A few things I remember – teaching Roland to chew gum. We used pińon pitch for gum. Grandma Barger sending us a quart of berry jam through the mail at a time when we had no jam at all. It came with the jar shattered – beans that we raised to sell bringing 2 or 2 ˝ cents a pound when we were getting five cents for pińons. I remember baking cottontail rabbits with bread dressing when we had no shortening to fry them in, and Roland carrying beets in a biscuit for a “lunch” when we were clearing land. No matter what we were doing, he had to take a lunch! One day right after we had eaten dinner we were fixing to go do some little chore around the place. He came to me and asked for bread and jelly. I couldn’t believe he was hungry since we had just eaten, but I didn’t really think he would ask for something to eat if he wasn’t, so I fixed him a piece of bread and jelly and he promptly put it in the hip pocket of his bib overalls for his “lunch.” He was probably two years old at the time. I also remember teaching Roland to read the winter he was four years old, when he and I were alone. For a tablet for him to write in, I cut brown paper into squares and sewed them together across the top.
I remember Daddy going to Magdalena and paying $3.95 for a sheet iron heater. That was a few months before Roland was born and I’d been wishing for grapefruit. Daddy had bought some and hid them inside the new stove for me to find. I also thought I was starving for some eggs. He paid sixty cents for a dozen in Greens Gap. They were cold storage eggs and in those days cold storage eggs were pretty awful but they satisfied my desire for eggs. Sixty cents at the time was an outlandish price. The fall of ’31 or ’32 Daddy loaded up the Model T with vegetables and went to Magdalena to buy some winter groceries. He paid $1.90 a hundred for flour that year.
The mines at Santa Rita had shut down and Grandpa Reed was getting only a few days work occasionally. Helen was still at home going to high school. I traded her a lot of the nicer dresses that I had worn working the Santa Rita Company Store that I really didn’t need anymore for the price of a pair of shoes. A good deal for both of us, we thought.
This store I worked in was a huge general merchandise store owned by the mining company – the Chino Copper Company. It is now known as the Kennecott Mines, Chino division. There was almost nothing that you couldn’t buy in that store.
I think now would be a good time to tell you about the different jobs Daddy has worked at since I first knew him back in 1928. Over the years, he worked at Santa Rita (Chino mines) three times after I first met him. He was working there when we met and twice we left the ranch and he went to work for them. One time we leased the ranch for three years and then we sold out. While working for them he was a locomotive foreman, brakeman and engineer at various times. He also was a truck driver, weight master, mine hoist operator at one of the underground mines, and a dragline operator at the precipitating plant.
There was lots of road building done during the Depression in order to have jobs for the men. Daddy worked on quite a few of them, some were State-built and others were being built for private contractors. On these jobs he was a truck driver, shovel runner, caterpillar operator pulling the grader and labor on the road job.
Other jobs included fence building, farming, carpentry, plumbing and working in the C.C.C. The C.C.C. – Civilian Conservation Corp – was started under President Roosevelt’s first administration to make jobs for men in June of 1933. In 1936 there was a State contract to let to re-build some of the Luna Road. The job was let to make work for the men in the immediate locality so the contractor, a Mr. Skousen of Albuquerque, in order to get the contract, had to hire a certain percent of local men – the rest could be his men. The local men had to apply for the work at Reserve, the county seat, where they were listed according to what they had done on the last State job they had worked on. Daddy was listed as a shovel runner. They had given the shovel job to another fellow, so they gave Daddy a job driving a dump truck. Skousen had a son-in-law that he wanted on the shovel job, so the first opportunity he could possibly use as an excuse to fire Daddy and the shovel runner, he grabbed it. They were working two shifts – can you what working in the dark on the Luna Road would be like? Daddy said the shovel runner got a little bit below grade working at night. It didn’t really hurt a thing, but it was an excuse to fire him, so they did. Daddy got out on a soft shoulder with his truck, and when he tried to pull out it would slide to where it felt like it might roll over. In the dark he really couldn’t tell to well. Rather than take a chance, he stepped into another truck and kept on working – didn’t lose a bit of time and did no harm, for when daylight came the first truck pulled right out. But since Daddy was listed as a shovel runner and they wanted to get rid of him, they used that as an excuse and fired him. The son-in-law had his job.
Living out on the ranch kept us a little isolated. Often there was no way to go any place and neighbors were few and far between. It happened that the first three or four years of Roland’s life he had never seen a baby. Helen had given him one of her dolls (over Grandpa Reed’s protests) and he did play with it, but not necessarily as a baby. It usually had a rope around it being drug around the yard. Most everything he played with had a rope on it, even if that “rope” was only some string tied together. He loved a rope. Then one of the young girls, Junie Hulse, had a baby and in a few weeks came to see us to show the new baby off. Roland was all eyes. He suddenly realized what his doll really was. Afterward he would try so hard to wrap his doll in it’s blanket like a baby was wrapped. He would tell me “wrap it like Junie’s baby.”
You might have wondered how Roland happened to be born in Brazito, NM. Brazito was and still is a tiny Mexican settlement on the Rio Grande just a few miles from Mesilla Park, which is near Las Cruces, the county seat of Dońa Ana county. There were just a few farms there and Grandpa and Grandma Barger (Daddy’s parents) owned and farmed one of them. They were nice little irrigated farms. They raised cotton, onions, chiles, alfalfa and cantaloupes for their cash crops. They were just then starting to plant pecans on a commercial scale. Now one of the largest pecan orchards in the U.S. is at Mesilla Park. We had moved to the ranch in October and now it was the first of January and we were almost broke with a baby due in March and no doctor closer than Magdalena. Daddy decided I would have to go to Grandma Barger’s to have the baby. Pearlie, Daddy’s sister, lived in Mesilla Park. On January first, 1931, in our Model T, Daddy and I and Frank Dumas left Horse Springs, leaving Mary and Joris at home, and went to San Antonio, NM, where they left me. I was to take a train from there the next morning to Mesilla Park. Daddy and Frank went on to Mimbres, NM (along the Mimbres River) to work on a road job. They stayed there until about two weeks before I came home with the baby. He was four weeks old when I came home.
I guess it was intended that I would have trouble having a doctor around when my babies were born. As soon as I got to Grandma’s, Pearlie took me to her doctor – Dr R.W.R. Smith. We made arrangements for him to come to the farm when it was time for the baby. And he did come, but decided he had lots of time and left to go see a man who was having hiccups. While he was gone, Grandma delivered the baby. I asked Dr. Smith what his initials, G.W.R., stood for. He told me “Great Western Railway.” I never did learn what his name really was.
I met one of the nicest ladies, the night I stayed in San Antonio, who ran a rooming house there. There was no place to stay. San Antonio was a tiny place on the S.F. Railroad – probably a rough place. I had to catch a train out around 4:00am. It was only two or three blocks to the depot. She loaned me an alarm clock so I could wake up, but the next morning when I was getting ready to go over to the depot, I heard an alarm go off in her part of the house. In a few minutes she came to my room to walk me to the depot. She was afraid for me to go by myself. I thought that was so nice. I was a perfect stranger to her and I’ve never forgotten her concern. We had visited while waiting for be-time the night before. She was a widow who had lost her husband the night the Rio Grande flooded and completely washed the town of San Marcial away. San Marcial was a little farming settlement along the Rio Grande a few miles south of San Antonio. That flood happened in 1929.
When Roland was about four months old we were at a home talent rodeo. There were always big crowds at these. People – ranchers and farmer – came from miles around. I was carrying Roland in my arms walking around among the crowd visiting when an old Mexican man with a big mustache grabbed Roland’s face between his hands and said, “que bonito, que bonito” and kissed him full on the mouth –- mustache and all. I was sort of shook up over that! Mexicans love babies.
This little story has nothing to do with the Depression, but it did happen back then, and when Jim heard I was writing these little happenings he wanted me to put this in. Jim was barely 17 years old at the time this happened and I guess it just about scared him to death because he mentions it every time we are together and get to talking about old times.
Roland was twenty months and I hadn’t been home to Santa Rita Since he was born. My Dad (Grandpa Reed) thought he was so great he wanted me to come home with him bad enough that he sent Jim and one of Jim’s friends to Horse Springs to get me and the baby. That was 250 miles of dirt road.
After I had stayed two weeks the boys started back to Horse Springs with us. We hadn’t gone but a few miles when the car sputtered and stopped. It wasn’t getting gas to the carburetor. The boys supposed it was something in the gas line to the carburetor, so they took it loose and flowed it out. Then they siphoned enough gas out of the tank to prime the carburetor and the car started. But we wouldn’t go too many miles and the whole procedure had to be done over. We had got as far as Sand Flat on the other side of Reserve when the boys were once more fixing to do it again. It was so cold and the wind was blowing and the boys were literally freezing to death working on that car. Jim had the gas line loose, but he was so cold he just had to get inside the car for a few minutes. Then he decided to blow on the gas line, not thinking where the other end of it was pointing. He sprayed gas all over Roland’s face. We were both scared. All I thought of was his eyes. We were lucky – it didn’t hurt him at all. We finally got to the ranch late that evening, just ahead of a storm. In order to miss the storm the boys started back the next morning early. The car did all the way back to Santa Rita as it had on the way to the ranch. They found their trouble: it turned out that a piece of the gas tank cover had gotten into the gas tank, and every so often it would get over the opening into the gas line. I said this didn’t have anything to do with the Depression, but actually it did in a way. The car was an old ’26 Chevy coupe with no heater. We didn’t have the money to stop and have the car worked on by a mechanic, who probably would have guessed what our trouble was.
We butchered hogs every fall and winter for our meat and lard. We had our own cure mixture that we thought was very good – a mixture of salt, black pepper, salt peter and sugar that we rubbed into the hams and side meat. The hams kept real well, but up lat in the spring and into summer, the side meat or bacon that we kept for seasoning would get rancid. Nothing is worse than rancid pork. Someone told me if I would put the sides of bacon down in wood ashes they would keep, so we saved ashes for a long time and before the weather turned warm in the spring I put some in a barrel – a layer of ashes and a layer of meat, then another layer of ashes and so on. It did not keep and what a job to clean the ashes off the meat when you need some. We never did learn how to keep it from getting old. We quit trying to.
One time when we didn’t have any sugar, Roland asked me to make some candy. I told him I couldn’t – I didn’t have any sugar. He said “Just make it plan, Mama.”
Ice in the summertime was unheard of out in the country, but one winter Montague Stevens cut ice off Old Horse Springs Lake and stored it in sawdust in a building on his place. Dad, Jim, Helen and Jims’ girlfriend, Evelyn Laurer, came out to the ranch along in June of the year Roland had his first birthday. We decided to see if Montague’s ice was still keeping and buy some to make ice cream – a real treat in that time. Montague did manage to dig around in the sawdust and find several pieces of ice that hadn’t melted completely, so we had ice cream in June. Jim still tells about Roland standing on the porch watching them turning the freezer and starting to cry. He had a piece of ice in his hand and it was burning him and he didn’t know what to do about it. He was only 16 months old.
This Old Horse Springs Lake was a homemade lake to catch the overflow from the Hors Springs, all on Montague’s property. We bought the original 160 acres of the ranch from Montague. Roy Moore had bought it and started paying on it. We traded our ’28 Chevy coupe to Roy for his equity. We paid the balance to Montague. He was considered the greatest grizzly bear hunter of all times. He wrote a book: Meet Mr. Grizzly. You would really enjoy reading it. He was an English man, college graduate, also wealthy. At the time we knew him, neither he nor his wife had become American citizens, although they had lived here many, many years. There was a reason for that. Had they given up their British citizenship, they no longer would be eligible for the monthly checks they received from England. In the book you will read of the home he built at Spur Lake near Luna, NM for his English bride and about how he got a houseful of massive furniture plus a piano up Luna hill. Daddy and I stayed over night in that house long after Montague had moved out. Roy more lived there then.
This little story has nothing to do with us or the Depression, but it did happen to part of the family years ago. Right after World War 1 Pearlie and Abe Cawyer (Edwin and J.R.’s parents) were moving from the Mule Creek area to Springerville, NM with all their belongings loaded in a wagon. At the foot of Saliz hill, between Glenwood and Reserve (near Gut Ache Mesa) Abe had to unload half of their half of the load and leave it at the bottom until he could haul the other half up the hill, unload it, and come back down for the rest. The horse couldn’t pull the full wagon load up the Saliz. Pearlie was afraid to stay at the foot of the hill alone while Abe made the first trip up, so she rode with him. When they came back down the hill for the remainder of their things, they were completely burned up. They had camped there the night before, so they always supposed a spark from the camp fire had set the things on fire. It was on this trip that Pearlie said she baked them an anniversary cake in a dutch oven over a campfire. It was either their first or second anniversary.
I believe these stories brings me up to the time Maureen was born, pretty well. My next book will start with the time she arrived – things were getting a little better by then, but we still had our problems.