Dad's Stories

Here are some that my dad told to me a few years before he died December 8, 1999.

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He told me of how when he was about seven or eight and still living in Oklahoma they had gone to visit his mom’s sister, Aunt Maude. The boys were put upstairs to sleep at night. A very steep, narrow set of stairs that I remember from the one time I was there when I was about six and we were moving from Texas to Las Vegas, Nevada and had stopped to visit. Daddy said the he woke up in the night and needed to pee but it was such a long ways down the squeaky stairs, and it was warm so the window were open, so he just let ‘it’ hang and out window and peed. What he didn’t know was that Aunt Maude’s window was open right below him and her bed was right by the window so she get any cool breeze that might blow. She wasn’t very pleased to be woke up being peed on by her young nephew, and he got whipped for it.
It was when we were visiting this same farm that I got to meet Aunt Maude and her brother, Uncle George, and to see someone milk a cow for the first time as they had about a dozen cows that they milked. I was surprised to see my dad milking one. What really surprised me was how bad the milk tasted. Aunt Maude said that the cows had got into some bitter weed so the milk tasted bad but it wouldn’t hurt us. Still I wasn’t about to drink it, and neither did my sisters. A few days later we visited Mother’s cousin, Blanche and her family on their farm near Estancia, NM and got to drink fresh cow’s milk that was good and sweet. I learned to like fresh cow’s milk from then on as long as they hadn’t been in some sort of bitter weed.
While at the Wills Farm in Oklahoma Daddy took me fishing for the first time. We walked and walked from one small pond to another while Daddy tried to catch a fish. I don’t remember if he caught any or not. He let me hold the fishing pole a couple of times but it was boring. I remember that a lot of the time I couldn’t see where we were going as the grass was way talker than I was and I was afraid of the big cows that seemed to come out of nowhere to see what we were doing, then they would leave when they found out we didn’t have any food. I think they were quite gentle I had just never been around cows before. When we got back to the farm house that evening I was very tired, covered in mosquito mites and chiggers but very happy my dad had taken me.

When Bob was about 15 he and a friend from Cortez, CO named L.T. James decided to hitchhike to Windover, Utah. After not getting many rides while hitchhiking, they caught a freight train to Elko, Utah and when they got of it was dark as they were in a tunnel. The train had to go through three tunnels at that time. They used their handkerchief for washrags to clean up with so they could start looking for a job. They didn’t have any money so Bob hocked his pocketknife for 25 cents so that they could get a big bag of day old bread to eat.
He said there were a bunch of bums and hobos living near a pass where a wooden water tower that held water for the train was. They had brought a couple of quilts with them for sleeping but were afraid they would be stolen while they were asleep so one of them stayed on watch while the other one slept at night.
The asked a man in a hardware store for a job and he wanted both of them right then at a ranch ten miles south of Jigs, Utah. They worked there for two months making $2.00 a day for a nine hour day. Then they decided to move on to Pocatello, Idaho where they thought they could get a better job.
But there were no jobs there so they decided to go on to Cheyenne, Wyoming. They were hitchhiking again this time and were picked up by a strange, (he didn’t explain what he meant by strange or I didn’t write it down) dirty man driving a 1939 car. Remember it was 1940 which meant that the car was almost new. They wondered how he got it but were afraid to ask. The first chance they had they asked to be let out and continued to hitchhike. Later they learned the dirty man with the new car had broken out of prison and stole the car.
It was my understanding that he did get all the way to Alaska on this trip or on another but couldn’t find a job there and finally went back to Cortez. It was at that time that he decided to enlist in the Navy when he was about 17.