Hugh and Julia, with their mother Elizabeth Rollins.

Phil Buckingham and his daughters, Katherine and Betty Lee, and their mother Ada.

An overall view of the Christmas mayhem in 1948.

I have read part of Judith Heumann’s book—up to the point where she wins her case against the New York Board of Education, so that she can become a teacher.

Thank you for suggesting the book. In some ways her story parallels mine. She is dealing with a much more severe paralysis than mine, but on the other hand she has both her parents willing to go to bat for her. I am sorry to say that Dad was never a strong supporter of my young life. 

Looking back on my early years, I think Dad was always hoping that I would “die young.” I remember him giving me a couple of prayer books when I was about five, and I remember a couple of times when Mom had to scream at him to give me an antibiotic when I had a high fever. 

If she threatened to call Dr. Sechrist, the doctor overseeing my birth, Dad moved pretty quickly. I did not understand this at the time, because the one time that I can remember that Dr. Sechrist visited us, before you were born, I am pretty sure that he was actively avoiding Dad. Dr. Sechrist  was the doctor supervising my birth, who handed the forceps to my father, and saw my father deliberately crush my hip. At that time, the end of World War II, there was no padding for the device which would re-set my hip bone, so I was released from the hospital without it.  (My long-form birth certificate, required when I began taking Social Security, says that my birth was an “attempted abortion.”) As I remember, Dr. Sechrist died when I was about 16, and that’s when Dad started his song and dance about how I did not need friends, I did not need a social life, and I definitely was never, ever going to college.

However, I did receive an actual, real-life National Merit Scholarship, and the nuns at OLP wanted bragging rights about it, so Sister Evelyn Joseph arranged for me to go up to the College for Women and fill out an application on the weekend before graduation, so that I could receive an acceptance. Mom then spent the whole summer arguing with Dad about whether I could actually attend the college. (He had torn up and thrown away my scholarship papers the minute I showed them to him —“Nobody’s going to want you when they see you!”— so there was never any question about my actually getting any money.)

I will say that living at 120 East Palm during the years when I was out of school was truly a gift for me. So many books, collected from both our grandmother Belle’s years as a teacher and our great-grandmother Julia’s years as a teacher… As you may know, when I took the required fourth-grade California state assessment test (from Miss Lang, the children’s librarian in Redlands, because I had not been in regular school that year) it showed that I was reading six years above my grade level. It did not mean much to me at the time, but it meant that I was statistically valuable to any school thereafter.

I always felt rather isolated from the world as I was growing up. Dad actively discouraged any social life for me (although Mom was of a different opinion) and he was always very, very slow about accomplishing any medical treatments. But my physical impediments were not nearly as severe as Ms. Neumann’s, and I was lucky enough to meet a nice young man who thought that the smartest teacher he’d ever had as a kid was Mr. Dorsey, who happened to be a polio survivor.

Thank you again for suggesting the book.

THE SAGA OF THE ANTI-NIKE FOR LIFE

A little brother’s dream trip to Burlington

In the winter of 1956 or thereabouts, when I was in the first grade, my family went on a shopping trip to Burlington, Colorado. It was a big city to me, full of wondrous things, and I was extremely surprised when my parents said they wanted to buy me a new pair of shoes to wear to church. The shoes I typically wore were brown leather high tops, with ugly soles. I wore those shoes for everything: to school, to church, and for working around the farm. I wanted so much to have new shoes, so that I could be like my big brother Gary.

Gary always had very nice-looking shoes. He worked hard to keep them polished and clean. That was no small task, especially in the middle of winter, when our small barnyard would sometimes be crowded with 300 or 400 yearling heifers, all eating, drinking, pissing, and defecating in the corral. Sometimes we would have six to eight inches of soft, smelly “mud” in the corral.

As I remember, Gary had a shoe wardrobe that included  a black dressy pair for church, combat boots for farm work, penny loafers for school, and some fashionable “Keds” tennis shoes. Gary was always a very smart dresser. I used to whine and complain to our mom about the lack of shoe equality between us. (I didn’t have the nerve to complain our Dad.) She never once denied the lack of equality, but she would be armed and ready with a reply.

“Kenny, I have never seen anyone like you. You can wear out a pair of shoes in two months! Gary’s shoes are in good condition even after he outgrows them. But you! There is never a pond of water that you don’t walk through, rather than going around. And after you help your Dad, your shoes look like someone took a knife to them! I have no doubt that when your Dad nails something in place, you put a nail through your shoes when he isn’t looking, just to see if shoes could be nailed together.”

I wanted to reply that if I had a lot of shoes to chose from, mine would last a lot longer too, so the inequity spoke for itself. I asked my Mother why Gary could have school shoes, combat boots for his farm work, shiny black leather shoes for church, and the best of the best in my mind, “Keds” tennis shoes.

Gary was 2 1/2 years older than I was, and in my mind anything he had, I should have equally. And I was very envious of those combat boots that laced up even higher than my high tops. Boy, did they show class! They were even better than cowboy boots!

By way of comparison take a peek at my lonely pair below. I am sure that seeing this will gain me a tad bit of sympathy.

I had just one pair of ugly every-occasion shoes. Be it for work, feeding the pigs and gathering the eggs, or standing with Gary in the back of the pickup throwing out bales of hay to the cattle in the winter, or taking apart a dead 3 hp Briggs and Stratton engine (which had black oil that oozed everywhere), or for playing in the mud, snow and rain with Gary, or even attending Sunday School, I wore those shoes.

Gary and I had a blast growing up together and we loved each other. Despite doing exactly the same things as me, however, Gary never seemed to get his clothes covered in grease or mud, and his shoes always looked clean and nice. (I remember occasions when he actually had the audacity to slow down our playing by taking off his shoes and socks when things got too dirty. He definitely did it the time that we built an earthen dam after a heavy downpour.)

Before I move forward with this story, I should point out that many of my friends had multiple pairs of shoes, but they were stuck with ill fitting hand-me-downs. In case that term means nothing to some readers, this situation occurred when there were multiple girls or boys in a family and each succeeding child wore whatever his or her big brother or sister had worn a few years earlier. Hand-me-down shoes had probably been repaired a few times, and hand-me-down clothes were generally faded, and might have patches on the knees and elbows. As a rule that’s what farm kids wore in grade school and what rich city kids probably did not. I was blessed in that way, being a younger brother, and I usually wore Gary’s old clothes.

Shoes, however, were a different matter for me. In the winter of 1956, as I remember, Gary’s feet were a boy’s size 10D, very normal. However, my size at that time was 7 1/2 EEE, which meant my very wide feet could not possibly fit in my brother’s hand-me down-shoes. In pictures taken around this time, I usually appeared to be about half Gary’s size and his hand-me-down clothes were always giant on me, so I always had to “grow into them.” My dad used to call me a “short snort” because I was so small and skinny. As a side note, I remember that Ron O’Neil and I would fill our pockets with gravel on the days the Flagler school weighed us and measured our height. Neither one of us wanted to be the lightest boy in the class.

If I had understood what people meant by the anti-Christ back then, I would have christened my everyday shoes the anti-Nikes.  They were old and worn out, and they were UGLY! I was really looking forward to getting a new pair of shoes on our winter trip to Burlington. I could be just like Gary, and I could wear nice shoes to church and special occasions!

CHAPTER TWO

THE SAGA OF THE ANTI-NIKE FOR LIFE.

“Never seek immediate gratification as there is only hell to pay. “

Late one Saturday morning, we drove 65 miles east of the farm to the town of Burlington, Colorado, which was our county seat. Any time we made a trip to Burlington it was a big deal, because it was the largest town on the old Highway 24, which ran from Denver to Kansas. (It entered Kansas near Goodland.) About 2,000 people lived in Burlington at the time that I am remembering, as opposed to about 700 in Flagler. Burlington had two wonderful bakeries, a five and dime store, a Gamble’s department store, smaller clothing stores for women and children, and even a hospital with multiple doctors (instead of the single doctor in Flagler). There was also a bowling alley, a swimming pool, and the administrative offices of Kit Carson County. The county sheriff’s headquarters had a jail sitting on the top of the old courthouse. The county fairgrounds were also located at the edge of town. But perhaps the best attraction of Burlington (at least in the view of small boys) was a Dairy Queen! We loved stopping there for a treat before heading home.

On the particular Saturday that I recall in this story, it had started snowing early that morning and my Mom convinced my Dad that he should take some time off work so that they could head over to Burlington and do some early Christmas shopping. As I have said, Burlington had a wider range of shopping opportunities than Flagler. And of course my mom loved the beauty parlor there, if she could get into it.

It was wasn’t too cold out, but the December snow was falling, coming down with big flakes and not much wind. It was beautiful as we drove to Burlington, but our windshield wipers kept getting gummed up with ice, dirt, and snow. Daddy would have to get out and pound on the windshield wipers to get the ice to fall off.

The day seemed to move very slowly. Gary and I went with our Mom most of the time, and then to the five and ten cent store, even though we didn’t have ten cents between the two of us. We looked at the great toys—model airplanes, model boats, model cars, and anything else that seemed magical at the moment. Finally, at about 4:30, our mother showed up. She wanted us to go with her to the Gamble’s store to look at a few things that she had picked out for us.

The first thing we looked at was a white dress shirt along with a bow tie for Gary. The look on his face told me that he would tell Mama that every size he tried on didn’t fit, because the very last thing in the whole world that he could see himself doing was wearing a dumb white dress shirt. The war was on. The first shirt had sleeves that were too short, the second shirt had a neck that was too tight, and the third shirt just didn’t feel right. Our Mom wasn’t giving up, and eventually that third shirt must have felt good enough, because that’s what he got.

Then it was my turn. I had not expected to get anything but my mother told me that I was going to be singing in the school Christmas Festival program and in the church Christmas Play. “And,” she said, “I finally think that you are mature enough to have a pair of Sunday shoes.” Just the very idea of getting those new shoes brought a huge smile to my face. I couldn’t wait!

We headed over to the shoe department, and all of a sudden every single person in the store department happened to be a friend of my mother, or if they weren’t friends before they met her, she was determined to talk long enough to make them my friends. She held my arm firmly, although I was stretching away from her, ready to make a getaway to see the kids’ shoes. However, she had her heels dug in, and she was trying to see another person that she could talk to, for just a little longer.

The clock showed the big hand moving towards the 12 and the little hand moving towards the 6 and I knew that meant it was going to be closing time before I ever got to pick out my shoes. But finally, with just minutes to spare, we made it to the children’s shoes. As I walked up to the display, I spotted the shoes I wanted. They were slip-on shoes, with red leather and brown leather combined, and I learned they were called penny loafers. If I remember rightly, they cost about $12.00, and my mother said, “No! That is way too much!”

She walked over to another pair of shoes. They looked kind of weird. I asked the man who was helping us what those shoes were made out of, because it sure didn’t look like leather. He explained to me that he had already talked to both my mom and dad about them and they were a very good pair of shoes because they were split pig hide, which looked more like suede then a smooth leather. They had the penny loafer design, but in a smaller “half-penny” style.

We were in a rush, and I had to sit down while he got out an aluminum thing and measured the length of my feet. He said, “Boy, you sure have pretty nice feet. Let’s see how wide they are.” And the little gauge that he measured with went wider and wider. The man said, “I’m not sure we have triple E wide children’s shoes, so maybe I will need to go to see if we have some for men.”

Back he came, not with multiple boxes with multiple designs, but with one single box. Instead of this shoe style being a pretty brown, it was a kind of god-awful army fatigue color of green. And sure as shooting, this pair fit like a glove. The salesman asked me, “Young man, would you like to wear these home? I’ll put your old  shoes in the box.” I said “yes” as fast as the word could come out of my mouth, and my mother said “no” as fast as the word could come out of her mouth. Thankfully, my father was there as the arbitrator, and he said, ”Give him a break and let him wear them home. He doesn’t get new shoes very often.”

Once Daddy stepped in, I knew I had won, but Mama had to get in one last word. She said, “Ken, it’s snowing out there. You make a dash to the car and get in so the shoes don’t get wet. And the second we get home, off they go. You will dry them off, and put them in a special place for special occasions.”

All the way home I looked at those shoes. At first in the store with all the other beautiful shoes and expensive shoes to choose from, I had thought they were ugly, but as I was riding along with them on my feet, I knew they were perfect shoes. They were soft, they were warm, the soul flexed very easily, and honestly I had never received any gift of clothing of any type that ever had the sophisticated look and feel, and the deep sense of joy, that these shoes brought to me.

It took us longer than usual to drive from Burlington back to our farm. Our farm was approximately 14 miles north of Flagler, on dirt-topped roads that we simply could not drive along quickly. The house was dark and cold when we finally arrived. Almost immediately we were told, “Gary, you need to milk the cow, and Ken, you and Gary need to feed the pig and her babies and make sure they have water. And finally, Ken, I want you to get the eggs.” Daddy said he would load the bales up and spread the bales among the cattle himself.

By now there were about six or seven inches of new snow on the ground. I helped Gary round up and corral the cow he had to milk and then I headed to the chicken house to get the eggs.  I was really glad that I didn’t have to work outdoors like Gary did when he milked the cow. There was mud about six inches deep, and then the snow on top of it, and I knew if I had to try to milk the cow I would ruin my new shoes. And the very last thing my mother had said before we got in the car and headed home from Burlington was, “Take those shoes off when you get home.”

So I knew there was some risk involved in wearing my new shoes to do the chores. I had even taken them off and put on my old shoes for at least a moment, but as I got to the back door and I was about to leave, I just could not wear those old shoes. I had to wear the new ones! So I ran back and put them on.

One of my chores was to feed the sow. She had recently birthed a litter of baby pigs and Daddy had put them in the chicken coop with all the chickens, because it was the only building we had that would really protect them from the weather. The little bitty black pigs were beautiful, unbelievably cute, and also unbelievably dangerous. Not because they would hurt you, but because their mother was very protective of them.

To keep the pigs in the chicken coop, my Dad had placed an electrified metal bar in front of the door. If the mother sow tried to get out, she would be shocked, so she stayed in the chicken coop with her babies. Behind the bar there was a heavy trough that we would pour her grain into, and another one that we had to fill with water twice a day. When I went in to gather the eggs, I had to straddle the metal bar that ran across the door, and I had to stretch far enough so that I didn’t step into the trough of water.

This was a supreme task on my part, as the fence charger on the bar was extremely strong. It would shock the heck out of me if I touched it. There was nothing to hang onto as I went over the bar. I had to lift up one leg while standing on my tiptoes, put it over the metal bar, and then lift up the other leg and step in. Between my “family jewels” (which were protected only by my Levi’s jeans and underwear) and the bar there was a space of just 1 1/2 to 2 inches. And then, once inside the chicken coop I had to face a pig that would just as easily bite me as look at me.

As I walked to the chicken house with my bucket, the more I thought about this the more I started to panic. My soft new shoes no longer had a nice green tint. They were covered with snow and had turned into dark leather. My feet were wet and cold, and snow had slid inside of my shoes and gotten down into my socks. I knew then that it was going to be difficult, if not impossible, to climb over the electrical barricade and not slip and shock myself. Besides that, the chicken coop was very dark. I stared in, but I could not see the sow or any of the baby pigs, although I could hear the babies.

I managed to make it over the bar. Then, all of a sudden, I heard a horrendous roar. It was the mother pig coming straight at me. She was doing 90 miles an hour. I threw the metal bucket I was carrying towards her. She was between me and the exit. The closest safe place I had for a retreat was the chicken roost.

If you don’t know what  a chicken roost is, let me explain. Old chicken houses like ours had dirt floors and a small access opening so that the chickens could come in at night or during inclement weather.  Along one wall there would be nesting boxes where the hens would lay their eggs. Each hen’s nesting box usually had a lid. Hay was placed in the box and the chickens would manage to jump/fly 4 feet up to the boxes. They would get in from a middle opening in the lid that you would raise to collect the eggs.

The hens were very possessive of their spaces in the nesting box and always sat on the same spot to protect their eggs. When a hen was not in her nesting box she might wander over to the roost. Our roost was homemade. A row of four support boards (two-by-fours) had been put against the wall at an angle. These support boards were about six feet high. Then, starting at about three feet up from the dirt floor, a one-by-four piece of wood was nailed along the length of the support boards as a roost.  There were two roosts above that, and on the very top a one-by-four piece of wood was nailed to the two by fours, and to the wall, to stabilize the structure.

The chickens slept on the roost just as you would see pheasants (or chickens for that matter) sleep in trees. The higher that the birds could get off the ground, the safer they were from the predators that might get through their small door into the chicken coop. The key predator in our area was coyotes, with foxes second.

Now why was the chicken roost crucial to this drama? Just as the chickens were seeking safety on their roosts to protect their babies against a 1000 lb. sow who was charging a human to protect her babies, I also saw that the chicken roost was the closest safe place I could go, and that I needed to be as high up as I could get.

Once I was perched on the chicken roost, I tried staring down that sow, and got nowhere. The sow was charging my weak perch. The chickens fled immediately, fluttering away to a safer place, and all I could hear was the deep, loud, threatening grunt of the mother pig. Our standoff may have lasted 8 to 10 minutes, but in my mind it also could have been 30 or 45 minutes… I knew that I was scared, that I had a precarious position with little to sit on or grab. It was nearly dark, though the outdoor light was still streaking through the windows and through the top half of the door, so I could see a little. The baby pigs could see me too, and wandered over to look. Then the mother sow made a charge toward where I was  balanced, to chase the little pigs away from me. This startled me. I yanked up my left foot and… Damned if my shoe didn’t fall off.

It funny what’s comes to your mind in an instant like that. I thought, “I didn’t get the penny into the leather strap on the shoe.” But that flashing thought lasted half a second. The sow thought she saw her next meal, and without hesitating she grabbed my shoe with her mouth and started chewing on it.

I suddenly became aware that I had just managed to get two females mad at me, and although one was a more immediate danger, with the other there would be hell to pay. When my mother found out, I would be in trouble so deep that all I could hope for now was to escape with my life. Time stood still. I screamed at Gary to hurry up. After what seemed like a century, he was done with the milking and he came to find me.

I made a break for it, although by now the sow didn’t seem to even care. My dad also showed up and the three of us walked back to the house. My dad marveled at how lucky I was not to be hurt. He assured me that he would get the eggs with me for a week or two until the sow settled down. (I could tell that Gary thought I was a wimp, because he said that he could have just gotten the eggs.)

My dad assured me that as a small person I had done the right thing. (I told no one that my shoeless foot felt like it was close to freezing off.) When we got back to the farmhouse I wanted to go anyplace but where Mama would see me. However, Daddy insisted that I tell her the story. We took off our winter coats as usual, and Mama came to the back porch to call us for supper, as usual. Then it happened. I had covered up the single shoe by putting my coat on the floor, and Mama politely suggested that I hang it up. And so what was left of the pair of new shoes was now exposed, the story was told, and my prospects for getting anything more than work shoes were deferred from year to year until I was in the sixth grade.

I lived to tell the story. It wasn’t pleasant but it was a great lesson. If I had not kept my mouth shut, I bet to this day that my sweet brother Gary would have gone to get my work shoes for me before I went into the chicken house to feed the mama sow, and thus would have concealed the evidence of my folly. My dad did assure me that he was sure that my shoe would be found in the daylight. We went out together about noon the next day to look, and unfortunately my father was wrong. There was a sole, a couple of things like tacks in the sole, and that was that.

The Old Well House (12/28/2020)

The Old Bunkhouse (1/15/2021)

The Old Chicken House & Things South (3/1/2021)

The next day, however, Kenny and I were told we could not see Grandpa, as he had suffered a stroke and wouldn’t even know us. We asked if he was going to die, and Mama said she didn’t know, but it could be so. As that anxious day rolled on, our Aunt Alma Lee Santala came to Flagler, and we were very glad because she was a registered nurse, and she would know how sick Grandpa was after she had talked to Dr Straub.  Our Uncle Duane Santala also showed up and went to the hospital, and all the adults stayed at the hospital all day. Neighbors came by to bring food and check on us occasionally.

The next morning, Alma Lee popped into the house to get Grandma, Mama and Daddy up. She was very excited and was smiling from ear to ear. She said she had spent the night at the hospital and Grandpa was much better. He could talk and move his arms and legs. 

As soon as she had some coffee, she headed out to her brother Eldred Santala’s farm  to tell them the good news, and to tell Duane and Eldred to go to the hospital, as Grandpa was a lot better.

We asked if Grandpa was going to be all right and she said she thought so, but Dr. Straub was still very concerned, because he had said that stroke victims usually get better a day or so after the stroke, and then the brain would begin to swell up and they would get very ill or die.

Just as Doctor Straub had predicted, on the fourth day,  Grandpa Herman Santala never woke up enough to recognize people and he died in the hospital at Flagler, Colorado, at about 1:35 in the afternoon on November 4, 1958. His coffin, with his remains, was shipped back to Satanta, Kansas, for his funeral service and burial.

By Gary Pickens, in consultation with Kenneth Pickens

Gary’s Romantic Afternoon with his Sweetheart along the Seine (7/15/1997)

The Old Well House (12/28/2020)

Larissa meets her Mischievous Uncle Bruce (8/1/1973)

However, first we needed to stop in the small town of Flagler, about 14 miles from our farm, to pick up a friend of Kenny’s, Ted Moore. Then it was a drive about thirty five miles to get to the pool in Hugo.

We boys got in the pool and had a great time. Then, after a long swim, and diving off the high and low diving boards, and racing to see who was fastest or who could stay under water the longest time, and of course watching the girls (after all Ted Moore, a well-known Romeo, was with us) it was time to leave.

I got out of the water and got dressed right away. But Kenny and Ted lingered in the pool. So I was the first to get out to the car. Mommy came over to the driver’s side of the car, and opened the door to get in. I was standing by the passenger door talking to my mom over the top of the car.

A storm approaches

We had been watching a small storm approaching from the south west. It did not look menacing but there was a strange whirlwind that was going just in front of it. It seemed to be very ordinary, nothing to be concerned with, but I had never seen a whirlwind this close to a storm. We have many whirlwinds on the high plains all the time. So Mommy and I both thought it was nothing to worry about.

As the storm got closer, we saw the whirlwind crossing the railway tracks, about half a block from where we were standing. When a small summer whirlwind hits you, it is a refreshing break from the heat on the high plains, so we were not concerned. Plus it was half a block away.

Then the whirlwind crossed US 40. It was heading straight for a large metal building. When it hit the building, sheets of corrugated metal started flying in every direction and the tornado abruptly changed directions. IT WAS COMING DIRECTLY TOWARDS US! I just stood there with my eyes wide open, staring at it for what seemed an eternity. I could not believe that the whirlwind was actually a tornado, and that it could change directions so fast.

The tornado hits like a sledgehammer

The wind abruptly began to blow harder and the gravel picked up from the parking lot began pelting us. Mom screamed at me above the din to get into the car, as she herself was climbing in.

I grabbed the door latch and fought to get the door open wide enough to get inside the car. Finally I got inside and I felt a little safer. Mommy noticed another young person about my age who was trying to get behind our car for some protection. She had me roll down the window and ask him to get in also. By now the car was rocking like a ship in a storm. The young man gladly climbed in.

And then suddenly, just in a moment, everything settled down. The car was stable. But the whirlwind was now near the swimming pool. A few 50 gallon drums (which had once held pool chemicals but were now merely trash cans) were being tossed about like beach balls, rising high into the air. Umbrellas had been ripped from their masts, and it looked as if the fence might be collapsing.

My perception of time was starting to return to normal. When the tornado was approaching, time had seemed to slow down. What felt like minutes was in reality just a few seconds. Now, time was normal again.

Kenny and Ted were still in the dressing room area. I assumed they were totally oblivious to the mayhem that was going on outdoors. They later said that the power went off momentarily, but that was all. Obviously, the changing room building at the swimming pool had been built like a fortress!

Reunited after the tornado

When the boys came out of the changing room, they were able to see all the damage that had been done by the tornado. As they came to the car, Mommy and I were still watching the storm go up the hill north of town, and the 50 gallon drums were still floating in the air. (The young person who had taken shelter with us had left by then.) Finally, when everyone got in the car, we headed home.

As we left Hugo, a small thought sneaked into my head. “If I had my driver’s license, I would be chasing that tornado!”

But of course my mother was a very responsible adult driver, and she certainly did not want to follow that tornado! She came from Kansas, the heart of tornado alley, and wanted nothing to do with them. Many decades earlier our barn had been hit by a tornado and removed the shingles on the west side.

Some useful resources

• Wikipedia
• Severe Weather 101: Tornado Basics
• Tornado facts and information – National Geographic
• Tornadoes | National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

The Dirty 50s: The Dust Storms of the 1950s (1/17/2021)

The Pickens Barn (12/30/2020)

The Old Chicken House & Things South (3/1/2021)

When I was really young, I remember that going into town to call my grandmother in Kansas was a very special adventure. I don’t remember what particular occasion was tied to my first memory of this, perhaps our trip to Kansas for Christmas. We didn’t have a phone at the farm in those days so when we needed to talk to someone by telephone, we would have to make the long 14 mile trip into the small town of Flagler, Colorado.

In Flagler there was a telephone exchange where several ladies worked at connecting people on the telephone. For my parents to call my grandma, they had to ask the operator in Flagler to connect us to the operator in Burlington, Colorado, our county seat. The Burlington operator would then have to connect us to the Colorado switchboard. Then the Colorado switchboard would connect us to Kansas, and the connections would continue on and on, until we finally reached Grandma.

Of course all this took time and we were paying by the minute, starting from the time that the first connection was made. The public phone in Flagler only took coins, so we brought a jar of coins with us when we started on our long-distance telephone quest.

The telephone exchange in Flagler was a small building on Main Street, pictured here. We went up a few steps to the porch, and the telephone was attached to one of the walls under the arched entryway. All four of us stood around the telephone while the connection was being made.

Once it was made, my mother said all the important things. Then Kenny and I were supposed to say our two or three words, and then we would hang up. I bet the conversation only took a few minutes, but there was always considerable time required make the connection between eastern Colorado and southern Kansas. A long-distance call was an adventure!

Grandma’s Very Cool Telephone

Our Grandma in Satanta, Kansas, had an old crank phone that was actually inside her house. I was very curious about using it. The telephone seemed like magic to me! My mom was a telephone expert, and she would go over, turn the crank, and start talking to the operator, an old friend from her childhood.

Then she would tell the operator lady who she wanted to talk to next. Sometimes it would be an obscure secret word or two like “Oscar 22.” And other times she would simply say she she wanted to talk to Jane. Sometimes she would be talking to Jane, and then as the time passed, she would be talking to more and more people on the party line. Other times she would just pick up the phone and listen to whatever conversations were going on. (That was supposed to be a breach of etiquette, but everyone seemed to do it.)

We finally get a phone at home

When I was in seventh grade, during the 1960-1961 school year, the telephone company told the farmers living north of Flagler that if the farm families would set up the telephone poles and string the wires to each farmhouse, the telephone company would support and maintain the network. The farm families jumped at the chance to have phone service, and putting up the telephone lines became a community project. Of course the farmers were experts on installing fences, and they already had a lot of the equipment needed to build the telephone network: post hole diggers, wire trimmers, big trucks, etc. The telephone lines were up in no time. (Kenny was pretty sad about the project, because Mommy and Daddy felt that I was old enough to help the men, but Kenny was not.)

One of the few things I remember from the work was that Daddy, Jack Scheidler, and several other men took a break and went to Jack’s place to get some water from a garden hose. Jack happened to be wearing really loose fitting bib overalls. His pocket was gaping wide open. So Daddy took a drink from the garden hose, and then stuck it into Jack’s pocket. Boy, Jack was mad at Daddy, but everyone else just about split a gut laughing at Jack’s reaction.

We got 15 – 20 miles of telephone line put up in record time during the fall of 1960. Then the telephone company came in during the spring and summer of 1961 and installed the phones in our houses. And so we joined the 20th century, on a party line with about half a dozen neighbors.

When we needed to use the phone, we would pick up the receiver and listen carefully, to make sure that the line was not being used. Then we would dial a three or four digit number and a local person would answer. If the call was outside the local area, we would have to call the operator by dialing 0 (zero) and then we would have to tell her where we were calling. Or we could use the obscure codes that the phone company had set up. Like xx to call Limon, yy to call grandma.

A few notes on telephoning in the Navy

In the Navy Bootcamp, using the telephone was a real problem. The link gives a full description and all the details of that situation! Once I left boot camp, telephone problems in the working Navy were a bit different. As long as I was stateside, I could have a normal phone call, but once the ship was at sea, I was out of luck. (In an emergency, if we happened to be in friendly waters, like the time when my Dad had a heart attack while I was on a training mission, the Red Cross could send a message to me on the ship. That way I could at least know the bare bones of a situation.)

Of course, whenever I was on Navy duty overseas and our ship reached a port, I could call internationally, but that was very expensive. I could also call through the HAM radio network if I could find an available HAM operator, although that was quite problematic, as the connections would fade in and out, and there was interference, and there would always be limits on how long I could talk.

My parents get a cell phone!

In the 1990’s, my parents got a new-fangled cell phone. It was quite large, with a strong carrying case and a short battery life.

The closest cell tower was in Hugo, Colorado, about 30 miles from their home. Reception was really difficult, but it would do in an emergency.

My iPhone

Today I have an iPhone. The battery still runs down way too fast, but other than that it’s a real marvel. I enjoy getting multiple video calls a week from the grandkids. A Christmas celebration via Zoom, with participants from around the globe, and nieces and nephews that I don’t get to see often enough, is a special treat.

The world has really changed since my grandmother’s time. She journeyed west to Kansas in a covered wagon, and now we we are landing vehicles on Mars, and talking with multiple members of our extended families on video calls.

Gary as a Thespian (3/27/1965)

The Old Well House (12/28/2020)

The Dirty 50s: The Dust Storms of the 1950s (1/17/2021)

by DS2 William Gary Pickens

Finding the USS Chicago CG-11

I reported aboard the USS Chicago CG-11 in early February 1972, after flying across the Pacific in early January. I had about a month of Shore Patrol duty while waiting at Subic Bay, in the Philippines, for a Navy ship that could take me out to the Chicago, which was then on duty as PIRAZ station “Red Crown” in the Gulf of Tonkin. This was the Chicago’s fifth Vietnam deployment. (She had been instrumental in developing the PIRAZ concept on her WestPac cruises in 1966 and 1967-68, according to Wikipedia.)

I finally got a place on a food resupply ship, the USS White Plains AFS-4, where John Pelkey, a friend from NTDS School, was stationed. (He is the young man in the blue shirt, mugging for the camera.) I enjoyed seeing John again, and looking at the computers he worked on. They were programmed for inventory maintenance, similar to a commercial business setup.  

There were about a half-dozen other sailors aboard the USS White Plains who were also bound for the USS Chicago. The food ship first resupplied a small task force, consisting of an aircraft carrier and its escort ships. (The series of pictures I posted below shows some of the intricacies of this operation.)

After this, the White Plains resupplied a few single ships, and then it finally reached the Chicago, where our small group got off.  We were transferred by helicopter, a Boeing CH-47 Chinook. (This was the only time I have ever been on a helicopter.) There were two bench seats running the length of the helicopter, where we were crammed together, each of us with a bulky sea bag. I had a seat by the window, and it was interesting to see how smoothly the ascent and descent happened. A graceful arc between two ships, simple and elegant–although extremely noisy.

Reporting Aboard the USS Chicago CG-11

Once aboard the USS Chicago, I got out and looked around to get my bearings. A sailor came over, ducked under the spinning helicopter blades, and said, “Watch your head and follow me.” He took us down to the chow hall and told me to wait for someone to come to get me. The chow hall was a maelstrom, filled with sailors carrying boxes from the supply ship, and other sailors coming to meet the new arrivals. 

Finally, George Hemmert came and led me away to my new station. I discovered that he was sometimes referred to as “Big George” in our division, because he was our senior Petty Officer on this cruise, the person who was really in charge of things in the ON division that was my new assignment. LTJG Jansen was officially our Division Officer, but Big George was the one who kept tabs on things and gave us our assignments. As far as we were concerned, Big George ran things in our division.

Daily Life Aboard Ship

I was swiftly integrated into everyday life on the USS Chicago. At first I was assigned to all the dirty jobs that sailors have to do when they are new on a ship. I scrubbed the latrines, including some very dirty urinals. When new supplies came aboard, I stood in a long line, called a “loading party,” where we handed boxes from person to person. I collected trash and threw it out over the fantail — the back end of the ship. There was a secluded platform with a small bench near the fantail where, if I was free, I liked to go in the evenings and write letters to my girlfriend/future wife.

The USS Chicago was operating the PIRAZ Station with the call sign Red Crown. This was a radio station guiding U.S. aircraft in the Gulf of Tonkin and North Vietnam. We were assigned rotating 8 hour shifts, working for 8 hours, with 16 hours off. Each week we shifted to a new 8 hour slot, which meant that our workdays shifted forward by 8 hours. It was disorienting. We never knew if it was dark or light outside, and many people never went outdoors. 

I tried to go out daily, because I was still a farm boy and I liked to see what the weather and the sea were doing — and sometimes I just needed a break from the dense crowding inside the ship. I found the time changes of our working shifts very tiring. It took me about three days to get used to each new time shift, and after four more days, I had to do it all over again. It was like being jet-lagged all the time. The other men were grumpy and hard to get along with, too. 

Changing Work Schedules in NTDS

All of us generally stayed in our work space when we were not sleeping or eating, and we would help each other out if anything came up. So after a couple of months we talked to Big George, and asked if we could switch our work schedule to 12 hour shifts. Each of us would just follow the same 12 hour shift during the time when we were between ports. We worked out the shifts among ourselves, and I chose to work from 6 p.m to 6 a.m., or from 1800 hours to 600 hours in military time. (The rest of the ship was still on the rotating 8 hour shifts, of course.)

USS Chicago Ordered Back to PIRAZ

By the middle of April 1972, the USS Chicago was scheduled to start heading back to our home port in San Diego, so we left the Red Crown PIRAZ station and started towards Subic Bay for repairs and replenishment. The USS Long Beach, CGN-9, was scheduled to come in and take over the Red Crown PIRAZ station.

However, before proceeding to assigned duty at the PIRAZ station, the USS Long Beach was also required to go through some “combat readiness” tests. The ship had failed to meet the standards, we were told, and so the Long Beach was sent to the South China Sea for more training and preparation, and the USS Chicago was ordered back to the PIRAZ station, to take up the Red Crown position again.

We USS Chicago men were all pretty ticked off by this. We had been well on our way to Subic Bay (in the Philippines) when we were ordered to turn around and return to the Gulf of Tonkin. We were not going home after all. I had already written to Marilyn, telling her that we were heading to San Diego, and she had spoken with St. Paul’s church, and had set our wedding day for May 20. Now I had to write again and tell her that this was not happening. 

Communicating with Marilyn

There was no good way to communicate back to the states in those days.  All I could do was write a letter, which might reach San Diego in two weeks, but now, with the Navy’s change of plans, might take longer. But I fired off a letter anyway and hoped it would make it in time. 

We did get another chance to go to Subic Bay several weeks later, when we finally resupplied the ship. I called Marilyn as soon as I could get off the boat and find my way to a pay phone. It was a very short call, because back then international calls were very expensive. Basically, we agreed that I would contact her whenever the ship got to Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, because we would be safely out of the WESTPAC area by then, and about a week away from our home port in San Diego.

A Wedding in July!

Marilyn had moved our wedding date from May to June after getting my letter, but she canceled that after my phone call. We were finally married on July 22, 1972, and the wedding invitations were given out by telephone after the USS Chicago was safely in port at San Diego. My parents in eastern Colorado were very busy with harvesting the wheat crop on the farm at that time, and they had to work very hard to finish it up and get to San Diego before our wedding day. My brother Ken stayed home to watch the farm, and my parents and my brothers Rodney and Bruce came to the wedding. Rodney was my best man, and Bruce was an usher.

Of course, at the time that our ship was ordered back to the Gulf of Tonkin, every man on the USS Chicago had homecoming plans and there were several other guys who, like me, were planning to get married. We all felt that this unwelcome change in our orders was completely the fault of the Long Beach for not being ready to do her duty, and causing us to be forced to do it for her. 

Reflections

In retrospect, I now think that the plans for mining Haiphong Harbor were already laid out when we had started for home, and the Navy wanted an experienced ship manning the Red Crown PIRAZ station during the battle. But we didn’t know this at that time.

I should also note that the Long Beach was a fancy new nuclear-powered ship that required fancy new repair materials, whereas the USS Chicago was a modernized World War II ship that could be repaired more easily and more cheaply. This may have been another factor in the decision not to send us home. (Please check out the links below for more background information about the USS Long Beach. Leroy Jones writes specifically about the difficulty of getting repair parts.)

However, at the time, from the ordinary sailor’s point of view, it was the ineptitude of the crew of the Long Beach that had kept the USS Chicago posted to her duty station long after she should have been home. And after this, the men of the USS Chicago were always extremely unhappy whenever they happened to meet the men of the Long Beach. 

Trouble in Guam, 1974

The worst trouble between the two ships that I can I remember was during the end of our WestPac deployment in 1974, when the USS Chicago was in port at Guam, and the Long Beach came in and tied up right beside her. The layout of the mooring situation required that the men of the Long Beach walk across the deck of the USS Chicago whenever they went ashore. 

Hans Streuli and the Battle of the Bus

A young man called Hans Streuli was a DS2 in our ON division on our 1974 cruise who had the distinct misfortune to be caught up in the animosity between the USS Chicago and the Long Beach. He was a nice guy, very tall, with a great smile. As I remember, he was originally from Liechtenstein. When Hans joined us, the USS Chicago was headed for an extended cruise across the Indian Ocean with several escort ships, a journey designed to diplomatically “show the flag” and counter the growing Soviet presence in the area. 

Hans was not a regular member of the crew. His country—or his family—was sending him to learn military service with numerous other countries. Before the stint with us, he had been with an Australian army unit. I once asked him (as a joke) if someday he would be someone important and I would see his picture in the paper, and he said no.  

As an aside, when Hans left our ship, he told us that he was going to a private island in the Mediterranean where clothing was optional. All of the sailors really liked that story, whether it was true or not! Marilyn met him once, and she thinks he might have been Prince Hans-Adam II of Liechtenstein. Of course sailors have always traditionally told “tall tales” about their past, so I took his stories with a grain of salt. He was really interesting and I enjoyed hanging out with him. 

DS2 Hans Streuli had the misfortune of being assigned to Shore Patrol (Military Police) duty on the night when the bad feelings between the Long Beach and the USS Chicago came to the boiling point on Guam, during the last part of our 1974 cruise. (Shore Patrol was a common duty assignment for the men in my division when we came into port. I had done it numerous times myself.) As a temporary member of the Military Police, Hans was given the job of keeping order on the bus that took the sailors from their ships to the Enlisted Men’s Club on the base, and back again. Most of us had done this job with only minor problems, considering that the Enlisted Men’s Club was basically a bar, but Hans was not so lucky. 

Sometime around midnight during his Shore Patrol shift, a particularly drunk and rowdy group, composed of about equal numbers of  USS Chicago men and Long Beach men, left the Enlisted Men’s Club. When they got on the bus, a big fight quickly broke out. Since Hans was currently acting as a Military Policeman (though he was armed only with a baton), it was his duty to keep order. He first tried to break up the fight, and then he radioed for reinforcements from the base Shore Patrol. However, when the base Shore Patrol came and saw what was happening, they decided to just hold the doors shut and let the combatants duke it out. They arrested everyone after it was all over.

The Aftermath

Poor Hans came back to the ship with two black eyes, and he was covered with cuts and bruises. The medics bandaged him in several places. He looked terrible for weeks. He had not even been aboard the USS Chicago when (from the ordinary sailor’s point of view) the inept crew of the Long Beach had forced us to extend our assignment in the Gulf of Tonkin, which had gotten us into two extra-intense months of fighting. I felt so very sorry for him.

From the ordinary sailor’s point of view, we men of the USS Chicago had worked hard and had done our time, but the military unreadiness of the Long Beach had forced us to stay at our duty station long after we should have been home. And that is why the crew of the USS Chicago did not get along with the crew of the USS Long Beach, at least during my time in the U.S. Navy. 

Links:

Blog about the USS Long Beach CGN-9, from Master Chief Douglas Haley. Has interesting stories about sleuthing for repair parts.

First-Hand: The Naval Tactical Data System in Combat – Chapter 7 of the Story of the Naval Tactical Data System

Official description of the USS Long Beach CGN-9. 

Stories from Leroy Jones, the officer in charge of maintaining the radars (and obtaining repair parts) on the USS Long Beach CGN-9 : 

Overview of U.S. naval mining strategies during the Vietnam War, written by CPO Michael Gonzales, Jr. :  

Webpage about Le Levant, Europe’s only nudist island : 

Wikipedia article about Hans-Adam II, Prince of Liechtenstein, including a picture of him in 1974, which Marilyn thinks looks similar to the man in the picture in the USS Chicago’s cruise ship, but with longer hair, a better tan, and no beard. (Whoever he was, it took a lot of connections to post a foreign sailor on our ship.)

 Wikipedia article explaining Shore Patrol

Wikipedia article about the history of the USS Chicago CG-11. (I was on the fifth Vietnam deployment and the first post-Vietnam Cruise.)

Here is a story of my experience working with the shore patrol while station on the USS Chicago.

Loading Supplies (3/16/1976)

Destroying Classified Information in the Incinerator (3/16/1976)

Repel Boarders Drill (3/16/1976)

Gary always managed to get the job of milking the cow and I would get the job of feeding the pigs and getting the eggs. The reason for this division of labor was he had to put on the kickers to keep the cow from knocking over the pail of milk when he was milking the cow. To get the kickers to work you need to be able to lean on the rear in of the cow and get the cow to step one step sideways in the process of stepping sideways you could clip that chain between the two kickers and tighten it up so the cow couldn’t kick over the bucket of milk.

At my weight, I could push on the cow until the chickens came home, and the cow would look at me and think “what’s that dumb fool doing back there you’re an annoyance” and not move an inch. Gary on the other hand could get the cow to move and then to my delight he could also milk the cow. Try as I might I could get one squirt a minute and he could get 60 squirts a minute and so that’s the way it was. When he was done milking he we meet and carried the milk bucket into the old well house where we had a cream separator and pouring the milk into the cream separator.

Gary would us the pail on the right to milk the cow. Then we would put the cream in the canister on the left and take to Joannes Dairy..

We would then sell the cream at Joannes Dairy in Flagler Colorado and have a little bit of spending money for the farm. The long and short of this story is that by the time we were done doing our chores which generally took about two hours and we came in from outdoors we were cold as the dickens.

When we came in from the farm in the middle of the winter our feet would be so cold that we would put our feet in the hot water in the bathtub to warm them up. It was excruciatingly painful when you stuck frozen feet in the hot water but eventually it made them so that they felt normal again. Then we would have a nice dinner, watch television and then at 9:30 we would go to bed.

Reason we went to bed at 9:30 was because our only television station was out of Goodland Kansas which was Central Standard Time zone and that’s their 10 o’clock news started at 9 o’clock in Rocky Mountain Time zone. The news lasted for 30 minutes and when the news was over it was time to go to bed.

When we were in grade school we got a dog from the Fellers and the dog had the perfect little white tie on his front chest it was tied with a Windsor knot on the top and then came out just like a tie you would wear to church today on his chest and we called him Rusty White Tie. I will write a full story about Rusty White Tie some other time. Daddy called him his bird dog, because daddy would make him sit on the post around the yard like a little bird and bounce there until daddy would let him get down.

At any rate at 9:20 Rusty White Tie would normally be laying under the kitchen table and just observing the world as the time approaches 930 he knew that that he would thrown out. Gary and I would let him stay indoors so he would get down on his belly and crawl to the steps to go upstairs when he hit the steps he would go 100 miles an hour under one of our beds or in a closet until we could not find him. But generally speaking, we never tried to find him because it was cold and we wanted him to stay indoors so when we were all settled in bed, out came Rusty White Tie. Happy as could be.

The Pickens Barn (12/30/2020)

Telephones in my life, and how they have changed. (3/8/2021)

First Time Camping (Without Our Parents) (1/18/2021)

The Old Chicken House

As far back as I could remember, the chicken house was just an old, ugly building that no one could see. For the usual visitors to the farm, it was hidden from view by the house and by the trees around it, and, of course, by the well house and the barn.

And the chicken house smelled to high heaven! The stink was very distinctive. Of course the chickens used to crap all over the place, and that smell dominated. We also raised baby pigs in the chicken house, but the chickens seemed worse to me. Once there were also two little calves born in a blizzard, that we put into the second room of the chicken house, and they had their own distinctive odor. But that is getting a little ahead of my story.

In my very earliest memories, the chicken house was just the long building that lay south of the barn and the old well house, forming part of the fence for the corral. Looking at it from the house, I saw a right trapezoid shape. The side of the roof near the barn on the north was the lowest point and the southern side was the highest. There were windows only on the south side.

The old chicken house was originally divided into three rooms. The eastern side, nearest the house, was the room where the nesting chickens lived. The room next door was used for many different things as I remember, sometimes the baby pigs or baby cows that I began helping to care for when I was five or six years old. The last room, the west room, was the storage room for chicken feed, pig feed, or coal for the water heater in the stock tank.

The center room also contained a large brooder for raising the littlest chickens. The brooder looked like an upside-down funnel and the little birds would run around and get under it for protection and warmth. The cute, fluffy little yellow birds needed constant heat to survive.

Sometimes my parents would order a box of little chickens that we would receive in the mail. The baby chicks were a little bedraggled when they arrived but they were generally okay. (Newborn chicks can survive 72 hours without food or water, thanks to nutrients from the egg yolk, which they ingest immediately before hatching. The U.S. Postal Service has allowed shipments of live baby chicks since 1918.)

When the baby chickens got a little older, they were moved to the room nearest the house. Some became laying hens, one was chosen as the rooster of the flock, and some became food. I think we also sold some, but I don’t really remember those details.

Chickens for dinner

One of my early memories from this time period comes from a day we were having company come for a meal. We needed several chickens to cook. Mommy and Daddy went out to the chicken house, where they selected the biggest chickens. Daddy had an axe and Mommy had a big bag. They would spot a good candidate and Daddy would run and grab it, carry it over to a block of wood, and chop off its head. Blood spurted everywhere, shooting several feet into the air, and spraying everything nearby. The headless bird would run wildly around until there was no blood left. Then Mommy would pick up the bird’s body, and start pulling out the feathers, which she put into the bag. Later, she would make pillows from the feathers.

A blizzard with baby calfs

One night, I remember that we were expecting a blizzard and at least two of the cows were due to have babies. Daddy had been keeping watch over them all evening. The blizzard blew in about sunset, which was also the time that one of the cows went into labor. A few hours later, Daddy came into the house carrying a new little baby calf. Mommy grabbed a lot of towels to dry off the calf and we made him comfortable in the back hallway. Daddy went back out to check on the next cow. A short time later he came in with the second calf.

Now my parents had a real problem, because there was not enough space for two little calves in our hallway. Finally, they decided to put both baby calves into the middle room of the chicken house. So Daddy carried the little calves out to their new beds. For the next several days, Kenny and I both accompanied Daddy to feed the young calves in the chicken house. We used a special bucket that had a rubber udder on the side.

The third room

As I have said, the third room of the chicken house was usually used for tools. It had not been constructed in the same way as the rest of the chicken house; It was more of a lean to shed, with the low end on the west side, and with the east side leaning on the chicken house. Kenny and I used it to climb onto the roof of the chicken house. The low side was only a couple of feet high and the roof of the chicken house was only a step up on that side.

Another big blizzard

According to one of my earliest memories, one year there had been a really bad blizzard. A giant drift of snow reached the top of the chicken house on the high side. Kenny and I both climbed onto the chicken house, using the low lean to roof on the western end. Then we climbed up the chicken house to the very top of the roof, and we walked straight out onto the drift.

The big snow drift had all sorts of places to slide down. One in particular was a lot of fun, but was also very frightening the first few times we tried it. It was near the building, a chute that abruptly dropped down close to the ground, and then leveled off, for a long fast ride. The snow on the top had frozen solid, so it was easy to walk on. But the drift also had several overhangs. One time I ventured a little too far from the building, and my right leg broke through the frozen drift and I fell down. I only stopped because my hip was too big to go through the hole, and it stopped me.

After recovering from the fall I tried to get up. First I tried to find something that I could put my leg on, to push myself up. But there was nothing. I kicked in all directions and I found nothing solid to step on. I tried to use my other leg, but it was at such an angle that I could not use it, nor could I use my arms. I could hoist myself up a little, but not high enough to get both my legs under me.

Kenny tried to help but we were afraid that if he got too close, he would have the same fate.

Finally, we decided that I was well and truly stuck, and the best strategy was to go get Daddy. So Kenny headed out to get him, and I waited for what seemed like an eternity. Finally Daddy, like a superhero, came and lifted me out with no problems.

The eastern room

In the eastern room of the chicken house were two long nesting boxes. On the north wall the nesting box was about four feet long. The hens would climb in, lay their eggs, and tend them until they hatched and the babies were large enough to take care of themselves. And there was also ramp for the chickens to roost on at night. It was about ten feet long and sloped up at a thirty degree angle. It was constructed of several 2×4 running up the slop. Then a number of 2×1 attached to the 2×4. They were spaced about a foot apart. At night the chickens would get on the highest board and sleep.

On the southern wall the nesting box was probably double the length of the northern wall. Each box was about 18 inches deep and the same front to back. The roof was on a hing and sloped down. A person could lift up the roof and get the eggs that the hen had laid in the previous 24 hours. Supposedly, once a year we would clean the nesting box and put in new hay for the chickens to nest in.

Above the nesting boxes on the southern wall was windows that looked south.

Gathering eggs

On the front of the nesting box was a wooden platform that the chickens would stand on when getting into and out of the nesting boxes. In my earliest memories, my head was about the same height as the platform. I would accompany my mom when she was getting the eggs. We would generally go before sunset before the hens had returned to their nests. But on rare occasions we would not make it, and mommy would have to reach in the box, grab the chicken by the tail and left it out of the box. The chicken did not like this one bit! They would try to peck my moms hands and squawk a lot. Especially to a little person’s ears.

As time passed, I grew and before long mommy said that she thought I was big enough to gather the eggs. So she turned the job over to me and my little brother, Kenny. He would crawl on the platform in front on the nesting box. I would hold the cover of the box up and I reached in a got the eggs. That was not too bad.

However, if we were late, and the chickens had returned to their nest, it was another story. Kenny would hold the lid open and I would tentatively put my hand up to grab the chicken by the tail. She would start furiously picking at my hand and I would pull my hand away. I would do this several times before I figured out where her tail was and grab it. It was not as easy as my mom made it look. Eventually, I got so I could do it as easy as my mom.

Several years pass and my parents decided to get out of the chicken business. But the chickens lived on and I eventually did not notice them. I think there was still some of them when I went to college. They were probably several generations from the first ones I tended.

Pigs move into the chicken house

My parents bought some little pigs so we could have pork. They put then in the middle room of the chicken house.They were really cute when they were young but they did not stay small for long. Soon they were too large for the small little room. So daddy cut a doorway between the middle room and the eastern room.

Each day after school, we would have to go out feed the pigs. We would take a long walk up to the old bunkhouse, fill a five gallon bucket with grain, and carry it down to the chicken house. We had an electric fence across the door to keep the pigs in. We had to lift the heavy metal pail of grain over the electric wire. To make matters worse, the doorway was always wet and muddy.

In the first years, Kenny and I would have to share caring the bucket since it was too heavy for one of us to carry. But it usually feel to me to hoist the bucket over the electrical fence and pour it into the pig trough. One day, I was hoisting it over but I did not get it high enough and it hit the electrical fence. All twenty thousand volts, plus or minus a lot, surged through my body! All my muscles tightened up and I could not let go of the bucket.

Finally, the fence charger turned off and I could let go. I let out a scream that let everyone know what had happened, luckily Kenny was the only one close enough to hear. He was laughing so much. I spilled the grain in the puddle in the doorway and it was not good for anything so Kenny and I had to go get another one. From then on, I was always very careful to lift the bucket high enough.

The Old Outhouse

We had an outhouse somewhere around the farm. I don’t remember where it was. Kenny thinks it was out in front of the house. The way I remember it, it was old and very ran down. So daddy got a another one that was in better shape. And it was put it out in the front of the house.

Kenny and I dig a deep hole

My mom was not very happy with this, she wanted it moved. But before it was moved it needed a deep hole dug. Kenny and I were assigned the task of digging a deep hole. We had watched as Cecil Bogart dig a deep hole, it appeared easy. So the next day we got all the shovels and other tools needed for digging.

Did I say that we were still very young. Well, we dug and dug and dug. We took shovel full after shovel full out of the hole. We poured jugs of water in the hole to soften the soil. We got big heavy jam bar and daddy’s pickaxe. We dug for days and days and several times daddy would ask if it was deep enough yet. And we would say no.

The outhouse moves

Finally, after considerable time, he came out to inspect the hole, and he said, “That looks deep enough”. So, the next day, he got the Farmhand, hoisted the outhouse up, and carried it over and lowered it over our hole. And that’s where it set for decades.

It was mainly used as a spare restroom, when there were too many people waiting in the house for the one restroom. Or when we had farm laborers or people working on the farm.

The Garden

South of the outhouse was where we had our garden. We only grew it for several years but it did real well. It was an area where runoff from the windmill and stock tank would run to then absorb into the ground. Things that grew in this area flourished. The corn, and beans was the best things. But buying things at the grocery store won out plus we did not grow enough to last a full year.

The Old Blacksmith Shop

South of that was an old blacksmith shop. I was too young to remember it, my mom and dad said it looked too dangerous to have little kids around so they tore it out by the time I could remember. The only thing that remained from it was an old forge that was moved to the quonset. It was a hollowed out piece of cast iron about two and a half feet by two and a half feet. It had four wobbly legs and a fan with a crank on one corner. The crank was connected to the fan through a series of gears that really sped up the fan. The fan blasted air across the bed of coal to produce high temperatures needed for forging iron. I only saw it used once, it generally collected junk in the quincet. Kenny and I liked to spin the crank and see how fast we could get it going.

The Farmland

South of that was farmland, we grew wheat and feed for our cattle. And also they would graze on it most of the year. Kenny and I would use it to fly kits, model planes and missiles. There was one Saturday I remember, when Kenny and I were out flying a box kit. The wind was perfect, we had several rolls of string, and we had low clouds. The kit would keep climbing and climbing so we would tie another role of string to the string running to the kit and it would keep rising. Finally, we used all three rolls and it started flying into and out of the clouds.

Finally, we had to bring it down, in doing this we got the string all tangled up and try as we could we could not get it untangled. Eventually, we had to throw all the string in the trash. We agreed that next time we had low clouds and plenty of string we would have to try again. We tried several times but we could not get the kit to fly into the clouds. I think that one day the clouds were exceptionally low.

The Pasture south of the house

South of that was a real pretty pasture. It was about a quarter of a section (160 acres) in size and had a dry lake that only filled after a rain. On the side of the lake were several old wagons from the horse and wagon era. Kenny and I thought they were old covered wagons from the early settlers but mommy and daddy thought they were from much more recent times. They said that people used wagons like that up until World War II.

Abandoned homestead

Up the hill from the wagons was an old abandoned farmhouse and two wells. One had a windmill and stock tank on it and was used for watering the cattle. The other one had been capped of to prevent things from falling into it.

The old house had been abandon many years before. But mommy and daddy warned us that rattle snakes lived in places like that so it scared Kenny and I off for many years. I did go in it when I was in high school. Daddy was thinking about using it to store wheat in it.

The mysterious bone

Daddy was out one day in the pasture a found a bone that looked a lot like a human finger bone. He showed it to several other people and they agreed with him that it looked like a finger bone from a human. Kenny and I were will real curious, and wanted daddy to tell us where he found the bone. He didn’t want us going out and disturbing someone’s grave. So he never told us.

Sometime later, an older couple who owned a very large ranch north of us stopped in one day and told daddy a story. There was, many years before, a very large ranch that included our land. It was there for many years. Then the settlers started arriving and one fellow found the lake and loved it and got a homestead for it.

The rancher was not pleased with this, but there was not a lot he could do. He did not own the land. So he sent his cowboys out to harass the settler. This continued for some time. Than the homesteader just disappeared. No one ever found out what happened. Perhaps, the finger bone was his.

The threesome’s father had settled the land while it was still untouched prairie. They lived with their parents while there was few neighbors. Their parents died and the children stayed on the land. In my time, they were two old men and one old woman. I don’t think I ever meet them.

The Old Bunkhouse (1/15/2021)

Gary’s Romantic Afternoon with his Sweetheart along the Seine (7/15/1997)

Memories of Sleeping in the Cold (2/16/2021)

Some background to this story

This story starts in the mid-1980s, when my wife began teaching in a private high school for young people who were “bright divergent thinkers.” Yes, my petite, quiet wife had started wrangling unruly teenagers! A few years after she started teaching, she also began working in the school office, so she became aware of much of what was happening behind the scenes. (And please note that this story is told as I remember it. She might have a much different version.) At the time that I am remembering, in the late 1980’s, the school year had just started and a newly-hired science teacher was having severe discipline problems. A few weeks into the school year, the new teacher came charging into the office and said “I QUIT! I’VE HAD IT with these students!” And he stormed out of the office, and out of the school.

This put the principal of the school in a real bind. She talked to people at other institutions where she taught, or had connections, including the Austin Theological Seminary, where she tutored students in writing, and the University of Texas at Austin, where she had run the writing lab before starting her own school, and she advertised everywhere she could. She had several people apply for the position, and, as I remember, she hired someone from the Seminary.

This young seminarian was a very quiet, religious guy, who said, as I recall the story, that he “couldn’t think of a better way of serving the Lord than helping these troubled young people.” He even felt that this might be his calling. So he started at the beginning of the next week.

But about a week or two later, he also came into the office and said, “I QUIT!” The last they saw of him, he was trotting up the hill to the bus stop. So a new search started for a science teacher. But it was quite difficult to find teachers willing to start work this late in the school year.

Tom Donovan joins the high school faculty

Economically, that period was a hard one in Austin, and the housing industry in particular was struggling. One day the principal’s husband heard that a friend, Tom Donovan, was having trouble getting work. Tom had been building really nice custom homes for wealthy people before the housing downturn came, but that work had come to an end. He also happened to be very close to having a PhD in biology, as he had completed all the required course work, years earlier, although he had not completed a dissertation within the allotted time frame. Now he was looking for a job outside the housing industry, and a job teaching high school science seemed a good fit for him.

So the principal hired Tom Donovan to be the new science teacher, and she told the students to expect him on the next Monday. (The students would be calling their new teacher by his first name only, because that was the school policy, but as I remember they did it with the greatest respect!)

The new science teacher makes his dramatic entrance

As I remember the story, the principal had just gone into the science classroom to make sure that the kids were behaving themselves, and to introduce the new teacher, when a loud “hog” (also known as a Harley Davidson Motor Bike) roared up into the driveway, just outside the classroom window. Some of the the guys jumped up and rushed over to the window to see what was happening. A man with a long beard slowly unfolded himself from the seat. He appeared to be about seven feet tall and very muscular, with no fat on him. He had a black leather jacket on, with a “HELL’S ANGELS” patch on its back. He was wearing leather pants and black combat boots.

He was coming to their classroom! A moment or two later they heard his boots thumping towards the door. He came in and gruffly announced that he was the new science teacher. Then he walked straight to the front of the room, nodded and said hello to the principal, grabbed a piece of chalk, and started teaching. There were no discipline problems in the science classes from that day forward, and the students loved him.

Tom explains his place in the hierarchy

After Tom joined the school, any time that there were discipline problems in his area of the school building, Tom would be sent to take care of them. One day in study hall, the students had made a bad mess and he was sent in to get the kids to clean it up. Another time, one of the kids asked why Tom was allowed to carry a pocket knife into school and they were not allowed to do the same.

Tom, as I heard him tell the story, was eating an apple with the knife he called his frog-stabber, carefully cutting the apple into pieces, then using the knife to put the pieces into his mouth. He slowly leaned forward to look at the person who had questioned him. Then he spoke in a firm voice, taking hold of the blade of the knife, and slapping the handle against the open palm of his other hand.

“BECAUSE I’M A TEACHER!” He looked the inquisitor straight in the eyes. That was the last question on that subject, and Tom’s reputation among the toughest kids continued to grow.

It became hard for me to know which of Tom’s stories were true and which were not. Tom was of Irish extraction, and storytelling came naturally to him. And of course, each time he re-told a story, it got better and better. He certainly had “the gift of the gab.”

Tom solves a student sabotage problem

The next story may be apocryphal, but I will tell it anyway. In the spring term of the year that Tom started teaching, the bell in the back school building failed to sound at the beginning of class one day. Someone had cut the electrical line to the bell. The students in that building missed the the start of class. Since Tom had worked in the construction industry, the principal asked Tom to fix it so that the students could not do this again. The principal was thinking about maybe putting the line in metal conduit or burying the wires. Tom said that he would take care of it. The next day, Tom had his ladder out, repairing the line in full view of the students. And he pounded a huge nail into the wall below the new line. While he was working, he would tell every boy who walked by that he was repairing the electrical line, and if it was ever cut again, Tom would personally hang whoever cut the line from that big nail. The line was never cut again, and the incident was soon forgotten as the school year passed. Tom’s popularity among the students continued to grow, and the stories about him grew also. He became a legendary figure among the students, and I am sure that many of them remember him to this day.

Tom and his crew add a family room to our house

During the summer vacation following Tom’s first year of teaching at the school, Marilyn asked him if he could look at our house to see what it would take to add a family room on the back. It was something she had wanted to do ever since we had bought the house, and she had it all planned out. He came by and gave us a quote. So we hired him to put the room on, and that’s how I got to know him. His workers were just as colorful as he was. They all rode motorcycles, and they lined them up in front of the house each day. I got numerous questions from the neighbors! Tom and his team did excellent work. We (and our grandchildren) still enjoy our family room, and it has outlived several other improvements we have had done on the house.

Tom’s work crew told a lot of stories, and in general they were fun guys to be around. I remember in particular that Tom was the president of the Hell’s Angels motorcycle club which kept order at Eeyore’s Birthday Party, which was always held at the end of April in Pease Park, near the UT campus. Eeyore might be an innocent character in a children’s book, but his birthday celebration in Austin could get quite raucous!

Tom’s San Diego Stories

Tom had grown up in San Diego, California, like Marilyn, so they had some things in common to talk about. One of the more memorable times for me was when Tom asked Marilyn where she had gone to high school. He said he had gone to Hoover High in North Park, but he knew all the other high schools in town, and he might know some of the people from her school. Marilyn said she had gone to Our Lady of Peace, also in North Park. Tom got a totally blank look on his face and said, “Nope, never heard of it.” (Marilyn guessed that her high school didn’t have any teams that competed with his high school, since her high school was all girls.)

One San Diego story that really hit home for me was when Tom admitted that one of his favorite high school activities had been going downtown and rolling drunk sailors for some easy money. When I was doing my Navy training in San Diego, we were constantly warned to be very careful in the downtown area because some of the local people would steal our wallets if we got really drunk. I’d never had any trouble with that, but here in Austin I was actually hiring one of the people I had been warned about!

Tom Donovan’s legendary pickup truck

Tom had an very old pickup truck that always looked like it was just about to break down. He told me that once, when he was driving on a very narrow street in Austin, heading down towards UT, a small, shiny new convertible pulled up behind him. The driver (either a frat boy or a very entitled attorney, Tom thought) was clearly irritated because Tom was not going very fast. So the guy honked and waved at Tom, trying to get him to either speed up or pull over. But Tom just continued his journey, driving a bit under the speed limit and stopping very carefully at all the stop signs.

By this time Tom was getting fairly close to the UT campus, and the guy behind him was getting really rude. At the next stop sign, Tom threw open the door of his truck, reached under his seat for a big pipe wrench, and climbed out, very slowly unfolding himself to his full height. He was well over six feet tall, and very muscular. He headed back to talk to the impatient driver. In his story to me, Tom said the guy’s eyes got as big as dinner plates as Tom walked slowly back to his sports car, swinging the big pipe wrench, and narrowly missing the headlights on the little car. The guy slammed the car into reverse gear, laid rubber backing up, and then turned around and headed away as fast as he could go.

Why Tom Donovan did not have a Ph.D. diploma

As I have said, according to what we both had heard, Tom had completed all of the course work for a PhD in biology, but he had never written his doctoral dissertation. As Marilyn remembers the story, his son’s birth happened just at the time when Tom should have been working on his dissertation. As I remember, his son was very sickly for the first few years of his life, and Tom felt that supporting his family and taking care of the baby should be his top priority.

Tom Donovan moves on…

Tom continued teaching at Marilyn’s school for several years. But eventually the economy in Austin improved, and Tom went back to construction work. We did hire him to install grab bars in our bathroom when we were having it refurbished before my mother’s visit, and at that time he told us he was moving to another city to be near his son, who was starting his own business. That was the last conversation I remember having with him, but I will always remember him as a true “Weird Austin” character and a friend.

Note: When I was working on this piece, Marilyn did some Google searches to try to find Tom Donovan and she found a memorial site about the nature trail in south Austin that bears his name. He was truly one of a kind.

Note: When I was working on this piece, Marilyn did some Google searches to try to find Tom Donovan and she found a memorial site about the nature trail in south Austin that bears his name. He was truly one of a kind

Escorting a Prisoner to the Brig (3/16/1976)

Fire Drill (3/16/1976)

Accommodation ladder (and whaleboat) watch (3/16/1976)