MY  LIFE  STORY

Marco  B.  Fox  (Fuchs)

Text edited and formatted by Kenneth W. Fuchs, nephew, 2003; revised 2011

CONTENTS

 

 

 

 

 

PREFACE

November 30, 1993 – I will now try to create a history of my life from the time of my birth on a farm about 5 miles east of Abernathy, Texas, on July 11, 1919, one year after my parents moved from Marble Falls, Texas, in the Hill Country to the High Plains, and will include some background on my parents that will go back to their childhood days.

EARLY YEARS AT ABERNATHY

	These are my memories.  I’m going to sit here and start at the beginning and try to tell everything I can remember about my life.   
	I was born on the 11th day of July 1919 at Dad’s Farm at Abernathy, Texas, along with my twin brother, Marion.  I was either born before or after Marion, we don’t know which, and we were the only two children of ten that were attended by a physician at our birth.  He was just a doctor, he wasn’t a physician. We were the only ones that were born after my mother and daddy moved from the hill country of Texas up to the plains because of his asthma and hay fever, probably a bad case of hay fever more than anything.  He always felt better at a higher altitude, dryer climate, but after they plowed that country up around Lubbock his asthma got to bothering him up there and in 1926 he traded that place for his place out here in Lea County, New Mexico.  Herbert Day, Gertie’s husband, said Papa told him that he would rather make a living raising livestock than try to make a living on a plow looking a span of horses in the ass all day planting a row crop was the reason he moved to New Mexico.  
I’ll try to give some idea of some of the things we did before we moved from 1919 to 1926.  I remember after we got to be larger kids, my father would take a wagon & team and go down off the Caprock around Post, Texas, and get a big nice formed cedar tree for Christmas and while he was there he would cut limbs off and make us toys.  I remember one year he built Marion and me a little toy rifle with a cedar limb for a barrel.  But he was such stickler for safety with firearms, even though these were just wooden guns, he wouldn’t allow us to point them at anything we wouldn’t want to shoot which included each other.  He was real particular about this safety with a gun.  He always had guns.  He told me one time he killed his first lobo wolf when he was 13 years old, so he was a very experienced rifle shot.  Of course he started out on muzzle loaders and things like that, but I don’t believe I’ve ever seen anybody that was better with a gun than my father.
He used to shoot with both eyes open so he could see the game with his left eye while he was looking down the sights with his right eye.  I never mastered that.  Both of my eyes have to be doing the same thing.  
I will relate an instance of Dad’s shooting ability on this page as I have room.  Dad wanted the cotton wood tree trimmed at the top so the tree would not interfere with the wind and windmill wheel so he ask George and Vernon to climb up there and saw the limbs off.  They both said the limbs were too small to hold them up, so Dad got his deer rifle [Winchester pump action in .32-20 caliber] and shot the limbs off by using three shots on the larger limbs . . . and the limb would break off a little ragged but it worked. 
In the course of growing up, my mother got frustrated with tending kids.  Roland was two years old when my brother and I were born and Vernon was about 4 or 5 and it was more like having a set of quadruplets than just having a set of twins.  One day Mother was just talking, and she said that she had too many kids and didn’t know what she was going to do with them.  This was a little before my memory, but I heard my brothers and sisters talking about it.  Some of my brothers decided they would thin us out a little.  They had Marion and me out in the tank by the windmill holding us under water, and I believe it was Gertrude who saw what they were doing.  She came out there and rescued us from drowning, but it would have thinned out some of us snot-nosed kids if they had just left them alone.  
While Mother was in labor having my brother and me, the rest of the kids went down the road to my mother’s brother, Uncle Fritz and Aunt Mercedes and  stayed there until someone told them that we’d been born and they could go home.  They were walking home and directly Herman said, “Oh, I see them, they’re out there swinging on the front gate.”  And when Vernon got there and didn’t see us, he never did trust Herman after that.  It sounded like a good way to keep the younger kids’ spirit up.  (Of course Vernon was just joking about never trusting Herman again.)  
I remember the Christmas that my mother had a bad case of MUMPS.  She was swollen big, but since I was probably four or five years old at the time her illness didn’t impress me as much as the “delicious” lunch that Rudolph made for the whole family.  Rudi was in college at Canyon, Texas but was home for the holidays and someone asked him to dismantle the tree, which he did, including the candles.  Most of the decorations were home-cooked candy and cookies and Rudi put it all in a pot ,added water, and made us the most unique lunch you ever heard of and we were told to go ahead and eat it as that was all we would get until it was all eaten.  Evidently mother got over the MUMPS and the rest of us got over the lunch eventually, but I still remember it, but can’t come up with a description of the taste.
We were a pretty close family all our lives and even when we were fighting, we tried to keep it just among ourselves.  I remember when I was about 2 years  old, Marion and I were always having a problem about who was going to do what.  Mother solved that by taking a piece of thread –  we had two peach trees in the yard, the front yard – and  tying one of us to one tree and the other to the other tree with a thread and get those threads just long enough to where we couldn’t reach each other.  And the one that got mad enough, or hollered enough at the other to break the thread, he was the only one to get paddled.  It worked out pretty well.  A little rough on my fanny as I had a temper when I was small, but in my case smarts went in through my fanny on into my brain better than any other way.

SOME CHRISTMAS EXPERIENCES

I’ll try to relate some of the Christmas experiences we had.  Our tradition was to open each others’ presents on Christmas Eve.  We usually had a big cedar Christmas tree in the middle of the room and we had to circle around it (that’s one reason why they had so many kids, we had to circle round this big tree and the only way we could hold hands round this big tree was to have enough kids) so we’d sing Christmas songs, “Oh Tannenbaum” was one and “Silent Night and Holy Night,” in the German language.  Also the tree was lighted with real wax candles that Dad watched real close to keep from burning  the house down.  Then we’d open our Christmas package from Mother and Dad and the one we kids would give to one another.  Then we hung stockings on the mantle and the next morning Santa had been there and he’d bring some more gifts.  I remember one time I was about 5 years old and Vernon was always pulling pranks along with the rest of us.  He got a sock that was beyond darning and it had a big hole in the toe, and he hung it up on the mantle and put a dishpan under it.  The next morning he got up and Dad had filled that dishpan with corncobs and horse apples.  Vernon said, “Oh boy, I got a horse.”  He ran outside and didn’t find a horse and he came back in and said, “but he got away.”  
Normally if there was an orange anywhere in the country we’d have an orange and apple which came out of the cellar.  There was very little candy.  You couldn’t just go buy any variety of candy even if you had a lot of money.  When you have 10 kids running around, a farmer didn’t have that much money.  I might add that oranges were used as a chaser when us kids needed some CASTOR OIL and to this day I am not particularly fond of orange juice the way most kids are.  I would rather get my vitamin C by going out in the hot sun.
I also remember one time Papa and probably some of the older kids went rabbit hunting in order to keep the rabbits out of our field crops and to feed the hogs and chickens.  Marion & I were playing close by while Papa was skinning rabbits when Marion noticed some blood on his leg and started to cry because his leg hurt, until someone wiped the blood off to show him that it was rabbit blood, at which point he stopped crying, which goes to show that Fuchs blood hurts much more than rabbit blood. 
 
A PONY AND A CHICKEN THIEF

We always managed to have everything we needed, and probably a lot we didn’t need.  All of us grew up, of course.  At about 5 years old I had rheumatic fever and am still living with the after-effects of it to this day.  When I was 7 years old  we moved to New Mexico, and I’ve got to bring you up to date about when a small young pony yearling colt showed up at our gate from the section line road, and after a couple of days, Dad turned it in so it could get some water.  Dad put an advertisement in the paper that we had this little pony mustang, and we never got an answer, we never found out where that horse came from.  But after we got to New Mexico, we finally broke this pony to ride, (it was a pretty good horse, it was pretty nervous), and when you were ready to get on, you’d better be plum ready or you’d land behind it.  That little horse would take off when you put your foot in the stirrup and she’d be gone.  We never broke her of that.  She was that way until she got loco.  (I’ll tell you about that after we moved).  
We had a neighbor there (this might be quite interesting) who was known as a chicken thief.  We had a pretty good-sized orchard.  We had peaches and plums and apples and what not and a bunch of peach trees got ripe, and Mother was canning them (I was eating more than I was canning).  This neighbor was about a quarter mile up the road, and Dad knew he was coming in there stealing peaches.  He set different ways trying to trap him and to know when to go out there with a shotgun to try to spook the guy.  I don’t know just how he knew he was out there, but he sneaked out there with that 16-gauge shotgun out by the chicken coop, and he could see this guy out by the tree and he was picking peaches and was dropping them in a basket by his feet.  Dad shot over his head with a shotgun and the guy took off running, jumped the fence, and got in that road.  The wind had blown the sand off the road and it was just hard clay.  Dad could hear every footstep until he got home and Dad even heard the screen door slam when he got home, so he was pretty sure he knew who had been there.  The next day Dad saw that guy in the store and he had a crease right in the side of his eye, over his ear, like where a pair of glasses goes over the ear, and he was getting something at the drug store to put some medicine on that.  I don’t know, since I didn’t go to town with Dad, what Dad said, if anything, to the guy.  This was a deformed pellet that didn’t follow the shot string like it should.
I’ve jumped to a later time now.  We lived in New Mexico for maybe two or three years, and once in a while we’d go to town, maybe once a month or six weeks, and get supplies we’d run out of and bring the mail.  We’d had letters and papers from a month’s supply.  I guess they were local papers, which could have been from Abernathy, and Mother would go through them and directly she read out loud the story of this guy Chicken Thief Arnold, that he’d moved to Colorado, and of course we didn’t know this till then.  He’d keep going into the same bathroom window in this house up in Colorado and when that guy was gone from home, he’d get whatever he needed.  So this guy set a shot gun for when this guy climbed in the window.  He shot himself and in this story it said he was from near Lubbock, Texas and was known as Chicken Thief Arnold so it was quite amazing how this guy got his last meal.

A BULL PUP NAMED TIGE, SOME HORSES AND CATS

Going back to Texas, after Gertrude got married, I don’t remember when, she and Herbert would come every two or three months.  They lived up in Hale Center, Texas, somewhere in there, and they would come down every once in a while.  We had an English bulldog pup named Tige.  I just found that out.  I was talking to George and he told me what his name was.  When he was just a pup growing up, Herbert and Gertrude would come down there and Herbert would tease this dog through the fence (I think it was a net wire fence or something), and this little old dog would get quite furious about that.  I went to New Mexico in a car.  About a week to 10 days later someone came with a wagon, milk cows, and horses.  I think there were several loads made, but old Tige the dog had come with them, and he was probably six months old.  I would say about 3 months later, Herbert and Gertrude came up there and everybody greeted them out in front of the house in the pasture, and when everybody came in, the dog was just as happy as he could be, but when Herbert came in, that dog, who had grown to be a full-grown dog, remembered being teased through that fence, and he wouldn’t let Herbert in the yard.  We had to talk him into letting Herbert into the yard
And another thing, when he was all by himself, this dog would get lonesome for Texas.  If there wasn’t someone out there talking to him, or something, he’d head for the northeast back towards Abernathy and howl.  Once or twice we saw him out there and someone would call him and he’d come back.  But he never got that out of his system, and eventually he took off for Texas and we never saw him again.  I’ve read about dogs doing that.  They just never learn where their new homes are.  
Horses are the same way.  You can get a horse and get him programmed to know where his home is; he’ll go.  You can turn him loose, and even if it’s pitch dark, you can turn him loose and he’ll go home.  But we had this bunch of horses, (we still did whatever farming we had to do by horses) and every time we went to get the horses, we had to go 1 - 1.5 miles to the NE and there they’d be pointing in the back corner towards Abernathy.  We finally solved that by putting them in a fenced-in pasture and put these horses in it where when they went to the NE corner they’d be at home there in New Mexico.  I don’t know how long it takes them to get programmed, probably six months before they get really acquainted to the new place.  I’ve heard a lot of people say that their horses come back to a temporary sheep camp, or a cattle drive camp and they turn the horses loose and the next morning they’d come back to camp.  I never did experience that all that much, but I do know that a horse will go back home if you turn him loose out in the woods or pasture, and they’ll be back where they know they are supposed to be, back where their home is.
Something I thought of while talking with George was that when we moved to that ranch out here in Lea County about the first of August, when the people that owned that place left there, they drove off and left a bunch of cats.  Of course no one fed them; they had to feed themselves.  After we got Tige there, that dog, he knew what to do with cats, and it wasn’t long till those cats all left.  They had been hanging around out there, and he made it an undesirable place for them to live.  Eventually they went wild and you’d see them in the pasture, and if you saw a cat out there, they’d jump in a hole, just like a prairie dog.  Finally they just went wild.  Even after 15 years after we moved there, there were wild house cats out there.  I think this contributed to doing away with the little quail that used to run wild all over this country.  People would just turn cats loose and they would just run wild.  Of course one that you think is a pet would be killing birds all of the time anyway.  They cleaned out the birds, the quail and stuff like that in this country.  
Now we’ll go back to Abernathy and pick up some thoughts that came to mind.  I remember, I’m pretty sure this was on a Christmas Eve, we were all sitting on these homemade benches on the side of this homemade table, having our evening meal, when the telephone rang (one of those old crank jobs) and when Dad got back he said, “Well, Caroline won’t be coming in; she got married today,” and Ewald got up, didn’t finish his meal, and he said, “Well, by golly, she beat me, but not by much.”  That “By Golly” was Ewald’s strongest by words as far as I remember.  He took off, probably in a Model T.  He went and got Ruby and they got married before midnight, so we had a double wedding there in different places.  I don’t remember what town Caroline got married in, but then Ewald got married on the same day.  I was probably only about 4 or 5 years old and that stayed with me.
  
RHEUMATIC FEVER

At some time near then I had rheumatic fever, and nobody knew too much about it.  Must have had a pretty severe case, and some doctor in Lubbock had advised Mom and Dad I wouldn’t live more than five years.  They were giving me medicine.  Even after we moved to New Mexico, I was having to take this medicine.  We were already a year behind in school because in Texas the kids weren’t allowed to start school until they were seven years old when school started at the first of September or whenever, and here in New Mexico they started at 6.  After I got over that rheumatic fever, I had an after-effect that affected my nerves and I lost one more year before I could go to school, so I was always about 2 years older than the rest of the kids in my class.  I outlived that doctor by quite a bit already.  My valve job on my heart was a direct result of that rheumatic fever.  A heart specialist in OK City said that was the only disease that they knew of that causes the scar tissue to form on the valve tissue in your heart.  Once you get that, they don’t want you to get any kind of infection.  Even if I have my teeth cleaned, I’m supposed first take some antibiotics.  I seem to be doing pretty good with that Hong Kong valve I’m wearing.
We used to sleep out under the trees in Abernathy all summer long.  I guess after there were 10 kids we didn’t have room to sleep in the house except in layers, and no air conditioning, and they would always put the oldest ones on the bottom layer.  Anyway, one real bright moonlit night, no wind, we were all sleeping out there and a big limb, probably 6 or 8 inches in diameter, broke off in the middle of the night, broke off of I believe it was a willow tree.  It woke everybody up, but there just wasn’t anybody caught under that particular limb.  We never did figure out why that limb didn’t break off while the wind was blowing.  It waited till it was perfectly still; but those things happen.

MY DAD’S CHILDHOOD HOME IN THE TEXAS HILL COUNTRY

I’ll go back and give you the gist of a conversation I had with my paternal grandmother.  My mother’s mother and dad lived around there at Abernathy and I knew them, but this was the first time I’d ever met my father’s mother.  This old house where Dad lived when he was a child had four stories.  It had a basement, more of a wine cellar, and a ground floor, a second story, and then you go up stairs and it had an 8x8 Indian lookout on top of the roof complete with gun ports and a trap door.  You had to push the door open.  Then you could wedge it shut where someone couldn’t come up behind you while you were shooting Indians. 
My father’s mother, my grandmother, told me the first time I saw her that when Dad was just a young sprout, just barely big enough to reload muzzle load guns, I think Aunt Jo was just a toddler.  My grandmother noticed some Indians circling the house on horseback.  I believe she said there were six of them.  So she gathered up all the guns that were in the house and took the 3 kids, my Aunt Frieda, Dad and Aunt Jo, and went up to this Indian lookout on top of the house and she was going to depend on my Father to reload these guns.  If there was any Indians ever come in and try to raid the place, I don’t know where my Grandfather was at the time.  She had a hard time keeping Aunt Jo quiet, just being a small child.  She said it must have been 30 minutes or an hour that these Indians rode around that house.  Just out of rifle range.  I guess they decided that the place was probably armed and they never tried to raid it, and finally just rode off into the brush.  I’m telling this just to try to show the short span of time from Indian frontier to present day when we’ve sent people to the Moon and all the technical advances that have been made in the past 75 years.
One lifetime doesn’t span a whole lot of time and the changes that are being made.  In fact, I believe that myself and my brothers and sisters have lived over the biggest change in technology and whatnot of any generation of children that were ever born, or probably from here on, we’ll still have a lot of advances, but I doubt in a 75 year lifetime that we’ll see any more advances than we’ve seen in the past 75 years.  Of course, I’m not quite 75 years old, but I lived pretty fast, so I just use that for a base time span.

INTO NEW MEXICO

I’ll use the rest of this tape for the background of when we moved to New Mexico.  I understand that Dad had a clear title to the farm in Abernathy, and he got clear title to the farm here in New Mexico.  I don’t know if any money changed hands or not, but he didn’t have enough money to stock the place here in Lea County.  There was a guy by the name of Pete Etcheverry that had leased that whole ranch and run sheep on it.  When he found out that Dad wouldn’t lease it back to him and was going to move on to it, why he brought a bunch of extra stock over there and he grazed that grass down to ground level.  So the next spring, after the grass had come up, before we could get any livestock, Dad made a deal with a guy in Bledsoe, Texas.  I don’t remember how many but he brought enough sheep to stock the place and run them for half of the increase.  I think that was a five-year deal, so this made it along about ’31 or ’32, before we could have wholly our own livestock on that place.  It made the income a little short those years, and then the Big Depression started in 1929, so this was a real handicap.
It took a long time to move on to a place and then to have a real depression hit a few years later.  I remember George was old enough, and he helped drive the increase of livestock from that guy from Texas, and George and somebody drove those livestock back to him.  By that time our place had been overstocked with all the livestock over the years, and the drought didn’t help it any because it didn’t rain for a year or two.  Of course these things never came to my mind, but this is one of the reasons that Dad had such a hard time making it on that place.  Dad was having to keep all his ewe lambs in order to have a herd of his own when he got rid of the rest of them after the end of the five years, and this also tended to overstock our range.  The grass and everything was good in those years, the beginning of those years at least, so the Depression didn’t hurt us near as bad as it did others.  We were never poor, we didn’t think we were poor, nor did the living standards show us to be poor.  We just didn’t have any money. Even so, we lived pretty good.  I don’t remember ever missing a meal. 
Anyway, we got that bill paid off and this of course shortened Dad’s cash income from anything he sold from then on.  But he had a 10-year lease on a Teague Section, a section we dug the loco weed out of, and he leased a five-year lease on Zach Jones’ place, a place that bordered on ours.  The Jones lived about 5- 6 miles north of us.  There was a row of homesteads along section lines and I don’t know the details on that, whether they proved up on this homestead that Dad had leased or whether they homesteaded that other or what happened, what the deal was.  But at the end of that five years, they decided to move back to the place that Dad had leased.  Then they built a rock house on their place and Z. W. lives about 100 feet north of the half dugout where he was born.
 I do remember getting out in the garden and killing off the blister bugs.  They were eating our tomato vines and potato plants in the earlier part of the year.  We’d take a little pan and maybe a half-inch or inch of water in this pan and just a skim of kerosene on top, hold it under the bush, and knock the bugs off the bush.  It more or less terminated those bugs.  It was a pretty nasty job and it had to be done all the time.  There wasn’t anything green for these blister bugs to eat out in the pasture, and they just gravitated to this garden and almost wiped it out.  If we hadn’t had so many kids running around there to help tend the thing, they probably would have eaten it up.  At about that time too, we had an infestation of what we called miller bugs.  They are little gray moths.  There were just hundreds of them every night out around our kerosene lights.  We didn’t get electricity out in that country until after Dad sold the ranch after W.W.II, so kerosene lights and the wood burning stove were the extent of it out there.
 
A MORTGAGED FEED BILL

Well, I’ll try to lay a little more background.  One year, I guess that was in ’29, Dad went into town and bought a winter’s supply of feed for these sheep and also our milk cows, and put our livestock up for collateral for this feed bill.  He had it delivered out to the barn, or maybe we brought it out there. I don’t know moneywise what we’re talking about, but this happened just before the stock market crash of ’29, and after that you could have given all that livestock away and not come up with enough money to pay a feed bill of say $1,000 or $2,000, whatever it was.  After the crash there wasn’t any way he could pay that bill. So this guy that ran the feed and grocery store was probably hurting for money too, but he kept coming out there wanting his money, and Dad finally got tired of that.  He couldn’t sell anything because nobody had any money.  He said, “Those sheep are right out there.  Just go ahead and drive them off and give me a clean bill on that mortgage for the feed bill,” and the guy said, “Well, I don’t have any grass.”  And Dad said, “Well, I don’t have any money.  You either write me a letter and let me sell this mortgaged stuff and let me pay you the money, or just  don’t come out here and bother me anymore.  I’ll pay you when I can.”  The guy finally wrote him a letter and told him he could get rid of them.  Well, I think maybe sheep were $1.50 a head by then, from nothing.  
There happened to be a guy from Levelland, Texas, a banker, whose bank had gone broke over there, so he came over and bought what is known as the Four Lake Ranch.  The place is worth a lot. In the bottom of some of these dry lakes, you could dig down 18 inches and there hit water level on an ordinary year.  Just dig a hole and let the mud settle out as the water came into it, and you’d have good drinking water.  Of course the lakes are part of the land.  But the Four Lakes Ranch  is still over there. It was a pretty-good-sized outfit (I don’t know the real size of it) on the north side of the highway between Tatum and Roswell, which wasn’t paved at the time.  The banker needed to stock it, and somehow Dad and he got together and he took some fellow that knew livestock real well and picked out the top stock that Dad owned and drove them off.  That got Dad out from under that feed bill of ’29.  I suppose that happened probably in about ’31 or ’32.  
Anyway, we had donkeys and what not, and one big difference of being raised like that and being raised in town was that we could play all day and walk a mile in any direction and still be on our place, whereas a kid raised in town, he’d walk 50 feet and he’d be on someone else’s property.  It makes a lot of difference.  You don’t see children nowadays paying much attention to not going onto someone else’s property.  They walk across your yard or anything.  It is just accepted practice.  But in those days, you didn’t get on someone else’s place without the owner of that place authorizing you to go on the place, especially on horseback or anything.  
								
CHORES 

We raised our own hogs, and we’d buy shoats for maybe 50 cents apiece and we’d feed them, then butcher them in the fall.  Normally we went deer hunting and we’d make sausage; it wouldn’t be pure pork.  It would be about half pork and half venison; it makes a good sausage, not too fat that way.  We had our own smoke house.  We’d make jerky out of beef or usually out of venison and
hang our hams and whatnot, build a fire.  We had cherry wood that makes a good-tasting smoke.  We, the kids, all helped do all those things.  
We’d make soap; we’d take the cracklin’ and make what lard that we had to have that we had to cook with (we usually had more than we needed) and we usually made soap out of the rest of that.  We had an old cast iron kettle; I don’t know whatever happened to that one.  I have one out here in my shop that belonged to Orma’s mother and dad, but the one we used out there out at the ranch, I don’t know what happened to that.  Maybe some of the nephews have it as a keepsake, the way I have this one.  
After I got big enough it seemed like they buried me up with quite a bit of the chores and we’d go out and get a load of cow chips and bring them in.  There was a lot of mesquite roots out in that country.  I suppose there had been a fire out there that killed a lot of it, probably somewhere around the turn of the century.  The main roots were all that was left.  You could find them about
even with the top of the ground.  You could take a pick and pry them out of the ground.  They make good fire wood.  Coal, I don’t know what it cost per ton, but we didn’t buy much of that.  I remember one time we bought a ton or two of coal, but most of the time we used cow chips or mesquite roots, and we’d build a fire under that old kettle.  
Of course, Mother had run plum out of girls at home even before we moved to New Mexico.  So we boys would always help her do the washing, and we’d build a fire and help wash.  In 1929 they bought a Maytag washer with a 2-cycle engine in it.  There were a lot of those sold in this country at that time and we washed with that thing for years and years.  It had a wringer.  You wash the clothes, then put them through the wringer, and we had a wash tub.  We’d hang the clothes on the line to dry.  I guess I don’t realize how my mother stood up to doing all the work she did, raising those 10 kids.  We always had something to eat; we always had homemade bread.  You couldn’t go to town and buy bread.  We didn’t have refrigeration.  When people around town had ice boxes, you’d get a block of ice at the ice plant, and nearly every little town had an ice plant.  You could keep stuff in these ice boxes pretty good, but we didn’t ever own one out there at the ranch because it was too hard to come in and get ice to put in it, so it wasn’t practical, and we just lived on stuff that would keep, stuff put up in jars.  

CHERRIES AND COW CHIPS

One year, I know, Dad had bought a homestead off of a guy named Winan; he’d gotten old.  He used to have a bunch of donkeys, and he’d go to Seagrave and get a load of products and whatever, and go by his homestead, and then go on to Roswell and unload the freight, and come back to his homestead, and that way he proved up on his homestead, and probably made enough money to live on.  But one wet year, and I don’t know what year it was, he got a bunch of cherry switches to whip them donkeys with, and he got back to his homestead and saw that it had rained so much that they were budding out on these little old switches so, he just planted those on his homestead.  I think at the same time he got a bunch of small peach trees, and he planted about 25 cherry trees and 23 peach trees.  After we bought that place, there was one year that those things were just loaded with fruit.  We put up half-gallon jars of cherries, and all us kids were pitting those cherries till we gave out.  Finally we starting canning them, pits and all.  We canned peaches for I don’t know how long, and that gave us some good food in the winter time besides just meat and bread what we normally had.  I’ll add in here that those trees all froze in the winter of 1933 in February.  It had gotten warm and the sap came up in the trees; then that cold snap killed all of those trees along with all the orchards in the Pecos valley at Roswell, at which time the farmers turned to other crops.  
We had a thermometer on the back porch that just went down to -20 degrees and Vernon went out there barefooted to see how cold it was while George was starting a fire.  This was an unheated house at night.  When Vernon came back into the house, he said the small bulb on the bottom of the thermometer wasn’t even full, so I walked out there to check it and he was correct.  A guy in Tatum said he registered -32.  Our water bucket was frozen solid in the house.
One time, we had some corn from before that drought, and when that drought and depression hit, we were very sparing with that corn for feed.  Dad finally got a guy from Tatum that had a grinder and he ground that corn up for corn meal without taking that outer hull off from the corn which makes pretty rough corn meal, but if it’s the only kind you got, you enjoy it pretty good.  I think the guy that ground it up took part of the corn for payment, so there wasn’t any money involved.  Then I just know how the other staples worked.  They would go to town once or twice a month.  In the Depression, they’d go maybe every two months without going to town, but everything seemed to work out pretty good.
	When we first came to this country, one of the first things the neighbors did (the closest neighbors were about 3 miles off or maybe further) was say don’t lock your house if you go off somewhere in the wintertime especially, because if some cowboy is riding through the country and if a blizzard comes up and he can’t get in your house, he’d just freeze to death.  This was standard practice until after World War II and people started moving in and then it finally got to the point where you just about had to lock up or no telling what all you’d lose.  The only thing I remember losing there was when we all went off on a Sunday, we had one watermelon on the vine (I think it was the only one we’d raised that year), and when we got back, we went out to get it and someone had stopped there to get a drink and cut that watermelon in the garden off the vine; it took about 3 - 4 years later when this old boy told us that “he sure enjoyed that watermelon” and we found out who he was.  He didn’t bother anything else around the house.  Things have changed a lot since then as far as neighbors and all.  
	One thing about gathering cow chips and burning them brings to mind one time my father got selected for jury duty out here in Lovington.  And it was 20 miles out and was just too much so he just stayed here in town and he’d eat in the cafe; on the west side of the square there used to be a cafe.  They would go over there to eat and they had this large wood- or coal-burning cook stove in front and the cook was also the waitress.  She’d stoke the fire a little and reach over to grab a chunk of coal to throw it in the fire and change her mind and pick up a cow chip and put it in there.  Dad was sitting there and she said, “I just hate to use that coal.  It just gets so much black on your hands, you have to wash your hands every time you throw a chunk of it in the fire.”  She just wiped her hands on her apron and went on cooking.  When he got off his jury duty, he came home laughing and I thought it was kind of funny myself.  He’d laugh about it every once in a while.  When I think of it, I do too.

DEVIL-HEADED CACTUS AND VERNON’S ENGINEERING SKILLS

	George and I one time were going after a load of devil-headed cactus.  We dug those up and burned the stickers off of them with cow chips we’d gather and chop them up so a cow could get them in their mouths and kept a lot of milk cows going through that drought.  And they’d give enough milk; we always had enough milk to drink.  In that way we cleaned a lot of those devil-headed cactus off that place and kept the cows in pretty good shape too.  We finally put up an old army cot and we’d lay those cactus on there with the stickers to the bottom and build a cow chip fire under there and burn them, trying to mass produce burning those thorns off the cactus.
	I believe this was some of Vernon’s engineering.  We had a one-cylinder engine of some kind, the flywheel was pretty big, and you had to stand on the flywheel enough to get it to turn, and hope you fell out of the way before you broke your leg.  It worked pretty good, and Vernon and George  rigged up a belt and hooked it on to an old grinder we had.  This thing had some old rollers in there about the size of your arm, I’d say about the size of your arm at least, (I’d say about 3" in diameter at least) and it had some burrs built on to them and you’d drop those cactus in there and it would just chop them up.  But the cows got to where if they were anywhere within listening distance, they’d hear that old one-cylinder engine kick off and they’d come to the house and we’d feed them those cactus and turn them in and milk them.  Of course we always had milk-pen calves.  We could butcher them if it became necessary.  Even in summertime we’d butcher a beef and put some of it up in cans, cook it and can that meat.  We were in pretty good shape on that end of it.  There just wasn’t any money.
	
DOGS AND VARMINTS

	As we kids got old enough to set a trap, we’d  trap for skunks and coyotes and there were a few foxes in this country, but I mean with hair all over them, and we had badgers around and once in a while we’d catch one of them and skin them out send the hides off to fur companies, as most people wore fur coats or at least coats with fur collars.  
	I will relate an incident that took place one day late in the evening as I was riding out in the pasture.  A large black dog that we had at the time was following me and doing his thing when I spotted a badger off to the side of me.  About that time this dog spotted the badger and the badger spotted the dog.  The dog lunged and grabbed the badger with a lucky bite right over its face and never turned him a loose, and I guess the badger was smothered as the dog shook him vigorously to keep the badger from removing  his [the dog’s] eyes.  That was the only time I saw a dog best a badger in all the time I was out there. 
	Another incident that I saw in another pasture and another dog, this was a small dog named Spot because he had some, this dog may have weighed 8 lbs.  As I was riding along, I spotted a skunk to the side and I tried to call the dog, but he saw the skunk and charged.  The skunk just had time to elevate his tail when Spot grabbed him in the posterior and got a fullload of skunk hydraulic fluid down his throat.  The dog got so sick he didn’t eat for a week.  This dog was hell on skunks after that; I saw him work eight hours on one skunk to kill it and did succeed.
	We never had a dog or other animal to have hydrophobia so I guess we were just lucky.  We all used raw milk and other products that are banned now, and the majority of us lived a long time as I have already and am still working on it.  
	A little more about Spot [the dog].  He fell off a wagon that we were hauling feed from the field with and the wagon wheel ran over him.  Another time he didn’t eat for a week.  When he got better, we noticed 4 or 5 ribs had been broken and had healed with a knot on each one of them.  He never got fat after that.  

BRANDING AND COW DIPPING

	This is a good place to add two stories that just came to mind.  I think these both occurred the same summer.  One was the last big roundup and branding of cows that I worked.  Vernon, Roland and myself helped on the Seth Alston ranch one July branding calves for I believe 4 days.  The cowboys rounded up the cows and put them in a large corral and then separated the calves from the cows.  Then we went in and grabbed a calf that we could flank, and working in pairs we held them down and the men with a hot iron branded them.  It was wind still and hot and the dust just hung in the air over the corral up to about ten feet.  I think we got about $5  for the four days, and I coughed for about a month to get all the dirt and smoke out of my wind pipe.  It was customary for each ranch to help one another which they did, but we didn’t need help, so Vernon talked Seth into paying us for our help.  The women folks prepared large picnic-style lunches each day.  I think they butchered a beef for the branding.
	We had an infestation of scabies [a contagious skin disease of cows and sheep] one year, either the same year or the next year in the mid 1930’s, and Seth Alston had the only dipping vat within thirty miles, so we helped dip several thousand cows.  But the hardest ones to dip were a bunch of milk cows that were driven about twenty miles to the dipping vat.  They were so gentle that we couldn’t spook them into jumping into the vat.  We rigged up a Model T coil and a battery to use as a prod on them.  It worked pretty good and worked real good on a guy named Stooge Snell who was more talk than help up until someone gave him a shot of that cattle prod.  It made a believer out of him.  Now you can buy cattle prods with size D dry cell batteries in them.
 	I was working on the Alston ranch one year toward the end of the thirties and Katie Alston gave the cook orders to not fry but one egg per hired hand for breakfast so she could sell the rest at about 10 cents a dozen.  But a guy by the name of Volder Travis was working there, and after a few days he told me he was going to get his ration of eggs each day, so when he came in for lunch he got a few eggs and he would take his thumb nail and punch a hole in the end of the egg and suck it.  He said after a few days he got to liking them that way.  The cook wondered why the chickens didn’t produce as they had been.
	I might as well tell about this Volder Travis.  Dad went to town to get some help for Roland and me as George and Vernon had joined the U. S. Cavalry.  Dad found Volder in jail and paid his fine, and he came out and ran the row binder and Roland and I did the shocking.  He was a good hand and didn’t need to suck eggs at our place either. 

HORSES AND DOGS AND FOG
 
	I’ll give a little background on the horses and dogs and one thing and another that we brought from Texas.  The horses have got a bad habit of wanting to go back home all the time.  It takes a while to program them where home is.  We had draft horses, one Percheron and some crossbred horses that we used to pull wagons and one thing and another.  They’d go back towards Abernathy every time we turned them out in the pasture.  When Dad finally set up a small pasture to the west of the house, when they would try to go back to Texas, after so long a time, they recognized this as their new home and they would come home.  But donkeys don’t suffer with wanting to go to the house; they just wander around.  
	We had an old foggy spell, foggy every night and most of the day.  I think it lasted about 10 days.  The horses had by that time programmed themselves where the new house was, except we’d bought a horse from Bill Monteith who lived southeast of our place.  I don’t know just how many miles, maybe 5- 6 miles.  And for some reason, that was before Dad found out that you could raise livestock, especially sheep, without bringing them into the corral every night.  They would go out in this fog and try to find the sheep.  We didn’t have a sheepherder to try to keep up with them.  So, they’d bring them into the corral, and it would get foggy just about dark, and they couldn’t see from nothing.  
	They had an old kerosene lantern on the front porch of the old place out there, and finally they let Roland, he was about 12 at the time, get on this horse that we bought from old Bill Monteith.  We told him if he got lost, just turn the horse with Roland in the saddle loose and he’d come home.  Well, that sounded like a good idea, except we hadn’t had him long enough to get him programmed to where home was.  Sure enough, it got foggy, he just turned him loose, and he came to this fence, and Roland thought he could kind of see a light and he knew this lantern was on the porch.  He got off to see if he could find a gate, and he recognized right away that he was at a barbed wired fence and not at the gate at the house, so he got back on the horse and headed him the other way.  The light that he had seen was the moon.  This was a ground fog and it wasn’t too thick above the ground, but he kind of figured out it was the moon.  So he turned the horse around, and this time he came home.
	George and Vernon were out on some donkeys and they don’t come home when you turn them loose.  They finally found a road and they didn’t know which way to go, but they followed it and this was totally dark by then.  When they got to a fence they knew that they had a gate on the east side of the place.  So they turned the donkeys around and by that time, they ended up at the north side of the place at a gate.  When they finally got them on the right way to go home, it took them a while.  Donkeys aren’t real speedy.  It ended up they got home that night and everybody came in.  And later on, we found out that livestock does better if you just leave them out.  Of course at that time there were a lot of coyotes and what not, and people had the idea that coyotes will kill sheep, which they will, but not all of them.  It’s kind of like one.  If you get one, there might be a lot of coyotes there, but just one will get you into trouble and give all the coyotes a bad name.  
	This long spell had given us a lot of problems.  I was too young to get out and get into a lot.  They thought I was.  I guess I was, having had that rheumatic fever.  It probably slowed me down some too.  But being 10 years old, they weren’t about to let me get out there in the woods and see if I could find anything.  I couldn’t even find myself at that time. I understand.
	The English bulldog we had was a pup, and I think I told you about Herbert teasing that dog when he was just a pup.  A dog has better memory than most people think.  A stray dog was like a coyote.  People who lived in that country, if they let their dog go too far from home, he never made it back because they’d shoot him just as soon as a coyote.  Since that time, it’s proven out that a pack of dogs running out in a pasture would do much more damage than a coyote.  Coyotes will kill a lamb or something for food, and a dog will do the same thing for sport.  In fact I’ve seen a big pack of dogs; we were several miles from town, and that was after we’d started going to Tatum to school, and this rancher came running out, just as the school bus pulled up to his place in his pickup, in a Model T or could have been a Model A, and he had a hired hand.  One of them had a shotgun and the other had a .30-30, and they took after across the pasture and we could see that this herd of dogs had these sheep, and they were just circling around that bunch of sheep.  And they’d run in and grab one and kill it and go in again.  And I don’t recall how many sheep they killed, but when they saw him coming, they headed back toward Tatum and Bill Duncan got after them and the smaller dogs fell behind, and he was shooting them as he went past them.  He never stopped for a fence.  He just drove through them and came back later to fix them.  But he got all 13 of them.  The last one was in that guy’s yard and of course it kind of woke that fellow up and he came out there and they got into an argument and probably would have had a killing, but Bill proved that dog had been out there killing his sheep and the guy wouldn’t admit that his dog ran around at night, but it did.  
	In fact, I know some ranchers here that had a pack of dogs that came out 14 miles from town and got to killing calves and one thing and another, probably sheep.  But they settled their difference there about whether that dog came out to that ranch.  And then, Bill had to go out there to that country where he’d shot all the dogs and fix all those fences.  It did kind of slow down the dogs from town coming that far.  
	Cats are about as bad.  You can’t have a leash law for cats, but you can get a well-fed cat and it will kill a bird.  It doesn’t matter.  I’ve had them out here since I’ve come back to Lovington, trying to catch a humming bird.  They do get sparrows and house finches and whatever is feeding at my feeder; they’ll get in there and try to catch them.  
	Later on we had two pups.  I don’t have any idea where they came from.  One was white and one was black.  The same thing happened.  There was this school bus driver and by the time he got to our place, why he’d be thirsty and he’d just get out of the bus with us and go to our windmill and get him a drink of water and leave.  But these pups were there and he would tease them.  Well, when the next fall arrived and he was driving the bus, these pups had grown up and he started.  Of course, with the warm weather there wasn’t any air conditioning or whatever in those buses, so he’d get out there to the windmill and those dogs remembered him teasing them when they were pups.  They were trying to keep him from going to the windmill, and this little black dog just quit barking and trotted off and wandered off around the house.  He had to cross under a fence and he came around to that bus driver and latched on to his ankle and after that, that guy wasn’t nearly as thirsty when he got to our place as he had been.
	I never did think that an animal was supposed to remember things, but they may remember a lot of things, especially dogs.  Cats are stupid.  Dogs have got a little intelligence.  
	I remember one time I was working for a farmer north of Abernathy and came in at noon covered with dust, so I washed in the horse trough before going inside for lunch when I noticed a squirrel coming from the south and he went up the southeast leg of the windmill and down the northwest leg, then on his way north into a field.  You must know that country is two hundred miles from the nearest forest or farther.  It stayed in my memory.  

MEDICAL EMERGENCIES

	I’m getting on down to some other things like medical services we had in this county when we moved here.  There was one old doctor here when we moved here.  His name was Deardoff.  He went by buggy, especially if he was going out on a ranch to attend to a birthing.  He’d take that buggy and after the baby had arrived, he’d hook up his horse to that buggy.  Of course that horse had been fed.  Old Doc he’d lie down and go to sleep, and when the buggy stopped at a gate, it would wake him up and that horse would go through the gate and he’d go sleep and he could make it back to town that way.  But after he bought a car, he couldn’t sleep going back to town, so he switched back to that buggy on something that he might have to stay  for quite a while.  They had their place too.
	One time Herbert and Gertie came out to our place, and Marion had a belly ache.  Well, Herbert had been in W.W.I, and he said, “Let me check it.  I’m not a medic, but I’ve seen a lot of people with appendicitis, and I believe I can tell whether or not that is what his problem is.”  So he went in and we had Marion in the spare bedroom, where the rest of us all slept upstairs.  He uncovered Marion’s belly, and he took his finger and pushed Marion’s belly and in one particular lace on the belly and Marion nearly climbed right out of bed.  He said that there ain’t but one thing, we’ve got to get him to a doctor.  So they’d just arrived, hadn’t even gotten their coats and everything off, and somehow they got word to Lubbock that they were bringing him.  I don’t know whether they called from our place.  We had a telephone that run along the top wire on the barbed wire fences; most of the time it shorted out.  He and I don’t know who all went; they just jumped in the car and went late one evening.  Herbert and Gertie had taken all day to get there to our place.  They lived north of Lubbock about 40 - 50 miles and a 100 miles was a long ways to drive in those days.  Nobody wants to drive it now.  But anyway, they got Marion there about daylight the next morning.  The doctors were waiting and they went in right away and operated and had his appendix removed just on the verge of rupturing.  It had started leaking.  Herbert saved his life by knowing what to do.
	In those days you didn’t go see a doctor because of a bellyache.  It had to be something serious.  It just worked out that they got there just in time.  Later on, Roland was having trouble with a lot of sore throats, and some doctor, I guess it was Deardoff, I don’t remember, but he told Roland he needed to get those tonsils out and Roland was old enough to drive.  He got in the car and went to Portales or Clovis.  Someone told him there was a doctor that would remove the tonsils out there.  He went up there to see this doctor and while he was there, they just took his tonsils out.  He laid around there awhile and then in this doctor’s office or clinic and got up and drove that car back to the ranch that afternoon.  So it wasn’t like it is today.
	One time a neighbor of ours came up there because his wife and kids had left him.  He was by himself; his name was Westbrook.  He came around there and he had a terrible stomachache, a bellyache I guess it was because back then, you didn’t have a stomachache; you’d get a bellyache.  So all we had was some Watkins Lineament, and I don’t know what it does for a bellyache except it gets your mind off the bellyache because your throat is burning.  So Mother mixed up a pretty stiff dose of it in a glass of water, and this old man was lying out there on a cot under the tree where us kids slept out all summer.  Marion came carrying out a glass of water and this Watkins Lineament out there and he told him, “Just turn this up and drink it all right quick!”  and the old man he did, and it took his breath away for a little.  Finally he got to where he could talk, and he said “That just set me on fire!”  I’m sure it did because I’ve taken it.  Marion looked at him real close and said, “I can’t see any flame or smoke,” and that made the old man mad and he forgot his bellyache and went home.  He’d walked down there; it wasn’t but a mile between our place and his.  
	Later on after Herman and Ewald had motorcycles, he came down there and he had a toothache.  He was in terrible pain, I suppose.  So Herman said, “I’ll take you in to Doc Coburn.” He was an old man who pulled teeth there in Tatum.  I don’t think he was a doctor, but since he pulled teeth, everybody called him “ole Doc Coburn.”  He got on that motorcycle and old man Westbrook was sitting behind Herman so Herman could drive, and Herman took him to Tatum in a manner that the old man wouldn’t forget.  He brought him back later on that day and the old man came in and pulled his hat off and said, “That Doc pulled a whole hatful of teeth out of my head.”  I don’t know how many he pulled, probably three or four and some that needed pulling long before that.  Later on he came back down there and still had a toothache, and Herman said, “You want me take you in to ole Doc Coburn?” and he said, “No way, I’ll just live with it rather than get on that thing again.”  He was quite a guy.  	One time he came down there early one morning.  We were just talking and we were all eating breakfast and this old man was sitting on a stool against the wall.  Roland had just gone outside to check some traps he’d set, I guess for gopher or something, and he came a wagging this big long rat or gopher to show us.  This old man looked at it, and he had just charged his lip with a big charge of snuff, and he tried to whistle, and he just made a brown fog over the whole table.  He was facing the table talking to us and he said he had never seen a gopher that size.  
	This story is told to tell what kind of entertainment we had.  We used that old man for entertainment!  Kids now watch TV or video games, but we had to kind of invent our own.  If you didn’t have kind of an eccentric neighbor to use as a toy, you kind of felt like you were being deprived.  Of course we didn’t know that then.
	I think that’s about all the medical service I can think of now.  I took medicine that Mother would just sit down and very carefully, drop by drop, put in water.  I don’t know what it was or what it was supposed to be, but it was pretty potent if you took too much.  It would make you act kind of funny, I guess.  I will go ahead and tell about our tick removal project that I helped Carolina with on Ophelia.  I think Ophelia was about a yearling at the time and she was fighting her ear, either right or left, I can’t remember which, and Carolina took her outside in the sun and found a tick in her ear which we couldn’t get out.  My dad phoned Dr. Dearduff and he advised us to put some amberjack in the ear, which worked, except the tick was too large to come out, so Carolina asked me to help hold Ophelia, and she used a hair pin to extract the tick.  When the ear got well, Ophelia quit fighting the ear.

LOCO’D LIVESTOCK
  
	I’ll go on and tell you about our loco’d livestock that we had in those days.  Cows, when the drought hits, cows or any livestock won’t eat loco unless they are just starved for something green or are starved for anything.  There wasn’t any way to get feed if you didn’t have grass in the pasture.  Dry grass in this country is good feed; it cures out, cured on the stem, they called it.  But if you didn’t have grass, and if it didn’t rain any, you’d go without.  And at that time one of the cows, sheep or horses would get a hold of that loco.  It stays green all winter.  Once they eat it, I don’t know how much they have to have, they get pretty well hooked on it and if they eat enough of it, they won’t even bother with eating grass.  Their entire time is spent looking for more loco.  I don’t guess a horse or cow or anything would ever get over that.  We had a horse, a little mustang, a strawberry roan mustang; she came to Dad’s place in Texas, and she finally got loco.  We kept her up where she couldn’t get to any loco for probably a year.  And soon as you turn them out, they go right back looking for loco.  They just don’t ever get over it.  So the best thing to do if you find something on loco, just get rid of them and be done with it because they won’t be any good anyway.  I’ve seen horses, like that mustang, that would start drinking water for at least 75 feet before she got to the water trough, you could hear them.  Then when she finally got to the water trough, I saw her put her head down in the trough plum down to her eyes.  And then she’d finally get to needing to inhale, and she’d run backwards a ways.  It’s kind of pitiful to watch.  For some reason we never would put that kind of animal down.  She should have been done a way with to get her out of her misery.
	At that time we had a neighbor by the name of Tommy Parker.  He, his mother and stepfather, ranch foreman on Seth Austin’s place, were pretty good neighbors.  He had some horses of his own, and in winter time he didn’t have time to train his own horses because he was out feeding stock and this and that.  So, this Tommy Parker and his daddy had trained a horse, broke it to ride, then broke it to rope off of, so it was getting in pretty good shape.  But he just didn’t have time to fool with it when he turned it loose with a bunch of horses that belonged to the ranch.  The next spring, Tommy was up there trying to round up that horse, and the horse ran right into a fence.  Well, he figured out the horse had gotten locoed over the winter, but our place was closer than their headquarters was, so he came down there and Mother and Dad had gone someplace and Roland and I were there by ourselves for a few days and we didn’t know what to do.  There wasn’t a veterinarian anywhere in that country.  We tried to sew it up, packed it with flour and everything we could think of, and that horse never quit bleeding.  It wasn’t bleeding bad, but it leads me to believe that a locoed animal loses it ability for clotting of the blood.  It took five days, but that horse finally died, and it just bled to death standing there in our corral.  This kid came down there to help us and we did everything we knew to do for that horse.  The cut wasn’t too deep or too long; it was about 4" long and maybe an inch deep.  But it just flat died right there and we had to drag him off.  I’ve never heard anybody say, but I believe this is one of the symptoms of a locoed horse.  Any kind of a cut, it won’t heal.
	Then the next year, this Walter Phelan, the stepdaddy to Tommy Parker, had the rest of his horses, and he asked Dad if he could put them up in a section of pasture we had.  We went in there, they made an agreement, and we staked off a hundred-yard-wide strip through this pasture.  All the people, Walter and Tommy Parker and we’d go up there with something to dig with and a toe sack, and we pulled all the loco out of that section of pasture.  We loaded it on a wagon and piled it maybe a quarter mile west of our house, and let it dry so it would burn, then burned it up.  One time a Norther blew in.  This was along in November, December, and it got cold, so Walter said, “I’ll just take this load of loco on up to the ranch and bring it back when it gets warm, and unload it and get some more out of there.  He got up there, kind of dug a hole in this loco and got down to where that Norther was.  He had to go north and west to get home and he just hunkered down to get out of that wind while he was going home.  By the time he’d gone the three miles it took to get his place, he had a terrible headache that lasted three days from just hunkering down in that loco weed to get out of the wind.  It’s a pretty potent weed.
	We noticed some of our chickens got to going up on this pile of loco.  It got to be maybe 10 feet high.  I don’t know how many wagon loads of loco we’d hauled up.  But we had found that there was a real small, maybe a 1/4" grub that lives inside the stem of this loco at about ground level.  Those chickens had found out about those grubs, and they were working on those grubs pretty good.  And then, I don’t remember who noticed this first, we noticed this big Buff Orphington rooster we had was loco.  We figured out what was wrong with him finally.  We put some corn out there to feed the chickens, and he’d peck at a grain of corn and miss it by 2 - 3 inches and just peck into the ground.  He kept getting worse; I don’t know what we ever did, probably knocked him in the head.  I never will forget that darned rooster getting locoed on that pile of loco weeds, which we burned later on. 
	We put Walter’s horses in that pasture; there wasn’t any grass in there but it kept them out and away from any loco weeds so he wouldn’t loco any more horses.  A cow, when she gets locoed, will get down and we used to just tail them up.  You’ve got to know just how to tail up a cow.  You’ve got to balance them on their feet, and cows weren’t gentle like they are now.  You’d better have your escape route lined out, get your horse or whatever you’re on back behind them when you turn that tail loose.  They’d get after you if you didn’t get out of their way right quick.  When they run after you, most of the time you’d have to do that project again.  
	There wasn’t really much you could do with that then and I realize that now, but back then, people just didn’t have money to buy another cow or a horse or if one got locoed, you just tried to save whatever you could.  We did a lot of work.  Sheep would get locoed too, but sheep are so stupid you can’t tell when they are locoed unless you get out there and watch them and see one that’s walking past good grass to get to loco.  Of course it will eventually kill them.  It’s not as obvious to see one of them locoed as it is a cow.  I don’t remember any of our milk cows getting locoed.  Of course, we tried to feed them to where they would not get out and work on those weeds.
	
ICE DONKEYS AND BREAKING HORSES

	We had three donkeys one time in cold weather and Mother and Dad had gone to town.  The pond was frozen over, and somebody, and I don’t think that I was the one that thought of this, but one of us decided to take them donkeys out on that ice (the pond was thick enough it would hold us up).  Well, we couldn’t get them out on the ice, so we tied tow sacks up on their eyes, and then led them out on this ice on the pond and then we took the blindfolds off of them and they saw where they were, and instead of running out to the edge they all ran into a bunch.  When they did, the ice gave way and they all caved in.  We worked and worked, we didn’t know how to get them out of there.  The pond wasn’t deep enough but what they could stand in it.  We finally got them out of there.  The donkeys would get their front feet on the edge of the ice and with our help break off chunks of ice, then get their feet on the ice again until we had them out.  We finally got them out of the pond there just about the time Mother and Dad got back from town, or wherever they’d been.  Dad told us to take them inside the barn and  get us some dry tow sacks and we toweled them things down till they were totally dry.  
	Things like that, we just did our own thing, you might say for entertainment because there wasn’t any such thing as having anybody else to entertain you.  We didn’t even have electricity until after Dad sold that place.  They finally got REA in that country and Dad did buy a battery operated radio that used 3 different kinds of dry cell batteries that it took to run that thing, so it was used for news programs and to keep up with what was going on in the world since we didn’t go to town except maybe once a month to get the mail.
	Well, I’ll tell you a little about shoeing horses and everything and breaking horses to work.  We’d buy saddle horses that were pretty heavyset and break them to work, and they would make pretty good wagon horses, once you got them broke.  And we’d plow with horses.  What little farming we had there, we’d plow.  But some of these horses worked out real well.  We had one, they couldn’t ride him, so we bought this horse somewhere, I don’t know where they got him, and broke him to work.  It just happened we were a little short on horses this particular year, and he decided he’d rather be rode than worked, so we just couldn’t do anything with him.  We hooked him on the back of a wagon, dragging him backwards till he decided that we were putting some pressure on his collar.  It worked pretty good, except by that time it was maybe 8:30 or 9:00 in the morning and we’d work him till noon and then we’d have to do the same thing in the afternoon.  So we finally got to relaying him and we’d work him right on till quitting time, which made it pretty hard on those other horses, but we got quite a bit more work out of him.  
	Finally, he just kept getting worse, so I just saddled him up and one day he got tenderfooted.  We decided to shoe him one day (I think Vernon had this idea), but it was quite a project.  I think he got tired and he didn’t want another shoe on him.  I guess if we had waited another day, it would have been all right.  But when you start shoeing horses, you don’t want to quit.  So we finally ended up with that horse lying on the corral with a rope on each foot and he never quit fighting.  They put me to sitting on his head, to keep him from banging his head on the ground.  They shoed him, but he still squirmed, even though he had all 4 feet tied to different parts in the corral.  Finally we got all his shoes on him (it seems like all these things happened when Dad was gone; I don’t know why).  When we finally turned this horses loose, he had his 4 shoes, but he’d squirmed till he wore all the hair off one side of him.  I think it was on his right side ’cause they had him lying down on his right side.  By the time he had hair enough on him to put a saddle on him, he’d already lost one of those shoes.  I don’t know whether they weren’t nailed on good or whether it was the rocky country out there that the shoes just didn’t last that long.  Anyway, we never tried to shoe that particular horse again.  If he got tenderfooted, it was his problem, not ours!  
	I tried roping off of him.  There just wasn’t any such thing.  You could ride him all day, but having him pull that wagon, he wouldn’t stand for that rope flopping around on him.  I never tried to rope off him again.  We kept him around  there for a long time.  Then we bought horses over close to the state line.  Of course, we didn’t have a trailer or anything to haul them in.  There weren’t any trained horses to get in a trailer anyhow.  So George said, “We knew he was outlawed.”  He didn’t balk so much as he’d cold jaw on you.  If he ever got to going after a cow or calf, he’d just take the bit in his mouth and run with it.  You couldn’t turn him or anything.  They just quit using him.  I think they got about $20.00 for him or something.  We broke him to work, and he made a good work horse; he’d always pull all his share of the load and never give us trouble.  George tried to ride him again later on, and a jack rabbit came up under him and he got startled and he threw George off and broke his wrist.  We never tried to ride that horse again.  We had another little horse there that had been rode quite a bit and been outlawed, but it had saddle marks on it, more than anyone can tell.  We put a collar on him and broke him to work.  
	One time I finished running a go-devil in a field.  I guess from the gate to the little field, it’s probably a half mile, and I didn’t want to go back after lunch and finish my work.  When I was going to the house with the go-devil and all, I went out and closed the gate.  I got back on this go-devil, and I was kind of urging these horses to go.  This particular horse started backing up, and I had to get off, and he ended up about half way on top of this go-devil.  I finally got off and walked to the house to get someone to help me get him going.  I got about half-way to the house and those horses passed me.  They tore up a good go-devil.  We never did work him or ride him after that.  
	I think it was in 1938 when Dad decided to buy a tractor.  If I remember right, we traded about 20 horses in on this F-12 Farmall Tractor.  We got rid of the rest of our horses except some saddle horses.  But before that particular horse tore that go-devil up, there was a horse trader that came by there; that was to make a little profit.  We had a bunch of horses around there and we tried to get him to buy that little old chestnut pony.  No that wasn’t that trip.  He wanted that horse; he was a sorrel horse.  He said, “Well, is he broke to ride?” and we showed him the saddle marks on him, “yea, he’d been rode a lot of times”.  We showed him the collar marks on him, and we told him that he’d been broke and worked too.  But he didn’t ask me if he was outlawed, so whoever sold him, George or Vernon, thought that you’re not supposed to volunteer information like that.  Anyway, he got the horse and he took him to a sale.  Somewhere down in Texas, (of course we found this out later), someone got in the sale ring with that horse and patted him on the flank and looked at his teeth to see how sound he was.  That little pony got a little bit vexed, I guess you’d say, and he cleaned house.  He ran everybody out of that sale ring, out of the corral where they were looking at him.  Then there wasn’t anybody bid on him.  This guy finally traded him for a half-Jersey calf.  I don’t know what Dad had sold that horse for, but of course this calf wasn’t worth near what that horse should have been worth.  A lot of horses didn’t take to roping arenas.  They weren’t broke that way.
	Sometime later, about a year later, this same horse trader came by the house and wanted a drink of water, and we asked him if he wanted some horses.  We still had a bunch horses there (that was before we bought the tractor).  That little chestnut was easy to ride and pretty nice, but we asked him if he wanted to buy any horses and he said, “No way!”  Then he told us that story about what had happened to him with that other horse he’d bought.  Dad, of course, was the kind of guy that if he’d been doing the dealing, he’d have told him that he was kind of outlawed, voluntarily.  But George was there and he said, “We told you everything you asked about that horse, so it’s your fault.”  And he said, “Yeah, it’s my fault.  I should have known a pony that size that had saddle marks and collar marks on him was probably outlawed, but I just didn’t think about it.”  So he admitted that it wasn’t our fault that he’d bought a horse that didn’t work out.  
	Then Dad bought this little tractor and traded everything but a few little saddle ponies.  We did what little farming we had to do with that tractor.  Of course this goes along with the horse and buggy days switching off to the automobile and tractor days.  The Depression slowed that down a lot.  People just didn’t have money enough to buy a tractor and do away with their horses.  Half of our farming was to raise feed to feed the horses to make feed on the other half of it to feed the livestock.  So, the tractor was much more practical in that sense than keeping a bunch of horses there.
	Of course out in this country I never did see any real big horses like they do now.  Like the Clydesdale horses you see on TV, dragging that beer truck around.  You used the best you had  available.  They had what they called little Spanish mules out there at the Seth Austin Ranch that they used to haul the feed wagon out to pastures.  But we never did use any mules out here at the ranch.  I’ve been around mules a lot since then, but not where I was raised.

SCHOOL AND CLASSMATES

	When I get in a little further on, I’ll explain about the school situation out there at High Top School, about how far these people were having to come in there to go to school.  It was approximately 3 miles from our place to this school house.  It was in the middle of a great large pasture; there were probably 6 or 8 sections of land in this pasture, and the Joneses lived over on that section of land further north there, probably 2.5 miles from the school.  I always thought it was about 6 miles from the school, but I’m not sure.  
	I’ll tell you now about our little country school, out at High Top, and try to explain to you how we went to school and what we did.  It was just a one-room school and a one-teacher school and she taught the first through eighth grades of school.  I didn’t go to school much in 1926 due to my after-effects of that rheumatic fever.  But in 1927 I started a year behind Marion and the kids in my class  (I don’t remember all of them);  there were 4 of Zack Jones’ kids , 2 boys and 2 girls.  The youngest, Valerie, was too young to go to school, but she wouldn’t stay at home with all her brothers and sisters going to school, so the teacher said just send her up there and let her do what she wanted to.  So she got started at about 4 years old where the rest of us were a little older.  I started school with Lillie May Jones in the same class, and we went through high school, all the way through graduation in the same class.  Later on, she married a guy named Bud Green that I went to school with in Tatum.  Then there was a Roland Clay.  There were some Butlers; they starved out in a year or two after we moved there, but they had some kids that went to school there.  And there was some Sartons; there were two boys, Earl and Marlen Sarton.  And  Jessie was red-headed, but I can’t think of her name right now.  That family just lived on the homestead.  Every fall when the cotton picking started, they just got on the wagon and headed to Texas and picked cotton and neither one of those boys ever got past the 8th grade because they’d just go to school a couple of months and then it would be along January or February before they ever got back to go to school the rest of the year and they never could graduate.  Marlen Sarton was in the Japanese prison camp for about five years in W.W.II.  I saw him years later.  That family finally moved over to Hagerman, and there was a family by the name of Cox that had 2 girls and 2 boys that went to school there for a few years until we consolidated with Tatum.  
	Then George, Vernon, Roland, Marion and I went to school from ’26 to ’33, I think.  I believe it was then when we consolidated with Tatum.  It was fall of ’34 or ’33.  But at this little school we had a man teacher that drove there in an automobile and all of the kids got there by donkeyback or foot or horseback.  We’d walk when it was warm enough, and we had a little hack we’d use with 2 donkeys to go the 3 miles to school and back home.  But after that first year, we had the teacher, and she roomed and boarded at our place, so we used that little hack and donkeys to go to school.  And there was either 2 or 3 years that the only thing that came to our school was either some kind of hay burner, either donkeys or horses or something like that.  There was no vehicle of any kind, only wagons.  	It’s not really the way to get your education if you’re really trying to learn something.  But a lot of times I probably learned more in that 3 miles to school, looking them donkeys in the butt than I did while I was there.  Especially, since I had to look them in the butt on the way back home!  	That’s the kind of education we got out there.  
	Cleo Heidel was the teacher there two years, and this Velma Love was of that strain of Loves that the town of Lovington was named after.  I saw her while I was living there in Oklahoma.  She of course got older too.
	(Oh boy, what big excitement!  I just turned this off to get my breath, and the lights dimmed in the kitchen.  I went in there and the stove wiring had all burned out on the electric stove, while I had a chicken in there about half baked.  Talk about a half-baked chicken!  After 48 hours and $500 -$600 I got the thing under control.  A new stove and one thing and another.)
	I kind of forgot how far I was, but I think I was naming the people who went to school out there.  I think one name I forgot to mention was the Hickeys.  Duer Hickey.  There was a girl too, I think her name was Ruth.  They came to school there and later on when they came to Tatum school, why the Old Man Hickey built a chicken coop on the back of that old pickup.  I don’t know what model it was; it was old when he did this.  He had chicken wire over the holes to keep the kids from getting out of the back of it.  It had a bench on each side of it.  That was our first school bus; no heater, of course.  It had tow sacks over it coming down over that chicken wire to keep the wind out.  It was pretty nice looking deal for its day.  
	Let me tell you a little about the different people that I knew.  The Sartens:  I saw Marlen Sarten after he’d spent three or four years in the prison camp in Japan.  They moved to Dexter.  I don’t know just what they did; I’ve lost track of them.  I found them by accident.  One time along about 1940, I guess it was, Dad, George, and Herman and I went hunting around Cloudcroft somewhere.  We stopped there at Cloudcroft and went in there at the cafe and got some coffee, I guess it was, and we ran into this Sarten girl.  I can’t remember her name.  She was working in that cafe at that time.  
	The Joneses:  Well, of course the old people are gone, but Dad was working that half section for five years.  At the end of that five years, they took it over again and built a house in place of that half dug-out that was on it.  One of the boys, Zeke Jones, still lives on the old home place.  I saw him; I think Terry was out there with me and talked to him, and if I’m not mistaken, Mark, my grandson, was with me and talking to him too at a different time.  I don’t remember if I told this or not.  But that youngest girl’s husband got killed in a plane crash recently.  His name was Zip Franklin.  At that time, I’d met this Lillie Mae Jones that I hadn’t seen in approximately 50 years, and at a funeral you don’t have time to chat, but she looked pretty good.  She’d aged a little bit and gotten a little wider, but outside of that, I recognized her right away.  Of course, some time ago, Neil Jones, passed away. But the old home place, I went out there, and if I get a Camcorder, I’ll go back out there and get pictures of some of these things.  One of the old wagons that we had there for feed and cow chips and this and that, the wheels are still out there; the wooden parts have rotted away, but the wheels are still there.
	
MAKING MONEY FOR CHRISTMAS

	Well, I’ll tell you a little about our way of making money for Christmas spending.  We didn’t go to town but maybe once or twice every two months on the average in the 20’s and 30’s.  When we got big enough, we’d start setting traps and have a trap line and  catch skunks and once in a while, a coyote.  But a coyote is too smart to get into a trap that some amateur had put out.  So, we usually shot them, run them down with a pickup and thinned them out.  For money we once in a while would catch a badger, a kit fox, or swift in this country, and we’d skin them and stretch the hide and scrape it and whatever, and when they got ripe we could send them off to a fur company.  I don’t remember the town or anything.  But we’d get catalogs, and they’d give us an approximate price.  It depended on the quality of the fur.  This was the only allowance or spending money that us kids ever had.  Of course, all kids were the same.  We weren’t deprived.  
	We went to town one time at Christmas.  I had about $5.00 and that was enough to buy everybody in the family something for Christmas.  But once in a while, you’d get a real good skunk hide and it would bring $1.50.  Of course you add a little postage on it.  I doubt if they’d even accept something like that at the post office now.  They had to be pretty well wrapped; that was before plastic was invented and it was hard to keep it where you couldn’t smell that skunk hide scent.  One of the guys I went to High Top School with had a trap line and he’d run his trap line in the morning, and he’d shoot these skunks with a .22.  Then in the evening when school was out he’d go and gather them up and take them home and skin them.  This was naturally in the winter time.  You had to wait till the fur was prime.  With this guy there and with the windows closed and a big old pot-bellied stove in the school house, it got pretty rancid in there.  He’d set his .22 in the corner, and of course people weren’t nearly half as neurotic about guns at that time as they are now.  In the evening, he’d take it home with him and set his traps.  	A lot of times now you hear that the way to keep a skunk away if you have one that comes around your house or barn, and if it gets under the house, is to put out moth balls and stuff.  The theory is that the skunk doesn’t like to be around anything that stinks!  But don’t ever believe it.  I’ve tried it.  This was our method of getting money for our own spending.  
	Of course, everybody helped raise a garden.  At the end of the first tape I think I made mention that Roland and I were in the garden chopping weeds and he stepped on something ahead of him and I heard him holler.  He stepped on a rattlesnake!  Both of us were barefooted.  Why this snake was about half asleep, and he had a knot on its belly, so we dissected the thing and it had swallowed a half-grown cottontail rabbit at sometime.  Snakes have a habit of going to sleep when they are full.  It half-heartedly rattled when it could when he got his foot off of it.  It never tried to bite.  
	So we had to make our own entertainment because we couldn’t sit down and watch TV since it hadn’t been invented! 
  
AFTER HIGH SCHOOL – VARIOUS JOBS

	I’ll now start from the time I graduated out of high school when I was 18 (I got out that year).  Some of these people I still see once in a while.  The main thing I want to tell about is still going on now.  Jobs were scarce as hen’s teeth.  During the summer of ’39 when I got out of school, there was a guy by the name of Johnny Moore (I graduated with one of his boys).  He got a contract to build about 25 miles of fence up in the Monzano Mountains, which was an old Spanish Land Grant.  The original document was of course written in Spanish and I think it was at least an 1 1/4" thick and without a map.  It just told where this land grant started and where it quit.  People bought it in the name of Campbell.  He was known as the “wheat king” of Montana at the time.  He bought that place with a guy by the name of Rascom with wheat plow checks which was a government program they had during the drought and Depression.  He had enough money that he bought, I think, 800 sections in that place.  
	Johnny Moore got that contract to build 25 miles of fence, and he contracted out 5 miles because he didn’t have equipment to go up on that mountain.  We bought some donkeys to haul fence posts and spools of barbed wire up to that thing.  He had it surveyed three times, and we took the center survey to build a fence.  We just wandered along the top of the ridge and measured a 1/4-mile string and then made an angle maybe 5 or 10 degrees.  But we were just following the top of that ridge.  There wasn’t any top soil there; just dust on top of the rocks.  
	We started digging those holes with crow bars and whatnot.  It was quite a project; we had a great large sleeping tent and a large cook or mess tent.  He had to hire an old man to do the cooking.  He was a pretty good cook, I guess.  Of course all of us except Johnny Moore were younger, just out of school.  We griped about that cooking; we gave that old man a terrible time.  
	One time he said, “Boy, those biscuits ought to be good; I really took pains with them.”  I told him, “Yeah, if we eat them, we’re going to take pains with them too!”  It kind of hurt his feelings, I guess.  We all got along pretty good.  Ole Johnny Moore had one boy named John Moore and his older boy was named Burle Moore and he worked with us.  I forget the names of all those who worked with us (there were about 6 or 7 of us); it’s kind of hard  to remember all their names.  They finally hired a guy from up in the hills to help us out.  
	What we did, we fenced off up in the mountains, and then down by the Rio Grande River there were some people who owned maybe a half mile by the river.  They had been farming and running cows out to what they called the grant (?), but there wasn’t anybody paying taxes on it.  We fenced it off and finally went on the west side of the river and fenced off some over here too.  Those people hired a line rider who carried a .30-30 Winchester on his saddle and a pistol on his hip.  He rode this land because some of those people along the river didn’t think that fence should have been built.  One time we were over there close to the Rio Chillow (a river that comes into the back of the Rio Grande).  Most of the time it’s dry, but we were fencing that and here came this line rider driving a bunch of milk cows along the Rio Grande.  He said, “I’m tired of those people cutting my fence, so I’ll just put these cows out in the open range here in the mountains, and they’ll have to look for them for a week or two before they find them.”  I don’t know how they came out.  He didn’t get shot while we were there; it’s probably a miracle that he didn’t.  I saw him in town (we went in once every two weeks), and there was a barber shop that still had a bath tub and we’d go get a haircut and pay a quarter and take a bath.  After about two weeks, everybody was pretty rank.  Everybody was just alike so it didn’t really matter.
	Johnny Moore bought two donkeys, and we used them to haul those posts up onto the top of the ridge.  But he was smart enough that he made a deal to use 10% steel posts (where it was too rocky to dig fencepost holes).  We’d take a drill, two of us, one with a hammer and one holding the drill, and we’d make a one- or two-inch hole, big enough to get a steel post down in the hole.  We came out pretty good on that.  A bunch of kids like that, we used to move right on through work like that; it wouldn’t bother us.  
	One time we were going down toward the river from up on the mountains, on the south edge of this grant, and it was just dirt and gravel, and John Moore and I headed down through there digging holes with a post hole digger.  Each one of us dug a mile of holes in that soft gravel, and I think he beat me by one or two holes in one day’s time.  We didn’t count hours; we counted days, like when the sun came up and when it went down.  I don’t remember what we were being paid, probably $2 a day or something like that, plus our groceries.  We had quite a time of it with all that crew in there.
	I’ll tell you about one incident.  We were building fence down toward the river when we quit one evening, and the next morning we were all in a pickup chugging our way down there.  A bunch of wild mustangs had grazed their way down to this fence and some of them had gone around the end where we quit the day before.  Of course we didn’t pay too much attention to them.  Some of them took off toward the hill there when they saw us coming.  Then this stud, that was his harem, he noticed half of his mares were on the other side of this fence.  He came a-charging that pickup with me sitting there on the back end.  His teeth bared and he was barreling down on us.  Someone beat on the top of that cab to get to get that old driver to move on out.  He didn’t know what was going on, so he slowed down instead of speeding up, and someone got it to cross to it, and he took off and outrun the horse.  We got to the end where we quit fencing, and he searched around there and went back up the hill.  There was one little pony in there that looked about like a yearling; it was steel gray with a black mane and tail and a pretty coat.  I sure would like to have got a hold of that little pony.  Of course, we didn’t have any horses or anything other than those two donkeys we used up in the high country.  We saw those horses three or four times there.  
	We fenced off land from those people who owned a spring up in those mountains and had about forty acres.  They had a bunch of cows which they ran out in the grant.  When we fenced them off, they didn’t have but forty acres, and all their cows were in there where they couldn’t find any water, and there were some pretty hard feelings up there.  But it wasn’t towards us; it was towards those guys who bought that property.  One guy was the national chairman of the Democratic Party, and the other was a wheat farmer up in Montana.  We understand that they bought that property for $.36 an acre and back taxes for that 800-odd sections of land.  I believe it was when I was living up in Wyoming that I heard where this Mr. Camel gave a bunch of land to the Game Department, and I think that land is where the NRA has their National Center, just south of Raton.  I think that was a different part of land, and I think they acquired that from this Camel.  I don’t know what this NRA gave for it, but apparently he got pretty wealthy off of some of that land.  Of course, when you get something for $.36 an acre like that, why all you have to do is wait till the times and the drought are in a little better shape and you’re going to make some money.  I read where this guy Camel had died, but the other guy had gotten out of that the year before that.  That’s just the way things go.

ORMA

	When I got through with that project, I came back to the ranch and worked on odd jobs on different ranches and around.  Roland and I had bought a 1936 Plymouth Coupe and used it for running around.  I don’t remember what we were in.  Roland went with a girl; I think her name was Edry (?) Lacey.  She made a blind date for me with Orma which ended up still a blind date, but we’ve been hooked up together now for 51 years.  So it must have been that somebody had a good impression of somebody else.  That first date, we went rabbit hunting out in some of those big pastures.  It’s illegal now, but back in those days you didn’t need a hunting license or anything to hunt rabbits.  I don’t remember how long we messed around shooting rabbits.  But anyhow, that’s how I met Orma, and it worked into a pretty good deal.  We got married in 1941, about April 15 I think.  She and I worked around the best we could.  
	I worked over in a place about half between Tatum and Roswell in a clay pit.  They used the clay for drilling on the oil wells.  So, I’d go out there for a week and come back to town.  That clay pit belonged to Warren Snyder.  He owned some ranches and ran the Ford house here in Lovington.  Filling those sacks with clay and kicking them around, I got kind of a bout with rheumatic fever, and one of my knees swelled up about the size of a sick football.  So I had to get off of that job for a while.  Then Orma and I worked up at Seth Austin’s ranch and had a one-room building that was about 10'x12'.  It had a bed in it and had a hot plate sitting on the other end where we cooked.  We could nearly have breakfast in bed there every morning.  
	Then I went from one job to another; they played out pretty regularly.  Everything we did was pretty temporary.  What they were planning on having was a canning factory here in town.  I got a job working on this building driving 16-penny nails.  Well, I didn’t have a hammer.  So I went down and bought a hammer, and I got the wrong size, not knowing it was a pretty light hammer (I’ve still got it back here in the utility room).  It’s an antique.  It was bought in 1941, or it could have been early ’42.

ARMY SERVICE DURING WORLD WAR II
  
	In June of ’42, I signed up and volunteered to be a glider pilot in Lubbock.  It ended up with about 5,000 soldiers that volunteered for this project, and then the Army noticed they didn’t have any place to train them or any gliders either!  So, they just kept the ones who had some flying experience and turned the rest of us out or we could stay in the Air Force and be a mechanic or whatever. So I just stayed in because I figured since I told the Draft Board what I was doing, soon as I got back to Lovington, they’d draft me into the walking Army.  I’ve done a lot of walking in my life (I did four miles this morning) and I still felt like I’d rather be in the Air Force (which was a part of the Army at the time).  So I just stayed in as a mechanic and a little later on, Orma came down there and we got a place to live.  
	I finally got my pay; the Army finally started paying a little more.  When I went into the service, the Army was paying $21 a month and then you got your laundry bill, etc., deducted from that.  When you get paid just once a month, it comes in pretty slim.  When the pay went to $50 a month after three months in the service, that wasn’t a promotion; the government just started paying a little more money. Not too long after that, they passed an allotment to keep your family if a soldier was married.  They took about $30 of that $50 and sent her a check for $50 and that made us about $70 a month, which sounds like not much money.  But you’ve got to remember that prices weren’t nearly what they are now.  Later on after Ronnie was born, of course by that time I’d been transferred and Orma had come back to Lovington.  Then I was gone to Mississippi.  I think she was getting about $80 a month for her and Ronnie and I was getting about $20 a month which is enough when you get all your groceries bought for you.  I smoked at that time, but cigarettes were about $.05 a  package at the PX.  Soldiers didn’t have to pay the taxes.  
	So then when I got transferred to Kansas, Orma came back up there.  I was a mechanic on B-24s for about 18 months.  Then they transferred me to a school in Ypsilanti,  Michigan, a Dearborn plant where Ford was building B-24s.  We went to this school, but I don’t remember what they were supposed to be teaching us.  From there we went to Chinook Field, Illinois, and I was getting tired of going to school.  So I took the shortest course they had, which was a hydraulics course.  At any of these schools I made a straight A on electrical classes.  I had a major who tried to talk me into taking electronics at Chinook Field and promised to send me to radar school at Boca Raton, Florida.  Well, I told him that I was tired of going to school and was ready to start fighting the war.  So he let it go at that; I missed a good opportunity to get a good education that would have done me a lot of good.  But I took that hydraulics course and there were so many of them signed up for that, by the time I got started, I just lay around there in my barracks.  I could have been out of that electrical course and gone to Florida.  A fellow doesn’t ever think about what is the best way to go.  From there I was shipped to Lamar Field, California, where I  was processed into the 4th Air Force.  I was only there three weeks.  By that time the war was over in Europe.  So instead of going overseas to the Pacific, they sent me up to Walla Walla, Washington.  I spent the rest of my Army career up there.  Orma never did get a chance to come back up there.  I didn’t have any idea of where I’d be.  I still felt like I was going overseas, and I didn’t feel like I should get her up there.  When they give you orders to leave, it’s usually within two or three days.  That Walla Walla, Washington is a bunch of miles from Lovington.  
	I met an old boy from Tillamook, Oregon, and he and I hitchhiked down the Columbia River to visit with his folks over the weekend and then hitchhiked back.  People would pick up a soldier along the road.  That road along the Columbia is entirely different.  It used to be a scenic road, and I think you can still follow the scenic road that has all the waterfalls that come in from the side.  We’ve never taken the time in the two times we’ve been there to go up that scenic drive that used to be the highway.    
	Of course farmers didn’t really have anybody to pick their apples and what not, so while I was in Walla Walla, the fruit farmers used to try to get the soldiers to come out and pick cherries (I never did go).  
	To go back a little on this, when I moved from Chinook Field to Lamar Field, California, we had a delay en route.  Orma and her mother and daddy met the train there in Clovis and I think it was 2:00 a.m., and they thought maybe we should go somewhere and eat.  So we went to a cafe there and at that time, I could eat pretty hardy.  This girl liked me.  What I told her I wanted was some eggs and probably a piece of ham and sausage.  And she said, “How do you want them eggs?”  I said, “I want one of them fried on one side and the other on the other.”  Directly she came back from the kitchen and said, “How did you say you want them eggs?”  Anyway, we ate.  I don’t remember how long I was delayed en route, a few days, and then I had to go back to Clovis and catch the train to go to California.  Then from there I went to Washington.  Eventually, I got out of the service.  	I spent about three years, four months and five days in the service.  That’s a long time, but of course pay now in the service is such that anybody that doesn’t mind putting up with that could make a pretty good living in different military branches.  Of course, if you’ve got conflicts, war and one thing and another, it might be a little inconvenient.  But at least you’d be pretty well trained.  
	While I was in Washington, there were 5 guys that prowled around out there in the country.  It might have been a result of picking cherries, but they found a 1928 air-cooled Franklin car that had been in the barn for years, and they bought it for $25, $5 each.  They brought it out there to the base, overhauled the engine, got it where it would run, and then one of them got his orders.  He was being shipped back to get his discharge.  So he just willed his 1/5 of that car to the other 4.  I asked the last one, “What are you going to do when you get your orders?”  He said, “I’m going to drive it up to the PX, park it and get out of this Army.”  Well, I didn’t have $25, and the tires weren’t all that good.  That would have been a good antique bargain.  I thought about it, but I was a little afraid of making a 2,000 or 3,000 mile trip, and fuel was still hard to get and tires were non-existent, especially for an antique.  It would have been quite a car.
	Finally I got my orders and came down through that country and where I stopped, I asked for change in silver dollars (you used to be able to get them up there in that part of the country) and I got home with about 6 of them.  I had one that was stamped in 1881, and I carried it for a long time and wore the date off of it.  I put it up.  
	
AFTER WORLD WAR II – WORKING FOR ATLANTIC RICHFIELD CO.

	After W.W.II, I scouted around looking for a job.  There were a lot of guys looking.  By that time they had established a way for a soldier to get $20 a week for a year while he was looking for a job.  Then the GI Bill came along.  A lot of soldiers said they weren’t going to do anything for a year.  They were just going to live on that $20 a week.  But I didn’t even draw one week of that unemployment; when I got out, I went to work.  The first job I got didn’t work out.  They had on- the-job training at different places, and I thought I’d get on in a machine shop and learn how to be a machinist.  I checked with one there in Hobbs, and they said no but we’ve got a job here if you want to go to work.  I decided, well I’ll go to work then.  I worked down there about 8 years.  Then I decided to change to a bigger company instead of a little independent.  Mostly for the retirement benefits.  So I got on with the old Atlantic Refining Co. which was a large independent and the 31 years I worked for them, it became the 4th largest refining company in the U.S.  Of course it is a big international company.  I guess I helped build it, what little help I gave, to make an independent one of the majors.  Now it’s Atlantic Richfield Co.
	
A HOUSE IN LOVINGTON

	While living down at Oil Center, I saw people live there in company houses till they got old enough to retire.  Then when they had to move, they didn’t have anything but their next paycheck.  So Orma and I decided to build us a house here in Lovington, in case I got wiped out down there in that high pressured gas.  They’ve got quite a bit of fire hazard and whatnot.  We built a house; then I found out they were building this plant out here east of Lovington, and we had the house rented out.  I went down to Midland and put in an application for a job, and I did end up with a job out here.  So without having to buy a house, we moved out of that little company house into our home, which later on we built on to.  After Pat and Ronnie had Mark, he helped me build on to that house.  I built cabinets of birch lumber and plywood and ended up with a house where the neighborhood started running down, and we lost money on the deal when we had to sell it.  At least it was a place to move to when we moved back to Lovington.  We lived there quite a few years, till both of Orma’s parents were gone.  Then I got a transfer to Wyoming and we just rented the house out for awhile.  But that’s a pretty impossible situation when you’re 2,000 miles away.  After we moved to Oklahoma, we finally sold that house.  The market was down, and we didn’t get nearly what the place was worth.
	About 1953, I suppose, we were up in Ruidoso and we dug up a pine tree that had a clump of dirt on it and planted it in the front yard of this house here in Lovington.  It was small enough then that Ronnie and Terry could run over it, and they did break some limbs off of it.  I told them not to be jumping over it anymore.  That pine tree is still growing over there, although the house has been vacant a few times, and not taken care of.  It’s probably 30-35' tall and looked pretty good; it looked pretty scroungy last spring.  I think the place was vacant, and someone is living in it now.  
	But by building on to it and bricking it and building the garage, it makes a pretty nice-looking house now.  It served its purpose till after both Ronnie and Terry were gone from home when we went to Wyoming.  It was just Orma and I that went to Wyoming.  It would have been a pretty good place to stay, except it does get a little cool in the winter and the summer doesn’t last but about 30 minutes!  But you get used to that, and we should have stayed in Wyoming instead of transferring to Oklahoma.  
	I ended up working 31 years with that company, and the last 10-12 years, I was foreman.  A field foreman is a glorified roustabout and you get an opportunity to be on call 24-hours a day and get to carry a beeper around where they can holler at you.  Days probably averaged around 14 hours a day, 7 days a week.  But I enjoyed it and seemed to be in pretty good health.  In fact, the superintendent when I retired tried to get me to stay on till I was 70, but I was having too much trouble communicating on the radio with my hearing.  So I told him, “No, I’ll just go ahead and retire.”

RETIREMENT
	
	That all took place about the time the oil boom was over.  We had built a nice place down there in Oklahoma and ended up taking a pretty good beating on the price of it when we finally found someone who would buy it.  We spent nearly 5 years, after I retired, before finding a buyer.  He happened to be from Oklahoma, and he was in business in McAllen, Texas.  He sold his business out and was moving back.  Okies are pretty bad about coming back home when they get ready to retire.  So he had enough money to buy me out.  My real estate agent told me that half price was better for cash instead of waiting for someone else to buy it.  So we made that deal during the family reunion up at Capitan and made the deal by the fax machine.  It was my first dealings with them; I’d heard of them, but had never used them.  Think about it, it’s a lot faster than the old pony express at the turn of the century or before.
	Ronnie and Pat were going to be gone about 6 days for the reunion, and it ended up being 6 weeks.  They just went to Oklahoma with us and helped pack up our junk and brought it up here and looked for a place to buy.  Well, we ended up over here on Clayton Avenue, which was a little better end of town then we had lived on.  We moved in here, and Ronnie was in the process of putting in a shop and I didn’t know it.  He was a life-saver in getting us packed up and moved out of Oklahoma ’cause those people who bought the house wanted it by the time school started.  They had adopted a kid who had just started to school, so we tried to get out and give them a chance to get the kid started in school.  And we did; we got moved before the kid started to school.
	We’ve had to do quite a bit of work on this place, replace fences and build a shop in the back.  It’s nice when you get old and buy a smaller place to take care of, except you ought to throw away some of the junk when you move.  We still have the place cluttered up, stuff too good to throw away and not good enough to use.  We haven’t been able to have a garage sale to get rid of it.  It will probably work out in the end.  I don’t know which end!  We’re just milling around.  About all you can do is keep the yard.  Just waiting gets kind of long when you don’t have anything to do.
	
LIVING IN OKLAHOMA

	I’ll move back to Oklahoma and tell a little more about our living there.  We first bought a place inside the city limits of Cromwell.  Then we bought some acreage about a mile from town, just off of I-40.  I ended up there with 78 acres and had 2 ponds built on the place.  When we sold out, we found 10-12 channel cats in the ponds, plus some bass; I’ve caught some 3-lb. bass out of those ponds.  I had the brush cleared and all the old oil-field cement buried, had the place looking pretty good, had a few cows, not too many for that pasture, just enough to play with.  It usually ended up that one of calves would die and fall in the deep freeze!  That was pretty good eating.  
	Then when I started having problems with my heart, the doctor told me to get rid of my cows and not get out when it was really cold or hot, and that doesn’t leave but about 30 minutes between them.  So all our work for planning to get set up for retirement changed, especially after I had that Hong Kong valve put in my heart.  That’s when the cold and hot weather really started affecting me.  	But I sold my prize bull I had before I had that operation.  He weighed 1,735 lbs. when I sold him (he was only five years old).  He was a registered red Brahma and had some of the prettiest calves you ever saw.  I weaned some of them that last year that weighed 750 lbs.  I was about six weeks late on weaning these calves on account of my heart.  I couldn’t get out there and work my cattle like I should have.  That’s a big task.  We sold ‘Ole Bill’, my red Brahma, plus two or three loads of the other cows.  I just hauled them off a few of a time.  But I took Bill up to a cattle sale with two cows.  He was a gentle bull.  You could walk up to him and pet him.  But weighing that much, he could hurt a fellow if he just stepped on his foot.  I watched him pretty close.  I got him up there at the sale, and he was at the back of the trailer and I had these two cows in the front with a partition between them.  I turned him out, and I told those fellows up there that he was gentle, but that he was a Brahma and they’d better watch it.  Well, he didn’t want to go anywhere when they turned him out.  In fact, he went back into the trailer once.  Finally, a guy came around and said, “Why don’t you turn those cows out, and he’ll follow those cows right up this lane.”  That worked out well; he’d did just what this guy said he would.  He just followed those two cows he was used to and went right up that lane and they put him in the corral.  I got more for him then than I gave for him when he was a yearling.  So I didn’t lose too much on him.  
	I had a bunch of cows that year.  In fact, some of them weighed 750 lbs. when I weighed them.  Other than eating a calf now and again, we did pretty well.  After that year we got rid of those cows; in the spring, I’d buy a few calves, about 300-lb. calves that were just weaned.  I put them on that place in the fall of the year.  Before I’d have to start feeding them, I’d load them up and take them to market and make a little money on them, usually make enough to make one fit in the deep freeze.  They worked pretty good in the deep freeze ’cause you don’t have to feed them or anything.  Just take part of them out a little at a time and fry them.  It worked good!  
	All the while we were trying to get rid of the place.  Of course, when I retired, I put quite a bit of money in CDs at 11% interest, and just this morning I went down to the bank to renew the CD and got a little less than 5%.  So my interest income had dropped more than 50% since 1984 when I retired.  So far we’re making it pretty good.  When interest got to going down, I decided to invest in some tax-exempt municipal bonds, and that will kind of offset having to pay so much in taxes because of my IRAs that I’m having to draw out of every year.  And what you draw out of you have to pay taxes on.  I figured that the way to go was with the tax-exempt bonds and offset a lot of that income.  It has worked out pretty good.  This year I won’t even have to pay any state tax, and I have been having to pay some every year.  
	My hearing has gone out the window.  I can’t find anything I can listen to any more.  In fact I have to get someone else to check these tapes to see where I last stopped them.  When it gets in written form, I’ll probably find out I repeated myself quite a bit.
	After we got moved here, we got Orma kind of back on her feet.  Of course her back will always be bad.  But she is getting kind of fat and sassy right now!  I feel good; I don’t push myself.  I just mow my lawn one day and edge it the next and water it the next and things like that.  I try to go out to the park and walk when the weather is decent.  I went out this morning and walked five miles.  That’s enough to keep me in pretty good shape.  It seems like that valve is working good.  I went back to the heart doctor the other day on March 13 (on Friday too!).  I told him that was the worst part of it.  He said he checked me over good.  

FRITZ FUCHS, MY MATERNAL GRANDFATHER

	I will inject a little story about my maternal grandfather here as it is as good a place as any for it.  I found out that Hollis knew where Fritz Fuchs’s homestead was up at Mountainair, New Mexico,  which I knew about but did not know the location of.

August 15, 1994 – I was talking with Hollis, Ewald’s youngest son this past weekend and he told me about a time that he and Linda lived at Mountainair New Mexico, and he was working for the soil conservation service as he is today. He introduced himself to a rancher who ask how he spelled his name and upon learning it was Fuchs, he said come into the house, I want to show you something, and over the fireplace carved into a rock was “Fritz Fuchs,” so my grosspapa had built that log house.  I was aware that he had lived there at one time and that my mother had received her share of his estate from the sale of that ranch during the Depression and her share was in the neighborhood of  $300 dollars, since Grosspapa had 11 kids.  That made the property quite valuable. (300 dollars during the Depression was a bunch of money.) 

May 13, 1995 – Hollis and Orma and I have gone to Mountainair to look at the homestead that Fritz Fuchs proved up on in about 1916 or so.  We found it, but some of the things we knew were there had been destroyed in the years since then.  For one thing a large rock that used to be in the front yard had been destroyed.  This rock had “Fritz Fuchs” carved in it.  Hollis saw that when he lived in Mountainair some 25 years ago.  Hollis remembers the rock being mounted over and a part of the fire place, but George remembers it as being in the front yard when he visited the place with Mother and Dad – I might have made that trip but do not remember it. We did find a flagstone with the date “May 24 1924” chiseled into it, very possibly the work of Fritz Fuchs, and the old log house he had built which is a part of a large house now, also a log smokehouse my grandfather built and used while he was proving up on the place.  We took plenty of photos of it all.  Now Hollis has come up with the legal description of the homestead, which is
SE4 \ SE4 \  Section 21 \ Township 3\ North, Range 8\  East, NMPM.
That is where the house is, so he probably homesteaded  SE 4\ of that section. 

* * *

1996

	HI there, kids!  Here it is a few days after my 77th birthday, and so I will try to bring this story up to date, mind you not to an end yet, as I am not dead yet, I think.
	I have lost one more brother since the last entry was made.  Vernon passed away on Sept. 30, 1995.  George and Mildred and Orma and I went down there and visited him in his and Ruth’s home shortly before he went.  Then Orma and I went again; also we went to his funeral.  Now that leaves only George, Marion, and Marco alive, of the ten children Mother and Dad raised.
	Now this year we had a large turn out for our reunion up at Alto, New Mexico.  We had invited Arno Struve and his wife to come to the reunion as he and George started first grade together in Abernathy, Texas.  Then us old timers had a story session talking things that we could think of about the olden days.  Everyone seemed to enjoy it as much as the visiting we all did.  We also invited Ed Giesecke to come, but he could not make it.  He and his wife went to Kölzow, Germany, in April this year and sent a report to Hollis that was very interesting to all of us at the reunion, about his impression of the old church from which our ancestor Pastor Adolf Fuchs gave his farewell address to that congregation and migrated to Texas in 1845.  Ed Giesecke said the visit to that church turned out to be the high point of his trip to Germany.  We will try to get him to come to the reunion next year.  He also visited with the lady that lives in the house from which Adolf Fuchs and his family moved when they migrated to Texas.
	The Giesecke name is intermarried with the Fuchs, Struve, Goeth, Wenmohs names, all German immigrants to Texas,  plus many other names like Schnelle.  Alfred Schnelle married my Aunt Joh.  
MAKING LYE SOAP

	Monday Sept. 16, 1996 – I will add a page to my life’s story and in detail relate how we used to make LYE soap or homemade soap.
	First, my father would go to some people that raised hogs and buy enough shoats to fatten  up  for the annual fall butchering; this was after we moved to New Mexico.  I believe that at Marble Falls and at Abernathy he had some brood sows and raised his own shoats.  We would feed the hogs all summer and get some size on them for the fall hog butchering and soap making after the weather cooled off and usually after deer hunting, so we could use the venison to make sausage mixed with pork.  
	Next, George and I would take a wagon and gather cow chips for the hog killing and lye soap making – It took several loads of cow chips.  After the hams, shoulders, and sides of bacon were all salted, peppered and hung in the smoke house and the sausage made and stuffed into casings and also hung in the smoke house, then we rendered the lard and put it up for cooking use.  
	We then gathered the other fat and put it into the old wash kettle with some LYE and cooked it while stirring all the time until it turned to lye soap.  We let it cool and then cut it into square chunks for use on dishes, laundry, and if some of us got a head full of lice, it was used to get rid of them.  The  lye and other stuff would be under the soap, and it was discarded, just thrown out.  
	It might interest you to know that when I got into the Air Force in 1942, the GI soap the Army had was pure and simple lye soap like I had grown up with and helped make for so many years.
	One time I remember Mother asked Dad how many cans of lye to use.  He eyeballed the pile of fat, and they decided that six cans of lye should be about the right amount, so there is no exact measurements for this.  Lye can be made from wood ashes, but we did not have the hopper to put the ashes into from the stoves.  The lye was made by adding water to the ashes and letting the water leach  the lye out as it seeped through the ashes and dripped into a container.  I have seen the hoppers but never used them. 

* * * 

1997

	This morning, the 11^th day of December 1997, I will add one page that will be the end page of this saga, and I ask Terry to fill in the dates and any other pertinent data to the last page.  Then he can make copies of it for those who have a copy of this book.

* * *

	Hello, this is Marco Fox (Fuchs) on July 8, 2000.  In three days I will celebrate my 81^st birthday. I decided to bring this story up to date and see if I can remember some of the happenings of the past year.  I am still writing the Fuchs Reunion news letter and sending that out about three or four times a year.  It seems everyone that receives the news letter enjoys them.  The next one will be after the reunion this year which is July 28, 29, and 30^th,  and I am the chief cook and have a bunch of Mexican casseroles and broccoli- rice casseroles in the deep freeze and ten pecan pies.
	I found a cousin of mine and added her onto my mailing list, so my next mailing I will direct to her as the story involves her grandfather, my mother’s brother Emil Fuchs.
	I sure was glad to hear that Fred was cleared of any reason to be thrown into the Hoosgow for four years.

* * *

	July 11, 2000, my 81^st birthday, at 4:00 A.M. I will add a note.  I just received a manuscript of my aunt Minna’s memories that I will put into the book I have of my uncle Emil Fuchs and his children.  That will be an addition of my mother’s brothers and sisters that would be a history of the Hill Country of Texas pioneers if all eleven of those brothers and sisters had made a book of their memories as my aunt Minna did.
	We will probably go down and have lunch to celebrate my birthday later on in the day, as it is before breakfast at this hour.

* * *

This is the final page of my life story and can be filled out after my death:

I, Marco Fox, died this Day       [August 11, 2007]         				
At the age of        [ 87 ]             				
Any Mitigating Circumstances:
____________________________________________________ 
____________________________________________________
____________________________________________________ 

My life companion Ruby Orma ( Lister) Fox 
Died         [ September 17, 2005 ]       
At the age of       [ 85 ]