Tampa, Florida

Tampa, Florida, McDill Air Force Base

During the summer of 1962 Daddy was transferred from Las Vegas, Nevada to Tampa, Florida. Daddy always put in to go to Alaska and our friends the Zamora’s always wanted to go to Florida. Military fate dictated that we would go to Florida and they would go to Alaska.
I was eleven and would be twelve in just a couple of months after we got there. Sarah would be six, and starting kindergarten and Janice was four. Since we would be going so far away from our grandparents we took time to stop to see them on the drive from Vegas to Tampa. First to Cortez, CO to see Daddy’s parents, sisters, and brothers, and all my cousins up to that date. As Daddy was from such a large family I could never keep up with all my cousins. Vicky was older than me by only a couple of weeks and since she always lived near Grandma and Grandpa I spent most of my time with her when we visited. Near as I can remember at that time I had about twelve cousins then. There would be lots more as time went on and there are several I have never even met.
From Cortez we went to Albuquerque and visited with several people including Grandma Kay Bischoff, Maude Green, and Mother’s cousin, Rex Green. Gram and Granddad Green had taken in Granddad’s brother’s five children, when he, Uncle Herb was sent to prison for a year for accidentally killing his second wife when they were drunk and she was going to shoot someone and he was trying to stop her. Or so the story went. There were three boys, William, Rex and Johnny, and two girls Jaunice and Lillian. They became sort of like adopted brothers and sisters to my mom and her sisters. Johnny was Mothers age and the two of them were always together, but when Gram and Granddad moved to Silver City, NM the children went back to live with their dad who was out of prison by then. I believe that Rex may have moved with them but I could be wrong about that. I do know that Rex did wind up in Albuquerque after WW11 where he met and married Aunt Billy who’s real name was Wilma. They had Terry who was a couple of years older than me, and Kelly who was a couple of months younger than me. Kelly and I played together as little kids and years later went to high school together. I actually knew Kelly better than all of my first cousins.
From Albuquerque we went to Pampa, Texas and visited with Gram and Papa for a week or so, and then it was off to Tampa, Fl a place we had never been to before.
When we were in Nevada Daddy had bought a green GMC Suburban. Sort of like a SUV now. It was before the days of seatbelts, and my parents would fold down the back seat, place several thicknesses’ of blankets on it to make a bed. Sarah and I would ride back there so that we had more room and could lay down to sleep if we wanted to. Janice usually rode in the front between my parents sitting on Mother’s overnight case. It was a hard case unlike the new soft ones. Jan was prone to car sickness and did better in front. Mother always kept a plastic trashcan handy for her to throw up in. Yuck! By riding in the back on the bed Sarah and I could easily get to the snacks and drinks in the back. I spent many an hour riding down the road that way watching the scenery go by or reading a book. Many times after I had read a book a couple of times I would read it out loud to every one else. It was to entertain my sisters but I think Mother and Daddy enjoyed them to.
It was a long drive, three days at the 50 miles per hour that Daddy drove, across Texas, south across Louisiana and the Mississippi River. Across Mississippi, where the constant green, flat country was almost nightmare-ish to us desert rats. There were tall trees with green vines all in them and Spanish moss hanging from them. None of us had ever seen anything like it. And there were bugs. Mosquitoes, chiggers, gnats, and flies. On across Alabama where we saw so many little shacks with dozens of colored children (African American now). I had been friends with Theresa and there were always black people in the military where we lived. Daddy worked with them and some even went to church with us, but this was so different. We had never seen people living in such poverty. I remember being afraid we would be living like the people I was seeing.
On into Florida and finally to Tampa. We spent about a week in a hotel before a place became available on base. It turned out that the base housing on McDill was not near as good as what we had at Nellis. To get any kind of a place Daddy had excepted a small, two bedroom, upstairs apartment. He had hoped that we could move to some place larger later but either one never became available or else he decided it would be too much trouble to move as he kept hoping that he could transfer to some other place.
We hated having to go up and down the two flights of stairs every time we wanted to go in or out of the apartment. I don’t think either of my parents had ever lived in an upstairs apartment before and didn’t realize what a pain it would be. Also, we didn’t have a dryer so we had to haul wet clothes downstairs to hang on the community clothes lines and then had to bring them upstairs. That’s a lot of baskets of clothes for five people. If the weather was bad we hung the clothes in the house, most on a collapsible clothes rack that usually sat in the bathtub unless someone was taking a bath. In that day and age and with my parents upbringing it was usually one bath or shower a week. How horrid now to think of only taking a bath once a week. How did we stand each other? Especially in all that hot, humidity that we were not used to at all after the hotter, but dry heat of the desert.
The housing area was like a circle of apartment buildings around a central playground and the clothes lines. Each building had eight apartments, most of them small, two bedroom apartments like ours. There were about ten of these apartment buildings which would be about 80 families living there. That’s a lot of people and a lot of kids playing on the playground. Of course fights broke out among the kids. I don’t think there was anything to serious while we were there and it seems most of the kids were babies up to about 14 or so. I don’t remember there being any older teenagers. Maybe they were just smart enough to stay away from such a group of brats. Thankfully I don’t remember many times when all the kids were out at once. Usually only a few when we went out to play. My best friend at that time was a girl my age who was named Joy, or as she renamed herself Glenda.
There was a plus side to living upstairs. Our building faced west directly out over Tampa Bay. Daddy said it was about a football length from the door to the Bay. All of it grass except for one huge, ancient tree. From a fairly large window in the living room we could watch the dolphins playing in the water, and watch the pelicans flying and diving down into the bay to catch fish. There were several different kinds of wading birds as well as a few seagulls. They didn’t come in the huge flocks that you can see some places but enough of them to make bird watching a favorite pastime considering we didn’t have a private yard any more. One of the main residents of the bay was what was locally called a saltwater alligator. I think it was just an alligator that decided he liked living on the edge of the Bay. He never bothered anyone and we leaned to just make a wide circle around him if he was spotted up on the grass near the buildings. I saw him a couple of times when I had to leave for school. Never real close and I didn’t want to see him close. I knew he could be really dangerous if I tried to. We weren’t scared of him, just respectful. At that time I don’t think we realized just how really dangerous he could have been if he had been antagonized or hungry. Now a gator would not be allowed to live so close to so many people if it could be caught and moved out to where a gator belonged. It was rumored that he was at least six feet long; a pretty good sized gator. Sometimes we wouldn’t see him for several weeks and then he would appear again. No one knew where he hid out during those times.
It was the job of the men who lived in the complex to keep the grass mowed. They took turns at it. And when they did or any time we had to go out we had to watch for snakes. I guess Florida has always been full of snakes. Daddy told tales of the water moccasins that got onto the jet and plane runways that they had to remove so that the snakes didn’t get up into the wheels of the planes and be hidden from the mechanics that were working on the planes. He told of one water moccasin that when someone ran it over to kill it, there were a whole bunch of baby water moccasins that ran out of her, as these snakes do a sort of live birth (so do rattlesnakes) and she was just ready to have them when killed. So Daddy and several other men ran around on the runway trying to kill all of the baby snakes.
There was one of the guard shacks only about a quarter of a mile down the road from where we lived. It was our most frequent way on or off the base when going to town. The guard shack had military police on duty there all the time to allow the proper vehicles on to the base. We heard that one night one of the guards was bit by a water moccasin. As close as the ambulance and clinic was to the base entrance the man died before he could receive medical help. It made us more conscience of watching out for snakes but I don’t remember ever seeing one except at some of the snake and gator exhibits that were scattered all over the state.
Our first year in Florida I was in the 6th grade. It was my last year to go to school on base. The bases had grade school on them but for junior high and high school we were bussed off base to the local city schools. There was a swamp behind the grade school that was supposed to have snakes and gators in it. We were told never to go out into it but some of the kids did. I just peaked over the fence at the puddles and trees.
This was the year that the Bay of Pigs Incidence or the Cuban Missile Crisis was going on, while Kennedy was president, and the United States was having problems with Cuba. Since Cuba was so close to Florida all the military bases in Florida were on ‘standby’ in case Cuba actually attached the United States. Daddy had a suitcase packed and sitting by the front door ready if he had to leave in a hurry. I don’t think I really understood what was going on, and I still don’t understand why there have to be wars. I just knew that Daddy might have to go off to a war with Cuba at any time. And we were confined to the base. Only those kids that went to school off base were allowed off along with some of the women who had jobs off base and I don’t think there were very many of them. Most of the women who were married to military men were housewives.
In school we were taught to hide under our desks if we heard the base air raid sirens go off indicating either a drill or that we were actually being attacked and bombed. Now I wonder what the teachers and other thought that those desks could actually do if we were bombed. We certainly wouldn’t have been any safer under a desk than we would have been sitting at one. It was really kind of dumb to even have us do it for drills.
We also knew that if we heard the sirens go off even for a drill, and there were lots of drills, we were to go into the nearest building and wait until the sirens stopped screeching. We did it but it all seemed kind of redundant and unreal to us kids. Or at least it did to me.
Daddy had said he would take us to the Everglades as Mother really wanted to go, and we had made plans to go one weekend and had to cancel because we were confined to base. We never did get to go.
Another important event for world history while we lived in Tampa was the shooting and death of President John Kennedy. As I write this there was the announcement on the news that President Kennedy’s brother Ted had just died. His sister Eunice died just a few weeks ago. President Kennedy’s death was the first death of a really important person during my life and probably one of the most important deaths in the history of the United States during the twentieth contrary. I will never forget the day in my 7th grade in school when the loudspeaker came on during my music history class that was a very boring class and seemed to be mostly a study hall to classical music. We were all expecting some kind of interesting announcement as it was at an unusual time for one. As with the rest of the world the sound of a pin dropping would have been as loud as a bomb after the school principal came on an solemnly announced that our US President had been shot and killed while in Texas just a few minutes before. My teacher put his head on his desk and started crying which caused several students to cry as well. None of knew what to do other than to look at each other. No one said anything, but I think a lot of us wondered if it would be the end of the United States. Would our country be taken over by Cuba or the Russians?
http://www.fiftiesweb.com/kennedy/kennedy-assassination.htm


When I got home I remember asking Mother what would happen now and she reassured me that the vice president, Lynden Johnson, would now be the president until the next election. She said it was a horrible thing to happen but the United States wouldn’t change that much. I still wasn’t that sure. Knowing that my dad had suitcases packed and was ready to go off to war at any moment didn’t help. But Daddy didn’t seem that concerned about President Kennedy’s death. He hadn’t voted for him. I do remember we watched all the news on TV about how it happened and even saw the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby.
We watched all of the news shows about the Presidents death, the swearing in of Lyndon Johnson, and the funeral of President Kennedy. One thing that impressed me was the riderless horse for the funeral. I had never heard of the tradition at that time. Of how a horse, usually black, is lead during a funeral with the boots of the dead person set backwards into the stirrups. The horse used during President Kennedy’s funeral was a black horse named Black Jack. He was special trained for use in the funerals of Presidents and famous government people. He was used at the funeral of Hoover and Johnson, General MacArthur, and lots of others. http://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/blackjack.htm At the time of Kennedy’s death I could never have thought that one day I would have a black horse and would name him BlackJack.
We did go to lots of the closer tourist places around Tampa. Bush Gardens where we toured the Anhizer Bush Beer Brewery. At that time it didn’t have all the rides, and the tour though the African Wildlife area. I believe that the African wildlife area was just being thought about at the time we were there. Cypress Gardens where we watched girls in old fashioned southern belle type dresses that wondered the grounds looking pretty. We tried to make similar dresses for our dolls. There were all kinds of wild birds as well as a bird show with trained parrots. Silver Springs where you could watch a water show with water skiers, and take a ride on a glass bottomed boat so you could see the fish in the water.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypress_Gardens

We really liked Weeki Wachee Springs where the show included real ‘mermaids’ that were well trained girls swimming in mermaid tails under water using air hoses. Our Suzzette dolls had to have mermaid costumes after seeing Weeki Wachee.

http://weekiwachee.com/main/
Clear Water Beach where we went to play in the ocean as we didn’t swim very well. Once it had little dead fish in the water and really grossed us out. http://www.clearwaterbeach.com/

Ringling Brothers Museum in Saratoga Florida http://www.sarasotacircushistory.com/articles/
The museum was the winter quarters for the circus and where they practiced the tricks, stunts, and other things for the circus for the next summer tour. We were able to meet a little woman who was a midget that preformed for the circus but was almost retired when we met her. I wish I remembered her name. I was enchanted by the huge, orient wagon that was at the museum. A large team of Clydesdale horses was used to pull the wagon. I remember they said that when Ringling actually used the wagon he had twice as many horses pulling it as was actually needed just for show.
It was at the Florida state fair that we got to see the Budweiser Clydesdale team. We didn’t get to see them perform but we did see them eating in a large tent. A farrier was shoeing one of them, and I pushed my way up close to watch. He was working on a back hoof and I was amazed at the size of that hoof. The horseshoer started to put a nail in that big hoof and it bent and I guess was going crooked. He pulled it back out and dropped it on the ground. Mother poked me in the back. “Ask if you can have that nail?” For once I conquered my shyness and asked. The man glanced up at me. Smiled, picked up the nail and handed it to me. I still have it in my jewelry box. To me it is more valuable than most of my jewelry.

Other things I remember about Tampa were drives along Bay Shore Boulevard from Tampa to St. Petersburg that were frequent as then we would go shopping. Picnics on the Hillsboro River where the water was stained the color of tea by the tannic acid in the river bed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillsborough_River_(Florida)
Tarpon Springs where we visited a Greek Church, and sampled Greek food, saw a sponge diver in the old diver equipment with the air hose and big glass-bowl-like face hood, and went to the zoo there. http://www.cardcow.com/14086/st-nicholas-greek-orthodox-church-tarpon-springs-florida-tarpon-springs/
http://gothere.com/Florida/TarponSprings/index.htm

http://www.divingheritage.com/keywestkern.htm
http://circusnospin.blogspot.com/2008/11/tarpon-springs-zoo-revisited.html this blog had an interesting bit on the Tarpon Springs Zoo. I remember at the time when we went there in about 1962 or 63 that it was a holding zoo for animals being brought in from their native country before they were sold to the bigger zoos in the US. I remember watching several tapers, lots of spider monkeys and some otters and there was movie film of them.


We were able to stay at our apartment for the Gasparilla Days Parade which was mostly a huge old pirate ship that had supposedly invaded Tampa Bay in the early 1900’s. The ship would go up the bay and by the base apartments and we would watch it through the binoculars and then on down by Bay Shore Boulevard. Seems like one time we saw it from the Boulevard while it was going under one of the drawbridges that are all over Tampa and several across the Bay. http://www.travbuddy.com/travel-blogs/48988/Gasparillathe-pirate-invasion-begins-Tampa-1
While we were in Tampa there was one of those rare ocean occurrences called a red tide. I am still not sure what causes it, and it wasn’t very pretty to see. Something causes the smaller fish in the ocean to die. Some sort of algae is thought to be responsible for the red tides that seem to occur in the Tampa area on a regular basis. We just happened to be there when one happened.
There was a bad hurricane named Betsy in 1965 and must have been the one that left an excessive amount of water in Tampa Bay while we were there if I remember right. Either Betsy in 1965 or Dora in 1964 or another hurricane caused a lot of rain on a Saturday night. I remember when we got up to go to church there was water up on the road that ran along the bay which was unusual. My parents didn’t make much of it as we drove though the water, off the base and on to church. I do remember talk about that we might be better off to be living upstairs if there was a hurricane. I am glad I thought so then although now I know it might not have been a good place to be as those old apartment houses were ‘condemned’ buildings when we were living in them and probably not very safe if there was any kind of disaster like a hurricane, or a fire. http://www.floridamemory.com/photographiccollection/photo_exhibits/hurricanes.cfm

It was while we were seeing all of these tourist places that my parents got the movie camera. Jan has it now and all the movie film and the projector. We took quite a bit of movie film but it seemed that there was always an argument between my parents about how to use it and what to take. Daddy insisted Mother do it, but criticized the way she did, which was always wrong in his opinion but he wasn’t about to do it himself. That always seemed like a common thing in our lives. I am not sure why Mother put up with it, or why Daddy wouldn’t do things for himself like the camera. I don’t know that he ever took any photos until he went on some hunting trips into the Gila Wilderness after he retired.
In Vegas I had a bit of an interest in taking photos but it increased when we were in Tampa. Of course Daddy would only let us have black and white film. Mother would let me use her old Brownie still camera but Daddy would always complain about how many pictures I took even when it was only one photo. As much as Mother’s family always loved photos I don’t think Daddy and his family had much use for them. He couldn’t seem to understand my interest and even worse was when I wanted to go to a photography school in Idaho after high school.
While in Tampa we continued in Girl Scouts. I can’t remember anything special that happened in Scouts while we were there. We did have meetings in an old barracks that reminded me of the one I had school in for 2nd grade. Plus we were on a Girl Scout Troop outing when we went to Tarpon Springs and saw the sponge diver, Greek Church and zoo.

Tucson, AZ

Tucson, Arizona

In 1965 Daddy had one year left to decide if he was going to retire from the military or re-enlist for another few years. With only one year he could have easily stayed in Tampa, but he and Mother disliked living in a tiny apartment in Florida so much Daddy put in to move to Tucson, Arizona and got it. So we packed, and were packed up by a moving company and almost reversed that trip across the United States that we had made from Las Vegas, NV two years before only to live in Tucson at the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base.
Again we got a nice base house – three bedrooms with a fenced back yard. Having lost our beloved parakeet, Morry while we were in Tampa we were promised a dog when we got to Davis-Monthan Air Base. And we got one. A beagle we named Boots. We also got another parakeet and named this one Tony.
I am not sure what Daddy did at this base but I do know that it was a base that had a huge area where ‘retired’ plane were kept. It was acres and acres of desert with old planes sitting on it. Frequently Daddy would take our dog and let him chase jackrabbits among the old planes. A couple of times he took us as far as the fence that surrounded the planes but wouldn’t let us go in among them like he and Boots did. He said that one day he heard Boots yelping and when he got the dog to come to him he had stuck his nose in a big cactus and brought back a big cactus sticker still stuck in his nose. That cactus sicker was at least 3 inches long. Mother kept it for a long time. Not sure what ever happened to it.
While we lived in Tucson I went off base to school for the 8th grade. I seem to remember I liked that school probably as well as any school I ever went to.
I had one friend there named Diane Myers that I also went to church with. It was also the best church we ever went to probably as I had Diane and another good friend there, Janet Blaylock.
While living there we went to Nogales, Mexico several times as it was only about an hour or so from us. We would park and walk though a gate to get to blocks and blocks of good shopping. We took Gram and Papa, and Grandma and Grandpa as both sets of grandparents came to visit while we lived there.
We also took them to see the old Spanish mission, San Xavier del Bac, which is more than 300 years old, and located just to the south of Tuscan This beautiful, white Catholic church had been used in several movies and would be used in the TV show High Chaparral in 1967, as would several other places in the Tucson area.

http://www.sanxaviermission.org/

Tucson has always been a favorite location for movies and TV shows. We went to see Old Tuscan the movie set several times. Sadly we never saw any famous actors while there. It’s usually closed while there is filming going on.

http://www.oldtucson.com/

We went to see Colossal Cave where a pair of outlaws had hid out after a train robbery. Unlike the caves back east, Colossal Cave is a dry cave with out the water dripping everywhere even though there is a stream running through part of it. http://www.colossalcave.com/welcome.html
Again Girl Scouts were an important part of our life but as usual nothing special happened while we were in Tucson. But I assume that Scouting kept us from being so bored in our very boring life.
Seems like we always had company while there. I remember Mac and Birdie Prible (old friends of Daddy’s that he had worked far as a teenager on their pinto bean farm in Cortez, Co.) Daddy’s brother Gilbert, wife Anah and our four cousins.
It was in Tucson that we were able to met Mother’s Aunt Milly. She was Granddad Green’s sister and probably up in her 60’s at that time. She was a widow but I have no idea what her husbands name was or what he did. Aunt Milly lived alone in a true adobe house. It was small with a living room, kitchen and two small bedrooms. It had the traditional thick adobe walls that made for easy heating in the and cooling in the summer. Her brother Uncle Homan lived nearby in her neighborhood in another adobe house. Both of them knew a lot about the plants that grew in Tucson and Arizona and had lots of houseplants. Seems like Uncle Homan had done some kind of work that had to do with or about plants. Both of them had lots of different kinds of native cactus and desert plants. But Aunt Milly had done the impossible by raising a banana tree from the seed of a banana that she had bought at a store. He had taken the best care of the banana tree for many, many years and when we were there it stood in a place of honor in the front yard and was old enough to produce a few bananas.
Aunt Milly was the only person I ever knew that had had a pet jaguarondi. I believe that her husband had found it as a tiny baby and brought it home to her. Jaguarondi are a wild cat, bigger than a bobcat but smaller than a cougar that is listed as an endangered species in Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. Most people have never even heard of them and very few have ever seen one in the wild. They are even rare in zoos. More our found in Mexico, Central America and South America than in the US.
I have always wished I had known then when I was 14 to take the time to write down all the stories that Aunt Milly told us. I wish I had known her better. That year in Tucson was the only time I ever saw her, but when Lee and I got married she sent us a beautiful white tablecloth that I usually keep packed away as I don’t want it to get ruined, and I have a white china pitcher that was hers.
We were there a year when Daddy decided that twenty years in the military was enough. He had three or four in the Navy when he was in his teens and the rest in the Air Force. He could have stayed in and would have got a nice bonus but it would have meant he would have had to go to Viet Nam for a tour there. He decided he had seen enough war duty when he was in Korean while in the Navy. So he retired and we moved to Sandpoint, Idaho.
On the way to Idaho we again did the long distance car trip to visit relatives in first Texas at Mother’s cousin’s ranch. Juanice (spelled as Gram had it on a photo I found) was married to Jahue Jameson at that time. Hope I spelled his first name right. It is the only time I have ever heard it. They had a big, fancy ranch house but all their children, all girls I think, had already grown up and left home. Boots our beagle dog was thrilled to be there and to be able to go run and play with the ranch dogs. My sisters and I were told we couldn’t go outside without an adult with us as there had been so many snakes that spring, a lot of new hatched rattlesnakes, and copperheads. I was worried for my dog but he survived with out being bite. We were shown around the ranch learning about cows and a little about horses. We were taken fishing to a special fishing hole where the men mowed the grass around the water before we could fish so that there were no snakes hiding. While there what seemed like this huge Hereford bull poked his head out of the brush to see what was going on at his watering hole. Mother took photos of us standing with the bull behind us. Thankfully he seemed to be more curious than mad about us being there.
Mother’s Uncle Herb lived with Jaunice at that time and on one day he went with us to, Lillian’s, his adopted daughter’s home on a different ranch where her husband was a foreman. While there Uncle Herb saddled an old zebra dun cowhorse and let us ride him. Regardless how I kicked him or pulled on the reins he would go down one road and only so far before turning around and going back to the house. Uncle Herb had assured my parents he was the safest horse in the world for us. But it irked me that he wouldn’t go farther down the road. Sarah rode behind me a couple of times but Jan didn’t want to ride. One of the cowhands had found a tiny, baby bobcat and Lillian and her daughter were raising it. It got to stay in the house while all the other cats, and there were a lot, had to stay outside. Playing with that baby bobcat was a real treat. They had had an orphaned fawn just before we got there that had played with the bobcat, but the fawn had died.
We left the ranch and went to Pampa to visit Gram and Papa. And somewhere on the ranch Jan and Sarah had come in contact with poisoned ivy. Probably while we were fishing at the bull’s watering hole. So we spent several with our grandparents with my sisters covered with calamine lotion and not feeling well do to the poisoned ivy. We had planned to do some camping after leaving Grams but that got put on hold due to the poison ivy experience. By this time Papa was retired and having lots of problems with asthma, and emphysema. I believe it was on this trip that we had to visit him in the hospital as he as so bad he was in an oxygen tent to be able to breath. For several years they had had a very small, black Chihuahua dog. Papa had named him Tiny. He had heard some story about how these obnoxious dogs could help him breathe better if he slept with it on his chest. Regardless of the story he adored the little dog. With him in the hospital he didn’t get to see the dog so Gram would use this extra big purse, put the dog in it and tell him to be quiet, and sneak him into the hospital room with Papa. For what ever reason I think Papa had a private room or there were just that few people in that area of the hospital. I thought that some of the nurses knew about Tiny but I guess they figured the old man didn’t have that long to live and if a little dog could help him through his last days so much the better.
After leaving Texas we stopped in Albuquerque to see Uncle Rex and made a stop in Estancia, NM to see Mother’s cousin Blanche and her family. Blanche and Oller had four sons, three older than me and the youngest being a few months younger. The story was that Mother, Blanche, and Uncle Rex’s wife Billy were all preguent at the same time. I was born in August, Kelly in November, and Clement in December if I remember right. The Austin family lived on a farm outside of Estancia and of course had horses. I got to sit on one of their horses; a brown and white paint that I believe was a stallion and have my picture taken. His name may have been Rebel. I got to see him again when we moved to Albuquerque when I was 16.
From Albuquerque we went to Cortez, CO to visit all of Daddy’s family and to see his old friends Max and Birdie Prible. They had three sons, the youngest being about my age. There were no horses on their pinto bean farm as one of their boys was very allergic to horses. But they did have cats. Lots of cats. A mama cat had been hit by a car shortly after having a litter of kittens and Birdie had hand raised them. They also had a Siamese cat about a year old. We loved all those kittens that were about 6-8 weeks old and it was the first Siamese cat we had any dealings with. My parents didn’t like him as he had a loud voice as all Siamese cats do. I had seen a couple of Siamese cats while living in Las Vegas. At a friends house there were always two statues sitting on a table by the door. Or I thought they were statues. One day one of them moved and they were real cats. Mother had said they were Siamese cats and had horrid loud voices. When Lee and I married we had a long list of cats as pets and there have been several Siamese as well as several that were part Siamese. I still really like the breed.

Sandpoint, Idaho

Sandpoint, Idaho

Sandpoint is in the northern part of the state of Idaho less than a hundred miles from the Canadian border. We lived there in 1966 and 1967. We never did actually get to Canada and I haven’t since but a lot of Canadians came to Sandpoint to do their shopping. We used Canadian money just like we did American money while there. It was all mixed up and no one seemed to notice any diffence in it. I doubt if that is done there now. It was a very small farming community when we were there. Now it is a big tourist area with a lot of movie stars having homes there, and the art scene like in Santa Fe or Taos, NM. Sandpoint started out as a logging and railroad settlement. http://www.cityofsandpoint.com/
Daddy went to Sandpoint before we left Tucson to look for a place for us to rent until we could find a place to buy. We would finally be getting the ‘farm’ he had always told us we could have when he retired. A place to have room for a horse. Only when he came back to Tucson to start us moving he had already bought a house in the middle of the town with a yard that wasn’t big enough to have our beagle in. A small two bedroom house that he got suckered into by a real estate agent.
The house wasn’t that bad, and it was kind of cute and it would have been alright if only there had been more land with it. It was close to my school which was the old high school converted to a junior high, and to Jan’s grade school. But Sarah had to ride the bus to the far side of town to a different school for her grade level.
Since it was a small town with very little shopping we went to Spokane, Washington to the closest military base to do our main shopping at the base commissary. That is also where we had to go when Sarah had to have braces. Sarah’s two front teeth had come in when she was in about 1st grade but she had developed a lot of teeth problems, most of them being heritary rather than from her fall, and needed to ware braces to correct them. Sarah would continue to have tooth and face problems all her life. That is the birth defect that she got the worse. Jan wore braces when she got a bit older, but when Mother asked me if I wanted them to straighten my crooked front teeth I said no. I said that there was no way I was going to wear that dumb head set and have those painful braces in my mouth. To me it wasn’t worth it. I still have crooked teeth and it has never bothered me.
With in a few weeks of arriving in Sandpoint we found there was the National Girl Scout Roundup of 1965 going on at Farragut State Park. Farragut had been a Navy base, once the second largest Navel Training Center, where Daddy had been stationed for a few months when he was in the Navy and he fell in love with the place. Only it wasn’t as good as he remembered when we got there. http://parksandrecreation.idaho.gov/parks/farragut.aspx
We went to the Girl Scout Roundup as visitors and got to see lots of things mostly related to camping but what I remember was watching a falconer exhibit a falcon and a kestrel or sparrow hawk that were trained to sit on his arm and come back when called. Plus we got to see a base where my father had been stationed many years before.
Again we were in Girl Scouts and Mother was still a Brownie leader. She had seen all three of us through Brownies and into Girl Scouts. Jan was still a Brownie in Sandpoint but I was now in a group for my age level as was Sarah. My group did frequent camping trips on the weekends. One weekend we met a large group of girls from the whole area at the base were we shopped and had a tour of the base near Spokane ending with a demonstration by the military police dogs that were trained there.
A couple of photos I found gave me the names of some of the girls that were in our troop. Kathleen Pobst, Linda Chaney, Marsha Oliver, Phillis Pobst, Patty Herman and our leaders were Mrs. Chaney and Mrs. Oliver.
That fall when I started going to Girl Scout meetings my leader had a litter of kittens in her house. I fell in love with a pretty black and white kitten and persuaded my parents to let me have him. We called him Cactus Tom, or Tommy. He and our beagle, Boots got along great but as time went on Boots learned to jump the four foot chain link fence that was around our back yard and most of the time he was gone somewhere else instead of being home where he belonged. There was a cute little female beagle that lived down the street where he could usually be found.
But my dad didn’t like the fact that the dog was always gone and one of us was out trying to find him. Or else we had to keep him tied up. And he managed to break first several ropes and then a couple of chains. He was one determined little dog. Of course it would never be thought of that Daddy could have had a higher fence built that would keep him in. He made us give up our dog instead and gave him to some one that he knew that lived out of town. This made the second dog he had made me give and I wasn’t very happy about it. Neither was my mom or my sisters.
Turned out that Mother preferred dogs and Daddy preferred cats. We still had Tom but we wanted a dog. Daddy agreed we could have another dog as long as it was small enough not to get out of the fence we had. So we checked around and a Girl Scout leader had a dachshund that was going to have puppies. The father dog was a Boston Terrier. We didn’t know much about dachshunds but Mother’s sister Elnora raised Boston Terriers so we knew what they were. Actually after reading about dachshunds we wanted the puppies to me more like their mama than the daddy. We got Bonnie when she was only about four or five weeks old. She was the brown color of her miniature dachshund mama and was a lot like her except for having longer legs and slightly shorter ears. We named her Bonita and called her Bonnie. Not sure where we got the name from but maybe was in some book I had read. Daddy wasn’t too fond of the name as he said it was a people name and dogs should have dog names but he wouldn’t suggest anything else. After all the problems with Boots, Bonnie was to be with us for a very long time and we were glad of it. She was a great little dog. Tom, the cat adopted her and would play with her like he was killing her, kicking at her belly and we were sure he would hurt her at first but he never left a mark on that tiny, cute puppy with his claws. He was really very gentle with her. Bonnie was the perfect dog for three little girls. She was always willing to play, go for a walk, or just sleep in our laps.
Right after we got Bonnie and while she was quite small Mother’s sister, my Aunt Wanda her husband, Uncle Dale and my three cousins Denise, Dana, and Diana came to visit for a few days since they had been visiting Dale’s relatives near Bend, OR. It was a great visit as I remember and one day we decided to go on a picnic in the mountains. As Bonnie wasn’t more than six or seven weeks old we decided we didn’t want to leave her home alone all day and took her with us. Since Aunt Wanda and Uncle Dale were the guests they got to ride in the front seat with Daddy who was the driver. That put Mother and I and I think it was Jan in the back seat. Seemed like Sarah, and my cousins were riding in the back of the Suburban. Bonnie had migrated from lap to lap for a bit and then settled in Aunt Wanda’ lap in the front seat. We were riding on a narrow logging road and we were the ones going up hill. We and especially Daddy had been out enough to be fairly used to going around a bend in a road and being face to face with a big logging truck. But Aunt Wanda wasn’t. All of a sudden a huge truck was right in front of us almost before we or the truck driver knew the other one was there. The logging truck was fully loaded with huge logs. It was as if we were nose to nose instantly. It startled all of us but Aunt Wanda screeched, and for some reason threw poor, sleeping Bonnie over her shoulder and the puppy landed in my lap. We all laughed about it afterward but it was kind of frightening.
I am sure she did some naughty things as a puppy but I can only remember one. That was when she decided to ‘eat’ a glass Christmas ball when we left her home for a couple of hours while we went out shopping. It was her first Christmas but she hadn’t bothered anything yet so we left her to have the run of the house. When we got home one of the small, old, fragile Christmas decorations that Mother had had for a long time was shattered on the floor. Or at least a little bit of it was. Most of it seemed to be missing. We found a few tiny pieces of glass around Bonnie’s mouth and panicked. Mother called the vet who told us to make her vomit using peroxide which we did but she didn’t throw up any glass. He said to just watch her and if she acted sick or odd to bring her in. We watched but she seemed to be fine. Maybe all of the glass had been on the floor? We hoped so. Anyway Bonnie survived and we had a great Christmas as we had snow for Christmas which we were not used to at all, since we had never lived where it snowed very much before. We got movie film of Bonnie running through the snow that was deeper than she was tall. She wasn’t really running more of a jump up to see where she was and then tunnel through the snow for a couple of feet, then jump up again. And every time she jumped up and came back down her long hound ears would fly up as if they were wings and she was really trying to fly. Of course after a few minutes of that the very shorthaired little puppy would be ready to come in, be wrapped in a towel, dried, fed something warm, and then sleep in our laps.
While we lived in Sandpoint Daddy worked for the Forest Service in the summer time and for a local gas station in the winter. It wasn’t what he and Mother had planned on when they moved there. Daddy had thought he might get on permently with the Forest Service instead of just temporary summer work. He did go to Missoula, Montana for a lot of fire fighting training and did some fire fighting as well as other work in the summer. But winters he would get laid off and would be hired by the Mohr Gas Station to do light mechanical work and to fill the cars. This was before the days of when every body filled their own gas tank. Back then you pulled into the station and the attendant would come out and fill your tank for you and check the oil. Then you would hand him/her the money, wait for change if needed, and drive off.
Daddy usually worked the evening shift and Mother would make supper for all of us, then fix a plate for Daddy covered in tin foil to keep it warm. I would then put it in the basket on my bike and ride down to the station with it for Daddy to eat on his lunch time. Sometimes we would all walk down there and sit with him while he ate supper. Frequently I could con him out of enough change to buy a candy bar out of the machine that sat inside the station by the cash register.
The couple that ran the gas station also were members of the Church of Christ same as we were. There wasn’t a church building in the town so the members of the church would meet at each others homes on Sunday morning for service. Seems like there were only four or five families at most and a lot of time it would be just us and the Mohr’s. Before long we met at their home one weekend and ours the next week. I guess my parents enjoyed it but it just seemed like a waste of time to my sisters and I.
The house on one side of us was vacant during the two years we lived in Sandpoint. It looked like it could have been haunted and we pretended it was but we were never afraid of it. We played in that yard as much as we did our own. It was overgrown with all kinds of fruit trees, berry vines, and flowers. Raspberries grew wild there and in the summer we feasted on them daily. Because the yard had gone wild the local birds found it a perfect haven. There were all kinds of birds nesting there but mostly robins.
One spring day not long after we moved there Mother looked out and saw our beagle, Boots, playing with a young robin he had caught. It was a baby bird that had probably just left its nest. When we rescued it we found the dog had broken its leg. Mother set the birds leg and it became my job to find lots of raspberries, and earthworms to feed it. At that time I was terrified of earthworms. My sisters delighted in coming up to me and saying, “Hold out your hand. I have a gift/surprise/present for you.” It took me a while to learn that they were going to drop one of those horrid, creepy, crawly, snake-like things in my hand. Of course they would also give me just enough pieces of candy, or raspberries, or other treats that I usually wouldn’t be expecting it when they would give me another earthworm.
By the time I had my own son I had gotten used to the earthworms and could handle them with no problems. I think part of the problem with the worms there in Idaho was that some of them were so big. After a good rain we would look out and see these huge nightcrawlers wiggling all over the yard. It was kind of creepy. After living where there were poisonous snakes for so long it wasn’t easy to get used to the icky worms. We were told there weren’t any poisonous snakes in our area of Idaho but it didn’t make me feel any better about those huge worms.
Knowing I had to find enough worms for the baby bird I would go out digging for small earthworms, pick them up with a pair of tongs, cut them up in small pieces for the robin and feed it. Finally its leg healed and it could fly good enough that Mother said it had to start living outside instead of in the overturned clothes basket it had been using for a cage. For several days it sat by the back door begging to be fed. Then it seemed to realize it was a bird and took up with the robins that were always around and eventually left. It was quite an experience raising a young robin and increased my interest in birds.
So since we didn’t have any pet birds at this time I bought a pair of parakeets and picked up a couple of used bird cages. I thought I would start raising parakeets as I had read about it and thought I might make some money from the babies. Maybe enough to buy a horse someday. One of the used cages must have had a disease in it from a previous bird or else the birds I bought were already infected. With in a year they had this grungy growth all over their legs and bills and didn’t last long.
I had a friend from school that was also named Barbara. She lived just a few blocks from us so I got to go to her house some. And she came to our house a few times. But she was being raised different to us. Where we had two parents and all the care parents could give their children, she and her sister were being raised by a single mom who worked. I am sure their mom loved them but she did have to work and maybe hadn’t had as good a family herself as my parents had when they were growing up. My parents were probably overly protective of us, while Barbara’s mom let her do pretty much what she wanted when she got home from school. Their house was never very clean and they did most of the cooking and cleaning instead of their mom. I knew a lot of women had to work to help support their selves and their children but this family was a bit rougher than any I had been around before. I am sure they might not have been as bad as I thought at the time now that I know what really goes on in the world and if they had been my parents wouldn’t have let me go over their. I am sure that Barb and her older sister, who had already dropped out of school and may have had a job, too, may have got into all kinds of trouble as they grew up. I seem to remember it was a bit exciting to have a friend who was what Mother considered to be on the ‘wild side’. She didn’t tell me not to be friends with her but to be careful. I do wonder what happened to Barb after we left Idaho, and where she is now.
Even though we had usually lived on Air Force Bases where there was almost no crime at all, Sandpoint seemed to be such a safe, perfect little town to me. Being overly shy and overly protected by my parents I was very cautious every where I went by myself or with any one outside the family. But Sandpoint seemed especially nice. We were allowed to go all over town by ourselves. I rode my bike everywhere or walked. I prowled through the small stores, and other public building, and spent hours and hours at the library. But knowing Barb and her family I was still cautious. And especially so when the trashman rode his cute, little, black mare up and down the ally behind our house. I adored that little horse. She was exactly the kind of horse I dreamed about having, but the man that rode her made me nerviest. I did recognize the man that rode her as one of the men who drove the truck that picked up our trash. I don’t know that he would ever have done anything wrong, but it was odd that he would stop and talk to me for a few minutes but if Mother, Daddy or my sisters appeared he would ride off. He was probably in his late twenties or early thirties, and even though I was only about fourteen I realized he was cute in a ‘bad boy’ sort of way, and wasn’t someone I should have anything to do with. I never talked to my parents about him but did talk to Barb about him. She knew him but didn’t like him either. We just liked his horse.
On one side of our house was the vacant house and yard and on the other side was Grandma Holtz. Grandma Holtz told us to call her that rather than Mrs. Holtz. She didn’t have any relatives closer than Spokane, Washington and sort of adopted us and we adopted her as part of our family. Not that we tried to intrude on her we just wanted to be her friends and to keep an eye out for her as she wasn’t young any more. She was probably in her late 80’s or early 90’s. I helped her do a lot of her yard work and Daddy did what neither of us could do, like turning over the garden area each spring so that she could plant her garden on Good Friday right before Easter. She was a stickler for planting it on that day, saying it wouldn’t grow well if it wasn’t planted then. And she always had a good garden. Her yard wasn’t as big as ours or the vacant yard but just big enough for her little garden and a few flowers in the front.
Grandma Holtz’s ( I thought her name was spelled with a ‘z’ on the end but I have an old photo of a nice looking man in a suit and on the back is written Holt Idaho but it looks like Mother’s handwriting and she could have had it wrong ) house was small, also. It seemed almost like a playhouse to me. All the rooms were nice but on the small side. Living room and kitchen and dining room, and bathroom downstairs, while a narrow staircase led up to two small bedrooms if I remember right. And if I remember she and her husband had raised their children in the playhouse. I, also, remember that she was sleeping downstairs in the dining room when we knew her as it was all she could do to climb the stairs to the bedrooms. They were used for storage more than anything else. I used to go over and help her clean house every week or so. I didn’t mind as it was easy work and she wouldn’t let me do much without insisting I sit down in the kitchen at her little table and have some sort of snack. Even then she made great cookies and always seemed to have some on hand.
She would tell us stories about being born over in Germany and when she and her husband got married they had their honeymoon on the ship coming to the United States. I think she was only about 18 or 19 at that time. I guess they must have come in through Ellis Island in New York City. I believe it might have been in the very early 1900’s. She told us that they made their way to Idaho and decided to stay in Sandpoint. I don’t remember why. I do think that they had a good bit of money, at least to start with, as they brought quite a bit of what looked like expensive glass ware and other household items with them. Since she was from Germany she spoke German and told us the correct way to say dachshund but we never could master it. Grandma Holtz explained that the dachshund was a German bred hound that was bred long and low so that they could dig very fast and go down the tunnels of gophers and other rodents. She was glad we had a puppy that was a German dog, even if she was half Boston terrier.
Toward the end of the second year we were in Sandpoint Grandma Holtz’s son or daughter, or maybe it was a grandchild, I don’t remember which it was, decided she shouldn’t be living by her self anymore and convinced her to sell her house and most of her things and move to live with her/him in Spokane. We hated to see her go but I am sure they were right even though we had been looking out for her. The son or daughter didn’t seem to be interested in many of her antiques that had come from Germany. Because we were she gave or sold a lot of them to use for very small amounts. I think she sold them to us to keep her children from getting upset that we took so many. I think it made Mother and us feel better, too, although I remember just paying a quarter or a dollar or so for each item. Jan has a lot of what we got from her. The blue cookie jar with a javalina type pig on top comes to mind. I have the clear glass spoon rest.
I also, found several old books when she let me prowl around upstairs one day. There were several Zane Gray books. I had discovered the western writer with Mothers help recently and had read several of his books. I had progressed beyond the teenage horse books and was looking for something else to read and Mother suggested Zane Gray since she had read his books when she was a girl. I was thrilled to find some old hardback books of his and quickly asked Grandma Holtz if I could buy them. She was pleased that I wanted them and let me have them for just a couple of dollars. None of them were first editions but they were old books and I still have them. I also have a book titled The Spell of the Yukon by Robert W. Service. He was a poet that went to Alaska for the gold rush and wrote the famous poem The Cremation of Sam McGee.
I think one of the reasons that Daddy had bought the house was because it had belonged to an elderly woman who was like Grandma Holtz and having to move out to go live with her son in Spokane. She was leaving most of her furniture as there wouldn’t be any place for it with her son. So with the house we got a couch, and platform rocker, a double bed for my parents and a dresser. An odd, old wooden case that may have held a radio at one time, that was on some tall legs. There was a drop down desk similar to the one I had from Las Vegas but had probably been made by a furniture company. There was a stove and refrigerator, and lots of dishes, and glassware. We still have a lot of this stuff, or at least Jan and I do.
Idaho is known for its huckleberries. Even my parents didn’t know what a huckleberry was when we moved there. We quickly fell in love with this delicious fruit. And I would give almost anything to have handful of them now. We learned to go on huckleberry outings in the fall to gather these wonderful berries. They are similar to blueberries but much better, sweeter, and bigger. Some would be as big as an inch or so across. We picked gallons and gallons of them as they were easy and quick to gather. Of course we always ate lots of them as we picked them, too. The main thing about picking huckleberries is that you have to remember that bears and other animals like them as much as people do. When we got them home we would pour them into the kitchen sink, give them a quick rinse, and then start canning and freezing them. Mother would can some of them whole, freeze a lot in the freezer, and make a lot of juice for making jelly. When we left Sandpoint we took several large jars of huckleberry juice and for special occasions Mother would make a batch of huckleberry jelly.

http://fwp.mt.gov/mtoutdoors/html/articles/2004/Huckleberries.htm

There were lots of bears in and around Sandpoint although the only one Mother and my sisters and I ever saw ended up dead. It wasn’t a good experience. We had invited friends to go for a drive with us in the nearby mountains. Sarah was the first to spot the young bear on the side of the road, eating huckleberries as fast as he could gulp them down. Daddy nearly always carried his rife with him when he went out and it was bear season since it was fall. He and Mother discussed if he should shoot it or not. They even asked the other couple and every one kept saying it was up to Daddy. I was hoping he wouldn’t. The bear was guessed to be about two years old, not real big but not tiny either. Probably out on his own for the first time. He had found a good supply of the berries and was trying to put on fat for winter hibernation. But Daddy decided to kill it. It was the first and only bear he ever killed. One shot to the neck and the bear fell over dead. The bear was loaded into the back of the old, green Suburban and brought back to our home. What do you do after you kill a bear and bring it home? Well it needs to be skinned and gutted. Mother started helping Daddy skin the bear and they wanted us to watch. Jan and Sarah started getting really upset about it and Mother took them in the house. She had a cold or the flu or something and the garage was really cold so Daddy had them stay inside where it was warm and me help him. I didn’t really want to but wasn’t about to admit it. I had always heard that when a bear was skinned it looked a lot like a human. And it did. We had seen deer skinned and butchered before but the bear was worse. On top of having to help skin out and butcher the bear we were made to eat part of it. Mother would cook it, Daddy seemed to like it and I could tolerate it but Jan and Sarah wouldn’t eat it. Jan had horrid nightmare about that poor little bear being killed and skinned for years and maybe she still does. I never admitted to my parents that I had some, too. Mother sent the hide off to be tanned and it went to Sarah as she was the one who had first seen the bear.
Hunting experiences in Sandpoint didn’t stop with the bear. Daddy had always been a deer hunter but he didn’t want to kill one of the small whitetail deer that were so numerous in Idaho. He wanted to get one of the rare and much larger muledeer. He came home late one day from hunting and had the two hind quarters of a big mule deer he had killed way up the side of a mountain. He was going to go back the next day and get the rest of the meat and the antlers. He asked me if I wanted to go with him. Of course I was ready and willing and it meant I got a day off from school. It was common there for kids to have days off for hunting and farming chores. So before daybreak the next day we left for the mountains. We rode and rode. Over this snowy dirt road to turn down another snowy dirt road, and to take another snowy dirt road. I hoped that Daddy knew where he was going and that we wouldn’t get lost. Finally he stopped and we started walking. Mother had insisted that I dress as warmly as possible. I can’t remember for sure what I had on, but I know I had on several shirts from a light turtleneck to one of Daddy’s flannel shirts on top. And what ever jacket I had that winter. Then there was a pair of longjohns, a pair of slacks, two pairs of socks and a pair of awkward snow boots that were hard to walk in as deep as the snow was. Daddy said that there had been snow during the night and most of his tracks from the day before were filled in. As we walked up the steep four-wheel-drive road it started snowing again. After about two miles we came to the remains of the deer. I guess Daddy could see just how tired I was from the walk up and we rested for a while. But then he said we should get going back down as he thought it was snowing harder and he wanted to get back to the Suburban so we could get back home before a real blizzard hit up on that mountain. Knowing that we couldn’t carry all the meat and the horns, and knowing that to follow hunting rules he needed the horns, Daddy had me carry the antlers with his hunting tag attached. Those antlers were heavy for a fourteen-year-old wimpy girl to carry. I slung them over my shoulders with the point of the antlers pointing at the ground. I had a bag slung over my shoulder with a small thermos of what had been hot coco, the remains of a sandwich and a candy bar in it. Daddy had a hunting bag with a thermos of coffee, sandwiches, and snacks in it and he hung a front hunch of frozen deer meat over his shoulder that probably weighed at least fifty pounds. It was a long trip back down and I remember falling several times and getting colder and colder. Once I was forced to have to stop and find a sheltered tree where I could drop my pants and pee. I did it as quickly as I could. Finally we got back to the car and I was never so glad to drop anything as I was that set of antlers. Neither was I about to tell my dad that I had no feeling in the tips of several of my fingers. I knew it was the first stages of frostbite but I was too embarrassed to tell him although I knew I should. Daddy insisted I drink some water, the rest of my coco and some of his coffee even though I didn’t like coffee. The extra thermos he had left in the truck was still warm. We ate another sandwich after loading the frozen meat and antlers in the back of the truck. Daddy had hoped to go back to get the rest of the meat but the snow storm was getting bad enough he decided not to. We headed back down the road. The tracks the truck had made coming in that morning had almost disappeared in the falling snow. It was well after dark by the time we got back to town and I think I slept about half the way home. I didn’t let them know that I spent lots of time in the bathroom soaking my fingers in warm water. I don’t know if there was anything else I could have done for the frostbite or not but that was what I had read in a book sometime and remembered. I didn’t make it to school the next day either as I was just to tired. I never did tell either of my parents that the tips of my fingers felt weird for several months after that trip. Mother had mounted a set of antlers from a deer that Grandpa Barnett had killed, another from a very small buck deer that Daddy had killed in Las Vegas, and later they got a set that Granddad Green had mounted on a plack himself. Somehow the antlers I hauled down off that snowy mountain never got mounted. Years later when Lee and I lived in Albuquerque Daddy gave the antlers to me saying they should be mine as I had carried them out of the mountains. I mounted them on a wooden plack and they now hang in my bedroom over my desk.
Seems we have antlers hanging everywhere. Grandpa Barnett’s set, and Daddy’s little set hang in the living room. Granddad Green’s hang in the garage needing some repair work. And one of Lee’s are in his room, and another in the spare bedroom. Daddy’s elk antlers from a big elk he killed down in the Gila Wilderness about 1980 hang on a post by the driveway. Some of his other deer antlers and some of Lee’s hang on the hay shed. I have to admit there hasn’t been a new set of antlers since 1980. After Dustin was born Lee never had any luck at hunting and doesn’t do it anymore. Daddy hunted after then but don’t think he had much luck at it either. Don’t know what it was about having a baby that stopped our hunting experiences.
After two years in Sandpoint it didn’t seem that Daddy would be able to do any better in the job department than the summers with the Forest Service and winters at the gas station so he and mother decided it would be best to move somewhere else. They decided on going back to Albuquerque, New Mexico. They knew that Kirtland Air Force Base was there and that Daddy might be able to get a civilian job of some sort there, and Albuquerque was big enough that he should be able to find something somewhere. I think it was at this point that Daddy may have regretted retiring when he did.
I remember most of the people that we knew in the town couldn’t understand why we were moving back back to New Mexico. They seemed to think that all of New Mexico was like the Sahara desert. Nothing but sand and a few small cacti. Even though we showed them pictures of Albuquerque, and the mountains near there they didn’t seem to want to believe us.
First we packed and packed. We had acquired so many things while in Sandpoint like the furniture and dishes left in the house. Daddy made several trips south with our old Suburban pulling a U-haul trailer. Finally we had sold the house and were headed for New Mexico. We took with us Bonnie, the dog, Tommy the cat as well as a parakeet, and two red-eared turtles. It was a long trip but not the first time we had ever been on similar trips. We stopped in Cortez, CO and visited with Grandma and Grandpa Barnett, Daddy’s brothers and sisters, and all my cousins on the way to Albuquerque.

A Teenager in Albuquerque, NM

Albuquerque, New Mexico; the Second Time

I think we were all glad to finally arrive. Daddy had rented a house, yes this time he rented one to start with, in what is called the Northeast Heights of Albuquerque.
We had been there less than a month when Gram called to tell us that Papa had died. It was the first time I had ever had someone I cared for die. I didn’t really know what to think of the situation. We quickly packed up, loaded the Suburban again and drove to Pampa for the funeral. We had to take Bonnie, Tom, and the parakeet with us as we didn’t know anyone to care for them for us. A few hours after we got to Gram’s house my Aunt Elnora, Uncle Alfred, and four cousins arrived, too. They had been on vacation in Texas and headed for Pampa to visit with Gram and Papa. If I remember they had already attended one funeral for one of Uncle Alfred’s relatives while on their vacation. It wasn’t a good trip for them.
By the next day other relatives began arriving. Relatives that we had never even met. Some from Papa’s family but I remembered more from Gram’s family. It turned into a horrid mad house. To make things worse it was the middle of summer and hot and I think Gram only had one small air conditioner in her bedroom. Back then most people didn’t have air conditions on every home like we do not. It would be unthinkable and difficult to live without one as I found out recently when ours when out while Lee was in Chaparral, NM visiting Dustin. I had a nice neighbor who when up on the roof, decided the motor was shot, and replaced it after I bought one.
As it used to be so common to do and still is with some families and friends, all of Gram’s friends bombarded the house with tons of food so that we didn’t have to keep cooking for that gang of people that were there. There was the five of us, the six in Elnora’s family, and at least ten other people. I remember that Gram’s sister Aunt Ernest was there and she was such a pain in the butt as I think she must have been all her life to others and probably to herself, too. With all that food it couldn’t all be put in the refrigerator. A lot of it was left sitting out on the table and we tried to keep it covered with tinfoil and towels to keep the flies off. For what ever reason the flies were really bad and the screens on the door and windows weren’t keeping them out, especially with so many people going in and out. Aunt Ernest had this thing for waving a fly swatter over the food on the table on peoples plate trying to keep the flies out and even killing flies right on the table and edges of plates and bowls. As far as I know no one got sick from flies or half bad food but it was a wonder to me that we didn’t.
Not only did we have our dog, cat, and bird but Gram and Papa had recently acquired a new Chihuahua puppy after the recent death of their old, black one Tiny. The new one’s name was Sally and she got on well with Bonnie and Tom. Gram and Papa had been on a vacation to Truth or Consequences, NM about a month before and had got Sally there. When they got back home they didn’t think about the cat that sort of lived on the place and just set the puppy on the ground. The cat came out, took one look at the puppy and pounced on her like she was a mouse. Then the cat gave the pup a disgusted look, gave Gram another one and stalked off with her head held high. It was as if to say that she really did know it was a dog and not a mouse. Gram said that she had been sure that the cat was going to kill her puppy. Maybe she didn’t because she was a mama cat with a new litter of kittens. The kittens, Sally, and our own pets were a wonderful distraction for me and my sisters with all the stress of so many people and the death of our grandfather.
It seemed everyone was in a stressful tizzy to get to the funeral. Everyone had already left and I had stayed behind to ride with Aunt Elnora, Uncle Alfred and my cousins. We were about a mile from the house when we heard a kitten screaming. Alfred stopped as we suspected it was under the hood of the car on the engine, and it was. It was alright but what to do with it. I was terrified that he would just toss it to the side of the road as I didn’t think he liked cats and we were running so late. I guess he could see the horror on my face and maybe on my cousins, plus Auntie Elnora agreed we had to take it back. I held it till we got back, got out of the car, gave the kitten a shove toward the house, jumped back in the car and we were off again.
Funerals are never fun, especially the first one you have to go to, and after going to my grandfathers, and returning to Albuquerque it was only a couple of weeks later when Gram called and said that her sister, Olive, had died. If I ever met Aunt Olive I don’t remember it, but she was the mom of Mother’s cousin Blanche who lived on the farm near Estancia, NM where I had been allowed to sit on the paint horse for my picture a couple of years before when we were moving to Sandpoint. Probably Aunt Olive had been there then but I don’t remember her. She had been what was called senile for several years and lived with Blanche, Oller, and their four sons. The story was that Olive had a big baby doll that she thought was a real baby and she ‘took care of it’.
Later I was to learn that senility is a form of Alhimazers or dementia. Gram would get it to a degree as she got older, as did her sister, Ernest. I can’t say about her other sisters. Sadly, my mom had Alhimazers almost as bad as Aunt Olive had it. So far there isn’t any sign of it in her two sisters, Elnora and Wanda which is the only thing that keeps me from being terrified that I will do the same as it does seem to be an inherited problem in some cases. My mother-in-law has it, also, which causes Lee to worry that he will. My dad didn’t and I don’t think there is any of it on his side of the family, so maybe I will inherit the Barnett memory gene, and Lee will had the good ones from his dad’s family. Dementia is such a sad, terrible condition.
Within a few months my parents had bought a house in what is called the South Valley of Albuquerque at 1709 Del Sur Dr. SW. It was an acre of land. The land backed up to a large four lane street called Rio Bravo and on the other side of Rio Bravo lived Maude Greene who had been Gram’s friend many years before when she and Granddad Green lived in Albuquerque. Maude wasn’t a relative as her husband’s family spelled their last name with the ‘e’ on the end of Greene while our family didn’t have the ‘e’ on the end. Again my parents had bought an older house from an older couple moving to a smaller place. And again we lived near an elderly woman and I would help her clean house when needed.
A few streets farther to the north of us lived Mother’s cousin Rex Green and his wife Billy, daughter Terry and son, Kelly. Kelly was my age and we went to Rio Grande High School.
We were thrilled with what felt like a huge yard. There was a nice lawn in the front with a couple of old elm trees. In the back was an area for a garden and a couple of apple trees. There was about half of the property with nothing on it behind us except another couple of big trees. Plenty of room for a horse. And here was Uncle Rex telling my parents he would give us an old, palomino horse that Terry used to ride named Trigger. I was thrilled. Finally I would actually have a horse. But no, Daddy said. He didn’t think I was responsible enough to care for a horse and he sure wasn’t going to do it for me. As with the beagle, Boots, it seemed that the idea of having to put up another fence to keep in a horse and a small shelter was to much for him to consider. Mother fought for me and the horse but my dad wouldn’t give an inch. I never laid eyes on old Trigger. I pushed the idea of a horse to the back of my mind. Way back. I knew that in two years I would graduate from high school. Then I could leave home, get a job and get me a horse.
Girl Scouts and High School kept me busy. I was a Senior in Girl Scouts and my junior year of high school. The Girl Scout troop for my area of town met at a church on Central Ave. in downtown Albuquerque. Because of that, twice a month I was allowed to catch the city bus after school and ride down town and go to the troop meeting. To me that was a big treat. I got to go and do something all by myself, even if Daddy did come and pick me up afterward. As a Senior Girl Scout we were encouraged to do special things to earn badges. Our leaders were Mrs. Stevenson and a woman who was in the Navy. She talked to us about going into the Navy as a career after high school and it was interesting but at that time I didn’t figure I would look to the military for a career and since Daddy had been in the Air Force that would be my first choice. Little did I know that I would end up joining the Navy in September of 1969 where I would meet the sailor that would become my husband. I wished I had been able to tell my Scout leader but I don’t even remember her name now.
Some of the girls in my Scout troop were Brenda Stevenson, Diane Yarbourgh, Alice and Helen Harris, Nancy Cunningham, Carol Pitroe, and Judy Senco.
The group of girls I was with decided for that year they would concentrate on earning a conservation badge with some of the other Senior Girl Scouts in our area. We had different leaders for this special badge and they were a couple; his name was George Conrad, hers was Gerry and they had a daughter Melody who wasn’t old enough to be in our group but as with all scouting she came with us rather than being stuck with a babysitter. We, also, had a Forest Ranger that helped us named Ranger Camp who took us on special outing once a month to different places in the Cibola National Forest to teach us about forest conservation. Yes, he was a Forest Ranger, and yes his last name was actually Camp. He was a really nice guy and his wife frequently came with us even though she was very pregnant with their first child. There was an older woman from the Forest Service that coordinated our trips whose name was Ruth Bush Jones. At the end of several months of going on day trips to different places we had been in the Cibola National Forest which included Mt. Taylor, Sandia Mountains, and the Manzano Mountains as well as several other places and still had a big camping trip planned.
We took a trip during the Christmas holidays to Red River Sky Resort in the northern part of the state. We weren’t allowed to do any skiing for some dumb Scout rule, not that I have ever skied, but everyone rode the sky lift except me. There was that thing about heights again. The trip was more to learn what the rangers did there and especially about how they rescued hurt, injured or lost skiers. We learned that a lot of that was done on snowmobiles because it was the fastest way to get an injured person down off of a ski run. One ranger, John Hunt, spent several hours giving each girl a short ride on one of those wonderful ski horses as the snowmobiles were sometimes called. I had found my first love for any kind of a machine. And it, too, was called a horse. I wasn’t to even see a snowmobile for a long many years but eventually my husband and I would have several.
There was a visit to a place near Grants for troubled boys that taught them some of the same stuff we were being taught only they lived at this special home. The place for the boys seemed to have closed some time ago but I am sure it must have helped some of them. Being girls in a camp with so many boys was a treat for most of us as we were all the shy kind who didn’t do much, if any, dating. Those boys treated us like royalty and we were only to glad to watch some impromptu basketball games and yell, scream, and give support to all the players.
In the spring, it may have been May; we went to a part of the Girl Scout Camp in the Jemez Mountains that was what was called – unimproved. Another words we didn’t have anything like the regular Scout camps have in the way of cabins, cafeteria, restrooms, or running water. We were there for a full week. We had small two-girl tents for about 20 girls, and a slightly larger one for George and Gerry. There was a cook tent that we also used for meetings when it rained, which it did several times while we were there. We cooked all of our meals ourselves – lots of stews, and foods that could be cooked in one large pot over an open campfire or in a pit fire. We gathered and chopped the firewood for the cook fire and our evening campfire each night. We had to dig a latrine and wrapped a large tarp around it to use as a restroom. Baths consisted of a pan of water warmed over the cook fire. Now days it might even be considered a survival-type camp. We were doing things that most people thought of as a Boy Scout camp trip and didn’t realize that girls could do it to. I had been camping a lot with my family but this let me know that I could do more than I had thought I could when I was out in the forest which is what I was supposed to learn plus how to protect our environment. Around the campfire we would discuss what we had done that day and what we had planned for the next day which mostly consisted of clearing brush or stumps from an area or going on a hike with some ranger or botanist to learn more about the forest.
Of course as is common with all scouting events we had a story telling and sing along each night around a campfire. I used to know lots and lots of the songs that were favorites of all scouts but now most have escaped me. I do remember that we sang lots of the songs that had been recorded by the group Peter, Paul, and Mary. This was in 1968 and they were very popular at that time. As with all scout meeting, we ended each night with the military song Taps.
After finding an old photo album with little black and white photos from the camping trip I have found the names of most of the girls that went with us. I have lost contact with all of them. I googled their names and came up with nothing. It would be nice to know what they are all doing now. Or what even one of them is doing now.
Patsy Colins, Patsy Sanders, Sally Hunt, Chris Yurka, Barbara Williams, Terry Woodall, Kathy Reed, Penny Leauaru, Diane Yarbrough, Brenda Stevenson, and Marline Mullner who was a camp counselor.
We had a bus that took us and our gear into the forest and brought us back out. Going in we went by a small saw mill and then through two tunnels blasted out of the mountains. To bad we didn’t get some lessons about the mountains we were going into. I guess I wasn’t interested enough as to where we were going to find out more than that we were in the Santa Fe National Forest. Lee and I moved to Albuquerque, after being in the Navy, and we discovered the Jemez Mountains. By then the saw mill was gone but you can still see where it was. The tunnels are still there. The road originally was a railroad for taking loggers into the mountains and bringing them and the logs out. I have no idea exactly where the camp was that we had that year but I am sure I have been near it several times. To bad I can’t recognize it, even with the help of the photos I took. There is one place that I have wondered if it could have been but that place is impossible for a bus to get to, and almost impossible for a 4-wheel-drive to get to any more.
I was voted to be the scribe for all the trips we took and for the camping trip. After each trip I would write up minutes, and a report of the trip. I thought it was fun to do this but all the other scouts seemed to think it was dumb. I guess none of them were the least bit interested in writing.
In July, 1968 I was invited by mother’s cousin Blanche and her husband Oller Austin to come to visit for a week. We had been to their farm near Estancia, NM several times and I enjoyed going. They had horses on the farm. So I went for a week and found myself collecting chicken eggs, feeding the pig scraps from the house, as well as helping with the housework and cooking. I rode the hay mower for a few hours one afternoon with my cousin Clement, who was my age. There were jackrabbits everywhere and one or two evenings we did some rabbit hunting as we drove across the back roads to another farm where Clement’s girlfriend, Annette, lived, who would later become his wife. His girlfriend’s older sister had married Clement’s older brother Norman. I think at this time Norman was away in the Army. The best thing about that week was that I got to ride a sorrel mare named Sandy several times. Sandy had a filly that was about four months old at that time that was to be Clements horse. There was an older filly, about two years old, which was Norman’s horse. There sire was the old paint horse that I had ridden and had my photo on a few years before when we were moving to Idaho. Again I fell in love with horses. This time I actually got to ride the horse. We did more than just walk down the road and back. This time Clement taught me to saddle, and bridle the mare. He taught me to ride at a trot and gallop as well as a walk. He taught me about reining the horse and how to stay on by balancing. We even did a little jumping over a little ditch that was in the middle of the field we rode in. It was only a few inches deep but such fun to jump. I was more determined than ever to have my own horse someday.
I was never happy in school. I was too shy and didn’t care if I had on makeup or had my hair done in the latest fashions or wore what was hip to school. None of that mattered to me and still doesn’t. I want to wear cloths that are comfortable. I want to feel clean and comfortable. Makeup always makes me feel dirty. I can’t wait to get it off after I put some on for the few things I do wear makeup for; like funerals, or wedding, or a graduation. And afterward I feed as if there was no one there that cared if I had makeup on or not. Or how I might have been dressed.
I was never comfortable in a group of other students. I didn’t care what they thought of me and I felt that none of them cared if I was there or not. Girl Scouts were a little better than school but not always. I never dated while I was in school. And I could have cared less. All the guys seemed so little boyish. I always felt so much more grown up than any of them. I was much happier playing with my pets or reading or even doing housework.
My sisters did do a lot more when they got into high school. I think they and my mom learned what not to do from me. But we were all three very sheltered children. If it wasn’t with Girl Scouts, school or church we weren’t encouraged to do anything. Even when we were small we were never left with a babysitter while my parent went out. When we lived in Las Vegas I remember my Aunt Wanda and Gram offering to babysit us while my parents when out to one of the fancy shows in Las Vegas but Daddy wasn’t about to do that. Apparently he wasn’t interested even though I believe my mom would have liked to go. She, like her daughters, didn’t know how to ask for a few special things, and I don’t think Daddy really knew what we wanted. If I hadn’t been so shy, even with my parents, I might have begged harder for a horse. If my sisters hadn’t been so shy they would have asked for dance lessons. My parents did offer us music lessons. Sort of. I was given an accordion one time and told to play it. No lessons. And I hated it as I didn’t even ask for it or want it. The same with a small, cheep guitar a few years later. While I was in high school they bought a used piano and got us lessons from the lady that lived next door, Mrs. Gossa. She was nice enough even though I though she was a bit weird. She had a grown daughter, I think she was in her 30’s, that still lived at home, didn’t work, or date, or anything. That was even more weird. Sarah and Jan seemed to like the piano lessons but, again, I really could have cared less. In desperation I told my mom a tale about not having enough time to practice with all my school work and Scouts and something would have to go and I would prefer it to be the piano. Either she believed me or realized how much I disliked the piano lessons and let me quit.
One nice thing Mrs. Gossa did do was to give me my first pair of high heeled shoes. I don’t know why she gave them to me as I don’t remember her or her daughter ever dressing up or wearing heels. I remember them wearing real old fashioned type clothes that I figured might have been what I would have seen back in the 1930’s or 40’s. I loved that pair of black, suede shoes and wore them for a long time. Of all the heels I ever had I think those were the most comfortable pair I ever had. I am sure they were expensive shoes originally. Maybe someone had given them to the Gossa’s.
I went to Rio Grand high school in the South Valley area for my Junior and Senior year of high school. I didn’t like those years of school any more than I had any of the others but by now I know how to tolerate it and that the end was almost insight. I knew that high school would mean a better job so I could get a horse. But I had this really idiot of a counselor that wouldn’t give me any help in trying to get into college. I would have tried to go to New Mexico State Collage in Las Cruces if I had known anything about the agricultural program that they had. I didn’t learn about it until Dustin decided that was where he wanted to go to collage. Besides the classes that were required I took a class in New Mexico History and New Mexico Literature both taught by the teacher I liked best of all that I had. Mrs. Hinton. She seemed old then so I am sure she must have retired not long after I graduated. I found New Mexico history and American History to be very interesting. My favorite time periods being anything before 1900 and especially the 1860’s to 1900 concentrating on the cowboys and Indians, outlaws, and lawmen of the southwest states.
During the beginning of my Senior year my dad’s job at the military base was done away with and he was offered the chance to do the same job at a base near Phoenix, AZ. I threw a fit. I refused to move again in my last year of high school. I figured out that I had changed schools nine times in twelve years. Seven times from 5th grade to 12th grade. My parents agreed that was it was too much to expect me to move in my Senior year and besides there was still the house to sell before we could move. So my dad went to Phoenix and lived in a camp trailer he bought through that year until I graduated and the house was sold.
I graduated in June of 1969. We had a large graduating class for that year and had the ceremony at one of the big auditoriums in Albuquerque. Each graduate was allowed to have seven people to come to it. My mom, dad, two sisters, Gram, and Grandma Kay Bishoff, and I asked my cousin Clement Austin to come. As turns out in a lot of such situations the school had thought that they would have to limit the number of guests each graduating student could have but as some of the guests didn’t come there were seats left over. I didn’t see it happen but I was told about it by my mom after the ceremony, as she had been very embarrassed by the whole situation and I guess I would have been, too, if I had been in her place but I thought it was funny then and still do now. Gram and Grandma Kay decided that they didn’t like where they were sitting with Mother, Daddy, Sarah, Jan, and Clement. They saw some empty seats in front of them and decided to move to them. Instead of making their way to a center isle and going down the steps to that row and back across to seats they wanted, they decided it was too far and climbed over several rows of empty seats to get to them. Mother said that without telling her what they were doing they got up, hiked up their dresses, and climbed over the seats to where they wanted to be. I can still see them doing it in my mind and know how embarrassed Mother must have been to see her mom and friend doing this in front of other people.
My high school senior photo. We were require






During the time I went to Rio Grande High School my best friend was a girl named Penny who was a couple of years behind me. She lived across Rio Bravo from us and down the street from Maude Green. Her family had several areas and raised a verity of quail and pheasants for sale to hunting groups for hunting and to
specially butcher shops for food in special restrants mostly back east. Every once in a while I would go over and we would go through all the very warm houses where the tiny chicks were kept and remove any that had died that day. Sometimes there weren’t any and sometimes there would be several. When you have thousands of little chicks there is bound to be a few that don’t make it. Most of the chicks were smaller than regular chicken chicks. After I moved from Albuquerque after graduation that spring she got a large pony she named Matador. I have a photo of her and the horse
somewhere.
The first year that we lived in Albuquerque Bonnie came in heat and I talked Mother and Daddy into letting her have a litter of puppies. Daddy was of the old school that thought that a female dog made a better pet if she was allowed to have puppies, which I knew even then was really a dumb thing but I wanted to let her have pups. The only dog that came around that we liked was a little black, tan, and white dog with a curled tail, pointed ears, and shorthaired named Fifi. Since we never heard him do more than whine we think he was a Basenji, the so-called barkless dog. A few months later Bonnie had four puppies, two females, and two males. We were told that we could keep one of the male pups. A gray one was chosen, and named Tag. Tag had a most obnoxious personality sort of like some Chihuahua’s I have known. After I left home he became more Jan’s dog than anyone else’s.


We talked to a dumb vet that told us Tag wouldn’t be able to father any pups until he was at least a year old. Don’t know how a vet could have thought that. We quickly found out that Tag could father pups by the time he was six months old as he and Bonnie bred when Bonnie came in heat. This time there were four male pups that were nice pups. But this time we weren’t allowed to keep any of them and had to find homes for them. It was so sad to have to give those puppies away. For the next year or so when Bonnie came in heat we were careful to keep her and Tag apart so that there were no more pups. Finally Daddy gave in and allowed us to have Tag neutered. That solved part of the problem. He still wouldn’t let us have Bonnie spayed. He was just too old fashioned that way saying that she would get fat and no good if spayed. I have had lots of female dogs now and have always had them spayed before they ever came in heat. They made much better pets that way.
It was about this time that our black and white cat Cactus Tom had what I now know was probably a urine infection. Instead of taking him to a vet my dad when out and shot him to “put him out of his misery” as the old saying goes. It was one of the most disgusting things he ever did to one of our pets. I guess to him all pets were disposable when they got sick or injured. You were supposed to get rid of
one and maybe you could have another. It didn’t matter that we might have loved that pet dearly. He didn’t care.
We were allowed to get another cat. Or I should say Sarah was allowed to. Seemed like Jan and I didn’t get much say in the matter but it was alright with me as I knew Sarah would pick out a good kitten and we would all care for it and play with it and love it. The people that lived by Grandma Kay had a cat having kittens so we waited for them to reach the six weeks and Sarah chose the gray one out of the litter. I would have preferred on of the black ones. I was always fond of black cats. At the time of this writing we have three black cats. Sarah named her gray cat Smokey. Smokey was to be with us for about 15 years and he was a good cat. He looked very much like the breed of cat known as the Russian Blue.
While we lived in Albuquerque we were near my mom’s cousin Rex Green and his family. Uncle Rex was the one that was going to give me the old horse that my dad wouldn’t let me have. Uncle Rex had race horses. I am not sure what he did exactly. I know he owned some, was part owner of others, and I think he may have done some training. I remember that each spring when the foals were being born he would take off to see them born. I don’t know if they were foals from his mares or someone else’s, but he had to see the foals born. He said that he could tell the minute the baby was born and trying to stand how good a horse it would be.


I would sit in our kitchen and listen to all the tales he would tell about different horses he had owned, known and raced. He and Daddy would tell about hunting and being out in the wilderness. It seemed that each would try to tell a bigger tall tale than the other. A lot of their stories had a real basic story but they would elaborate on it until I don’t think they knew what was real and what wasn’t. It’s too bad I didn’t have a tape recorder back then. Many times it would be Rex and Mother who would do the story telling. They would talk about when they were kids growing up back in Texas. During the time that Gram was living with us she could add to those tales with the best of them.
Rex never sat in our livingroom but always at the kitchen table. He would drink cup after cup of hot, strong coffee with several dollops of milk and about a quarter of a cup of sugar in it. That stuff must have been really sweet, or maybe not. When Mother or I would wash the cup there would be a lot of sugar still left at the bottom of the cup.
My parents and Uncle Rex always made coffee the old fashioned way. A coffee pot that sat on the stove and perked when the heat from the burner made it boil. They did use the ‘guts’ or the insides of the coffee pot that would cause it to perk

into the glass ball on the top; the metal stem on the base and the metal filer basket. Most people now don’t even know what I’m talking about. I still have one of these older pots. Some of my relatives didn’t even use the ‘guts’ or parts that I am talking about. They just put the water and grounds in a pot and let it boil until it was strong enough to suit them. And it had to be strong. Those old cowboys, and Texans liked their coffee strong. That tale about the cowboys wanting their coffee strong enough to float a horseshoe isn’t that far off the mark. I believe that some of them did actually put a horseshoe in the coffee to make it ‘stronger’. And Rex was one of those Texas cowboys in his younger days. So was his dad and brothers, and his sisters married cowboys.
Mother and Gram would always tease Rex that he was the way he was because he nursed on the hound dog. Gram said that Rex’s mom died not long after he was born, and she and Granddad took care of him in their home for a while until Uncle Herb married again. Gram said he crawled out onto the porch one day when he was about six or eight months old and when she found him he was on the porch nursing with the puppies that their greyhound dog had recently had. The mama dog didn’t seem to mine and neither did Rex. This would have been before Gram had my mom as he was older than she was.



Uncle Herb married again and Rex went back to him and there were additional brothers Bill, and Johnny, and sisters Jaunice and Lillian. When my mom was five and her sisters were two and one, Gram and Granddad had to take in all five of mothers cousins while Uncle Herb was in jail for a couple of years. The story was that Herb killed his wife when they were fighting over a rifle while both were drunk. As the story goes Herb was trying to keep her from using the rifle on a Mexican woman that lived down the road from them as she thought that the woman and Herb were having an affair. Most likely they were.
Another story that Mother told me was that Rex’s brother Bill was at Iwa Jima when the flag was raised that the famous photo is of. He wasn’t one of the ones that raised the flag but was one of the injured that was lying nearby and saw them raise it. I have tried to research this but didn’t come up with any Green that was there, but the story still could be true as I really didn’t find anything about the wounded that were there. Plus there seems to be quite a bit of controversy about who actually raised the flag, let alone those that might have been nearby.
In the early 40’s Rex came to Albuquerque and met Billie, as he called his wife Wilma. Aunt Billie worked for Mountain Bell Phone Co. I think as a phone operator and retired from them many years later. They had a daughter Terry who was a couple of years older than me, and a son, Kelly Rex, who was born in November after I was born in August. Kelly and I went to school together for my junior and senior years. For what ever reason, Rex made Kelly wait another year to graduate. I never did understand why as he said he had enough credits. After we moved I didn’t keep up contact with Kelly but heard that he had married, had some kids, and divorced. After Lee and I moved back to Albuquerque in 1973 we saw Rex and Billie fairly often and at time Kelly was living in Farmington, NM.
I remember that we had Ginger our first Siamese cat then and every time Rex came to visit Ginger would wait until she though he wasn’t thinking anything about a cat and would sneak under the table where he was sitting drinking those cups of coffee and jump up on his lap startling him. He would always cuss her and push her off. Ginger did the same thing to my mother-in-law, Goldie Borror when she came to visit us when Dustin was about a year old. It seemed like she was so frightened she didn’t know what to do with the cat and Lee or I would have to remove her. Ginger always seemed to know when someone came to visit that didn’t like cats, and sneaky thing that she was she would insist on waiting until just the right moment and then jump into there lap. She never did anything else, just as if that was enough to let the cat haters know that there she was the “Queen” of the house and everything in it.
Rex and Kelly did get into the habit of doing some prospecting down in Grant County New Mexico for a while and would stop in to visit with Mother and Daddy in Silver City, NM. One time Kelly got put in jail for something which I always thought might have been for drug possession but I could be wrong. Daddy went down to Lordsburg, NM to see them there and to get the gun that they had with them at the time as Rex didn’t want it to get in the hands of the cops there. He told them the rifle had been borrowed from Daddy, so he was able to get it back. It was kind of a family rifle that had belonged to Gram and Granddad before Rex had it. I have it now. It is the Winchester 53, 25-20 caliber. It still shots good but ammunition for it is really hard to get.
Right after Dustin was born Rex came to see us. I mean right after; the day after we got him home. Of course Mother was there and she entertained him, and I guess he had come to see her as much as me and my son. But it seemed like he would never go home. I was really needing some time with Dustin and some help taking care of him as I wasn’t used to taking care of a baby. I don’t think Uncle Rex even realized he was being a pain in the butt that day and I never let him know it and I am glad I didn’t. That would have been about July 6th, 1980 as Dustin was born on the 3rd. It was about 1982 when Rex died and I went to his funeral. I believe that that was the last time I was Kelly and Aunt Billie. It was a Baptist type funeral and a very elaborate one. I know it was what Aunt Billie wanted but Mother, Sarah, and I were sure that Rex was laughing at us all from where ever he was as he wasn’t very religious at all. Aunt Billie did have them play several cowboy songs before the ceremony started and when they played ‘Little Joe, the Wrangler’ I started crying but thought I was doing it quietly enough that no one would notice. I was sitting right behind my cousin, Kelly, and he turned around and handed me a roll of the hard, flat, candies he had always carried when we were in school and was always offering to me then. He smiled and made me smile and I knew it was alright to cry as there were tears in his eyes, too. Afterward he gave me a big hug and we talked for several minutes.
I don’t ever remember seeing Kelly again even though I do remember talking to him on the phone a couple of times. We were never told when he died, but sometime later Rex’s sister Juanice told Mother, but by then I couldn't believe anything she told me and thought she might be talking about Rex. When I started writing this I did manage to find his obituary but couldn’t find one for Rex or Billie.




After Papa died Gram sold her house in Pampa, Texas and came to live with us for a while until she could decide where she wanted to live. Due to the fact that I had a double bed, she usually slept with me. The house we had only had two bedrooms even though they were large bedrooms. Mother and Daddy had one and the other is where my sisters and I were and now Gram. It got to be crowded. I didn’t like the situation but don’t think I ever considered the fact that most teenage girls had their own room or only had to share their bedroom with maybe one sister. Many a night I got up and slept on the couch in the livingroom because I couldn’t sleep next to my snoring grandmother even if I did think the world of her.
After a few months of this Gram must have felt she was crowding us or was feeling a bit crowded herself. She and Maude Greene had always been good friends and Maude invited Gram to move in with her for a while. Instead of doing that Gram moved into an old adobe two room house that was on the back of Maude’s property. I think it would have been a good place for Gram except there was no running water or bathroom in that old house even though there was electricity. Gram would go up to Maude’s house during the day to use the bathroom and use a big tin can at night. She was still spending a lot of her time at our house during the day. After a couple of more months she went out to California to visit with my aunts and their families. While she was in El Cajon she decided to move there. She found a small, two bedroom trailer of mobile home in a trailer court that was for sale and bought it. It was only a few blocks from where Aunt Elnora lived. It had a small yard where she could grow a few flowers and she could have her dog, Sally there. It seemed the perfect solution especially after Mother and Daddy decided to sell their house and move to Phoenix, Arizona.