain, to shut the pressure off. We wanted to take five and smoke a cigarette. I guess this valve tender must have imagined that he heard a signal over this electric beeper to turn the pressure back on, as all of a sudden this big heavy nozzle on the end of our hose reared up and started whipping back and forth across the culvert. If we hadn't all three jumped and grabbed ahold of it before it got up any more momentum, it would have beat us all to death. We did have the choice of leaping out the lower end and falling the forty feet into the raging, flooding river. Needless to say, we didn't do that. That valve tender got a good bawling out.
    There was this big head tower that was stationary and then five highline cables that reached over a quarter-mile across the river and canyon to these tail towers. Each tail tower was on arc-shaped railroad tracks and had their own power to move back and forth. These tail towers each had a huge block of cement on the back side for ballast. Each line had a bucket on it that would hold about nine yards of cement. The operator would bump these big buckets against a bulwark and these cars would come out of the batch plant on tracks, fill the bucket with cement and away would go the bucket at about twenty miles per hour to whatever block they were pouring. A man with a phone would be at the pour, telling the operator in the head tower how far out to go and when to lower the bucket. He would also tell the operator in the tail tower how far sideways, either way, to move. With eight or nine yards of concrete, each dump would make quite a pile. Men with big post vibrators would have to work and smooth these piles down flat before the next bucketful was ready to be dumped in just a few minutes. The aggregate for the batch plant to make the cement came by a belt from six or seven miles away in the river bottom. This belt was run, day and night, loaded with rock and sand to keep the batch plant supplied. I heard later on that there was enough concrete went into the dam that it would have poured a four-lane highway from San Francisco to Kansas City.
    I was working on the swing shift one night, and the crew that I was working with and I heard this blood-curdling scream for several seconds. It made our hair stand on end. Then came this sound, like a ripe watermelon hitting bedrock and then a hard hat rattling on the rock. Some of our crew dropped their tools and ran over to see what had happened. They came back a few minutes later, white as sheets, and one of them was puking. A rigger that had been riding on a crossarm above one of these empty buckets on the highline had fallen off when the operator for some reason caused the bucket to give a sudden jerk. Another rigger managed to hold on even though a crossarm came down and smashed one of his legs and an arm. The other man fell five hundred feet before the bedrock stopped him. I was glad that I hadn't gone over to have a look. I knew by the sound that it was too late to help him.
    Another time we heard a commotion a few hundred feet below us where the power house was being poured. As they had lowered this big bucket of concrete, it had hit the big hopper that they dumped into. This hopper, where men were taking wheelbarrows of cement out of the bottom, already had about twenty yards of concrete in it. When the weight of the nine yards in the bucket was added to it, the hopper tumbled over, burying eleven men in this soft concrete. All that could be seen of some of them was just an arm or leg sticking out. It was a miracle that none were killed. One man had broken bones sticking through his skin in several places and was in the hospital for months, but he lived.
    One of those big highlines, nearly as thick as a man's arm, broke one night, and the end that came down across the dam writhed over a wide area. Again, it was a miracle that it didn't kill anyone. I was told it cut one man's arm off just below the shoulder as clean as if a doctor had done it with a knife. It could have killed a dozen or so men.
    They would blow a whistle every time they set off a dynamite blast, and every time flying rock would knock out a bunch of 500-watt bulbs that was strung on a cable about five hundred feet above the dam. Later we would see a man pulling himself along in a little car under this line and replacing these bulbs. I was sure glad that I didn't have his job. It paid to keep your hard hat on. One night as I was eating my lunch, I had this half-drank pint jar of milk held out in front of me and this rock, not much bigger than a marble, fell off a highline bucket going over. It hit dead center into the jar, went on through the milk, and then through the bottom of the jar. A rock that size and falling that far would kill anyone as quick as a bullet from a gun if it hit him on the bare head.
    I was making this big money, about $37 per week, and I went down to Redding in the late fall of 1940 and bought the first 1941 Chevy sold that year, hot off a flatcar. I traded in my 1937 Ford sedan on this two-tone green, five-passenger coupe. I remember that with radio, heater and white sidewall tires, it cost $966 and the payments were $35.05 per month. I had helped make the payments on a lot of cars as part of the expense of going on these slot machine trips, but this was only the second brand-new car in my name alone. I was rather tired of traveling, drinking, and eating in restaurants so much, and it was a good feeling to be working entirely on my own. Of all these trips that I had gone on, I never did aspire to beat the machines on my own. I knew how and could beat a machine all right, but I was crude compared to Andy. He could do it so fast and so smooth that I was content to let him do that part of it. I would have been like a squawky fiddle player compared to a fine violinist.
    We met some nice people around these construction jobs, and I loved that kind of work, but I noticed that most of them that followed this kind of work never had very much and had to move around a lot. Very few of these jobs would last over a year or two, and then they'd have to move to the next job. Prices always went up around these big jobs, as all the businesses would try to get all that payroll possible. We kept having those torrential rains, and one afternoon when I went to work in January, the cofferdam had washed out, and I figured that I'd be laid off for a few weeks until they got it repaired, so back to our little home in Oregon we headed. I had found out that the gold dredge was starting up again, and I went right to work on it. I worked on it for about six months, until World War II began. The government shut all gold mining down, as it didn't contribute to the war effort. They confiscated the big diesel motor that powered the dredge and also took away the D8 cat that we used to clear the ground ahead of the dredge. Here I was, out of work again. It turned out that the dredge never did start up and run again. This Joe Most, who ended up being the sole owner by marrying the only other shareholder left, used it for a tax depreciation for the next twenty years, and he told me that he gained more profit from it in that way than he ever had by running it. He also owned a floating fish cannery boat up in Alaskan waters that he made real good money with. That dredge boat sat in its pond on Pleasant Creek, rusting away, until he sold it to a Canadian enterprise in about 1980. I think it has been in operation again, since then. I never dreamed, when I was working on it, that my oldest granddaughter and her husband would be the ones hired to get it in shape to be sold forty years later, to pump the steel pontoons out that had partially filled with water, clean the whole boat up and get it sitting on an even keel again.
    Some good friends of ours had moved up to Bainbridge Island, in Puget Sound, between Bremerton and Seattle, and said there was a lot of work going on in that area. Away we went again and temporarily moved into a house with them. I took the first job that was offered me in this creosote plant where they treated telephone poles, railroad ties and other wooden things. I even drove a gravel dump truck for the county a week or so. I finally got a good job helping build big high cyclone fences around this naval radio station that was being built on the island. That job lasted for a few months and then the company had me work for them building more fence around a submarine fuel supply depot that was being built over on the mainland at Port Orchard, below Bremerton. I had to commute back and forth on a little diesel boat, which I thought was fun.
    Andy was out of work and had sold his beer joint in Arvin, California, and it wasn't hard to talk him and Eunice into coming up to where we were, especially after I told him about all those slot machines they had around Seattle in King County. We rented a big old house together across the street from our friends, and Andy got a job right away on the island as an electrician. It didn't take us long to get started beating those slot machines on our days off. We made a lot more beating machines on our two days off than we did on the five days working. The whole of King County was open to gambling, and we soon collected a handful of private club cards to get in the clubs inside all the cities, which really added to our income. One weekend we went across the state to Spokane, Pullman, and to Coeur d'Alene in Idaho. I remember we cleared $888 to cut between us, which wasn't a bad two days' work. I was only making $1.15 per hour on the job, and Andy wasn't making a whole lot more than that on his job.
    There was a huge fireplace in this old house we had rented, and we'd go down to the beach and haul home firewood for it in the two-wheeled trailer I had used to move up there in. Our friends had a friend that had his own private oyster bed on the beach and let us gather burlap bags of those fresh oysters. A couple of times we got in on a grunion run and came home with buckets full of those good-eating little fish that we had picked up on the beach. The women would pick bucketfuls of wild huckleberries and make delicious pies with them. An apple tree in our yard was loaded with the best apples I had ever tasted.
    One Friday evening, Andy and I cleaned up after work and took the Kalakala ferry over to Seattle and started beating some of the clubs. We ended up in the Eagles club in Olympia. While I was standing there helping Andy beat this quarter machine, a couple of young girls that were playing a machine next to us kept giggling and kind of rubbing up against me. Pretty soon, to make it look like we were losing, I went over to the bar to buy some more change. When I reached for my billfold, it was gone. The first thing I thought was that these girls had picked my pocket. I told our women what I thought, and they went right over and Ellen asked them, "Which one of you girls stole my husband's billfold?" Of course, they denied it and went back to the ladies' restroom. Ellen and Eunice thought they were going back there to get rid of it, and followed them. They shook these girls down, but couldn't find anything on them. Pretty soon, we all heard quite a commotion back there. When the bartender opened the door, Ellen and Eunice were beating the hell out of them. These girls had came into the place with a couple of guys on motorcycles. The guys started objecting and we offered to take them on, but they left without their girlfriends. I know they thought their girls were guilty and got out of there before they got into trouble. The bartender was on our side, too. We headed on home from that place, and I got to thinking on the way. As soon as we got into the house, I went to the bedroom where I had changed clothes before we left, and sure enough, there was my billfold in my work pants. I had left it at home. I was nearly afraid to tell our women for fear they would beat up on me.
    A couple of nephews that were in the army and stationed at Fort Lewis had spent the evening with us, to experience what beating slot machines was like, and we had put on quite a show for them.
    One day we were on a ferry, heading over to Bremerton, when I heard this paper boy hollering, "Extra, All about the Japanese bombing Pearl Harbor!" Soon after that, we could see that the jobs we were on were about finished. I hated to leave that beautiful island. It was covered with a greenery of growth and these huge fir stumps, which showed what a forest had been there in the early days. The remains of what had been the largest saw mill in the world at Point Madison could still be seen on the north end of the island. I think it was a Long-Bell mill. Besides logging off the island, they had rafted logs into it from all around Puget Sound. The only place that I ever saw that I could have liked to live in as well as our Rogue River area was some beach property above Seattle. This was at Crescent Bay, and it had a wide sandy beach with a gentle slope. Away from this beautiful beach was an area forested with young Douglas fir as thick as the hair on a dog's back. It was being sold in five-acre tracts with beach frontage for $500 with fifty dollars down and fifty dollars per month payments. I wanted to buy one of these plots and build a log house on it out of these small fir trees. They were just the right size to make the logs from, but my wife had different ideas and talked me out of it. I'd like to know how much that property would sell for now in the 1980s. [One five-acre plot on the bay is being offered in 2025 for $435,000.]
    Besides our jobs being about over, the slot machines were getting hot to us, and several other sets of hustlers were beating them. One night, a. carload of these machine owners took out after us after we had beat this joint. Andy soon lost them in the fog, and that was the only time that I appreciated fog, as it might have saved our lives. This was just one of the dozens of times in our slot machine hustling career that I can remember ditching a carload of mad people who was after our hides. If Andy had a car length head start, he was hard to catch, as he could fairly drive a car. We had heard that the people in control of gambling around Seattle were original gangsters, who had been run out of the East by other gangs. They were really tough hoodlums.. Andy and Eunice, Ellen and I, all left Bainbridge Island at the same time, in two different cars. We started towards the East and then came south on the east side of the Cascades, until we got to Klamath Falls, Oregon. Then we came back over west to our Rogue River. We beat machines all the way down, whenever we found any. Andy and Eunice went on down to Ventura, but we stayed in our little house for a few days and then drove on down to Sacramento to spend Christmas with Ellen's folks. After spending a week there, we started on a trip to Colorado and Kansas, for a visit with a lot of relatives and old friends. This was an exceptionally cold winter all over the West. We traveled on a solid sheet of ice from Auburn, California, clear down into Kansas. Our kids took down with the measles when we stopped in McGill, Nevada, to visit my sister Elsie and husband Ed. We were forced to stay for a long two-week visit with them until the kids were able to travel again. That Eastern Colorado and Western Kansas really looked bleak after being in our lush green Washington, Oregon and Northern California for so long. We enjoyed the visiting all the nice people again, though. We stayed one night with some friends in Denver, and I couldn't figure out why our car was so hard to start the next morning and why it ran so sluggish after I did get it started. Then they told me it was 25 degrees below zero. The low sand hills, where I had been raised, looked almost flat after being in and close to mountains. It had been so long since I had been back there.
    I got to go coyote hunting with Ellen's Uncle Rhene in Kansas and shot one at long range with my 30-30 rifle that I had taken along on the trip, and Rhene shot one with a shotgun. We had caught up with it out in the middle of a big wheat field using his old Chevy car. We threw them in the trunk and headed for town to collect the bounty the state paid for coyotes and to sell the carcass for a couple of dollars to someone who wanted the hide. On the way to town, we had a strong tail wind all the way, and the smell from those coyotes made me sick and about ready to puke. I would have sooner been smelling skunk. The state of Kansas had allotted $20,000 to pay one dollar each bounty for the 1942 year. By the last of January, when we took these coyotes in, the man said we were lucky to get in on the tail end, as they had about used up the money. That many coyotes had been killed in just one month's time. We couldn't make any money hunting them, but it was fun. The only thing if you kill off too many coyotes, you would get an infestation of jackrabbits and destroy the balance of nature.
    It was so cold that we came back west on a southern route. We stopped in Parker, Arizona, to see my sister Edith. Her husband, Merle, was working as a welder on the new Parker Dam being built on the Colorado River. We visited some more relation and friends in Southern California, and then a few more stops on our way back north to Oregon and our little home. That old saying, that the best part of travel is getting home again, has always proved true to me.
    They were just starting to build this army camp they called Camp White, a few miles from Medford and about twenty miles from our home, and I got to go right to work on it as soon as we got home. I signed up as a carpenter, but they couldn't get enough material to keep us busy at first, so I went to work as a laborer. I was glad that I did, as I soon got a job as a pusher (labor foreman) and material expediter and made more than carpenter wages. I worked steady from February till late fall to help finish the brick hospital division. We were always short of material. I had a truck, lumber carrier and Hyster, at my disposal, so I'd go around to the other divisions being built and steal their material every chance I got, which made my job a lot more exciting. The superintendent would say, "Towse, we need so-and-so material and I don't care how you get it." All the dozens of different divisions that were being built at the same time were having a kind of race to see who could finish their job first. The army was pushing them, as the war was on and they needed the camp quick to house the soldiers. In fact they started moving the men of the 96th Division in before all the buildings were finished. I used to feel sorry for some of the big, fat soldiers that would come limping in away behind the main column. They were coming back from a 25-mile hike, that early in the morning, soon after I had started to work. That made me happy to be working, instead of being in the army.
    We didn't stay home long after this job was over. We went down to Sacramento, where Ellen's folks had bought a house, and moved in with them, and I went right to work on another army camp, Camp Kohler. Later on they turned it into a Japanese internment camp. I got a good job, keeping time for all the laborers, check tools from the warehouse and signing up new help in the office. That is the first time that I had ever met people that couldn't read or write. About every tenth man that hit the office up for work was illiterate and would want me to fill out the form for them. My superintendent didn't have any sympathy for them, as he said, "There was no excuse for anyone in this country not to have an education." So I had to turn them away. Most of them had come out west from the Southeast and Appalachia, I think. I felt sorry for most of them, as I could see they needed work bad and would have been good workers if they only had a chance. I also had a company pickup at my disposal on this job and would run all over Sacramento, running down material or some kind of errand for the superintendent. I liked this job fine, but one morning when I came to work after a torrential rain, this huge laundry building was all caved in and a wreck. They had dug about a ten-foot-deep ditch, right alongside of the pier posts that held up the whole length of the center of this building. The roof wasn't on the rafters yet and this ditch filled full of water and all these pier posts caved off into the ditch, letting all the structure above come down. I figured it might take them weeks to get this fixed, and I didn't feel like helping them do it, so I quit and back to Oregon we went again. I was appalled at all the waste on these army camps that I had worked on. They were all ten percent cost-plus jobs. The more a contractor made a job cost, the more money he made. A lot of lumber would get spilled off those lumber carriers into the mud because they hadn't built roads good enough to start with. It would be pushed into piles with a bulldozer and burned.
    There was a big demand for lumber by this time, and I had worked in the woods just enough so that I could pass for experienced and didn't have any trouble getting a job falling and bucking in the woods. In fact, logging was so essential to the war effort that it kept me from being drafted into the army. Of course, having a family helped keep me out, too. This work made me eligible for a lot of gas stamps, too, when it was rationed. I always had a lot of stamps, extra, stashed away, in case some slot machine hustler would come along and we could go on a weekend trip to make a little extra money. It was fun again, to go on a trip, after I had been doing that hard labor, and the drinks even tasted good for a few days at a time.
    Andy's brother, Jim, came along and wanted to go on a little trip, so I got this friend, Harley, to go with us one weekend. I knew that Clackamas County, just east of Portland's Multnomah County, had machines. Just we three guys went up there to have a look-see. The first thing we found out was that someone else had been beating them, hard, and they were hot to people like us. I remember this one joint had an old antique half-dollar machine. Jim caught it on the pump, without even having to drill a hole in it, but couldn't spin the reels, as it had one of those cast-iron brakes on the inside, just back of the handle. He caught the brake and tried to snap it by dropping his weight on the handle, but he was such a little skinny, lightweight guy that he couldn't get the job done and turned it over to me. When I dropped my weight and the brake snapped, it made a terrible sound, like the machine had broken all to pieces.
    The man came running out of the kitchen from the back where he had been fixing us a sandwich. He was very excited and wanted to know what was going on. I told him that the machine was stuck and I had to shake it to be able to pull the handle down, but that I had fixed it and it was all right now. That seemed to satisfy him and he went back to the kitchen while we took about eighty bucks out of his machine. We left the slot machine man's joint till last, and I guess someone had called ahead on us, as they started watching us real close, right from the start. We got this quarter machine beat and started on a half and by that time the joint was on fire. I mean they were really watching us. This huge man came over and acted like he was going to grab ahold of Jim, but Jim turned just as the man got there and had his hand inside of his unbuttoned coat. The man chilled and backed off, as he thought Jim was ready to pull a knife or gun on him. Several men started gathering around, and I told Jim and Harley to go out the front door and start walking along the road towards Portland. I would pick them up in my car in just a minute. I ran nearly clear around the outside of this big building. When I got to the car, a man was kneeling down, starting to let the air out of a front tire. I ran up to him and made a kick at his rear-end, but he got going so that I couldn't quite get a kick in. He'd keep losing his balance and fall to one knee and I'd just about get a kick in on him. He got to the front door and went inside, so I ran back to the car. About a hundred feet down the road I picked Jim and Harley up. I hadn't gone a block before this Century Buick fell in behind us. Jim said, "Open this Chevy up and get us out of here." I knew that I couldn't outrun their car, and that they would probably try to run us off the road at high speed, so I just slowed down to about forty miles per hour and rolled my window down. My bluff worked, as they were afraid that I would start to shoot at them if they passed us. They followed us for a couple of miles, till we crossed the Multnomah County line. Then they made a U-turn and headed back down the road. We had made several hundred dollars off of their machines that afternoon.

    I enjoyed working in the woods. It was better than anything I had done. I hadn't forgotten the taste of the woods from the summer of 1939. I straight-bucked behind a set of fallers to start with, then I teamed up with this old faller that had already fell for Weyerhaeuser Timber Company for twenty- afive years. The only thing was that Walt was strictly right-handed and I thought I was. Being as I was the new beginner, I had to learn to pull the falling saw and chop left-handed with the ax. Within a few months I had learned to do all this from the left about as well as from the right. I loved the smell of the woods and being next to nature. What a different environment from where I had been raised on the plains of Eastern Colorado. I'd tell some of the loggers on the job that I used to fall timber back in Eastern Colorado. When they'd say, "We know there isn't any timber in that country,' I'd say, "No, not anymore, as I clearcut it down to low stumps and that's what I'm going to do to this country."
    This work was dangerous enough to keep one on his toes, and we had better keep alert at all times. This made the time pass fast, as we had to keep our mind as well as our body busy. A lot of those big old growth (virgin) Douglas fir, cedar, sugar and ponderosa pine were hundreds of years old and would be from four to six feet in diameter on the stump. They would make a thunderous noise when all those tons of weight hit the earth. Some of them were over two hundred feet tall and would make five or six thirty-two-foot logs. I remember Walt and I fell two sugar pines before noon one day. One scaled out 16,000 board feet and the other 19,000. A two-bedroom house can be framed with 5000 board feet. We had to pick out a good lay especially for these really big trees. If we needlessly broke up a lot of timber, we wouldn't last long on the job. A lot of times we'd have to lay a tree between stumps or miss outcroppings of rock to keep from breaking and ruining a lot of valuable lumber. We could also ruin a lot of lumber by not bucking them into logs the right way. When a tree we had fallen draped over a rise in the ground, we had to undercut first from the underneath side to keep from slabbing or splitting the logs. We carried a Dugan or Sullivan undercutter with us, and it had an adjustable roller on the bar that would slide up or down and lock in place. We would drive the sharp end of the bar into the side of the tree where we wanted to buck into it, put the back of the six- or seven-foot saw into a groove on the roller, and saw with the teeth up. As soon as the tension of the wood started pinching our saw we would take it out and corner cut from the top side. This would make the wood break square in the middle of the log instead of splitting and maybe ruining the log on each side of our cut. My right elbow still doesn't bend right from taking too long of a stroke and hitting a broken-off limb sticking out of another tree lying in back of me. Many a time, when I bumped one of these knots with my elbow, it would put my whole arm to sleep for several minutes. We even had to be cautious when we were chopping the limbs off a tree we had fallen. They might be holding over a sapling that would fly up and knock our heads off when the limb released it.
    When we fell timber on steep-sided hills, we would use springboards to stand on when we sawed with those old hand saws. A briar, piece of barbed wire, or Swede fiddle were some of the nicknames we called them. These springboards were pieces of 2x6-inch white cedar about five feet long with an iron bolted on one end and a curved sharp lip on top. Each of us would chop a notch on his side of the tree we were going to fall, just back of the proposed undercut and about three feet below. The bottom of the notch was flat and the top cut would be sloped downward. It had to be just the right size and shape so we could stick this iron end of the board in, press down on the back end of the board, and work this sharp, curved lip into the top of this notch. We'd swing the board back and forth a few times .to make sure it worked easy. Then we'd step on it and kick it around some to make sure it was right and wouldn't kick out of the notch after we began sawing. We used an oil bottle made out of a fifth whiskey bottle with a hook wired onto the neck so we could hook it into the bark of the tree. It had a hole in the cap or pine needles stuffed inside the neck. We had to swish oil (diesel worked good) onto the saw to cut the pitch so we wouldn't miss a stroke. We kicked our board around so we were always in a comfortable position to pull the saw. We had to put the toe of one caulk boot under the end of the board and kick it around. We'd saw straight in for the undercut and then take out chips with our ax for the top cut. The more a tree leaned, the bigger the undercut had to be. We had to corner-cut into the back, instead of straight in and parallel to the undercut, or the tree might split up behind the undercut and barber chair for forty or fifty feet up the tree. Also it could jackknife with the butt end kicking back that far behind the stump. The whole tree would be hanging parallel for a second and then fall off this high stump, that high off the ground, on one side or other and come crashing to the ground with a terrible sound. The concussion, after falling that far, would shatter and ruin the whole tree for use as lumber. Besides, this kind of falling could kill one or both fallers. On a heavy-leaning and big tree, we'd have to take out four or five layers of chips with our axes to get to the back of our saw cut that we'd made for our undercut. If a tree was real straight with no visible lean, it didn't require such a deep undercut, and we'd saw straight across the back and get wedges started back of the saw as soon as we could. Just a little breeze could cause the tree to sit back and clamp the saw tight. If the tree sat down just the quarter-inch width kerf the saw made, it would let the top of a 200-foot-tall tree come back four or five feet, and then you were really in trouble with all this added leverage against you. We always kept steel plates and big long steel wedges and an eight-pound sledge hammer in case we should have this kind of problem. I still remember a lesson we had in a physics class in high school, a wedge is the most powerful leverage known to man. I believe that, as we moved some overwhelming leverage against us with these wedges and our puny taps with a sledge hammer. I always plumbed a tree before starting to fall it. First we'd pick out the best lay and then step back, directly behind the tree from our intended lay, hold the ax loosely, and let it hang from the butt end of the handle. Then I'd sight along the handle, using it as a plumb bob. This would tell us how much side lean, if any. Then I'd step off at right angles and do the same thing, to tell us how much lean towards our lay, and how big and deep of an undercut was needed. That way we would know if we had to use wedges or corner cut in the back. If a tree had a lot of side lean to our lay, we'd saw up close to the corner of the undercut on this tight side and "hold" wood on the loose side. When the tree started to fall, it would break wood sooner on the tight side and the wood we had held on the loose side would hold and help swing the tree around to fall true with the line our undercut pointed. It didn't take long, from experience, to lay a tree just where you intended.
    These men at the fairs that fall a peeled pole set in the ground straight up and down, and drive a peg out a ways with it, have the great advantage over a faller out in the woods. When a tree has side lean and maybe most of the limbs on one side, it takes a lot more know-how to lay it in a certain spot than it does falling a pole at a timber show. A lot of these high roller "gyppos" wouldn't take time to saw a log clear into on the ground and would leave wood uncut in the middle "Swede hitch" or an uncut slab at the bottom, we called "Russian couplings." When they set a choker around and the cat would start skidding the logs to the landing, these uncut places would cause the log to split and ruin a lot of the lumber. Most all of the logging outfits paid by how much scale you cut. If you got tired and sat down, your pay stopped.
    I always got a kick out of a new man, breaking in to this falling or bucking in the woods. One man, fresh from L.A., came running around the hill one day, all excited, to where I was bucking logs. He said "Come quick, I just hit a bee tree."
    I went with him and he showed me this pitch oozing out of the cut he had made. After that, ever time any of us hit a pitch seam,we'd call it "honey." The boss, "bullbuck," sent a couple of men that had always bucked but never had fell trees to go fall a huge dead tree "snag." It was a fir and had bark nearly a foot thick, and the several inches of sapwood underneath the bark was all rotted away. They started sawing into this old rotten bark, but it was so dusty that they decided to chop a ring out of it first. They went clear around the tree with their axes. Just as they had about got it completely ringed, all this big thick bark let go and for about fifty feet, up to the first limbs, shucked down the tree and made a pile of bark chunks, six-foot-high clear around the base. They were lucky to get out of the way and not be covered up and killed, and it took them all of a half hour to dig and recover their tools. This was a fast lesson, but it could have been fatal. A friend of mine, that I hand-fell timber with for over a year, told me about the time he was setting chokers for this logging outfit. They hired this young kid, that was fresh from Oklahoma, to help him. R.C. had brought a pocket full of walnuts off a tree he had at home and would shell and eat one once in awhile as they worked. This kid said, "Where did you all get those nuts," and R.C. told him that he picked them off the fir limbs that they skidded in with logs. This kid really looked those limbs over good for several days before someone put him wise.
    One bad thing about working in the woods in those days was that every time a forest fire started, the first thing they did was to get all the woods crews to fight fire. I had to go with our crew to the Limpy Creek fire and was out on it for 28 hours straight with only one dry sandwich and a shriveled-up orange to eat. I ran out of water to drink. Several of our crew came close to getting burned up in that fire, when the wind made a sudden change and broke out on the side, trapping them in the middle. They had to run back into the old fire, which was still real hot. This was the worst fire I was ever on, but I had to fight a lot of lesser ones during my twenty seasons I spent working in the woods. A friend, Rusty, and I went out on this Sykes Creek fire on the night shift. We had our area all surrounded with a fire trail and the fire under control and decided to take a little nap on this rocky hillside. As daylight came, our day shift came in to relieve us. The first thing they said to us was, "Did you see any rattlesnakes?" They said they had killed a dozen there in that rocky place where we had been napping, the day before, and that there was a rattlesnake den there. We sure wouldn't have done any sleeping there if we had known that.
    Another fire, that we had to hike several miles over rough terrain to get to, was getting so big that they drafted all the logging truck drivers to go along and help us. We fallers and buckers really enjoyed that fire, as we got to see those truck drivers suffer. They were a sad-looking bunch by the time we got that fire corralled and headed back over that route. They were all limping bad from wearing those truck driving field boots, and we were afraid we might have to carry some of them before we made it back to the road. We razzed them for a long time about being those tough truck drivers. Some of those south slopes in the heat of the summer got awful hot to work on. After the timber had all been fell, there was no shade left in clear cut. Those dead needles would seem to reflect the sun's rays and make it even hotter. I probably drank gallons of water on some of those hot days. On real steep ground, some of it as steep as a cow's face; the timber would all slide till it would come to a stop in the bottom of a narrow canyon. It would be slid and piled in there like someone had spilled a box of matches, and it had to be bucked into logs. This is what we called a jackpot, and I had to buck out a lot of these. I always felt that it was a lot more dangerous to buck logs on a steep hillside than to fall them. It was hard to even measure off the log lengths with a tape in these jackpots, let alone buck them. I would have to chop notches into one tree so I could get footing to stand while bucking the tree slid alongside of it. Sometimes when I bucked a cut, the ground was so steep that the rest of the tree would drop down and slide down 32 feet and I could buck the next log off, standing right in the same tracks. In the wintertime, sometimes, I 'd be bucking logs in a narrow canyon, which the sun would never shine into, and it would stay frozen all day long. I've told people how cold it was and that I'd have to hang my water sack by a fire, to thaw it out, so that I could get a drink of water and they'd say, "How come you wanted a drink if it was that cold?" and I'd say, "If you ever bucked logs, you'd understand why."
    A young, husky kid from Idaho and I teamed up to fall timber on this one job. Eddy had been a golden gloves champion over in Idaho, and he loved to go down to this rather tough joint in our town, the Homestead Tavern, and pick a fight with the biggest, toughest guy he could find. He'd bump into this big man and excuse himself, real polite and shy-like, and then pretty soon he'd bump him real hard, and just as the man started to hit him Eddie would knock him out with one punch. Eddie had a real baby-looking face, and people that didn't know him would never dream that he was a tough fighter. Eddie and I were falling this big spiketop fir which was dead from about halfway on up. The best lay for it was to slide it down behind this big cull fir, quartering down the hill about a hundred feet away. This big cull fir had a limb growing out the side, about two-thirds the way up, as big around as a man's body, but I thought, being as it was a cull, rotten tree that this big limb would sheer right off when this tree hit it. I gunned this spike top tree right at that limb, and it went true to my aim. The only thing, that limb didn't shear off like I had planned. Instead, the tree we fell broke over it, and the concussion broke a hundred feet of this dead top up into chunks, down to twenty feet long. They held together, like an accordion and came back up the hill, right towards us. I ran and got tight up behind a big fir around the hill, and the last I saw of Eddie, he was heading for a hole that a windfall uprooted tree had made. The top of this tree we had felled held together till it got back over our heads. Then it started falling apart. It seemed like those chunks were falling all around me for a long time. At last, when all was quiet, I stepped out from behind this tree, and the first thing I saw was that this hole that I had last seen Eddy heading for was full of chunks. I could feel the blood drain out of my face and I hollered, "Eddy!" in a shaky voice. About that time I heard a voice say, "Here I am." He had changed his mind at the last second and ran around and had been standing right by me, behind the same tree. I just knew he had been killed and was never so glad to see a guy in my whole life.
    I was straight bucking on this job at the headwaters of a little creek that emptied into the Applegate River. The boss needed more timber felled, and he had hired a man they called Slim that would pair up with me. All the way out to the strip of timber we were supposed to start falling, Slim was telling me what a great faller he was and that he had fell all along the Columbia River. The first tree we came to was a real heavy leaner and he said, "This has got a good lean, so we won't have to put a very big undercut in it." I knew right away from that he had never felled timber before. I could also tell by the way he pulled a saw. A couple of days later the boss asked us to fall a big dead snag that had the top broken out of it. It was close to the landing and leaned heavy toward one of the guy lines that braced the A-frame that they used to load logs on the trucks with. We put a big undercut into the tree, and he was on the loose side in the back cut, so I told him to hold at least ten inches of wood on his side and I would cut up close. That way the wood would start breaking there first, and swing the tree around, and make it fall true to the way the undercut was pointed. When the tree fell, it drifted over and clipped the outside of the stump that the guy line was fastened to. When I looked at our stump, I saw that Slim had cut his corner clear off. Why that tree didn't drift farther and go across the guyline I'll never know. It would have jerked the A-frame over that the men were using to load a truck with right then, and could have killed several of the men. That was the last day I felled with Slim. They put him to straight bucking by himself, but he soon got fired from that job. As soon as they got around to skidding his logs in with the cat, they found out that he hadn't been measuring the logs off for length with a tape, but just bucking them off where it was easiest for him to saw. They had some real odd lengths of logs and had to trim them back on the landing to the nearest acceptable length.
    I was still hand falling with a neighbor of mine about the time World War II was coming to an end. Power saws were starting to be used. My partner, R. C. Weaver, said these power saws would ruin the country. I thought later that he was about right, as the timber started to be gutted twice as fast. R.C. and I had to fall strips of timber right alongside of some of these power saws. For a long time, we could out-fall them, as they spent a lot of time repairing them and no one knew how to file their chains right when they would get dull. For the first year, there wasn't even a saw shop closer than Roseburg, nearly 100 miles away, and they'd have to ship their chains up there by Greyhound bus to be sharpened.  We used to laugh at them a lot when we'd hear them cranking and cussing, trying to get them started. One day as we had stopped for lunch, we heard this man across a draw, cranking and cussing with all his might. He was bucking felled trees with this nearly new, big McCulloch chain saw. Finally, we saw him pick this big saw up (it weighed about ninety pounds) boost it clear over his head, then throw it as far as he could down this steep hill. He cussed for a minute or so longer, then went down the hill to where his saw had landed and rolled. We thought, "Well, he's sorry for what he had done and was going to see how much damage he had done." To our surprise, he picked it up and threw it that much farther on down the hill.
    One set of fallers bought this brand-new McCulloch saw and brought it out on the job on a Sunday, to try it out when no one else was around. They were about as new to falling trees as the saw was, and the first tree that they fell, close to the landing, went sideways and crushed their new, over $500 saw into small pieces right into the ground. That put an end to their falling career before they even got started. A young Dutch fellow, whose family had just moved into our area, begged my partner and I to let him go out into the woods with us and he'd work for us for no pay, just to learn how to fall timber. He wanted to start making some of that big and easy money he'd heard about. We wouldn't let him on account of the insurance we'd have been responsible for. I felt bad when he got a job falling with a power saw, all by himself, and in just a few months a tree kicked back off the stump and killed him.
    A set of fallers were carrying this big heavy, two-man saw up the hill on their way to a new strip of timber that had been assigned to them. Why they kept working with each other as partners none of us could understand, as they would argue about where to lay about every tree that they would walk up to. As they came carrying this big saw, right along close to where we had stopped and were eating our lunch, they stopped and were arguing as usual. After they had stood there for several minutes, chewing each other out, the one that was carrying the heavy motor end said, "By God, if we're going to keep arguing, let's set this saw down."
    Loggers are a crazy bunch of guys and would play tricks on each other every chance they got. This would ease the pain and monotony of this hard work. This Doug Stoneman on one job loved to find someone's ax sticking in a stump and he'd throw it and stick it, about fifty feet up, in the nearest big tree. He'd have to fall the tree to retrieve his ax. The bullbuck had a habit of leaving his empty lunch bucket on a stump alongside a skid trail so it would be handy to grab and he could be the first one down to the landing at quitting time. Several times, someone would put a big gob of pitch on the bottom so that he'd jerk the bucket open and spill all the contents out on the ground when he tried to pick it up in a hurry. Once they tied a fine fish line to his bucket, coiled it up alongside the stump with the other end [tied] to a bush. When the bullbuck picked it up on the fly, he came to the end of this fish line about a hundred feet down the skid trail and the lunch bucket was jerked open and out of his hand, spilling his thermos bottle out and breaking it. We had to be alert at all times. I got so I'd open my sandwiches before biting into them, as there might be a live yellowjacket inside or someone would smear pitch on the handle. When we'd get on the crummy, to go home, we'd better look to see if some mean guy had slipped a chinquapin burr under us before we sat down. That was about the equivalent of sitting on a cactus.
    If you didn't ("stag") have the hem cut off the bottom of your pants legs (so that they would tear out and free you, in case they got caught as you were running away from a tree that you were falling), several guys would grab you and cut them off for you, anywhere from just below the knee or above. One man always had long bootlaces in his caulk boots and they would nearly drag the ground, even after having them tied in big bows. He fell this tree through a thicket of second growth firs, and it broke dozens of small limbs off of them. When these small trees straightened up from being bent over when this big tree broke a path through them, they threw all these limbs straight back, like a bunch of arrows. When he started to run, these long boot laces caught and tripped him. There was so many of these small limbs, that he was covered completely, and it took his partner several minutes to uncover him. He was lucky he wasn't hurt. He never wore those long bootlaces again after that.
    I'll never forget the time that I stepped on a loose piece of bark as I was walking down this steep hill on a felled tree. I had a six-and-a-half-foot, hand bucking saw draped over my shoulder. My feet went out from under me but I had presence of mind enough to throw the saw away from me as I went down. Some brush caught the saw though and threw it right back at me, cutting several long gashes across my back. When I got down to the saw filing shack, one man had me take off my shirt and bend over and someone else poured those raw cuts full of merthiolate. Red-hot coals wouldn't have felt any hotter, and I screamed so loud, you could have heard it for a mile. A half-dozen guys standing around all laughed uproariously. I could tell they hadn't witnessed anything so funny for ages. I came down to the landing after work one afternoon and some men were playing with this live rattlesnake on a stump. One held his mouth open with a stick and the boss on our job spit a fine stream of snoose juice into its mouth. That poor snake writhed around and was completely dead within a few seconds. That made me glad that I didn't chew snoose if it was that powerful.
    This Jim Beck and I hand-fell together for quite awhile, and one summer we fell and had to peel the bark off trees used for piling and telephone poles. They had to be limbed under the bark and only would peel good for a couple of months while the sap was up. We got paid so much a lineal foot for these, instead of by the board feet, as we did when we fell and bucked trees for lumber. The boss drove his own truck after he skidded them to this ramp that he had built up with dirt and poles, and he'd roll them up this ramp and onto the truck with a small cat. This truck had to have the trailer let out with a long reach, so far behind, to haul these mostly over 100-foot-long poles. A man had to ride back there on and guide with this big steering wheel. He would be quite a sight riding back there, standing up, his cap on backwards and shirttail out and flapping in the wind as they went down this steep, crooked road. I wouldn't have traded jobs with that man for all the money in the world.
    This Jim and I fell timber for lumber later on. I remember this big "schoolmarm" fir we fell up on Wards Creek. It was two trees really, grown together for about sixteen feet above the ground. We could have put one big undercut in it and fell them both at the same time, but just for the hell of it, we decided to leave a land mark for people to talk about when they saw it for years to come. We springboarded up, four boards high, each about three feet above the other and fell the one tree. Then Jim stood on the stump and I went up one more board higher and we fell the other one. This left a grotesque-looking stump for a monument for any hunter to marvel and comment about while going through the woods until it would rot down or some wood cutter fall the stump for firewood.
    Ever so often, a slot machine hustler would drop by, and Ellen and I would go on a weekend trip. Sometimes we'd go on a pretty long trip, once again, when the outfit I was cutting for would shut down for the winter. It would be fun for awhile again after working that hard labor, and even the drinks would taste good. I'll never forget this old hotel in Bly, Oregon, on a cold winter day. Andy was beating this quarter machine that was on a stand alongside of an oil floor furnace. The management had this furnace turned on full blast and I had to stand right over it in order to cover up the odd way Andy had to wiggle the handle while he spun the reels and lined up pay numbers. I thought he would never get that machine drained. I was sopping wet with sweat and it was running down into my shoes and I figured that I really earned my cut of the money out of that machine.
    We were in this Pine Cone joint, on the edge of Klamath Falls, and had just beat the dime machine and were waiting for this huge red-faced Swede logger to quit playing the quarter machine, so we could have a go at it. He had put his whole paycheck into this machine and still no jackpot. Finally, he lost his temper, picked the machine up off its stand and dropped it, time after time, until it fell all to pieces and quarters were rolling all over the floor. Several bartenders came running back to this hideout room when they heard all this noise. This big Swede looked mean at them and just kept on crawling around on his hands and knees until he had picked up the last quarter,then stalked out of the joint, still looking mean. No one had the guts to interfere or even say anything to him. They knew that he would probably have killed all of them, he was so big and mad. We really got a bang out of this show, even if it did cost us the money out of that quarter machine.
    We still would get to take a trip down around Lake Tahoe. Down through the many years, this had always been one of our favorite areas, as it was beautiful country and we had always been able to make good money there. On this trip, we stopped and beat the little lumber town of Chester on our way home. We got some real heat in about the fourth joint we beat and left town in a hurry with a carload of mad Italians in hot pursuit. I made several maneuvers in town, down alleys and around a few blocks, temporarily ditched them and headed up a crooked mountain road as fast as my little Chevy could go. A few miles north of town, as I still was going full speed and making the tires squeal on every corner, the steering wheel came off in my hand. I had put on a new horn rim a few weeks before and must have cracked the steering column, pounding on it to get the old horn rim off. My reflexes let me push hard down on the steering wheel and it caught enough on the broken edges so that I was able to steer it to a stop. I held down on the wheel and was able to make it to the next town to get it repaired. It was a good thing those men had given up the chase, or we'd have been sitting ducks.
    An other trip with that Chevy, we drove into the company lumber town of McCloud, about two in the morning, and couldn't find a room to rent and our gas tank read empty. I drove around town several times, trying to wake someone up to get some gas, but no luck. It was too cold to sleep in the car so I decided to try to make it on down to the old Highway 99, over twelve miles away. The first two miles out of town was uphill and the engine started sputtering before we got to the summit. By swerving the car back and forth across the road, I was able to pick up enough gas to just barely make it to the top, and then I kicked it out of gear and started coasting downhill. There was still an upgrade here and there, but I let the car coast at breakneck speed down steep curves on the grade and was just able to crawl over several of these hills, then away we'd go again, coasting as fast as the car would roll, out of gear, so we could make it over the next uphill. We made it down to the highway and to an all-night Richfield station on the edge of Mount Shasta City in better time than I would have with a live engine.
    During the war, I had to work six days a week, cutting timber for the Ingam Lumber Company on Grave Creek, which was about thirty miles [away,] taking the Ditch Creek shortcut. They would threaten to turn you in to the draft board if you didn't work steady. At the same time, the people around Rogue River begged me to open up our dance hall. The people that had been leasing it from us gave up their lease, as they said enough people weren't coming to their dances on account of gas rationing and so many of the young men were away in the service. I knew I couldn't make any money either, but I figured the people in our area had to have some kind of recreation. After dancing all day on a springboard, falling timber in the woods, I'd have to eat, clean up and go down and open up the hall every Saturday. After a few drinks, though, I'd have enough "artificial inspiration" to make it through the dance. It lasted till two in the morning, and then a lot of times we'd lock the doors and have our own private party till daylight with some of the soldiers from Camp White who took the place of the orchestra. One soldier would even bring a bass viol with him, and another  had an accordion that he could play as good as the guy that was on the Lawrence Welk Show in later years. We had a half-dozen of these soldiers, from the 96th division, come home with us, and I'd fix all of us ham and eggs and my wife would make homemade biscuits to go with the homemade, wild blackberry jelly. When they would get tired, they would all sack out on our living room rug. We enjoyed these boys probably more than they enjoyed us, and I've often wondered how many of them made it safely through the war. Anyway, I'd have to go down and clean up the hall on Sunday, which was quite a job, especially with the hangover that I had sometimes.
    I never had any trouble with any of these soldiers like I'd had years before with the CCC boys. Most of the CCC boys were tough city kids from the slums of New York and Chicago and they didn't mix very well with our local boys. Several times there would be two fights going on at the same time. They nicknamed our hall The Bloody Bucket. All I worried about was getting them outside the hall but the local law had their hands full on Saturday night.
    I had signed up for the draft in 1941, while working on Shasta dam, and finally in 1944 I got a notice to report for my physical for the army. Ellen's folks were running a farm for a man down the river from Sacramento, on Sherman Island near the town of Rio Vista. Ellen figured that if I was going to be gone in the army, for no telling how long, that she and the kids would like to stay with her folks, so we went down there.
    By this time, our son, Loy, was school age and started into the first grade. Everyone was sure I was going into the army and had several big going-away parties for me, but by the time they called me up to Camp Beale near Marysville for my physical, they had done away with what they call limited service. Anyway they put me through all the tests and gave me the shots. When the man was taking my fingerprints and found out my index finger on my right hand was missing, he said, "Wait a minute, you don't belong here. Your trigger finger is missing." I didn't argue with him and jumped on the bus and headed back to my wife and kids. I didn't tell the man how many deer up in Oregon that I had shot without that finger. I brought home a big sack of cartons of cigarettes that I bought at the PX before I caught the bus home, and I was mighty popular with everyone for awhile, as cigarettes that we considered good brands were rationed on the outside and hard to buy.
    That day I spent taking my physical was very amusing, and I'll always remember it. The first thing that happened was when I'd just received my shots and was stepping ahead in the line. A big burly-looking man behind me fainted and fell into me, almost knocking me down. Then I got held up for a few minutes at a desk and this sergeant behind the desk was laughing. I asked him what was so funny. This long lineup of nude men were coming around the end of about a four-foot-high wall. This sergeant said look, "You can tell how well-hung each one of these men are before they come around the end of that wall, just by the looks on their faces." Sure enough, some little short, cocky-looking man with a smirk on his face would be unbelievably well hung; maybe the next man in line would be a big fat guy and his would be shriveled up and hard to see. I got to laughing with this sergeant until my belly hurt. At another desk, they were taking urine samples. This poor young kid, just ahead of me, could only dribble a few drops in this little milk bottle. He was so bashful and scared. After a minute, with no success, the man grabbed the bottle away from the kid and filled it on up with water at the sink, handed it back to the kid, saying in a gruff voice, "Here drink this." That poor kid drank it, along with some of his own urine that was already in the bottle. I'm glad that didn't happen to me, as I would have thrown bottle and all into the man's face. On down the line a little farther, a bunch of us were lined up and a man had us put our hands on our legs, bend over as far as we could, spread our cheeks, so he could see our ass. One man in our line was bashful and would just hump his back a little and wouldn't spread his cheeks for the man, so this man grabbed him by the arm, led him down the line a ways, and stopped behind this big colored boy. He ordered this colored boy to bend over and spread his cheeks. Then he had this bashful guy bend over. Then he pointed and said in a real forceful voice, "That's what I want to see on you."
    I was real happy to get out of going into the army, especially when I found out that I would have been sent to Amarillo, Texas for basic training. By this time my sister Eunice and Andy had split and both were remarried. I found out that Andy and his new wife were living nearby at Stockton and Andy was working in the shipyards and his wife, Leona, was working in the OPA office. I went over to see them and it didn't take us long to get going on the slot machine trail again. Sacramento, Calaveras, Contra Costa and another county or two were loaded with slot machines, and we started making good money evenings or on Andy's days off. When Andy wasn't available, we'd go with his brother, Jim. Charlie and Alice had also split and Charlie and his new wife, Ethel, would come down from Oregon to go on trips with us. We stayed down there with Ellen's folks until school was out that June. I wasn't in any hurry to come back to Oregon and go back to work in the woods at that hard labor. I was making a lot better than wages where I was, and I didn't have to worry about the army drafting me any longer. We had Ellen's mother to mind our kids, and we were footloose and free to roam.
    The Lake Tahoe area still had machines, and we'd spend a weekend up there pretty often. As usual, there were several other sets of hustlers beating these machines, and quite a few of the joints were starting to get hot. Ellen and I had helped beat this joint in this town of Mokelumne Hills in Calaveras County many times. We weren't along this time with Charlie and Ethel when the bartender shot a hole in the wall right beside Charlie's ear when he had his back turned beating this half-dollar machine. The bullet came so close that it deafened Charlie in the ear for several minutes. He never pressed charges against the man, but someone in the joint must have, as the law took all the machines out of the whole county a few days later. A lot of people, besides the churches, fought the gambling in most places. That episode was probably the last straw of what they would stand for.
    By the time school was out in June, Ellen and I had a pretty nice little bankroll saved up and came on back to our little home in Oregon. While we were away, our home county of Jackson had been opened up to gambling, and this was real handy for Charlie, Ethel, Ellen, and me to make some good money right here on our doorstep. Also Klamath County, only 100 miles away, still had machines, so we had plenty of territory to keep busy in. Just the same, I went back to falling and bucking logs in the woods again, as I felt better working and not depending on slot machines for my entire living.
    By this time, Charlie and Andy had both become what I considered alcoholics. They would drink a lot when not beating machines, while I would seldom take a drink except for a beer or two on the way home from a hard day's work in the woods. Their heavy drinking would cause them to get too careless while beating machines, and it caused us to get unnecessary heat in the joints. One evening, Charlie, our women, and I were making the round of joints around Medford. The slot machine man, Si Owens, caught up with us in this joint in Central Point. He had a carload of his goons with him and intended to beat up on us. He had a gun in his hand when he opened the front door of this place and tried to get us to come outside. We knew better than to do that, but Ethel threw a hot cup of coffee in Si's face. I told the owner of the joint to call the state police or we were going to use all the bottles behind his bar for ammunition if those guys came in there after us. In a few more minutes, some state cops came and took us down to their headquarters a mile down the road. They kept us there for about a half hour and then told us to go on home, but please don't stop anywhere on the way. They were on our side and were real friendly to us. The next day, I found where Si had tried to put some lump sugar in my gas tank, but I had a strainer that kept it from going down into the tank.
    Nearly a year later, I happened to be in the Homestead Tavern in Rogue River one evening when Si came in and went into the back room to service his machines. I hadn't forgotten how he had pulled a gun on us that night and tried to put sugar in my gas tank to ruin my motor. I followed him back into this machine room, walked up to him and shook him down for a gun and then shoved him around a bit. I told him that he wasn't so brave without his gun and a carload of goons. I had to shove him around several times before he started swinging wildly at me. I covered up and waited for my opening, hitting him over an eye, and he went down into a corner. Someone had left some tools lying on the floor, and he got up with a hammer in his hand. I grabbed his hand with the hammer in it and was about to lay one on him again when the door opened and the owner and several other people came into the room and broke it up. I was glad, as the fight had came to a point where I would have had to hurt him real bad or be killed. I was satisfied, as I had opened up a deep split over his right eye. A year later when I saw him this cut had turned into an ugly scar. I had heard that he had been a gangster back East before coming to Oregon. I told him that if anything unusual ever happened to me or my family, that he was going to get the blame for it and that I knew where he lived. Several times after that I delighted in beating Si's own personal joint [the Zero Club] at the edge of Medford. I had also told him that if he caused us very much trouble, that I'd gather up about a dozen of my logger friends, furnish them free drinks to go with us, and beat every machine we came to. I could have done it too, as a lot of the loggers I knew would have been delighted to spend an exciting evening like that.
    Once, they opened up this old town of Jacksonville to gambling for the three days of a gold rush celebration. These joints had no experience with gambling or had probably never heard of such people as slot machine hustlers. It was like taking candy away from babies, and we kept making the rounds of all the places for all three of those days and took jackpots in all of them on the last day. I'll bet they wondered why they hadn't made any money, as they probably went in the hole. The Homestead in Rogue River, of course, knew that we beat machines and we never bothered them, but several times a hustler from down south would stop in to see me and I'd let them go in ahead of me and go into the back room where the machines were. Then I'd mosey in later and entertain and keep the bartender busy while they would be draining the machines. We'd meet later and I'd get my cut of the money.
    Charlie, Ethel, Ellen, and I took this trip over into Idaho, and the state had voted gambling in legal on a trial basis. It was legal statewide but optional for the towns and counties. We made a very successful round of the whole state and decided to stop and beat this big upstairs club in Nampa again on the way home. It had been pretty warm when we had beat it a few weeks before, but we thought we'd beat it just one more time. We had beat their quarter machine and Charlie had the half about dry, when they suddenly woke up and remembered us. The bartender called the slot machine men, and the owner of the joint pulled a big pistol and held it on us and .wasn't going to let us leave. Ellen busted by this man with the gun and ran down the stairway. As the man turned to try to stop her I made a step toward him, which made him forget her and train the gun back toward me. I hollered over and told the bartender that he had better call the police or someone was going to get killed over the slot machines. Someone must have called them, as they arrived in a few minutes, before the slot machine men got there. They took us down to the police station and questioned us for awhile and then locked us up for about a half-hour. The sergeant on duty was a nice guy and just locked us up for our own safety. He hadn't been out of the Marines very long and was a very understanding man. He was on our side. and when he let us go he offered me an escort till I got over the Oregon state line about ten miles away. I told him if I got a couple blocks head start that I didn't need an escort. He told me that if I ever came back through there to stop and visit with him, but to please not beat any more machines in his territory. Ellen had gone back up to our room in a hotel, after she had broke past the man with the gun and hid the piano wire tool we were using, in a Gideon Bible. Maybe no tenant of that room has found that wire to this day. It's a wonder that man hadn't shot one of us, as he turned pale and the gun in his hand was shaking like a leaf in the wind. Oh, yes, we didn't sleep in that room we had rented that night. I remember our women in the next cell to Charlie and me were singing, "I'm in the jail house now." Of all the probably hundreds of slot machine trips that I had been on, this was the first and only time that I was ever in jail over the machines.
    On another trip up into northern Idaho with Andy and Leona, the cops shook us down in Sand Point. They took us down to the station and were about to book us, when I said, "What are you going to charge us with?" The cop at the desk said, "With beating slot machines." I said, "Good, I've always wanted to make some easier money than just beating these machines. We'll sue this city for having these illegal gambling devices." I told them that I had a lawyer that said he'd be more than glad to take our case if we ever got into any trouble over slot machines. I had bluffed them out, as within a few minutes they turned us loose without booking us. They didn't.want to raise a stink or any publicity in the papers about their illegal machines, as the majority of that town's citizens were against them, and that might have been the end to all gambling and the crooked cops' cut out of it. We were glad to find out that they hadn't found our tie-up of over $200 in change that we had pushed back under the front seat of our car.
    I've thought a lot of times it was a wonder that some of these crooked cops or slot machine men didn't plant a gun on us or frame us in some way, so they could put us behind bars and get us out of their hair for a long time. I never did get in a fight in any of the thousands of joints that I helped beat during all those years, except the time I beat up on this slot machine man, right here in my hometown. I never counted the time that the gangsters beat up on Andy and me at Euclid Heights, Ohio. I didn't have a chance to fight back there. I did bluff a lot of guys because I knew not to show fear but not to get cocky either. We had the advantage, as they didn't know how tough we might be. One guy in a joint down in Arizona, that the bartender had told to watch us, got kind of cocky, so I grabbed him and made him dance with me until Andy finished draining the machines. A lot of times people in joints would like to have started a row with us, but we'd drain the machines and be on our way before they had figured us out. No one ever dreamed that we could drain their machines in such a short time.
    This young, local man got out of the Marines at the end of the war, and we teamed up, falling and bucking timber in the woods. We worked for a couple years, still using the old hand saws, before we started using power saws. Dale and I fell and bucked, probably, several million board feet of timber with that old-fashioned, hard work method. I especially remember one tree we fell. Dale came to work with a bad hangover this Monday morning, and the sun was getting pretty hot by the time we walked up to this big yellow pine. It was about four feet in diameter and didn't have any lean that we could see. We put the undercut in and chopped out the chips, then started on the back cut. For some reason or other, we got the back-cut started with a curve and soon hit real thick, sticky pitch. Dale was sick anyway, and he was on the hot, sunny side of the tree. We couldn't seem to get enough oil splattered on the saw to cut that thick pitch, and pulling the saw over that curved stump made it all we could do to keep the saw moving back and forth real slow-like. I could hear Dale puffing clear on the other side of the tree, and then he'd say, "Stop!" and I'd hear him puking around there. It made it tougher yet when we'd stop the saw, as it would allow the pitch to accumulate even more. Besides all this trouble, we had to wedge the back-cut up about two inches before we could get the tree to fall. That thick pitch oozed up out of that stump and ran over the edges for a long time after the tree had fallen. I was all pooped out from all this exertion, so I know what an ordeal it was for him with that terrible hangover. After all these years, we still talk about this one tree when we meet on the street.
    Soon after Dale and I started using power saws we got this job falling and bucking this big patch of timber on a five-mile right-of-way for a new road. The ground was pretty steep in most places, and they wanted the timber fell back and forth, parallel with the road. That way they could yard the logs up onto wide shoulders with cats, load them on trucks and haul them to the mill. The two men that had the job to start with were inexperienced or lazy. They would let about half of the trees fall straight down the hill and they'd slide down out of reach of the winch line on the back of a cat. They soon got fired, and that's when Dale and I got the job. This little Rock Creek was close to our road in places, so every time it was handy we'd take our lunch down and call it a picnic. We'd take a six-foot piece of leader line and some flies and catch little mountain trout out of this creek and then throw them back in. Sometimes we'd catch the same one over and over. When we'd find a yellowjacket nest, close to the ground, all we'd have to do was tell the powder-monkey about it and he loved to blow them up for us with a stick of dynamite.
    One day the boss had been to town and came speeding back up the road in the middle of the afternoon, jumped out of his pickup, real excited-like, and hollered, "Everyone get the hell out of the woods; there's a seventy-mile-an-hour wind coming in off the coast." I threw my power saw into our pickup and didn't lose any time heading down the road. Before we had hardly got moving, the wind was weaving and bending trees over and we could hear dead trees (snags) falling all around us. About a mile down the road, we were stopped by several of these snags that had fallen across the road. Before we had barely got out of our pickup there was a lineup of a half-dozen pickups [and] several loaded or unloaded logging trucks backed up behind us. Dale and I were the only ones in all those rigs that had thought to throw in a power saw. It was up to us to make cuts in these snags. Then an empty logging truck hooked a chain on his front bumper and pulled them back out of the way. All the time that we were clearing the road, this patch of snags still standing above the road were weaving around, and we expected another one or two to come crashing down across the road on us at any second. We were very lucky, as no more fell in the half hour it took to clear the road, and every rig got through and on home safely. The next day we found out that several more snags had fallen across the road before that storm passed on through.
    After Dale and I had finished clearing the right-of-way for this road, we got a job cutting timber for this big outfit. They had bought the timber on this big tract that our new road had opened up. While we were cutting, a pair of fallers on the strip next to us had left a big rotten tree standing and had knocked all the green limbs off it by trees they had fell as they worked their way up the hill. This had made a snag out of it, and the bullbuck came by and said to me, "Towse, if you will walk over and fall that snag, I'll pay you double scale for it." There happened to be a big root left, tight up behind it that had been cut off of a windfall. I had to climb up on these roots about fifteen feet above the ground, lean out with my big McCulloch saw, which weighed all of ninety pounds counting the forty-inch bar, and put the undercut in. This tree had a real heavy lean, downhill, so I had to put an extra deep undercut in and corner cut first one side and then the other. It had to be at a sharp angle on the back cut, as I sure didn't want to barber chair that tree while I was in such a precarious position. When the tree fell, it broke a lot of wood and there was such a terrible pressure that it even split and shattered the stump underneath. As it fell and pushed this tall stump back into these high roots I was standing on, it disturbed a nest of yellowjackets somewhere underneath. They came boiling up out of those roots in a cloud and started stinging me. I didn't want to risk throwing this nearly new $500 saw down and breaking it up on some rocks below, so I half carried and drug it down off those roots till I got it laid safely on the ground. By this delay, I had been stung dozens of times and took off on a run around the hill with a cloud of them following and stinging me unmercifully. I must have run two hundred yards around the hill before I lost them and stopped with my breath coming in gasps. Dale had been watching me and was laughing real loud at all this entertainment I was putting on for him. I was standing there, not having all my wind back yet, when here were yellowjackets boiling up around my feet and stinging me again. I had to take off and run a long ways again before I outdistanced them. All this time I could hear Dale going "Ha! Ha! Ha!" I had stopped in another nest in a hole in the ground. I figured that I had more than earned the double scale I got for falling that snag.
    Another time that Dale got a big laugh out of me was when that big saw got caught on something and kicked back out of the cut while I was bucking. I started running backwards to get my balance and ended up thirty feet away on my butt with this big saw on my lap. Again, I heard this "Ha! Ha! Ha!" from Dale, who was watching across a little draw from me. It seemed like it was just my luck that he was always nearby and looking when anything amusing to him would happen to me. Of course, I got a laugh at him a few times when he'd get into a nest of hornets or yellowjackets. I've said, many times, that I'd like to have a dollar for every time I've been stung by yellowjackets. It would pay for an extended vacation for me to anywhere in the world. I've known several men that tried to work in the woods that were allergic to any kind of a bee sting and would turn blue and have to be rushed to the nearest hospital. Also a lot of men would get poison oak real bad. I sure wouldn't have been trying to work in the woods and exposing myself to all these problems if I were they.
    It was a good thing that Dale was working nearby this one day. I had bucked this log in the top of this tree and rather than carry my ax up to the next log to be cut, thirty-two feet away, I tossed it up the hill. I packed my saw up there, and when I cut this next log off my chain caught and made the saw kick back just enough to make me rock backwards into these limbs on the side hill. I felt a stinging sensation on one cheek of my rear end and felt warm blood running down my leg. My double-bitted ax that I always kept razor sharp was lying in these limbs. I had forgotten about throwing it and I had sat back on it. I hollered to Dale and he came over and we made a sort of diaper out of our T -hirts to tie around the cut to stop all the blood flow we could, and Dale drove me to the nearest doctor, thirty miles away. That ax had cut a gash four inches long and a couple inches deep, which gaped wide open. I tried to go back to work a little too soon and pulled some stitches and had to be sewed up a second time. I have a lot of scars on my body from ax and saw cuts, but I am lucky at that as several of my friends and a lot of acquaintances were killed in the woods during the years that I spent there. I've had my share of close calls though.
    I fell this tree just before lunch time and decided to limb and measure the logs in it on the way towards my lunch bucket. I was pulling the tape along with one hand and whacking these small, bushy limbs off with the ax with my other hand. Just as I clipped this extra bushy limb, it came alive and if my reflexes hadn't been working real good, I'd have had my head torn clear off. This bushy limb was all that had been holding this slender fir sapling that was bent over in a U shape, and the broken end of this sapling hit me in the mouth as I was going with the punch. It broke my upper plate of false teeth and bloodied my nose, but if it had caught me under the chin with a square lick, it would have killed me for sure. When that sixty- or seventy-foot-tall sapling straightened up, it stood there shaking for a minute or two from all this released tension. I was mad that it had happened before I ate my lunch, as it was hard for me to drink coffee, let alone eat sandwich.
    Another close one came when I fell this tree across a dead fir top that was lying crosswise on the ground, just below it. As the butt end of this tree hit the ground, it slid into this dead fir top, broke it and the top end which was against a laurel tree, came back up behind me, breaking it across my back. My reflexes saved me from getting my back broken, as I had turned and was going away with the punch. It broke across my back and raised a welt an inch high, angling upward across my back and shoulder blade. I sat down and moaned with the pain and bent my back, back and forth, several times and knew it wasn't broken, although it felt like it was. I sat there in pain for about fifteen minutes and could feel my back getting stiff, so I got up and forced myself to go back to work. I felt later that if I hadn't made myself do this, I would have had to take several days off. I was rather stiff and sore for several days but worked without too much discomfort.
    I could go on for many pages to tell about all the cuts, bruises and close calls that I had in the woods. One spectacular mishap was when I was falling timber on this real steep ground with this Ward Hutton. We were falling with a big Mercury Disston power saw that weighed about 120 pounds with a five-foot bar and chain on it. The outfit we were falling for wanted all the timber fell straight down the hill, as the ground was as steep as a cow's face. Those trees would all slide clear to the bottom and out onto flatter ground where the cats could get to them. Ward was a weight lifter and could stick the dogs of that big heavy saw into the bark of a tree about his chin height. We'd take turns; he'd fall five trees on the motor end and then I'd take my turn and fall my five and he'd be on the stinger handle on the end of the bar. I'd have to get the motor up on one knee and lucky to get it over chest high. This one big fir tree was a quarter of a mile up this steep hill and was standing so straight that we couldn't find any lean to it. We put the undercut as high in the downhill side as we could lift the saw. We were nearly two feet above and in the grass roots when we started our back cut. We sawed straight into the back and got some wedges started in the cut as soon as we had room behind the bar. We sawed up to what we thought was about two or three inches of wood left behind our undercut. We shut the saw motor off, took the handle off the end of the bar, pulled it out of the cut and set the saw back of the tree. I started taking up on the wedges which didn't feel too tight. The wedges felt strange. They drove pretty easy but still weren't lifting the tree. All of a sudden that whole tree slid off the stump, still standing straight up. It slid down that steep hill for about fifty feet, still standing straight up and down. The butt end plowed a furrow a couple of feet deep in the soil, then it came to a stop, balanced there for a few seconds and started falling back up the hill, right at us. We ran for our lives around the hill. The tree landed right alongside of its stump and then started sliding backwards down the hill. I can still remember the clickety-click noise those limbs made as they broke coming by the stump, as the tree picked up speed. It slid backwards clear to the bottom, digging a deep ditch all the way with its butt end. We were so far above the undercut with our back cut we had misjudged how much wood to hold. With the crooked grain in the butt of that tree, we had really cut it clear off, letting it slide off the stump where we had the bottom of the undercut sniped up at an angle. We had a cedar do the same thing to us one time when we had misjudged the wood we had left, but I cussed it on down the hill instead of letting it fall back towards us.
    This Ward Hutton was quite a guy, and I had a lot of fun working with him that one season. He was a dead shot with a rifle and could kill a running deer with a snap shot through a scope about every time. I never hunted with anyone else that could do that as consistently as he did. He had a pet wild bobcat he had found as a baby in the middle of the road and raised. There was a bunch of tall elm trees in the yard where he lived, and he'd back off far enough to see into the tops of them. In just a few minutes he'd bring back as many birds as the shots he'd fired with his .22 rifle. These he fed to this bobcat. He would let this bobcat out of the pen every day and it would romp and play with his big red Irish Setter dog. They'd chase each other around and around, all over the place, and the bobcat would get his daily exercise in this way. Ward had it for a long time after it was full grown and it still remained a gentle pet. I think he finally gave it to a zoo, though.
    Ward was real fastidious about his eating habits. One day he brought a nice ripe cantaloupe to work with him. At lunch time,he said, "Harold, if you've got a knife to cut this in two with, I'll divide with you." He cut it with my knife and we were both starting to enjoy that delicious melon when I happened to think, and said, "I just remembered that I cut the rattles off that rattlesnake we killed in the road on our way home yesterday and I didn't wash the knife." He turned white and threw his half of that melon, that he'd just taken a few bites out of, as far as he could. Another time on a real hot afternoon we ran out of drinking water. I had remembered seeing a black muddy spot in the ground, a short distance around the hill, so I went there and scooped out a hole and let this cold spring water start seeping into it. In about a half hour, when our tongues were both hanging out from thirst, I said, "Ward, how would you like a nice cold drink of water?" He thought I was kidding as we were a way up on this dry hillside, but I finally talked him into following me around the hill. He was still skeptical even after he saw me lie down and drink deep from this new cold spring I had made. The only thing I hadn't told him was that I had seen this salamander half buried in the black mud right by my nose while I was drinking. Ward was so dry that he overcame his aversion, laid down and was gulping this cold, clear water. All of a sudden, he made a leap to one side, rolled over a couple of times, and got to his feet. He had spotted this salamander right there by his nose. I know that I couldn't have moved as fast as he did even if it had been a live, coiled rattlesnake.
    This was about the time that a bunch of these new jet planes had been based at a field over by Klamath Falls Marine air base. No one was within a quarter of a mile of me. I had just fell a tree and was ambling my way over to another one and thinking what a nice spring day it was. In the middle of this reverie, there was this loud explosion right over my head. It startled me so I gave a jump, dropped my power saw and ran a few feet. It took several seconds for me to figure out that I had witnessed my first sonic boom. I had read about them but was unprepared for that first one. I heard a droning noise over head, one clear day, looked up and saw this huge-looking plane, at a high altitude, going over. I couldn't believe the size, but finally figured out, that it was really two planes hooked together, one smaller one refueling the other. Those jet planes, based at Klamath Falls, loved to fly over our Rogue Valley to make a lot of their booms. I never did get used to them enough not to jump or be startled.
    One time, when Dale and I were working together and had stopped to eat lunch, we got to talking about the possibility of a man on the moon. We were wandering what good would come of it if they did. Neither one of us said anything for several minutes, but Dale had been in deep thought and said, "I wonder if there would be any good fishing up there." It struck me funny as Dale had always been an avid fisherman and he was thinking that if there was a good fishing hole up there, it would all be worthwhile. I liked to go on fishing trips all right, but after I'd catch a few I was always content to watch someone else catch them. I loved just the being out of doors, especially in nice weather. It was the same way with deer hunting trips. I liked to get a deer to eat, as I love venison, but the trip and being out camping with my son or a group of friends was the best part of it. Dale had been raised here on the Rogue River and was an expert fisherman. He would catch a salmon or a steelhead if anyone could. If I couldn't catch a fish in just a little while, I didn't have the patience like some people have to keep on fishing for hours without catching anything.
    One thing about all the time I worked in the woods, I never had to cut much wood for our fireplace. I would bring home chunks of broken fir and pine limbs and big slabs of thick fir bark that I could make smaller with a few licks of the ax. That kind of fuel couldn't be beat for making heat. For quite a few years I raised a pig or two to butcher in the fall and would salt cure my own bacon and ham. I also raised fryer and laying chickens, ducks, rabbits and a garden. We hardly ever ran out of venison in the deep freeze, and we ate fresh fish pretty often. We always ate pretty good at a minimum of cost.
    I raised these Cornish chickens for awhile, which are a game breed. One day a big hawk dove down and grabbed one of our fryer chickens and started to fly off with it. Our big Cornish rooster flew about four feet into the air and hit this hawk on the fly, making him drop the chicken, and then he got the hawk on the ground and against the chicken wire fence and really gave him a flogging. The hawk finally got away but flew away with a wobble and was dropping feathers as far as we could see him.
    The chicken survived with a bunch of feathers and a chunk of meat out of his back where the hawk's talons had ripped him.
    I found one of our tame mallard ducks dead and half-eaten one morning, so I laid him up on the top of wooden post and set a steel trap on top of him. The next morning, the trap with a big piece of wood tied to it was missing. I found this huge owl up against our chicken pen fence, where he had dragged trap, wood and all. I could see that his leg wasn't broken, so I threw my coat over him and freed him from the trap. He flew across the creek and, with a little difficulty, lit on a limb of a big pine tree. He never came back to bother my ducks again, though.
    We were sitting out on our front porch one warm summer's day and visiting with some friends when a neighbor's billy goat came into our driveway. I got up and went over to shoo him away but he wouldn't shoo, so I made the mistake of kicking him in the rear end. This made him mad and he reared up and came at me with his head down. To protect myself, I grabbed him by a horn and was afraid to turn loose. I half drug him out of our driveway and on up the road for about a hundred yards with our company urging me on and getting a big bang out of my trouble. I finally got the gate open, shoved the goat through it and shut the gate behind him. Before I could get away from there, he reared up and urinated all over me. I came running home, gagging from that terrible smell and shucking my clothes off on the way to the shower. Our company hadn't been so amused for years and nearly went into hysterics, laughing so long and hard. I hadn't smelled anything so bad since the time that I was shaking an egg from under this setting hen to see if it was rotten. Sure enough, it was, and blew up in my face. That time, I washed my face in some old dirty water in the chicken watering trough before jerking my clothes off on the way to the house and the shower. My wife was the only one around to get a laugh out of that ordeal.
    This same company was visiting us when I had just bought a new Roto-hoe garden tractor. It was a combination cultivator and lawn mower, and the instructions with it showed a pretty young girl changing it over from one attachment to the other, with the greatest of ease, in just a few minutes. It always took me at least a half hour to make the change, along with a lot of cussing. Anyway, I started trying to plow the garden with it, and all I could get it to do was to dig holes in one spot. I would keep jerking it out of one of these holes and just get it going, then it would dig another hole. This friend of ours, Pat, got to laughing so hard that she laid down on the lawn, rolling over and over, out of control. Pat's husband, Charlie, was sitting on our daveno, napping with his chin on his hands, when for some reason or other our pet parakeet flew out of his open cage and across the room, to land on Charlie's nose. He woke up, slapping at that bird as fast as he could. I got to laugh at someone else for a change.
    I forgot to shut the chicken house door one night, and a raccoon took this chance to raid our chickens. After that, the survivors wouldn't roost inside anymore. They were half-breed banties and could fly good. So they scattered out and started roosting in different trees all over the place. Every night, we'd wake up and hear some of those chickens squawking as the coons would climb up the trees and pick one or two off. Finally, we only had one rooster and hen left out of our original fifty chickens. I noticed that they had gone to roost in our big weeping willow tree that night and, sure enough, they woke me up with their squawking, about daylight, the next morning. I grabbed my 30-30 deer rifle and ran outside in just my shorts, and it was just breaking daylight enough so that I could make out a dark shape up in the tree. I couldn't see the sights yet but just fired at that dark shape as best I could and down it came. I had dead-centered this big old mother coon. I was sorry later as I could see she was nursing some babies. They probably starved to death without a mother. Losing two more .chickens wouldn't have been much worse.
    Late one night, a big noise and commotion in our back yard woke me up and I rushed out the back door and turned the flood lights on. There were five young raccoons fighting in an oak tree. I hollered real loud and made a run towards them and they all came scurrying down out of that tree. When they came to the 25-foot-high creek bank they didn't take time to climb down it, but went sailing straight out into the air. I could hear them going plop in the water down below as they hit bottom. It took me quite awhile to quit laughing enough to go back to sleep.
    We had a beautiful swimming hole in the creek right behind our house, about 75 feet from the back door. It was seven or eight feet deep out in the middle, with a sandy bottom. The water was so clear in the summertime that you could count the grains of sand on the bottom. I built wooden steps down the bank to it, with a platform. I built a gangplank out of long fir poles which I could raise straight up and down in the winter when the creek was high. I used a pulley, hung high in a tree, and a cable attached to this hand winch on top of the bank. In summer, this gangplank served as a bridge across the creek and a diving board for the kids. Our boy and girl would spend the biggest part of every day down there and learned to swim and dive like otters. My wife would have the kitchen window open, and the minute she couldn't hear kids laughing and hollering, she would step out the back door to check if all was well. Most days our kids would have a bunch of neighbor kids for company.
    They were really popular with this nice swimming hole. I used to envy our kids, as all I had to play in when I was a kid was our shallow stock tank by the windmill or some old dirty stinky lake back there in southeastern Colorado. I didn't learn to anymore than mud crawl until I was sixteen years old and out in California. I think you have to start pretty young to be a real good swimmer. I can swim some, but I've always had a fear" What if I had to jump in and try to save someone from drowning? I'd drown both of us, for sure.
    In summer when I'd come home black from falling old growth firs all day that had charcoal on the bark, it was nice to take a bar of soap and a towel and take a bath in the kids' swimming hole. One night, I took a flashlight down and showed Myrna all those dozens of crawdads crawling around on the bottom. She said "Eek!" but that never stopped her from going swimming. Once in awhile, you could hear a bunch of kids hollering when a water snake would brush against one of them in the water. After our son, Loy, got a few years older, he and some of his buddies would go camping on one of our nearby wooded hills or in some old miner's deserted shack. He could go fishing in the creek behind our house and catch trout, "in season or out." He liked to open the season a little early every spring before other fishermen fished all the holes out. In fact, our little place was a kid's paradise. My wife used to say, "Why don't you make your son stay home once in awhile and mow the lawn or do some other chores?" and I'd say, " I want him to lead a kid's life and have still more fun than I did when I was a boy." It seemed like I was always so busy working to make a living that I didn't spend as much time as I should have with my kids. I loved to sit and watch them have fun, evenings, after work or on weekends down at the swimming hole. I climbed away out on a big maple limb that overhung the swimming hole and tied a rope with knots in the end of it, to hang down nearly to the water. They could pull it over to the bank and swing away out and drop "kerplop" into the water.
    A huge tree root lodged in the creek just below our swimming hole from a high water one winter. That spring, one of my nephews, a couple of years younger than I, stopped by for a visit. He had worked some in the woods up in Washington state and said he was a powder monkey. Merle said, "If you'll get me a dozen sticks of dynamite, I'll blast that stump out of there for you." He must not have got those sticks tamped in good enough, as instead of blowing the stump apart, it blew out and hurled a bunch of good-sized rocks high in the air. Several of them came down with a loud crash on top of our house. Ellen came boiling out of the back door when the rocks quit falling, mad as a wet hen. She said, "You must have put two sticks under those roots to make it do that." We never did tell her that it was a dozen sticks. I waited for the next high water to get rid of that stump.
    My wife, Ellen, had a good-sized temper when aroused. One time while I was cleaning out some shelves under a brick chimney I found this nest of little naked mice. I remembered that Ellen was taking a nap back on our screened-in-porch that warm summer's day. I couldn't resist taking that handful of mice, lifting up an edge of one of her big-legged shorts and throwing those mice as far as I could up her pant leg. Her reflexes were working real good, as before I could move out of range she had slapped me real hard several times across the face. It was so funny though that I figured it was worth getting slapped.
    Time kept marching on, and our kids were growing up too fast. It was fun going to their school doings. We'd go watch Loy take part in basketball, track and other sports and Myrna cheerlead. They had a lot of friends, and after games we'd have a houseful of kids. A lot of times they'd dance to those old 45 records. They both went all twelve of their grades and graduated from high school here in Rogue River. Loy had gone a few months to a California school when he was in the first grade when we stayed with Ellen's folks while I thought I was going to be drafted into the army.
    A friend of mine, another logger, had been over in Eastern Oregon and worked one summer helping a man run a pack train of.horses, taking people into the Mink Lake basin to camp and fish. There were about fifteen lakes within a few miles' radius and most of them had fish in them. Syd kept telling us about this good fishing, so finally a bunch of us loggers got organized and let Syd lead us into these beautiful lakes. As soon as it was legal to fish in these high lakes, the first of June, we took off work for a week and drove over to La Pine, a little town about fifty miles south of Bend. We left after work on Friday. First, we stopped at Chemult, where an ex-Rogue River man ran a bar. We got to drinking and didn't leave there till his bar closed at 2 a.m. Then we went onto La Pine,where we turned off left and drove another twenty miles on a washboardy gravel logging road. We parked just before reaching Elk Lake, cooked some breakfast over a camp fire, and started this eight-mile hike that took us up over this 6,000-foot ridge and then down to the 5,000-foot level of these lakes. We all had at least fifty-pound packs with bedroll on our backs. Before we had gone very far, there was snow on the trail. We were the first people to use it. This was eight miles by using the cutoff that Syd knew about, and we crossed the Skyline Trail on the ridge, which starts down into California and goes clear to the Canadian border. There were still five or six feet of snow on the ground up on this ridge. We headed for Cliff Lake, where the CCC boys had built a shelter before World War II, and that was where we made our camp for the week. From this headquarters, we would hike to any of these lakes we chose every day. We caught mostly eastern brook trout but some rainbow. The rainbow were the most fun to catch, but the pink-meated brook trout were the tastiest to eat. We were allowed, by law, to take home ten fish under twelve inches and ten over twelve inches per day and a two-day limit, which we had no trouble filling. Seven or eight loggers could eat a lot of fish in a week's time. We had plenty of snow banks to keep our fish fresh.
    All of us took in a fifth of whiskey each, which would loosen our tongues every night for some tall tales around the camp fire.
    I remember this one story Syd told about when he helped bring the pack train with tourists in to fish. He said that a bear came into camp one night, and he turned on a flashlight and hollered to scare this bear away. He scared it so bad that it ran square into the side of the cook tent, where the cook was sleeping. The bear got tangled up in the tent in his mad rush to get out of there, tore the whole tent down and dragged it away, scattering dishes and groceries along the way. You can imagine how that poor cook felt, being so rudely awakened.
    That first trip into these lakes was quite an ordeal for me. I didn't have the right kind of backpack. I used an old army surplus parachute bag I had, instead. It didn't fit my back at all, and I had raw sores on my back before we had gone very far and the whole trip in was miserable. This on top of falling timber in the woods the day before, up all night with no sleep and drinking a lot of beer and whiskey, which I was out of the habit of. Anyway, I felt like taking a nap soon after we arrived and set up camp. I was sleeping so sound that when Syd came back from fishing, a few hours later, he said he went over and felt of me to see if I was alive.
    We had so much fun on this trip that we made it an annual affair. The least members in our party was five and one year; nine of us went in. I think that I went six years in a row. The second year I let my son, Loy, go along. He was so eager to get in there that he would go away ahead of the rest of us and pick out the trail by the blazes marked high in trees, After a while, when he had been away up the trail ahead of us, I saw him walking at a fast pace back down the trail toward us. I asked him why he was coming back. and he said he had seen fresh bear tracks crossing the trail. He didn't get far ahead of us after that. We would see one of those bushy-tailed tree martens now and then, and after we got into the lake basin we saw elk, deer and lots of chipmunks and camp robber jays around camp. There was a lot of these whistling marmots that lived in rock piles along the lake shores. I saw one old doe, eating our fish heads that we had thrown out. I never knew before that a deer would eat any kind of meat. They must have tasted salty to her.
    These camp-robbing jays would hang around and dive down and grab any morsel of food right off our plate if we weren't alert. One year, I took a fifth of Four Roses whiskey. The ads had always said it was good stuff and I, not being an expert, took it along on the trip. The guys all made fun of me for bringing that sour stuff along and wouldn't touch it, so the last day in camp I decided to get rid of it and not pack it back out of there. I soaked some hotcakes and cooked oatmeal that we had left over from breakfast in this whiskey and put it out on a stump for these greedy birds. Sure enough, they got busy and fought over who was going to get to eat the most of this handout. In just a short time, there was a bunch of drunk birds, squawking. Several were hanging upside down by one foot from limbs in the trees. We had a lot of fun watching them, but I'll bet a lot of those poor birds had some awful hangovers.
    We found an old rubber raft in an old trapper's log cabin on an island out in the middle of one small lake. We waded out to this cabin and there was a bear hide nailed on a wall. A few years later, there was a picture of this cabin, with the bear I think, in a Field and Stream magazine. We took this raft down to Porky Lake, a mile or so away, and somehow got it blown up enough to float. Three or four of us dared to get into it, we paddled out into the lake a ways and started fly-fishing. The other guys started catching fish right away on flies, but I hadn't fly fished much and was having trouble getting enough line out. I was whipping my pole furiously back and forth to get more line out, when a big trout grabbed my fly as it touched the water behind me. What a surprise that was, and I nearly fell out of the raft backwards. We were catching fish so fast that the rest of our party on the bank, who weren't catching anything, started begging us to come in and let them have a turn in the raft. We kept telling them to go to hell for a while till we caught quite a few more fish.
    One year a big fellow we called Blimp, on account of his being so big, took off work to go with us on this trip. He had a logging outfit, and I was falling and bucking timber for him at the time. I remember when we were weighing our packs, getting ready to go, Blimp weighed in at 244 pounds. He seemed to be in good shape. He skinned his own cat in the woods and hiked around in the hills quite a bit, so we thought nothing of his going along with us. I noticed that he sweat a lot and needed to sit down and blow quite often while hiking in with that pack on his back. He made it in and felt like fishing a little while after we got in and made camp. He ate a big supper that evening, slept good and ate a big breakfast of hotcakes and fish the next morning. After breakfast, we all set out to fish in Vera Lake, a couple miles away. We hadn't hiked very far when Blimp started complaining of a bad heartburn. Pretty soon, he said he felt sick and decided to go back to camp. I was going to go back with him, but Don Dimick said, "No," that he would, as I hadn't got to do any fishing yet. They headed back towards camp, and the rest of us went on over to this lake and started catching fish. We were whooping and hollering and having a gay time, when here came Don, looking rather pale. He said, "Blimp is dead!" We were all stunned. We all reeled in our fishing line and I started back down the trail with Don. Blimp had had this heart attack while sitting down resting with his back against a tree. The snow there had melted down to bare grass. I helped Don drag him up onto a snow bank and we threw a coat over him.
    Two of our bunch, Rusty and Dale, started hiking out to get some kind of help. We had to get Blimp out of there. Later, they said, the nearest helicopter they could find was a small one out of Portland. They wanted $100 per hour and weren't sure they could lift that much weight at that high altitude. They didn't figure anyone could afford that, and the army wouldn't send a helicopter in after a dead man. They could have lied and said Blimp was still alive and then it would have been simple to get him out. Anyway, about ten the next morning here came this man on a horse, leading a pack horse with a rubber sack tied on the pack saddle. It was a lucky thing that Don and I hadn't known enough to straighten the body out as he fit across the packsaddle doubled up, and it would have been almost impossible to have loaded him straightened out stiff. I felt sorry for that poor pack horse before we got back to the road. Several times he would break through the snow where a hollow place had formed from a bent-over sapling underneath. The horse fell clear over on his side many times, and we would have to jump on his head and hold him while we untied the body, got the horse on his feet again and then reload. Rusty and Dale hadn't come back in with the man and pack horse and were waiting out at the road for us with an ambulance. There were three full packs left back at the camp. Rusty and Dale hadn't taken theirs out when they went for help and Blimp's was still in there. We hadn't started to use any of the supplies that we had packed in the day before. We didn't want to leave all those groceries and the three sleeping bags for some later fishermen to claim. So, Rusty, and a coach Lawrence, that had taught some of our guys in high school years before, and I headed back in to camp to get this stuff. We arrived back at the camp pretty late in the afternoon and had planned to stay all night before hiking back out again; but after resting a little while, decided to head back out. We were hungry, and Rusty and I were going to load up on a bunch of food, but this coach wouldn't let us. He said it would cause us to have cramps with all this exertion we had to go through yet that day. He shook up a mixture of eggs and powdered milk and had us each drink about a quart of that for the strength we were going to need. We took a gas lantern and flashlight in our hands, and we hadn't gone very far before it began to get dark. With all the traffic on the trail in those two days, it wasn't hard to stay on it. It was around midnight when we got out to the road again. Someone had driven my pickup home, so I had to drive Blimp's old Dodge pickup. We stopped at an all-night cafe to eat after we got out on the main highway and got the gas tank filled. Then we went on non-stop the 200 miles to Rogue River. I didn't lose any time getting to bed when I got home, and my wife said she didn't think that I turned over or moved for the next eight hours. I had gotten out of my sleeping bag early the day before, hiked that eight miles out with a full pack, while helping with the pack horse, then back in with no pack, and out again with a full pack and then drove home, all within less than twenty hours' time. I must have been in pretty fair shape, when I think back about it. A bunch of us went in to those lakes one more year after that. Blimp dying in there kind of took part of the fun out of it. Our son had gone along on most of these trips, and it was good experience and a lot of adventure for a young boy like him. He took along one of his buddies on one trip.
    My mother and old George had bought a forty-acre, dry land farm a few miles out of Grants Pass, and I helped build them a small house on it. Ellen, the kids, and I would go over to spend a few hours with them almost every weekend. The only thing was that we had to watch our car real close, as their goats loved to jump up on the hood and stand clear on top. One time we saw five, all buck, deer bedded down under some oak trees about 150 feet from their house right in the daytime. All five were a three-pointer or better. In Oregon, we just count the points on one side. Back East, they count the total number, and I guess some of the western states count them that way, too.
    Ellen's folks had bought a place near Sacramento, and Ellen would take the kids on the bus with her from near babies on up, to go see them once or twice a year. Sometimes I would take them down in the car if I had a few days off work. My sister Eunice and her number 3 husband, Howard, moved back to Eunice's old place in Rogue River. Howard had just got out of the Seabees. He was a brick mason and a plaster and stucco man. I went into partnership with him for a year right after the war so I could have a change from working in the woods. He was also a fair carpenter, and I knew a little about building by this time so for something to do between jobs we built a "spec" house to sell on a piece of Eunice's property. We got along fine and made some pretty good money together, but the union kept heckling us. We were a small business and only hired one old man in his seventies to help us. This plasterer's union steward was a big Swede named Johnson, and he'd come around and threaten us with bodily harm if we didn't join their union. His attitude made me all the more reluctant to join.
    This man hired Howard and me to tear up a big cement slab that someone had poured on the ground without even clearing off the foot-high grass first. It had all cracked real bad. We busted it all out and had a truck haul it away. Then we had the job of repouring it right and building a big cement block home over it for the man. We had just re-poured this big floor that morning and were out on the slab, on planks, finishing the cement with trowels, when here came this big Swede. He grabbed this old man we had working for us by the shoulder, wheeled him around pretty rough-like and said, "Where's your card?" The old man, John, said, "I'm past the age where I need a card." I was getting mad, and when he turned and asked me where my card was, I answered, "I don't need your damned card and you'd better get the hell off our job." This Swede ran out on the plank and started hitting at me. When I raised up real fast from this kneeling position, everything turned black before my eyes for a few seconds. I still don't know how I got to my feet, backed that man the length of that plank and took his glasses off with out getting hit. All this time, he was throwing a flurry of punches. His arms were as big as my legs, and it would have been like being kicked by a mule if he had landed one of those haymakers on me. I guarded myself and waited for an opening and laid one on him. He got up real slow-like, and I just kind  of started slapping him around when all of a sudden another man was coming up behind me with a piece of cement block in his hand. Old John saw him and pointed a hose with a high-pressure nozzle at the man and ordered him to drop the cement, which he did. Then a woman was going to do the same thing and John threatened her the same way. We found out this Swede lived across the street and that he was the one that had made the bad cement pour, and he was furious that we had taken his job away from him. He never came on any more of our jobs after that. I was glad when I found out he had lost two of his front teeth, which compensated me some for my skinned knuckles. Howard and I went to Medford to a union meeting and explained what had happened, and they sort of apologized to us but we never did join. I heard the Swede got fired over that deal, as the union didn't approve of his methods either.
    Howard and Eunice got itchy feet, sold their real estate in Rogue River and headed for Alaska. They bought a new Chevy pickup to pull this overloaded small trailer house up the ALCAN Highway to Anchorage. Howard went to work as a carpenter for the first year, and then they bought some ground nearby at Spenard and built a home and then a restaurant they called the Tip Top. They did well at this, and a short time later Howard built this big 60x80-foot Red Barn dance hall, about eight miles out on the Seward highway. They did so well that they ended up staying for nine years before they sold out and came back to Rogue River again and built a new house on some land they bought.
    As soon as Howard and Eunice left for Alaska, I went back to work in the woods again. By this time, my old partner in the woods had inherited a 320-acre piece of ground with a lot of good timber on it. He and this Syd that I mentioned earlier on the fishing tips went into partnership, bought an RD6 cat and started logging this timber by themselves. I got to do most of their falling and bucking. They logged together for several years, and then Dale bought Syd out and logged for many years on his own until his retirement. I kept working for him for quite a few years, as we always got along well. Dale and I had put in a lot of hours falling and bucking timber together. In fact Syd, Dale, and I had camped out one summer in the Dead Indian plateau country and had cut our money that we made three ways. This timber we worked in was about halfway between Ashland and Klamath Falls and about 75 miles from home. We would leave home real early Monday morning and come home early Friday afternoons. We pitched our tent, which we cooked and ate in, next to a forestry guard station. We slept on cots and in sleeping bags under a big canvas stretched between trees. Dale and I did all the falling, and then we'd drop back and help Syd catch up on the bucking end when we got too far ahead.
    This young college kid that was on the guard station that summer told us that he had seen a bear and that he was going back out with an old gun he had and try to shoot it. He came back to camp after dark, and we asked him if he had seen the bear. He said it had stood up in some tall bushes and was looking at him and he shot at its head, and it fell down out of sight. He was afraid to go into these tall bushes to see if he had killed it. Syd and Dale had killed and dressed out bears before, so they volunteered to go back out with him to find this bear and, of course, I tagged along. The kid had thought to leave a big rock on a stump along the road to mark where he had shot from. It was kind of scary, walking out into that thick brush with a little flashlight, as we didn't know but what that bear might be wounded and mean. We found the bear, dead, within a few minutes, but couldn't find a bullet hole where he had been hit. Syd gutted the bear out and we hauled him back to camp and hung him up in the doorway of the garage behind the guard station. Syd skinned the hind legs down a ways and told the kid how to take care of it the rest of the way by himself. This kid had never even killed or skinned out a deer by himself, but he did a real good job of skinning out even the feet, as he wanted to have the hide made into a rug with the feet and head left on. The next evening when we came in from work, he had the job all done. The reason we couldn't find where the bear was shot was that the bullet had hit dead center in one ear and had killed the bear instantly.
    Dale and I had never fell any of the Shasta fir that grew up in that high-altitude country. This bullbuck on the job had told us to be sure and drop down a long way with our bottom cut of the undercut, twice as far as for pine or red fir. He didn't say why and we said to each other, "That old man from Mississippi don't know what he is talking about." The next day, we found out. We put an undercut into this big Shasta fir that was about four feet in diameter and so straight that we couldn't make out any lean to it. We put the usual snipe on the bottom cut as we did for all other species of trees. As soon as we sawed in the back cut far enough, we started a couple of wedges behind our bar. We sawed straight in till we only had two or three inches of wood left to the back of the undercut. We took the handle off the end of the bar and slipped it out of the cut and laid the saw behind the base of the tree. It didn't take but a few licks with the maul on the wedge until the tree lifted and started to fall. When the top surface of our undercut closed against the bottom surface, it still hadn't broken the wood we had held but started pulling slivers. The wood was so tough, like baling wire. Then the tree started splitting up and kept splitting on up for at least fifty feet, right behind the undercut. It made a horrible sound that I will never forget, and when it finally broke over, the butt end kicked straight back for the full fifty feet that it had split up and the whole tree hung horizontal up there for a second before it rolled over and came crashing to the ground beside that tall stump. We had "barber chaired" our first and last tree. We had to run for our lives and were very lucky that one or both of us weren't killed. We got really busy, bucking all these dozen short logs, between the many breaks that were caused from this terrific concussion. We found out the hard way that these Shasta fir are tough as baling wire on the stump but real brittle wood just a little ways up. We had ruined at least half the lumber in this seven- or eight-thousand-board-feet tree. We thought the bullbuck would fire us when he saw what we had done, but he didn't say a word. He just stood there for a minute, shaking his head. He knew that we had learned our lesson and wouldn't do it again. We had a lot of respect for that Mississippian after that.
    This Mistletoe Lumber Company was from Mississippi, and they imported a lot of their help from there to get cheaper labor. It wasn't long though before these men wanted as much pay as those Oregonians were getting so the company didn't gain for very long on this savings they had planned. This was beautiful virgin timber on this Dead Indian plateau country and hadn't been opened up to logging many years yet when I worked there.
    I took our son, Loy, up a few times to camp for a week with us. He loved the woods as much as I did. His mother wasn't too enthused about him going to the woods with me very often, as she was afraid I'd break him into being a timber faller. Loy went out to see us fall timber one day, and we fell a huge red fir. Before it had barely settled, he jumped up on the stump and then on to the butt and went running toward the top to see how long the tree was. When he got about fifty feet along the tree, to the first limbs, he turned and came running back as fast as he could with a cloud of yellowjackets stinging him. There had been a big nest on a limb, and they were already shook up and mad from the concussion of the tree hitting the ground. Loy kept running and swatting at these mad yellowjackets for a long ways and ran across below where another set of fallers were cutting on their strip and I was hollering at him to come back, as I was afraid he would get a tree fell on him.
    Loy stayed in camp quite a bit of the week though and kept the young college kid on the guard station company. They made some box traps to catch chipmunks in, to play with, and would go down to a pond nearby and watch some beaver work. There was another logging outfit camped about four miles from us, and we knew most of the men and would visit back and forth once in awhile in the evening after work. Several times, someone would kill a deer and divide with the other camp. We'd hang the carcass high in a tree at night time and then lower it in the morning and wrap it good to keep it cool during the day time, as it would get pretty warm. We could keep the meat real good all week this way, and if we had any left, we'd take it home with us on the weekend so our families could help eat it. One evening some men came over to visit us from this other camp and we sat around a camp fire, BS-ing each other, and divided a gallon of wine. We had been talking about this old shaggy, skinny bear that someone had seen several times in our vicinity and was afraid some night it would raid one of our camps. Someone had dropped these men off at our camp, so later in the evenin, we had to take them back to their camp. Loy had been asleep, we thought, in his sack nearby but before we could get going here he was, climbing in the rig to go with us. He hadn't been asleep at all and was lying there listening to us talk about that bear and wasn't about to stay in the camp by himself while we took those men back to their camp.
    Dale and I camped out up in that country one more season, but Syd didn't go back with us. We camped in an old tar-papered roof shack this time a couple miles from the Moon Prairie guard station where we had camped the year before. This old shack was a lot better than cooking in a tent and sleeping out under a tarp. It could get pretty cold nights at that high altitude even after a hot day. I saw frost on the ground quite a few times in August. and then it would warm up to ninety degrees by afternoon. To beat the heat we'd go to work early in the morning and quit about three in the afternoon. We were camped right by Hoxie Creek and it was real refreshing to take a bath in that nearly ice-cold water. The mosquitoes and no-see-ums would be pretty aggravating for a few hours in the evening, so we'd sit in the smoke of a camp fire till we were ready to go to bed. A lot of chipmunks and camp robber jays would keep us company. One old bedraggled-looking camp robber used to like to sit on the edge of our cardboard garbage box, located just outside the cabin door, and it would reach out and grab yellowjackets on the fly and gulp them down live and never blink an eye. I still can't figure out how he could do that without getting stung all the way down his throat.
    This last outfit that we cut timber for that fall were cheating Dale and I on our scale. After we suspicioned them we started scaling our logs to check, and sure enough they were cheating us bad. A brother to one of the partners of this logging outfit was cutting for them, and we had been hearing what a high roller he was, cutting fantastic scale every day. Now we understood why. The scaler was giving him about a third of our scale every day. This scaler was supposed to be very religious and would preach the golden rule to us every time he came around. We made the mistake of bitching to him about short scale.
    We said we were going to get a state scaler to come out and rescale all our logs. When we came to work the next morning, they had bulldozed a path through another faller's strip and were skidding our logs to the landing. To cap it all off, they fired us before we had a chance to quit.

    A few years later, after Dale had his own logging outfit and I had been cutting for him several years, a friend of mine, Woody, said he was going to drive up to Anchorage, Alaska, to look the country over, and would I like to go with him. I had always had a yen to see Alaska, so jumped at the chance. Woody's wife, Blanche, my wife and son took a plane up ahead of us, and Woody and I drove up the ALCAN Highway in his Chevy car. We'd take turns. He'd drive a hundred miles and then I'd drive a hundred. We left Rogue River on June 16th, and the first night out of Seattle we stayed in a hotel in Prince George, B.C. It never got completely dark that night. We slept along the road in our sleeping bags the next night somewhere before Fort Nelson. Then one more night we slept at a gravel pit just before entering Whitehorse in the Yukon. About midnight the next night, we rolled into Anchorage. Woody would sleep most of the time when I drove, but I never slept a wink while he drove. I was afraid I'd miss some of that beautiful scenery.
    Once when Woody was driving along, about seventy miles per hour, this big grizzly bear broke out of a dense woods and ran as fast as a horse could have run, right across the road in front of us. Woody just had time to hit the brakes enough to keep us from hitting that bear broadside. His hind feet were stretching clear up even with his nose, he was running so fast. I could see the muscles in that big body working, and he was as high as the hood of that little Chevy. It startled hell out of us, and no one said a word for a ways down the road. Finally, I said, "Woody, what if you had hit that bear broadside and wounded him and the car doors would have come open and dumped us out there on the road alongside of him?"
    I thought we might see more wild game along the road, but we only saw one moose, one lynx cat and no deer all the way. We pulled over and took a picture about midnight (with no flash) of this lynx. He sat there on the shoulder of the road long enough for us to take the picture and didn't seem to have any fear of us. We had bought a fishing license for both British Columbia and Yukon territories and fished several good-looking rivers and small streams with every kind of lure or bait we could think of, but we didn't even get a bite. We wondered why we never saw anyone else fishing. Some kind man along the way finally told us that just the stupid greenhorn tourists were the ones that didn't know better than to fish when the spring thaw was in progress and all that melting snow water was swelling the streams.
    We were lucky to hit mostly good roads, as they had just freshly graded them after the snow had melted off the gravel roads. They turned out to be better than the paved roads, which were washboardy in a lot of places or had broken loose in chunks from the permafrost underneath. Sometimes there would be a rough road sign, but mostly not. It seemed like most of the cars that we met coming towards us would be traveling at a high rate of speed. They would be weaving a lot from having worn-out shocks, and I'd be glad when we got by them safely. Anyway, I enjoyed the trip, every mile of it, as there were so many beautiful rivers, lakes, snow-capped mountains with glaciers coming down out of them, and there was a lot of green-forested country.
    One thing I didn't enjoy was when we were up in the muskeg country, miles from any habitation, and all of a sudden I had the urge to go potty real bad. I had Woody stop the car and I bailed out and ran out in that muskeg a ways to find a bush to get behind in case a car should happen along. As soon as I stirred up this muskeg, up came clouds of millions of mosquitoes and started feeding on me. I think that was a new record for going potty in a hurry, and when I pulled up my pants there were a cloud of them inside. I opened the car door at the end of a fast run and a cloud of them followed me inside before I could close the door.
    We made it all the 3,000 miles from Rogue River to Anchorage with only one flat tire, but we had to have the gas tank taken off at a garage just inside the Alaska line. The many miles of travel, flying up against the bottom of it from those gravel roads, had worn through the metal like it had been worked over with real rough sand paper and it finally caused some bad leaks. We stayed at Howard and Eunice's place for a few days, and I hit up the union hall for a carpenter job, but nothing was open right then so Woody and I went down to Seward. The only job we could find there was gandy dancing on the Alaska railroad. We took it for a temporary job to make expenses till we could find something better. The railroad was government owned, so we had to take a physical and a civil service exam. We rented an apartment together, and Blanche came down to cook for us. This job was another new experience to me and was fun for a short time. The section foreman invited us up to his house one evening and showed us colored movies and slides that he had taken of scenery and wildlife all over Alaska. We were in Seward when they had the silver salmon derby there in Resurrection Bay and also a world competition marathon race from the center of town to the top of a high hill a couple of miles away and back again. We didn't take part in either one, but it was interesting to watch.
    After a couple of weeks, I came back up to Anchorage and got a job as a carpenter, building nose hangars for planes at Elmendorf air field. I felt pretty important when I just couldn't quit but had to resign from the railroad job. Loy couldn't seem to find a job up there, so we sent him back home on a plane. That is one time that Myrna was glad to see her brother, as she had stayed home to hold down the fort while we were away. Loy got a job right away in a stud saw mill a couple of miles away in Rogue River. I enjoyed this change from working in the woods awhile. Ellen and I would go out to Howard and Eunice's Red Barn dance hall on Saturday nights. It was sort of a rough place, as the Eskimos would get drunk and unruly. Howard had a big bouncer to help him out when things got so out of hand that he couldn't handle it with his doubled-up piece of chain that he kept handy. Several times while we were there, Howard would have celebrities from the Grand Ole Opry for extra entertainment to draw bigger crowds. Ray Price, Lefty Frizzel, Cowboy Copas and several others came, and I got to meet and talk to them. They were all interested in my telling them about falling and bucking timber in Oregon and all about logging.
    Woody stayed at Seward and worked another week or two on the section for the railroad, and then he quit and came back to Anchorage and got a job in a filling station which he later took on the management of and ended up staying in Alaska over three years. Woody and I tried fishing several good-looking creeks around and up to five miles out of town, but all we ever caught was a few small Dolly Varden trout. We found out later that probably hundreds of service men from Elmendorf air base and Fort Richardson had their families up there living with them and that was mostly what they did for pastime on weekends was fish. They kept those streams fished-out worse than our Evans Creek at home. They did have a good sockeye salmon run in the Knick River while I was there, but the river was lined, elbow to elbow, with fishermen and I didn't care to crowd in for that congested kind of fishing. There was a lot of drizzly rain, but it wasn't bad to work in. One day it got up to 82 degrees and made me sweat a lot as the humidity was so high. I had been paying this man that worked on my job to ride to work with him. He had about thirty of those malamute sled dogs tied up in his back yard, and twice a week we would stop by this butcher shop on the way home from work and fill his pickup bed heaped up with meat scraps, fish heads, and tallow to feed these dogs. He had to be sure that the length of the chains he had them tied with didn't allow them to reach another dog, or they would fight and tear each other to pieces, especially while he was feeding them. Some of them had beautiful coats of fur which would have made a nice rug. He kept them to run in any sled race that came up.
    The latter part of October, I decided to quit my job and head for home before winter set in. I had already bought our plane tickets to head home on a certain day, when this Davis, that I had been riding to work with, offered to take me on a moose hunting trip. He had a gun he was going to loan me and hunt along the bank of this lake, and we could bring any meat we got back in his boat. I was rather teed off that he hadn't mentioned it a few days earlier. Anyway I didn't feel like trying to work up there in that cold-winter country. Howard had told us about their doors freezing shut several times and he had to take the door stops off and saw clear around the door where the ice had frozen it shut before they could get out of their house.
    A lot of the men customers in the Tip Top Cafe loved to tease Eunice, as she had quite a temper and would cuss them out. They nicknamed her "Yukon Eunie" and would do anything they could think of to make her mad just to amuse themselves. One man that was always making fun of her cooking told her that there were flies in her soup, so she bought some rubber cockroaches to put in his food. A cop told Howard it was all right to shoot someone if he heard them breaking in, but to be sure he dragged them into his house and shoot them one more time to make it legal. One Saturday night, Howard and Eunice came home late after closing their dance hall and had just been to bed for a few minutes when they heard this loud noise. They thought it was someone breaking in, so Howard grabbed his big .45 pistol that he had hanging on the head of the bed and made a dash towards the noise. What had happened was that the pole cover over their septic tank had rotted enough to let it cave in from all the weight of the dirt on top of it. There was so much pressure that it forced a lot of the contents of the septic tank back up through the toilet in the bathroom. It hit the ceiling with a terrible force, and the whole bathroom was one big mess. Eunice got to thinking that it could have been much worse, as she had been sitting on that toilet only a few minutes before it happened. There still seemed to be a scarcity of women in Alaska in the 1950s, and they were rather looked up to and protected. I remember this one article on the front page of a paper, which read, "Woman shoots husband six times in self-defense."
    I was glad to get back home again. Dale had done all of his own falling and bucking while I was away, and I think he was glad to give the job back to me. He said the only thing exciting that happened while I was away was that a bear, that his cat had scared out of its bed down the hill from him, had about run over him while he was squatted with his pants down, going potty.
    I can't remember the last slot machine trip we went on. I think it was in the mid-1950s. Andy and Charlie had both died young by then of cancer. They had both drank and smoked heavy most of their lives, and I think that shortened their lives. I smoked up until I was 44 years old, about the time that I quit working in the woods. I was smoking close to two packs a day and had this chronic ticklish feeling in my throat. The hardest part of quitting was making up my mind. I just know that I soon would have had cancer of the throat if I hadn't quit just in time. Ellen helped to encourage me to quit, but she still smokes heavy now, 25 years later. People who smoke remind me now of being just as foolish as a kid sucking their thumb, and it's a lot worse for a person's health, besides it is expensive and a filthy habit. I'll always remember this article I read in the Readers' Digest, years ago, this man offered his son in high school $100 if he would never start smoking. Then again in college he offered him $100 again if he would quit smoking. Years later, the son came home and kept bragging that he had quit smoking of his own accord. Finally the father got tired of his bragging and said, "Son, I'll give you $100 if you'll just stop talking about quitting smoking."
    Our daughter, Myrna, married Larry McBee as soon as she graduated from high school. Larry's folks, Ellen, and I went to Reno with them to witness this big event. About one year later, our son Loy married Phyllis, and it wasn't very many years before Ellen and I were grandparents to four boys and two girls. Loy and Myrna each ended up with two boys and one girl each. When Larry and Myrna's first baby, a girl, was only eight months old, they bought a Volkswagen bus and took off up the ALCAN Highway for Anchorage, Alaska, to make their fortune. Ellen and I were pretty shook up when they took our first grandkid so far away from us. They were up there for over three years, but of course Ellen and I flew up there to see them a couple of times and got to see Terri take her first steps.
    Larry soon got a job driving a Pepsi-Cola truck and later on drove dump truck for a big construction company and made good money by working a lot of overtime. Myrna went in partnership with a lady at the Kiddy Drop out in Spenard and was making about as good money as Larry in just a short time. Myrna was pregnant with the second child, Mitch, when they moved back to Rogue River. They had made a pretty good stake up there and bought a nine-acre piece of ground on a flat rise, overlooking our nice little town. Loy and I got to help build their nice home for them. Loy got away from the sawmill work and worked for a plumbing and electric store near Medford [Beaver Electric, today's Grover's] for the next nine years.
    The last time Ellen and I flew up to see Larry and Myrna, before they left Alaska, a friend, Jim Spencer, took us out for a weekend of fishing to an A-frame cabin at this beautiful Big Lake, about 80 miles northeast of Anchorage. We caught some nice fish and Jim had brought along some huge frozen moose steaks. That was the first time I had tasted moose meat, and it was so good that I was able to devour a steak that covered a big platter. There were dozens of cute cabins all around this big lake and some on islands out in the lake. We drove around to this Call of the Wild tavern and restaurant, and the couple running it were from Medford and knew a lot of people that I did and we had a good visit. This made the world seem a lot smaller to me. Jim had a plane in partnership with a buddy and was going to fly us in, but his buddy happened to be using the plane and I was glad, as there was a low overcast that morning. I think about as many people up there had planes as cars. In summer, they would have pontoons to land on water, and then skis in winter to land on the ice. There were so many lakes in that country. I could hear power chain saws, cutting firewood and that made me feel more at home out there. I always thought that I would like to build a log A-frame like that one we stayed in, but so far I haven't.
    My stepdad had died of a heart attack, which left my mother all alone on their forty-acre ranch, so I talked her into coming to live with us. I built a nice two-bedroom house, next door to us, in my spare time, for her to live in, as she was a very independent person. I sold her place for her so she would have an income. She lived in the house for over three years before she died at the age of 82 years. Since I have grown older and slowed down enough to think, I realize what a great person she was. She had given birth to eleven kids, besides a couple of stillbirths, and raised nine of us to maturity, without much help, and I never remember of ever going hungry.
    In between slot machine trips, falling and bucking and construction jobs, I had helped build several houses down through the years, enough to be an experienced carpenter. I told my friends from the woods that I had so much timber fell ahead, that I'd better start building and use up some of the surplus lumber. I liked this kind of work and ended up building for the next over twenty years, until my retirement. By this time, my son-in-law Larry and his brother Jim had started building apartment complexes for themselves around Medford and I went to work for them. Some of the men my age that I knew from the woods envied me, as they too would like to have gotten out of the woods, but they had worked there for so long that they didn't know any other way to make a living. Several of them went on working in the woods, long enough to be killed there.
    I started out helping build from the ground up. We poured our own cement foundations and then up with the building, a lot of them two-story. This way, we were doing something different every day or two, which made it more interesting to me, and it never got monotonous. A lot of the big contractors hire a certain crew for each job, such as foundations, framing, siding or roof sheathing.
    It seemed like after I quit going on slot machine trips and logging that I had more time to go on hunting, fishing and picnic trips. For quite a few years, our kids and families and a group of our friends and their families would go up to Camp Comfort on the South Umpqua River for the three-day Labor Day weekend. We'd always take plenty of food along and several kegs of beer, which we iced down, and everyone could draw their own beer when they got thirsty. Most of the younger people and some of our grandsons by this time would take motorcycles along and ride different trails around the camp. We also set up a couple of horseshoe pits and would chip in money for a pot and have tournaments to see who won the pot. We always had musical talent in our bunch who would play guitars and sing around the campfire at night, sometimes until the wee hours of the morning. Some of the young boys would catch some nice trout out of the river or go swimming in that cold, clear water. We even took along a gas-powered generator and had light and a place to plug in electric guitars under this shelter that was open on one side. The CCC boys had built it, back in the 1930s.
    Two different years, my son, son-in-law, and several friends and I went elk hunting over in northeastern Oregon. We camped within a few miles of the Snake River, which was the boundary between Idaho and Oregon. We pitched our tents by the Imnaha River among the beautiful Wallowa Mountains. I wasn't lucky enough to even get a shot at an elk either year, but just the camping out in that kind of surrounding satisfied me. One of our party killed a spike elk, which was enough to make the hunting atmosphere.
    Loy had worked in this plumbing and electric store for the nine years and learned the trades. Later on, he also became a master builder and carpenter. He had wired and plumbed a couple of apartment complexes for my son-in-law, and later on I helped him build a couple of duplexes of his own in Rogue River. Still later I helped him build several nice and big homes for other people and also a big two-story restaurant in Rogue River. When I wasn't working for Loy or Larry I would work for a friend and contractor, Gene Russ. Over a period of five years, I helped Gene build hundreds of those FHA houses, all up and down our Rogue River Valley, in and out of towns. This was the same kind of building that I was used to and liked. We had as high as eight houses under construction at a time, and sometimes I'd help pour a foundation in the morning and then go nail on trim or hang doors on the inside of another house that afternoon. We always had inside work to do in case it rained like it does sometimes in the winter here in Oregon. I can't remember of drawing a single unemployment check, in the over twenty years that I was in the building trade. Most of the winters that I had worked in the woods we'd be shut down for sometimes three months, on account of rain or snow in the high country and muddy roads. I would get to draw unemployment checks and call that my vacation. The saw mills would seldom hire a man if they knew he had worked out in the woods, as they knew he'd quit them and go back to the woods at the first sign of spring.
    Loy and several of his fishing buddies started building this cabin, away down the Illinois River. This river is a tributary of the Rogue and comes into it about halfway between our little town and Gold Beach on the coast. Every time they would go down to steelhead fish they would take material down for the cabin, as much as they could at a time, on the backs of their motorcycles. Of course, I finally got in on the deal and got to help with the work. Sometimes we'd take the motorcycles down in pickups or trailers on a Friday after work to the end of the road at Briggs Creek. We'd camp and stay all night. Then the next morning we would ride in on the cycles over this narrow trail that the CCC boys had hewn out of the side of steep, rocky banks many years before. It was a distance of over eight miles on down to Pine Flat to our campsite. I never rode a bike in by myself but always rode on the back with someone, most times with Russ Miller on the back of his Triumph trail bike. That was a hairy scary trail. It had been made for walking on only. Several of the corners were so sharp that we'd have to stop and slide the back end of Russ's Triumph around them by hand. In a lot of places, we looked straight down nearly 500 feet to the river. It would look like a silvery ribbon from that far above.
    When the boys got the idea of building this cabin they tried taking a load of material down the river on a raft. It took them several weekends and a lot of hard work. They would only make a few miles a day. Then they'd hike back up this steep mountainside to the trail and hike back to their bikes or pickups before dark. Then they'd come back up the trail the next morning, and slide down off that steep bank to where they had anchored the raft and go again.
    One morning when they got back to the raft a bear had torn everything off it, and a lot of the lumber had floated off down the river. It caused them a lot more work when they tried to retrieve all they could. Another day after they had paddled, got out and pushed to get around rocks and the sun had come out and it was getting hot, they found this full gallon jug of wine floating where it had hung up among some rocks. By the time the three or four of them had finished drinking this wine, that was as far as they got that day. Anyway, they finally got the raft and most of the material down to where the cabin was going to be built on this old mining claim. Rafting it had been so rough and such hard work that they never tried that again.
    This was quite an adventure for all of us and was fun even with all the hard work involved. We even took several sacks of cement down on the bikes. One trip, I had several 2x2 aluminum windows strapped on my back while riding on the back of Russ's bike. I could picture myself, in case we ran off the trail, sailing off down to the river so far below like a hang glider with those windows on my back. Some of our bunch hauled sand and gravel in heavy burlap bags, and we poured a thin cement floor for our 12x16-foot cabin. We cut and peeled fir poles to frame the walls and roof and nailed 1x4-inch battens on the walls to nail the shakes to that we had to split. We had brought down aluminum roofing in four-foot lengths to nail on more 1x4 battens for the finished roof. We built two layers of wide shelves in one end for enough room for eight sleeping bags and left room under the lower bunk to shove our food. This was stored in five-gallon cans back under out of the way. A little ice-cold and clear creek came rushing down off the hill right by our cabin, and we took down some three-quarter-inch plastic pipe and had running water to the faucet above our sink inside the cabin. We had a two-burner propane stove to cook on and a tin heating stove for keeping us warm. Loy even built a candelabra that held eight candles to hang overhead. It was so attractive it would have made Liberace jealous. We also had gas lanterns and windows and a couple of clear plastic panels built into the roof for daytime light. No one ever had a better setup for comfort, and along one of the best steelhead fishing rivers in the whole world.
    My power chain saw came in handy down there. I fell a huge fir snag close by the cabin and cut enough chunks off it in a short time to furnish firewood for a long time. I fell the sugar pine snag also that we split the shakes out of for the side walls of the cabin and I built a fancy Chic Sale privy that overlooked our little rushing creek out of those shakes. We had quite a few experiences going in and out, over that trail, that I'll always remember.
    Bob Allen was the last in the line-up as we were on our way in this one time. We stopped at this bridge over a little creek that the trail crossed and all got a drink of that nice cold water. We sat there talking for quite a few minutes, and still Bob hadn't showed up. After awhile, one of our bunch was going to ride back up the trail to see what was delaying him, when here he came putting around a bend, looking rather bedraggled. He had tied about a three-foot long bow saw across his handlebars and had ridden too close to the rock bank where the trail was narrower even than usual. One end of that saw had hit the bank, causing the bike to go down and throwing Bob over the side of the trail. The bike stayed on the trail but Bob kept sliding down this loose shale rock towards the edge where he would have tumbled close to 500 feet nearly straight down this rock bluff into the Illinois River. If Bob hadn't been such a tall, skinny guy and spread those long arms and legs to get traction, he would probably have slid on over the edge of the cliff. He was really shook up about this mishap, as several cans of beer had come out of the pack on his back and he could hear them clattering, one by one, until they went over the edge. He knew there wasn't a chance of getting them back when they fell the hundreds of feet into the river below.
    We had this nice comfortable cabin and used it for seven or eight years. Different bunches of us, whoever could get off work at the same time, would go down and stay as long as they could. The best time to fish for steelhead was in December and January for the winter runs. I've never been much of a fisherman, but when I got the hang of it I caught some nice steelhead. I had to learn just how much weight to use on my line, according to the swiftness of the water, and how to tell whether it was a fish or just my weight bumping along the bottom so I could give a jerk at the right moment to set the hook. We generally had better luck by using fresh salmon roe for bait and casting out into the swift current with our spinning reels and let the bait drift along the bottom. Most of the steelhead would average between 24 and 30 inches long and weigh from ten to twelve pounds. Not being a good fisherman, I had to change from an eight-pound test line to a twelve, in order to wrestle those wild fish in to shore. Those fresh up-from-the-ocean steelhead were full of fight and would make a half-dozen leaps high above the water before they would tire enough to be landed.
    This cabin was too much fun to last forever. A bunch of hippies finally found it, back there away from the river in the brush and timber where we thought it was pretty well hid. They used up all the hundreds of dollars worth of food that we had stored ahead. The worst was that they left their garbage piled in the middle of the floor, causing a bear to break in through the tin roof. He really left the cabin in a shambles. Not long after that, the government made a wild river out of that part of the Illinois and made us tear the cabin down. We had used it for about eight years, and I have a lot of fond memories of it. Anyone that ever rode a motorcycle over that trail will certainly never forget it.
    This one fellow, Tom, bought a new bike and came in with us. It wasn't geared for that kind of trail, but he made it all the way in and down those steep switchbacks to the cabin without a mishap. A couple of days later, going back out and climbing back up those same switchbacks, he got into trouble. I guess he didn't lean far enough forward, starting up the first one and when he revved up the motor full throttle, the bike reared up in front and Tom accidentally kicked it out of gear. The bike picked up speed real fast as it rolled back down that steep hill on its back wheel and ended up fifty feet below the sharp corner of the trail before it came to a sliding halt in some brush and left Tom hanging by his armpits in some scrub oak limbs. It took a lot of help to get his bike back on the trail and on above those five or six wicked switchbacks. He never tried to ride in there again and sold that nearly new bike soon after that. Several other guys that rode in on that trail drew blood before they finished the round trip, and we were lucky not to have any fatalities. One of the last trips that I went in with the bunch, we found the hippies had stolen a bunch of stuff out of the cabin, including the regulator to our propane gas stove that we used to cook on. We tried to use the stove without the regulator, when it about blew us all up and set the cabin on fire. We finally gave up after my son burned his arm and Russ had his hair on fire. Loy and Tut Kile decided to ride back out and buy another regulator and the rest of us started fishing. After midnight, we were awakened by the sound of motorcycles when they arrived back in camp. They had the regulator all right, but they had got to drinking until some joint they were in closed. Then they brought a friend they had met in this bar back with them. After driving back out forty miles to the end of the road at Briggs Creek, they got back on the bikes with the rest of a jug of wine and their friend, Bill, who rode on the back of one of their bikes. Bill had never been to the cabin before, and as drunk as he was, he was not able to see much in the dark. They were scaring hell out of him. He'd holler stop every so often and get on the back of the other bike, and pretty soon he'd change back again. One was just as drunk and reckless a rider as the other. When they would come up over sharp rise in the trail, the headlight would shine up into the sky and leave the trail dark for an instant. Finally, Loy's headlight burned out and they couldn't get it going again, so he stuck the butt end of a two-celled flashlight in his mouth to light the trail for the rest of the way in. He couldn't get his mouth out of round for quite awhile after they got to the cabin.
    Several days later, when Bill rode back out behind someone, in the daylight, he couldn't believe how he had survived coming in, riding behind those drunks and in the dark. Some hippies had planted some marijuana in an opening in the woods down there and someone reported it to the law, thinking maybe this would help to run them away from our cabin. The law sent a man in on a motorcycle to investigate and destroy those plants. This man came back out the next day all ragged and bloody from riding a big highway bike over that trail. He said he didn't care if they raised any amount of pot down there, or he had to quit his job, or how much money they would pay, he would never ride a bike over that trail again.
    A man who had moved out here from Saginaw, Michigan, that I had helped build a house for went down with us several times. He had been a state policeman in Michigan, and we got a kick out of having him help us poach an illegal deer for camp meat. Paul had always been an avid and very successful fisherman where he came from and was really disappointed when he couldn't catch a steelhead when all the rest of us, even I, were catching them. He had fished a long ways down the river and had cast into this deep hole for hours with no result, when my son came along and made ready to cast out into this same hole. Paul was depressed after he had tried for so long without even one bite and told Loy that it wouldn't do him any good to fish there, as he didn't think there could possibly be even one fish in that hole. Loy cast out anyway, hooked and landed a big steelhead within a few minutes and soon caught a second one. That was more than Paul could stand and he said, "Back home, I caught more fish than anyone, but I can't catch these damned steelhead." He said he was determined to catch one that day if it took all the rest of that day and all night. All the rest of us went back to the cabin about sundown, filled up out of a kettle of stew, drank some wine and laid down on the bunks with our clothes on and went to sleep. It must have been close to midnight when a noise woke us up. At first, I thought it was a bear trying to break in, but it was Paul lighting the gasoline lantern. He had fished all this time and had finally caught a small steelhead. How he had got a half-mile back to the cabin through the brush and rough ground without breaking a leg in the pitch dark without a flashlight was a miracle. He had finally got the feel and caught as many as anyone else from that time on. It wasn't long after he had been down to the cabin with us a few times and fished the Illinois upstream that he was the authority for a story that appeared in an issue of the Field and Stream magazine on the secrets of steelhead fishing.
    Down through the years, after I started working steady as a carpenter, I got to help build nice homes for a lot of friends and for several men that I had worked in the timber with years before. It seemed like so many people would live in some small old house or pay rent all the time their children were growing up. Then after the kids were grown and had left home and married, they would be able to afford and build some huge and fancy house that they would get lost in by just themselves. They'd have to pay taxes on it and put out a lot of work to keep up. When I finally got around to building a new house for Ellen and I after our kids had flown the coop--it was a very small one-bedroom, too small for any of my wife's relation to be able to move in with us. I've always been lucky that our kids with their families lived near by and we could see or visit with them nearly every day by a local phone call. There was no occasion for them to stay all night. Most kids, if they move very far away, only make it home once or twice a year. As high as taxes have become, I don't want to pay on any more house than necessary. Of course, if I was a rich man, I might think differently.
    All the years since we bought our little place in 1936, we have never moved our furniture, except to next door when I built a new house after living in the old one for forty years. I retired when I reached 63 years of age but have helped my son build several big homes and a two-story restaurant since. I try to lead an active life and feel like doing it. After my mother died in 1961, I used the house that I had built for her next door for a rental. Then I bought a big mobile home and moved it in for another rental. After we had moved into the new house, I tore the old one down and moved in still one more mobile home. With the income from these three rentals added onto our social security checks, we have a very comfortable living.
    Ellen started getting this manic depression about fifteen years ago. She has either been too high or too low, and the doctors can't seem to get her back to the normal. The past four years has been a low low. I can't get her out of the house even to go visit our own kids or grandkids. These past two years I have had to do all the cooking and most of the housework. I made the mistake of asking her how she liked my cooking and she said, "It's better than starving and that it ought to stick to our ribs." I asked her one more time, and she said, "I guess it's all right. I'm still holding it down." I call it my "mean cuisine," but we seem to survive on it.
    I have even given up deer hunting and fishing near home as I have to stay near by and can't be away for over a few hours at a time. This staying at home has caused me to fix our little place up a lot more than if we had been able to gad around the country like we had done so much of before. Until the last four years, we would take a trip every year, down to Blythe, California, to visit Ellen's folks, where they had retired for their last twenty years of life. Since they passed away, we haven't even gone down to see a couple of Ellen's sisters that live near Sacramento.
    This little one-and-a-half-acre place keeps me just busy enough in my old age. I take care of all my renters' yards and do all my own maintenance work. Our place is loaded with trees, and I have some kind of leaves, pine or fir needles to keep raked up for at least six months of every year. Our Evans Creek has moved over a hundred yards away from our high bank from several floods. It has left us a beautiful sand bar, which I have taken advantage of and have built a nice park on. I put in two sets of horseshoe pits with floodlight, a cabana, propane gas barbecue, fireplace and lots of picnic tables and benches. We have had a lot of nice picnics down there every summer. I poured cement steps to get down the steep bank and pitched tents in case anyone wants to camp out overnight. One big party we had, some friends who are professional musicians set up their electric enhancement equipment on our patio and blasted music and singing down into the park until after midnight. After six hours they brought just their guitars down and sat around the camp fire, entertaining us for a few more hours. There were close to a hundred people total that came and went during the afternoon and all night at that party. We had a big horseshoe tournament, plenty of food and two full-sized kegs of beer. We had one other party, nearly as big, and dozens of smaller family get-togethers.
    We will soon have our tenth great-grandkid, and three of our six grandkids aren't married yet. So we have a potential to collect many more of these little rascals. For the past year, I have started preparing a way to entertain all these young ones. So far I have built two merry-go-rounds, one low and the other high, with crossarms and tires hung on ropes underneath. I built a framework with a penthouse or lookout overhead with a plastic roof and a teeter-totter, monkey bars and chin bar underneath and a slide and a pipe to slide down from the lookout. I also built a follow-the-leader setup out of 4x6-inch cedar on edge, on top of posts from six inches to three feet high. I have two swings for babies, two big swings for older kids and a porch swing for the mothers to sit in while watching the kids play. My next project for the park is a tree house about twelve feet up in this clump of four cottonwoods that are growing close together. It will have a woven rope ladder to go up on and a pipe and a slide to come down on. I have all the material, redwood 2x6's and pipe laying there ready to begin building. I will even have a crib hung from an arm by ropes, to put a baby in when they go to sleep.
    I don't mind babysitting with any of the great-grandkids, as I can just turn them loose in my park and let them entertain themselves while I relax and drink a beer. We also have five-year-old twin girls in a rental on one side of us and a six-year-old girl in another rental on the other side. I sit out on my patio, which is cantilevered out over our high creek bank, and watch these three little girls playing on the equipment or building mud pies. They spend hours down there most every day that the weather is halfway nice. These little girls fill in to entertain me between visits from any of my great-grandkids. Until a few years ago, I wouldn't rent to children, and now I see what I was missing out on. I've fallen in love with every little kid, nearly a dozen, that have lived in my rentals since I changed my mind. I think maybe something about getting old makes me appreciate kids more all the time, or maybe I've just slowed down and have more time to enjoy them.
    One of our trailer rentals sits near the edge of our steep, twenty-five-foot-high creek bank, and I decided to build a redwood deck onto the back porch. My wife, and also the renter that was living there at the time, said it couldn't be done so that made me all the more determined to build it. I slid about halfway down this bank and dug out some places to set pier boxes to pour cement footings. A couple of big husky grandsons helped me pour the cement, but I managed the rest of the way by myself. I counterbalanced the 12x16-foot deck six feet each way on the posts coming up from the pier footings, and my deck turned out as solid as the Rock of Gibraltar. Of course, I had to build a good rail around the perimeter to keep little kids or drunks from falling overboard. I had this cement mixing machine and have poured probably a hundred yards of sidewalks, foundations, steps, whatever on this little place down through the years. I even poured cement steps down our high creek bank with a one-inch pipe rail alongside to hold onto. I just kept thinking of new places to pour concrete with it, so I finally gave it to my grandson-in-law, Don, so I wouldn't have it sitting around to tempt me into pouring even more cement. I told him not to ever loan it back to me, no matter how much I begged.
    I find it hard not to practice my old tree falling trade. Every year, someone has me fall some of those dangerous kind of trees, where I had to wedge up several inches to tip the tree to fall with the undercut. I always take my pay out in wood for my fireplace. Until a few years ago, I would go up on forestry or BLM land and fall a big fir snag, cut it up and haul home for firewood. One big dead snag tree would make enough wood for my whole winter's supply. Now, they would hang you for doing this, and you'd better have a permit for every stick of wood, or else. Wood has always been so plentiful in our area that I never dreamed of seeing the day when it would be like this. They love to sell you a permit for wood forty miles from home, even if they know it had already been cut and hauled off. If there is wood, they have it pushed up in piles with a bulldozer blade, dirt and all. They make it as tough as they can on you. They are doing their best to discourage people from getting by cheap by cutting their own wood.
    Our area is settling up fast these past ten years. Every little creek has new roads punched in along them, and houses are being built or mobile homes have been moved in. I hadn't taken a drive for several years up our Evans Creek road until a few weeks ago when I drove about fifteen miles to where it used to be wild country and I had fell timber in the old days. Well, I nearly got lost, as it was all strange to me. Instead of the gravel, washboardy road, it was all paved and asphalt roads leading off every little ways, and there were dozens of new houses and mobile homes any direction I looked. People have always liked this area with its beautiful timbered hills and rushing, clear water creeks, but only a few of them could find a job to make money to live on, so pretty soon they would starve out and have to move back to L.A. or some other hated city where the big money was. That is the only thing that kept our area from being overpopulated up till now. A lot of people were mad when they passed a law that you weren't allowed to build or have a home on less than five acres out in the country. Now, I can see it was a good thing.
    Our little town of Rogue River has quadrupled in size since I first came here in 1935, and the traffic is like a little L.A. We have a big shopping center and, lately, about a hundred condos under construction. We are getting famous as a retirement center. At my age, I am satisfied with the old town, but a town has to grow to make work and a living for younger people raising families. The small mountain across the road from us that used to be all woods, and I hunted deer and gray squirrels all over it, now has two paved roads across it, with a lot of big expensive houses along them. I got to help my son build one nice home up there before I retired. It looks like San Francisco, all lit up at night from those houses.
    One evening, just at dusk, I saw this raccoon down over our creek bank. He didn't run or seem to show much fear, so I went in the house and got a slice of bread and threw it down to him. He grabbed it and then wanted more. I had really started something, as within a few nights I had this one coon and several of his buddies begging for food alongside of our patio. One learned to catch a slice of bread in mid-air. In a short time, I had them begging right outside the slider glass door leading out on to the patio and I started buying dog food for them in 50-pound sacks. This big male that my wife had named Pretty Boy learned to climb up on the patio rail, reach down and flip the tight-fitting lid off the big garbage can that I kept their dog food in. This lid was hard for me to get off the can but he would catch his claws under the edge and flip it off with ease. When we'd hear that lid clatter onto the wood deck, we always knew that Pretty Boy had arrived.
    When the mama coons had their babies, they would bring them with them, and they were the cutest things I had ever seen. If I had forgotten to put their food in the two cast iron skillets just outside the door, they would all stand up on their hind legs with their noses against the glass, peering in to see why there was no food in the pans for them. One night, my wife counted a whole herd of fifteen of them on our patio at the same time. They were of all sizes, milling around and fighting over the food. Ellen went out to get more food out of the can one night after old Pretty Boy had already flipped the lid off the half-empty can, and a mama coon came up out of there and growled at her. She backed off until the coon moved away, but when she tried once more to dip some food out of the can she found a baby coon curled up and fast asleep in there. She went back into the house and got the camera and got a flash picture just as the little coon roused out of his nap and looked up into the camera.
    When our youngest grandson Randy was fifteen and bought his first camera, he came and stayed all night with us and stayed up most of the night, lying on his stomach on the rug just inside, with the slider door open, and broke in his new camera by getting a roll of good pictures of mostly baby coons. It cost us quite a bit of money for film besides the fifty-pound sack of dry dog food, bread, walnuts and even eggs every week. We were feeding birds in several feeders in the daytime and then I'd put sunflower seed and walnuts in the feeders at night for the flying squirrels. These squirrels are a night animal, but they got used to the floodlight and we could watch them. They would run up and down the tree like a streak, chasing each other and then sail out in the darkness. They would make numerous trips to the feeder in the tree about ten feet behind our patio and take jaws full of food back to their nest to store for the next winter. It cost us at least fifty dollars a month for all this food for our wild friends, but it was worth every penny for the entertainment we got out of it. When Ellen and I were first married back in 1936, we could have lived off the money it cost us to feed these wild friends. We enjoyed showing them to all our friends, and they would take a lot of pictures.
    We fed these coons for five years, and then we noticed that fewer and fewer coons came in to take advantage of our hospitality, and finally down to only one poor old skinny mama coon and then none. I blamed it on to a trapper that I had been trying to run out of the creek bottom behind our house, and then I heard that maybe the government trapper had poisoned them. Finally I found out what had really happened to them. They had got a disease, distemper, and it had wiped out the coon population for miles around. This government trapper told a lady we knew up Wards Creek, that was also feeding a herd of coons, that we people who fed them were the worst enemy they had. We caused them to all congregate in one place and whatever disease one got, they all got. If left alone, they would stay spread out more to evenly divide the supply of food such as that nature provides, crawdads, frogs, duck eggs along the creeks and irrigation ditches.
    One night a baby skunk came in and ate with the coons, and he kept coming back, night after night, until he was nearly full grown. He would make a run at a coon, turn and hit him with the side of his body to try to shove him out of the way, but never did let off a stink. The coons would back off, but come right back and try to ignore the skunk as much as they could. That skunk was as cute as any baby animal could be, and we enjoyed him as much as he did our food. Our creek bottom behind the house has always been full of wildlife. There is always fresh tracks of coons, skunks, deer, fox, beaver, mink, muskrat and brush rabbits down there in the sand. I still like to go down by the wide spot in the creek about sundown on warm summer days to watch the beaver work. A mink got in my irrigation sump, right in the daytime, and I watched him swim around real fast and muddy up the whole pond. Then he'd keep coming out on the bank to eat crawdads that he had caught.
    Rats started coming in to eat the coons' food, and one night I heard a commotion and saw this huge owl up against our glass sliding door with a full-grown, fresh-caught rat in his claws. The owl sat there blinking for a few seconds and flew off with the rat still kicking. I would have liked to have gotten a picture, but I wasn't fast enough.
    One of my bird feeders is made out of a piece of broomstick and two hubcaps and hangs from the limb of a maple tree on our creek bank. I have a metal cup with a ten-foot long handle on it so I can lean over the rail of our patio and put feed in the feeder for my birds in the daytime and for my flying squirrels at night. The rats got to climbing over twenty feet up in the tree and then several more feet on some small limbs to get into the feeder, so I had to cut all these small limbs off to stop them. I never knew before that rats can climb a tree nearly as good as a squirrel. The flying squirrels can still sail in, and the gray squirrels can leap into the feeder, so I solved that problem.
    I counted the bird houses as near as I could, and I have at least fifty holes hanging all over our yard and down in the creek bottom for them to build nests in. I have one fourteen-hole apartment, one twelve-hole, several duplexes and the rest singles. About a dozen big houses are for wood ducks, woodpeckers, flying squirrels and gray squirrels. I always look forward to the little purple tree martins, coming back from down south, early every spring. When I see the first one, I write the date down on the calendar. This year it was March 5th, but they sometimes make it back by the middle of February. The evening grosbeaks are a colorful bird, and they are past due this year to come back from the south. My favorite birds that use the feeders are the little chickadees, nuthatches, Oregon juncos, towhees, finches and several kinds of sparrows. The juncos and Steller's blue jays are with me all winter, but as soon as the warm weather comes in the spring they take off and go up into the nearby timbered hills to nest. I hardly ever see one again until late fall, and I know that winter is nigh when they come back down into the valley. I feed on an average a couple dozen quail the year round in our driveway. They are so pretty and amusing to watch, especially when they bring their babies in with them. They love to dig holes in the garden to dust themselves in. The English sparrows also do this and will fight each other for the dusting holes.
    We have eighty-some rose bushes on our little place, thirteen big lilac bushes and numerous other shrubs and flowering trees, besides the petunias, pansies, zinnias that I replant every year. We have some kind of flowers blooming nearly the year round to help cheer us up. Right now, in March, our tulips and bridal wreath bushes are blooming, and the daffodils, crocus and several kinds of lilies and the big yellow forsythia bush are about bloomed out. I don't think anyone ever dreamed, least of all me, that I would be a bird or petunia fancier in my old age, judging from the life I led in my younger years. I could never enjoy keeping a wild animal or bird in a cage. The one night in my life that I spent in the Grants Pass jail for illegal gaffing a salmon made me realize that it's no fun being caged up.
    A few years ago I guess it was the game commission that planted a few elk in our Evans Creek drainage, and they are doing pretty well so far and multiplying. One big bull elk wandered down out of the hills and started feeding and staying with a dairyman's cows across the creek from us. He got to thinking he was a cow and would even go into the barn with them and would bed down with them right in the daytime alongside the busy county road. It was quite an attraction for people to stop and take pictures of. The dairyman put up with his eating his pasture and hay, but the neighbors called the game commission when he started eating their strawberries and ruining the young fruit trees. Some men came out a couple of times and tried to tranquilize him with no success and ended up shooting and killing him. There were a lot of protests in the papers about his being killed, but it was too late as he was already dead. A short time ago, I got to see a herd of nearly thirty elk feeding on the edge of a pasture less than ten miles from home. It was quite a thrilling sight. This area was a natural habitat for elk before the turn of the century, and I hope to see the day when it is again. Our blacktail deer do well here, but there surely aren't as many left as the game commission, in order to sell more hunting licenses, try to make people believe. Any time a country settles up heavy with people, the wildlife generally suffer for it.
    I have finally collected a lot of woodworking tools for my shop and intend to spend a lot of time out there in my old age, building toys for our many great-grandkids, redwood recliners and chairs for our renters' yards and for the park. I have always been able to think of more things ahead to do than I can get done, so I am not afraid of ever running out of something to do.
    I have a big potbellied wood-heating stove in my shop to keep warm and comfortable with in winter, and radio and stereo with hundreds of records to listen to while I work. My brother-in-law and sister, that sold their Pleasure Inn cafe and beer joint in North Palm Springs, California, in 1972, bought a four-acre "ranch" up the road from us a mile. They put a trailer house on it and became Oregonians with us. While Penny and Nelle were moving their belongings to their new home, Penny asked me if I wanted a slot machine. It was one that the law had made him take out of their joint in the early '50s when California clamped down on gambling all over the state. Penny had nailed it into a wooden crate and put it in a storage shed and forgotten about it till they started moving to Oregon. It was a 1930s model Mills dime castle machine, like we used to beat. It wasn't in good working order and I let it sit on my shop bench for ten years before I finally used a lot of WD-40 and oil to make it work good again. I furnish the dimes and everyone that comes out to my shop enjoys playing it. Penny didn't think it had ever been beat but I found a hole that had been drilled in it. I am using it for a bank and play every dime change I get hold of into it. If I ever get hard up for money, I'll make up a wire tool and beat it.
    Penny is probably sorry he gave that machine to me as he found out those old machines are worth between a $1000 to $1500. They are in demand for people to use in their dens or for parties. A lot of these old machines are still in use in joints. I have read a few articles in papers about people beating these new electronic machines and it does my heart good. As old as I am, sometimes I get the urge to go on just one more slot machine trip.
    I often wonder why I am still alive or even survived through childhood. The close calls I've had while working in the woods, beating the gangsters' slot machines, working on heavy construction on dams and big bridges, and even the carpenter work I did for so many years, could be dangerous, and I figure that I have been more lucky than careful. The worst that I've ever been hurt though was when I was playing around in my shop at home since I retired. I was cutting some 2x4's on an angle with my big gear-driven Skilsaw and had the guard tied up so the blade would cut clear through the board, and I guess my arms got tired after cutting a dozen boards with that heavy saw, and I let it swing back alongside of my leg. It caught in my pants leg and cut a gash about ten inches long. The full depth the blade was set right alongside of my kneecap. I ended up spending four days in the hospital and was lucky that I didn't lose my leg, besides it cost me about $800 over what my insurance paid. I had always told my son and grandson not to use a saw with the guard tied up, and then I do it to myself.
    Another time I was using my chain saw to clear some small fir trees off a lot so we could start building a house. I had cut the top out of this little fir lying on the ground and stepped back with the motor shut off. I caught my heel, losing my balance, and the chain finished winding down across my left knee just above the kneecap. It cut down to the leaders and took a lot of stitches to close it up. I had spent all those years using chain saws when I worked in the woods without cutting myself, and then just had to do it on a carpenter job. I had my finger cut off when a small boy, then finally a hernia on each side fixed, and a ruptured appendix, and hope I don't have to be cut on again for a long time.
    I am looking forward to celebrating our 50th wedding anniversary this next June 30th, 1986, so I've got to be careful and make it that much longer. Plan to have a get-together of family and a few close friends, down in our nice park in the creek bottom behind our house. I tell everyone that I'm shooting for the gold. I say that 50 years is a long time to live with one woman, but my wife says it's a longer time to live with one man. Sometimes I think that I'll get rid of all my windup clocks that tick, as they make me nervous ticking off the short time I have left of my life. I've always said that I don't mind dying, but would like to put it off as long as possible. I've had an exciting and a good life and hope to have a few more years to enjoy my kids, grand and great-grandkids.
    I hear people talking about hard times. The young people that I know don't know what hard times are. Half the kids that go to the high school across the road from us drive their own cars to school and have later model cars than mine. I can't think of anyone that doesn't have colored TV, stereos in their homes and most of them have boats, campers, motorcycles or snowmobiles in their yard besides an extra car or pickup for every adult in the family. Anyone in trouble can sign up and get food stamps, rent or fuel relief, and doctor or hospital care. I read a lot and watch TV some and can see a lot wrong with our country, but I can also see that we are the best country in the world. I thank God that I was born in this USA. There are SO many countries so poor that the babies born are losers and don't have a chance from their first day on earth. We at least can complain, out loud and in public, without being thrown in prison or sent to Siberia for it. Most of the people that I know and I live better than kings did less than a hundred years ago. They had to have dozens of servants or slaves to do for them what our modern conveniences do for us every day. We should all feel very lucky and try to enjoy every day that we can live in peace. I do.
    I must bring this wild story of my life to an end somewhere. It seems as though I should be at least a hundred years old when I think back to all the things that I have experienced in my nearly sixty-nine years of life, and I keep thinking of more things that I haven't written down in this story. I happened to marry a woman that I've always loved and we have never had any real serious trouble. This has made for a happier life. I have always had a lot of help from all of my sisters, especially the two younger ones, Eunice and Nelle, who I was in closer contact with. I often wonder what a different life I might have had if they hadn't helped me to get a start in life, or if I had married a woman that I couldn't get along with. Now it is a good feeling to know that we have our two kids and six grandkids that help us out and are always doing nice things for us.
    I am trying to taper off and practice taking life a little easier after all these years of hard work and activity, but as good as I feel most of the time, it's hard to slow down. I have a lot of good memories of the past but am still looking eagerly ahead to the future, whatever it may be.
    As the grand finale to my story I wish to add that our son, daughter, grandkids and many friends gave my wife and I a very successful golden wedding anniversary party June 30th, 1986 down in our park in our backyard. Old friends that we hadn't seen in years surprised us by showing up from hundreds of miles away. Many phone calls came from as far away as Michigan, Nebraska and from all over California. I expect our next fifty years of married life to be a lot smoother.
Harold Nelson Towse, The Good Old Days: Life Story of Harold Towse in the Rogue River Valley, 1990


Last revised February 8, 2025