MORE ABOUT MY SENIOR YEAR IN HIGH SCHOOL

MORE ABOUT MY SENIOR YEAR IN HIGH SCHOOL
Not long after the matter of the bloated cow, winter came on strong and cold. I had agreed with the Vogels that I would go to the Clement place to bring the whole bunch of cattle to their place. The agreed date (a Saturday) came, and though our old homestead thermometer showed the temperature was below the 40 degree below mark, I walked out to the Vogels’, borrowed their old slow saddle horse, and set out. I soon found it was much too cold for riding, so I walked and led the horse the rest of the way and back.
It didn't take long to round up the cattle, as they were near the gate, waiting to get out of there. The walk to the Vogels’ home, about three miles, was a bitter one. The cattle, the horse, and I all were literally covered with white frost from our breathing. The poor old horse coughed frequently, a sign that the cold air was bothering her lungs. That was the last time, I believe, that I had occasion to drive the cattle. I surely wouldn't have wanted to have another day like that one!
That winter I signed up for the senior class play, and greatly enjoyed being a part of it. I had only a minor part, of course, but it went over very well and we had lots of fun rehearsing. Having a part in a play was helpful, too, in learning not to be too nervous in front of an audience! Now I need to say something more about the typing class. When we finally were allowed to begin using the machines, we found that we could already type! In fact, on one of the first speed tests Miss Adams gave us, most of us were typing twenty-five to thirty words per minute! After that, typing became easier and easier for me, and I was soon typing as fast or faster than anyone else in first year typing. When spring came, and I entered in typing at the district scholastic meet at Malta, I won first place easily. Later, at the state high school week, at Bozeman, I again took first place in first year typing. Somehow it was a natural skill for me.
A highlight of that winter was listening to the radio in the evening. I had never before lived in a house having electricity, and the ability to tune in stations as far away as Denver and Cincinnati, Ohio, was a marvel. We listened as regularly as we could to such programs as Amos and Andy, The Great Gildersleeve, Major Bowes' Original Amateur Hour, and Fibber McGee and Molly. Those were great programs!
Often that winter we went out to ice skate on Vogel's slough, where there was good ice. I was still singing in the church choir, and active in the Epworth League, too. That year our Epworth League group sometimes met with the group at Saco, and that was fun. I remember that we went to the Saco church on Easter Sunday, early in the morning, to have a joint sunrise service and breakfast together. Did I just think of the significance of the day, and all that? Hardly! One Saco boy told me of a place not far out of town where there had apparently once been an Indian battle, for many arrowheads were found there. I was more interested in that, though I never went out to see the place, than in the Easter message.
Early in the spring we began to have track practice, and for the first time I had the freedom to go out for a school sport. I had always been pretty good at running and jumping--both standing and running broad jump--while in grade school, so those were the events I worked on. I found that I couldn't keep up with the competition at all in the shorter races, but could do well in the mile run. It was a new experience for me to have track shoes available (borrowed ones) to use for running. Our team went around to various track meets with other nearby schools. The one I especially remember was a meet at Fort Peck, because on that day I managed to run the mile in 4:45. That was very good time for high school runners in those days. The world record was somewhere around 4:05 at that time. No one ran a four-minute mile until several years later. I never ran a mile that fast again, though I ran some in my freshman year in college.
In early May a group of students from Hinsdale, mostly seniors, but also some younger girls, went to Malta, about forty-five miles west of Hinsdale, for a district scholastic and track meet. I didn't do at all well in the track events, but did do very well in all five subjects in the scholastic meet. Because I had a conflict as I was taking another test when the first year typing test was given, I had to take my typing test alone, after all the others had competed, Miss Adams told me, before I started to take the timed test, that forty-five words per minute would easily win. As I mentioned earlier, I knew almost exactly what the rhythm was for forty-five words per minute, held to that, and got first place, with a speed of forty-five words per minute! It was a cinch, due to a good teacher.
That afternoon, on our way back to Hinsdale, my good friend and classmate, Foran Drabbs, and I almost had an argument. We both admired a younger girl who had come along for the scholastic meet. The teacher in charge of our group had agreed that we could stop in Saco on the way home, to see a movie. The difference between Foran and me was who would get to take E____ to the show? Or maybe it was who would get to ask her first, as she wasn't riding in the same car with us. I don't recall just how we decided the matter, but this I do remember-- she refused both of us! Later she was my date, my very first date ever, for the Senior prom.
Just a week or two before our graduation, three or four of us seniors had a wonderful surprise! Mr. Orr, the principal, had arranged for us to compete in the state high school scholastic meet on the Montana State College campus, in Bozeman! He drove us over, and I can't adequately tell how excited I was on that trip. For the first time I saw real honest to goodness forests, and we went through real mountains on our way. We travelled through Great Falls and Helena, then down past Three Forks to Bozeman.
Somewhere around the famous Gates of the Mountains, we saw a bear climbing up a hill in the distance. Of course we couldn't be sure what kind of bear it was, but for me it was surely a grizzly! We arrived in Bozeman late in the afternoon, where we were assigned rooms in dormitories on the campus. I can recall very clearly my delight in walking around on the school grounds, looking at the various trees, and what were for me, huge school buildings.
Oddly, I don't remember much about the various events of that week. I was fortunate to place first in the state in typing, and I did well also in the other subjects in which I competed. Highlight of the week was the day I spent out on the Madison River with Mr. Orr and another man whose name I can't recall. I didn't fish, but watched them with their fly rods, wading in the great stream. I don't think they caught much of anything, but the weather and the scenery were both beautiful. I became even more enamored with the idea of becoming a forest ranger, and being able to live always in such surroundings.
Our senior class had sometime in the previous year decided on our class colors--Nile green and silver--and we had placed our orders for graduation announcements. It was almost time for graduation when I learned something that really surprised me. I had thought up 'til then that I was clearly the head of the class, and would surely be giving the valedictory address at our commencement exercises. Now I learned that not I, but Larry Haverfield, was the valedictorian! I came in a close second, but it was a severe blow to my pride. Further, Larry had completed all the work required for graduation in the two years he had been attending Hinsdale High School! As I said before, I didn't know him well. He, with his family, had come from somewhere in Canada. When they came to live near Hinsdale in the fall of 1934, he was almost twenty years of age. Yet in those two years he had managed to take all the necessary subjects, and beat me by a couple of tenths of a grade point. He really earned his victory, and I had earned my second place, too, because I hadn't worked as hard as I might have. It was a bitter pill to swallow. I had broken the pattern of being a Cumming youngster who graduated at the head of his class, as Robert and Jean had done.
Senior prom, senior class day with its great picnic at Vandalia Dam, everything related to graduation came and went swiftly. Though it was a real budget stretcher for me, I bought a class ring, and then almost never wore it. I think it cost either $12 or $15; that was a big price for me. The most interesting graduation gift I received was a very simple baitcasting rod and reel that my parents gave me. With that I was ready for some real fishing. I imagined that Milk River contained all the various sport fishes I had read about in the outdoor magazines. I fished with high hopes of catching a great northern pike, or a bass. I know now that such fish had never been found in the river, and probably haven't to this day! But with that rod I caught many goldeye, a few cat fish,and many carp. It was a great gift. Though the cheap little casting reel often gave me trouble with monster backlashes, I learned to cast fairly well with it, and used it for years. Now the summer was before me. I still dreamed of going to the University of Minnesota, but the possibility of doing that seemed very remote. I needed money badly. Steady jobs were not available; as a result, I had several jobs that summer. First, I rented a couple acres of ground right by Milk River, 2 miles east of town, from one of our old neighbors, Mr. Kent, and started a truck garden. I used the irrigation pump and old single cylinder gas engine we had used on the Burke place. With Dad's help I got that all set up so I could irrigate most of the garden area. That worked fairly well, and by the end of summer I had a good crop of potatoes and corn, and made a little money on those. It took too much time, though, going the two miles out to the garden spot in the little old Model T Ford, getting the pump going, directing the water where it was needed, and hoeing and weeding between spells of tending the engine. I did find time to fish,though, and sometimes went swimming, too.
Twice that summer I had brief jobs on government programs. The first was a two-week job of poisoning rodents. A crew of five or six of us was driven out to a previously selected spot early each morning. There we filled heavy sacks with poisoned grain, which was to be placed at any rodent holes we found. We slung the bags over our shoulders, and walked, and walked, and walked. We spread out about twenty feet apart, in a line, going across fields and pasture land, putting a handful of grain in every hole that looked as if it might be occupied by some rodent. We worked mostly through prairie dog towns, or colonies. We also sought out the holes of the little pocket gophers or ground squirrels. I hated the idea of poisoning animals, but the rodents were truly pests. Unfortunately, many birds also ate the poisoned grain, and died.
My second government job was as a laborer on a small dam-building job out southeast of Hinsdale, in the Missouri River breaks country. I remember Dad took me out there in the old Ford, out across the hills south of Hinsdale, a long, long ride. Finally we found our way to the camp. My arrival was expected, but my first work assignment wasn't! I was told where to put my little kit of belongings, and then report at once to the cook house. I was appointed, without any consultation with me, to the job of cook's helper, or "bull cook."
That was as mean a job as any I've ever had. I had to peel endless piles of potatoes, as there was a large crew of hungry men to feed three big meals a day. I slept in a big tent with blankets, no mattress, on the hard ground. The cook routed me out of bed about 4:30 in the morning, to help get breakfast. I toasted great piles of bread, and made coffee enough to drown out a prairie dog. I set the table twice for each meal, and afterward had to help wash the dishes. I had a little time off when the men were out working on the job, but had to begin helping with lunch again about 10AM,. I didn't get done with the last dishes of the day until about 8PM, and then, totally exhausted, went to bed. I was on that job for a week, and then an opportunity for escape came. Believe me, I had often thought of taking off over the hills for home during that week! But one day a new young fellow came out to the camp to work. At once I asked the boss if I couldn't be relieved of my job, and get out on the real work-- shovelling, pouring concrete, and so on. He said it was OK with him, if all right with the cook. That man, I guess, was willing to change helpers, so I went out as a regular worker.
The work on the project was just as hard, but I enjoyed it. In a week or ten days we had completed the pouring of a big concrete-lined tank to be used for dipping cattle and sheep. We also built corrals, a loading chute, and other necessary facilities. We were a lively crew of workers, all young fellows, and the work went quickly. I remember that several of us went to Glasgow one night so we could listen on the radio to the prize fight between Joe Louis and Max Baer, the German fighter. If I remember correctly, we stood around outside a tavern (I was too young to be allowed inside) and heard the fight on the radio through an open window. Louis won in the first round, I think. Baer suffered a broken vertebra, or something like that, and had to stop. Back we went to camp. The work at the little earth dam was finished soon, and I was again out of a job.
Soon after, the Montana Power Company came looking for men. The company owned the natural gas line running along the "high line" and the Great Northern Railroad. The work they were doing consisted of digging up sections of the gas line to see whether the pipe was so badly corroded that it needed replacement. I got on with them, and for just a few days spent the day on the business end of a long-handled round-nosed shovel. Again, though the work was hard, and we were expected to move huge amount of dirt, working with a couple of other fellows was fun. We chatted as we dug, told big stories, and so on.
All of these jobs paid what seemed huge wages--fifty cents an hour, with nothing deducted for income tax. On the job at the dam, my pay was reduced to cover the charge for food, to the tune of a dollar or so a day. I still managed to save a few dollars.
Most of the rest of the summer I spent working as a farm hand on the Hellstern farm east of Hinsdale. I worked at irrigating beets, driving team while haying, and helping with milking morning and night. That summer I could hold my own with the Hellstern boys at milking. They milked a herd of forty big rangy Holstein cows, with huge udders. We usually started the morning milking about 5AM, after feeding and harnessing the horses. Three of us would milk while a fourth man handled the storing of the milk. They didn't have fancy cooling equipment or milking machines--it was all done by hand. Earl, one of the Hellsterns, left right after milking to take the fresh warm milk to the creamery at Glasgow, about twenty-fivemiles away.
With three of us milking, it meant milking thirteen or sometimes fourteen cows, each of which would give about fifteen to twenty quarts of milk at a milking. Our normal milking time was about an hour. That meant that we were taking only four or five minutes per cow. Because the big Holstein cows gave so much milk, we usually had to empty the milk bucket once during the milking of each cow. It was great exercise for the hands and forearms, and I really didn't mind it at all. The hard part of the job, though, was to milk those same cows again in the evening, after a long hard day of irrigating, haying or threshing. Then the job was a real chore.
Often after finishing the milking in the evening, we would all hike down to the Milk River, about a half mile away, and go for a good cooling swim. We would get to bed about nine, and wasted no time with talk, as all of us were dog tired. For that kind of work, six days a week, with Sundays off (except for the milking), I received thirty dollars a month and "found"--that is, board and room. Did I suffer that summer? Not at all! The hard work, and the good food we had, with all the cream, butter, cheese, and ice cream we could eat, helped me to put on weight. When I left at the end of summer to go to school, I was hard as nails. I believe I had somewhat unusual strength for one of my height and weight. In those days I weighed about 140 pounds, and there wasn't an ounce of fat on me. I really think that hard work is good for a growing young fellow, and didn't resent it a bit, though I suppose I did my share of griping.
Too soon summer was gone. It was time to think of college. Meanwhile my parents had come up with a plan to allow both my sister Jean and me to attend Northern Montana College at Havre. I had to forget my dream of the University of Minnesota. I was very happy to go to some school. But that is another story, and will have to be covered later.

SENIOR! Only sixteen, and a senior in high school! I was proud! Because I had skipped a year (or done two years in one) in grade school, I was a year or two younger than most of my classmates. While I was proud of it then, I realize now that it might have been better if I had been older. My social adjustment wasn't all it might have been. I was socially a "loner," and except for some playing and visiting with the Vogel and Grant kids, I didn't mix much with the other students in my class. Not that I didn't have an interest in girls! That was coming on a bit, though I was scared to death of talking to any of them. Secretly I greatly admired two or three different girls that year, and sometimes day-dreamed about being married to one or the other of them. I figured we could live off the land, dressing in animal skin clothing and moccasins. I never stopped to think of winter weather--it was always summer, and beautiful, with ripe berries and lots of game to shoot. Those were foolish dreams, I know, and I've never before told anyone about them. The change in our living situation that fall was a big one. Dad had taken a job at Fort Peck Dam that year, so we left the Burke place in late summer. We moved in to town, though Dad was living most of the time in a barracks at Fort Peck, housing provided for the workers on the dam. He was away all week, coming home most weekends. We sold nearly all the cattle, and pastured the few remaining with the Vogel's at a place on the river about five miles from town. It was known as the Clement place, from the name of a former owner. We sold the old team and wagon, too, so we really had become "town folks." I missed the woods on the Burke place, and the animals and birds, but found plenty to do in town. On some weekends I had to go to the Clement place to check on our few cows, and that meant walking the five plus miles down there and back. Later I will tell of one or two notable days connected with the care of thestock. As a senior, and with most of the required subjects already completed for graduation, I had a choice of what I would study in this my senior year. I liked Mr. Shaw so well I chose to take both physics and advanced algebra from him. I also took another course in animal husbandry, chiefly because I knew that would involve stock judging, which I very much liked to do. The fourth course I chose was typing, and that was tough! Both Robert and Jean had taken typing, and were good at it. But just as they had warned me about what a tough teacher Miss Dorothy Dutch was (my teacher for algebra and geometry), now they told me how awful Miss Adams, the typing teacher could be! There were about twelve of us in the class, and despite the warnings, I looked forward to learning to type. As it turned out, touch typing is probably the most valuable skill I learned in high school! I've used it all my life, and it has been a wonderful help. In this my senior year I decided what I wanted to do as a career: I would be a forest ranger! I read everything I could lay hands on about that line of work, and even decided where I would go to college. For some reason, it didn't enter my mind to go to Missoula, to the state university, where there was a fine forestry school. Instead, I planned to go to the University of Minnesota, because their school seemed to get the most publicity. I wrote for a catalog, and liked what I saw. Little did I know how difficult it would be to go there, pay the high tuition charges, and all that. It was a goal, and helped me to apply myself toward being a good student, I think. Back to typing class! Miss Adams surely was different from most of the teachers. She was a perfectionist! In order to learn one thing at a time, and because knowing the location of the various keys is essential to learning to type rapidly, we didn't even touch a typewriter for the first three or four weeks! I had never heard of such a thing! Instead of using a machine, we sat with our hands in the correct position on the edge of the typing table, and practiced for hours-- asdfghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz, over and over, or mixing numbers in with the letters. There were big charts on the wall in front of us, showing the location of all the letters and numbers on the keyboard. For the first week or so we could look at those charts. After that the charts were taken away, and we were supposed to know without hesitation where each letter or number was, and which finger was designated to hit it. The school typewriters had no letters or numbers on the keys, to tempt us to look at the keys. Then there was the proper finger stroke to use, too. We would be learning to type on old Underwood standard machines, of course; electric typewriters were unknown in our area. Miss Adams called it the "tiger stroke," meaning that the finger didn't just poke at a key, but must hit it with a clawing motion, sharp and precise. Miss Adams watched us individually, to make sure we were moving our fingers just right. It was practice, practice, practice for an hour each day, five days a week. I thought we would never get around to real typing! When we did get typewriters, most of us in the class found we could type 20 - 30 words per minute, with not too many errors. One other thing--Miss Adams wanted us to learn to type smoothly, rhythmically, without sudden spurts, pauses, or stops. So we had victrola music to keep time to, usually marches, very snappy. If anyone had come by and seen twelve people typing on imaginary typewriters, keeping time to the music, they might have thought we were crazy! I know some of us thought someone was! On the other hand, I know now how important that rhythm is. I learned that to achieve a certain desired speed in typing, one could estimate how many strokes per minute were required to reach a chosen rate of so many words per minute, and simply type along at that rate. Twice later, in typing contests at Malta and at State High School Week in Bozeman, I won by trying to type at a certain rhythmic rate, and hit the desired speed almost exactly. My other subjects were just as interesting to me that year. In animal husbandry, we made field trips to watch how the farmers used different feeds for livestock. We judged animals at the fair in Glasgow, and held meetings of the new Future Farmers of America club. The teacher, Mr. Skinner, was interesting, and a good teacher. Mr. Shaw, my friend from previous years, lived up to my expectations, especially in teaching physics. I got such a good grounding in physics that two years later, at Northern Montana College in Havre, I was selected to work as physics lab assistant, to help earn my tuition and college expenses. Town living was very different from being on the Burke place. There were no animals to care for daily, except for a few hens kept in the big old barn at the back of the lot. Thus I had more free time--free for reading. Hinsdale had only a very small town library, and for some reason I almost never went there to borrow books. In this my fourth year at high school, I had read nearly all the books that I found attractive in the school library. It was at this time that I began to borrow many books from Mr. Shaw's personal library--he had a whole wall of books on shelves. I had read a few of his books in the prior year, but now I sometimes went over to his apartment on Saturday, and read all day, or brought home a fresh bundle of books. The house we lived in was less than a block from his place, so I didn't have far to go. I mentioned that we had a few cattle left, pastured on the Clement place, with the Vogel's cattle. With Dad away at Fort Peck, I had to check on them occasionally. Thus one frosty Saturday morning, in late October or early November, I walked down there (about five miles from town) to see if they were OK. There was alfalfa growing along the river bank on the Clement place, scarcely half a mile inside the pasture. On that particular morning, I walked down along the river, and found what I didn't want to find: a cow terribly bloated from eating the frosty alfalfa. She lay on her side, with her belly so extended her legs were away up in the air. There was so much pressure she could hardly breathe, but she was still alive. She was not one of ours; she belonged to the Vogels. I knew she could not live long. There was not enough time to walk clear back to their place to tell them. If anything could be done for her, it was up to me. I had learned in animal husbandry class that veterinaries use a special tool for relieving cattle or other animals suffering from bloat. I didn't have anything like that. I had only my pocket knife. But I remembered that the sticking point was toward the back end of the rib cage, and with great fear I stabbed the cow right there with the largest blade of my knife! There was no question whether I hit the right spot! Gas whistled out of the cut, along with a fine green spray that pretty well stained all my face and front! That cow shrank like a punctured balloon! I knew that the wound should be sterilized, but I didn't have anything with me with which to do that. So after washing up a bit in the river, I walked around some more, checked to see that the other cows were all OK (and not eating alfalfa!), and then walked back to Vogels to tell them about their cow. When I left, the cow was already on her feet, though looking a bit wobbly. The long and short of it was that the cow lived on, whether happily or not, I don't know. I told my agriculture teacher of my adventure, and he was sure that the cow would die of infection. But she survived! In those days there were few vets around, and I am sure the Vogels didn't call one to come out to check on the cow. More later about my senior year - and no more gruesome stories!SENIOR! Only sixteen, and a senior in high school! I was proud! Because I had skipped a year (or done two years in one) in grade school, I was a year or two younger than most of my classmates. While I was proud of it then, I realize now that it might have been better if I had been older. My social adjustment wasn't all it might have been. I was socially a "loner," and except for some playing and visiting with the Vogel and Grant kids, I didn't mix much with the other students in my class. Not that I didn't have an interest in girls! That was coming on a bit, though I was scared to death of talking to any of them. Secretly I greatly admired two or three different girls that year, and sometimes day-dreamed about being married to one or the other of them. I figured we could live off the land, dressing in animal skin clothing and moccasins. I never stopped to think of winter weather--it was always summer, and beautiful, with ripe berries and lots of game to shoot. Those were foolish dreams, I know, and I've never before told anyone about them. The change in our living situation that fall was a big one. Dad had taken a job at Fort Peck Dam that year, so we left the Burke place in late summer. We moved in to town, though Dad was living most of the time in a barracks at Fort Peck, housing provided for the workers on the dam. He was away all week, coming home most weekends. We sold nearly all the cattle, and pastured the few remaining with the Vogel's at a place on the river about five miles from town. It was known as the Clement place, from the name of a former owner. We sold the old team and wagon, too, so we really had become "town folks." I missed the woods on the Burke place, and the animals and birds, but found plenty to do in town. On some weekends I had to go to the Clement place to check on our few cows, and that meant walking the five plus miles down there and back. Later I will tell of one or two notable days connected with the care of thestock. As a senior, and with most of the required subjects already completed for graduation, I had a choice of what I would study in this my senior year. I liked Mr. Shaw so well I chose to take both physics and advanced algebra from him. I also took another course in animal husbandry, chiefly because I knew that would involve stock judging, which I very much liked to do. The fourth course I chose was typing, and that was tough! Both Robert and Jean had taken typing, and were good at it. But just as they had warned me about what a tough teacher Miss Dorothy Dutch was (my teacher for algebra and geometry), now they told me how awful Miss Adams, the typing teacher could be! There were about twelve of us in the class, and despite the warnings, I looked forward to learning to type. As it turned out, touch typing is probably the most valuable skill I learned in high school! I've used it all my life, and it has been a wonderful help. In this my senior year I decided what I wanted to do as a career: I would be a forest ranger! I read everything I could lay hands on about that line of work, and even decided where I would go to college. For some reason, it didn't enter my mind to go to Missoula, to the state university, where there was a fine forestry school. Instead, I planned to go to the University of Minnesota, because their school seemed to get the most publicity. I wrote for a catalog, and liked what I saw. Little did I know how difficult it would be to go there, pay the high tuition charges, and all that. It was a goal, and helped me to apply myself toward being a good student, I think. Back to typing class! Miss Adams surely was different from most of the teachers. She was a perfectionist! In order to learn one thing at a time, and because knowing the location of the various keys is essential to learning to type rapidly, we didn't even touch a typewriter for the first three or four weeks! I had never heard of such a thing! Instead of using a machine, we sat with our hands in the correct position on the edge of the typing table, and practiced for hours-- asdfghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz, over and over, or mixing numbers in with the letters. There were big charts on the wall in front of us, showing the location of all the letters and numbers on the keyboard. For the first week or so we could look at those charts. After that the charts were taken away, and we were supposed to know without hesitation where each letter or number was, and which finger was designated to hit it. The school typewriters had no letters or numbers on the keys, to tempt us to look at the keys. Then there was the proper finger stroke to use, too. We would be learning to type on old Underwood standard machines, of course; electric typewriters were unknown in our area. Miss Adams called it the "tiger stroke," meaning that the finger didn't just poke at a key, but must hit it with a clawing motion, sharp and precise. Miss Adams watched us individually, to make sure we were moving our fingers just right. It was practice, practice, practice for an hour each day, five days a week. I thought we would never get around to real typing! When we did get typewriters, most of us in the class found we could type 20 - 30 words per minute, with not too many errors. One other thing--Miss Adams wanted us to learn to type smoothly, rhythmically, without sudden spurts, pauses, or stops. So we had victrola music to keep time to, usually marches, very snappy. If anyone had come by and seen twelve people typing on imaginary typewriters, keeping time to the music, they might have thought we were crazy! I know some of us thought someone was! On the other hand, I know now how important that rhythm is. I learned that to achieve a certain desired speed in typing, one could estimate how many strokes per minute were required to reach a chosen rate of so many words per minute, and simply type along at that rate. Twice later, in typing contests at Malta and at State High School Week in Bozeman, I won by trying to type at a certain rhythmic rate, and hit the desired speed almost exactly. My other subjects were just as interesting to me that year. In animal husbandry, we made field trips to watch how the farmers used different feeds for livestock. We judged animals at the fair in Glasgow, and held meetings of the new Future Farmers of America club. The teacher, Mr. Skinner, was interesting, and a good teacher. Mr. Shaw, my friend from previous years, lived up to my expectations, especially in teaching physics. I got such a good grounding in physics that two years later, at Northern Montana College in Havre, I was selected to work as physics lab assistant, to help earn my tuition and college expenses. Town living was very different from being on the Burke place. There were no animals to care for daily, except for a few hens kept in the big old barn at the back of the lot. Thus I had more free time--free for reading. Hinsdale had only a very small town library, and for some reason I almost never went there to borrow books. In this my fourth year at high school, I had read nearly all the books that I found attractive in the school library. It was at this time that I began to borrow many books from Mr. Shaw's personal library--he had a whole wall of books on shelves. I had read a few of his books in the prior year, but now I sometimes went over to his apartment on Saturday, and read all day, or brought home a fresh bundle of books. The house we lived in was less than a block from his place, so I didn't have far to go. I mentioned that we had a few cattle left, pastured on the Clement place, with the Vogel's cattle. With Dad away at Fort Peck, I had to check on them occasionally. Thus one frosty Saturday morning, in late October or early November, I walked down there (about five miles from town) to see if they were OK. There was alfalfa growing along the river bank on the Clement place, scarcely half a mile inside the pasture. On that particular morning, I walked down along the river, and found what I didn't want to find: a cow terribly bloated from eating the frosty alfalfa. She lay on her side, with her belly so extended her legs were away up in the air. There was so much pressure she could hardly breathe, but she was still alive. She was not one of ours; she belonged to the Vogels. I knew she could not live long. There was not enough time to walk clear back to their place to tell them. If anything could be done for her, it was up to me. I had learned in animal husbandry class that veterinaries use a special tool for relieving cattle or other animals suffering from bloat. I didn't have anything like that. I had only my pocket knife. But I remembered that the sticking point was toward the back end of the rib cage, and with great fear I stabbed the cow right there with the largest blade of my knife! There was no question whether I hit the right spot! Gas whistled out of the cut, along with a fine green spray that pretty well stained all my face and front! That cow shrank like a punctured balloon! I knew that the wound should be sterilized, but I didn't have anything with me with which to do that. So after washing up a bit in the river, I walked around some more, checked to see that the other cows were all OK (and not eating alfalfa!), and then walked back to Vogels to tell them about their cow. When I left, the cow was already on her feet, though looking a bit wobbly. The long and short of it was that the cow lived on, whether happily or not, I don't know. I told my agriculture teacher of my adventure, and he was sure that the cow would die of infection. But she survived! In those days there were few vets around, and I am sure the Vogels didn't call one to come out to check on the cow. More later about my senior year - and no more gruesome stories

"BATCHING"
Do you know what "batching" means? I don't mean the kind connected with computer operation. The meaning comes from the word "bachelor," which commonly is taken to mean an unmarried man. From that idea, of living without a woman, comes the term "batching." To Dad and me, in the fall of 1934, it meant doing our own house- keeping, cooking, and so on. Mom and my two sisters were living in Hinsdale, in a house rented from Dr. Cockrell. Dad and I were on the Burke place, two and a half miles out of town, taking care of the livestock.
Dad was working that winter on the Works Progress Administration historical program, digging out and reporting on the early-day history of Valley County ranching. He was away often, going through old newspaper files in libraries, and talking to old timers who could remember the former days of big ranching. Dad did his writing at home, in long hand, of course, for we didn't have a typewriter. He sent his reports in to some office. Later some of his stories appeared in the WPA History of Montana.
With Robert away working at Fort Peck Dam that year, I vibrated between the Burke place, and the house in town. I had the usual chores to do, taking care of the stock, and continued to walk back and forth the two and a half miles to school. But now I could go to the town house (hey, I never thought of that before! We had a "town house!") for lunch on school days, and Dad and I usually were there for Sunday dinner, after attending church.
Mom loved her work at the post office, and took pride in doing a good job. When the usual crowd came to the post office in the morning to get their mail, Mom enjoyed visiting with the people. She put in a good long day, too--from eight in the morning to about five or five-thirty in the afternoon. The girls enjoyed living in town because it meant they didn't have those long walks in the cold each school day.
The house they lived in had two stories, and had electricity, and water (cold water only) piped into the kitchen. The outdoor toilet was enclosed in a long shed out behind the house, which also included a storage room for all sorts of odds and ends. The house was heated in part with a wood and coal burning heater, in the living room. Part of my work now included helping to keep firewood on hand for Mom and the girls.
At the back of the yard there was a tall old red barn, long unused, but storing all sorts of old gear--harnesses, parts of a buggy, and other odds and ends. The yard was large, with a good-sized garden area,which we planted the following summer. Most important for all of us was the electricity! We had never before had a home where we had that convenience. On my short stays at the house, I could listen to the radio, something which we had not had previously. The set we had was an old Philco, shaped like a big mantle clock. Of course there was no FM in those days. Dad strung an antenna from the roof of the house to the top of the barn. On winter nights that old radio would pull in stations like KOA, Denver, and another one in Ohio, whose call letters I don't remember. I thought then, and still do, that radio is a marvelous thing. I wonder if God didn't get a bit impatient, waiting for man to "invent" it, when He had made the thing possible from the very beginning!
In this, my third year of high school, I had some choice of subjects. That year was the first in which agriculture classes were introduced in our high school, and I signed up for Animal Husbandry. Along with the agriculture subject, I had the usual English, chemistry with Mr. Shaw, and civics (government organization, and things like that). I liked all my studies, and earned good grades without really putting out much effort. In those days, very little homework was required. We did have to write "themes" in most of the courses; these were usually written outside of class. I could do most of my studying in the hours I spent in the assembly room,between classes.
Chemistry was of special interest to me, and Mr. Shaw had a good deal to do with making it interesting. He liked to conduct little experiments, to show us how things worked. The laboratory was very primitive, and lacked many things needed to do a really good job of teaching or experimenting, but he "made do," as they used to say.
One of my classmates helped make things lively. Tom was the son of Dr. Cockrell, our local doctor, and was a great "cut-up" in school, beside being a good basketball player. One day, after discovering a can of ether in the chemistry supply cabinet, Tom soaked his handkerchief with ether, and anesthetized himself, right in class! He sat behind me (I was always a front row student, by choice) and all I knew about what was going on was a peculiar odor in the air.
Suddenly, while Mr. Shaw was talking, Tom became unconscious, and slid down out of his chair onto the floor. Naturally that caused a big commotion! Several of the other students had known what Tom was trying to do, so they weren't as surprised as were the rest of us. Mr. Shaw quickly determined what the problem was, and just let Tom sleep. He was recovering, I remember, about the time class let out, as he hadn't gotten very much ether before he passed out. I don't remember what trouble Tom was in for that escapade.
One day Mr. Shaw wanted to show us how metal would burn. He lit a bunsen (natural gas) burner, and proceeded to burn steel wool. This is not difficult to do. Steel wool can be heated until red hot, and then waved briskly in the air. The result is that the steelburns, with visible flames. That, however, was only the beginning of this experiment. Next Mr. Shaw placed a little steel crucible on the top of the wood laboratory table, and filled it with a mixture of powdered aluminum and ferric oxide, which is really only common rust put up in a can. To light the mixture, he used a little ribbon of magnesium foil, tucked into the powdered mixture in the crucible, like a wick.
Then he lit the magnesium ribbon with the bunsen burner. Like the magnesium in photo flashbulbs, the ribbon burned with a brilliant white light. When the heat of the burning magnesium ribbon reached the mixture below, it ignited and flared up in a big tongue of flame almost to the ceiling. The heat was so intense, the steel crucible became red hot at the bottom, and burned its way very quickly about a quarter of an inch into the top of the lab table! That was something Mr. Shaw hadn't counted on! When the smoldering wood had been quenched, and the crucible cooled off enough for us to inspect it, we found a little chunk of iron in the bottom. All the aluminum had been consumed, and the iron in the ferric oxide smelted. It had been very interesting, and became a subject for discussion for some time! I think Mr. Shaw wished he hadn't tried that experiment, though.
Another time we were learning how hydrogen is generated, and were treated to minor explosions of hydrogen in a big bell jar. Then Mr. Shaw had the happy idea that we also could generate some oxygen, mix it with the hydrogen, and have an oxy-hydrogen torch that would produce heat and water. (You know, maybe, that water is composed of a mixture of two molecules of hydrogen teamed with one molecule of oxygen--that's why it is sometimes called H2O).
The idea sounded good. We set up the necessary equipment. The oxygen generator combined sulphuric acid, strong stuff, with zinc oxide. A tube led from the oxygen generator to a "y" tube, to which was attached a tube from the hydrogen generator. The mixture of the two gases lit readily enough, but there wasn't enough of the gas to make a very big flame. For some reason, I was watching the operation at very close range, and reached up to give the oxygen generator a little jiggle, thinking that would produce more oxygen. Maybe it did; I don't know. The flame backed up through the tube to the oxygen generator flask, which exploded right in my face, spattering me with sulphuric acid, some of which got in my eyes! It burned like fire, believe me!
Mr. Shaw acted very quickly. He put my head in the sink, and ran cold water into my face and eyes immediately, and with his fingers opened my eyes so the stuff could be washed out thoroughly. The only harm I suffered was some lasting redness in my eyes, but there was no damage to my vision, for which I am thankful. One student in the class was standing clear across the room at the time of the explosion. He had a piece of glass about an inch long from the flask stuck neatly in the middle of his forehead! What could have been a tragic event turned out to be almost harmless. Several of us had some acid on our clothing, and that didn't do the cloth any good, as you could guess.
That experience didn't keep me from further experiments with hydrogen. We knew that it was lighter than air, and one of my classmates and I came up with a neat idea. We would fill some rubber balloons with hydrogen, write something on them, and let them go in the assembly room! They would go up against the ceiling where no one could reach them! We got a couple of balloons filled all right, and decided that we would tease our basketball coach and his lady love a little. So we painted on the balloons "Mr. U_____ and Miss P_______,", (we used their names, of course) and released the balloons in the assembly room as planned.
The only trouble was that it wasn't very difficult to trace down the culprits! The balloons were used as targets, and shot down with paper clips fired from rubber bands. The principal lectured us strongly, though he could hardly keep from laughing. But we didn't do that again! But let's get back to the batching. That winter I learned to do simple cooking, especially with things cooked in a frying pan, or boiled in water. We had plenty of vegetables from the garden to eat--potatoes and carrots and even some musk melons (our name for cantaloupe) stored in the cellar under the house. And beside those things, we had eggs and milk and cream in good supply. We didn't lack for food. I did help to increase our meat supply that year by shooting pheasants and grouse frequently. We had a small stack of wheat hay down on the hay field. Dad had tried raising wheat that year, in place of the usual alfalfa, but the grain was so poor it wasn't worth harvesting or threshing. So we had cut it with a mower, raked it, and stacked it as hay. The stack contained a lot of wheat, and the Chinese pheasants learned quickly that it was a good place to feed. Jack rabbits, also, came regularly to the stack on winter nights.
Since we were fattening the birds ourselves, we saw nothing wrong with harvesting a few of them. So sometimes I would go down to the haystack on Saturday mornings, hide in some loose hay, and wait for the birds to come out of the nearby brush. I think I always shot only the male birds. Whatever, they were very good eating! Also, there were a few grouse around that winter, and I shot two or three of them. We ate pheasant and grouse simply fried in the skillet; we didn't do any fancy cooking with them.
It was in that fall and winter that I developed an intense interest in learning to mount animals and birds. I saw ads in the outdoor magazines I read, of how just about anyone could quickly learn the necessary techniques through a correspondence course from the Omaha School of Taxidermy. So I wrote to the school, and received their literature. The course sounded fascinating, and I wanted to take it, but the cost was far beyond my ability to pay--something like fifty dollars. So I didn't do anything about the course, simply because I couldn't.
It was only a couple of weeks later that I received another letter; they were offering a special price! I could have the course for only twenty dollars, or something like that. Again, I didn't reply. Well, the end of the matter was that I could take the course for just five dollars, they were so interested in me, etc., etc. That I could handle. I sent in the five dollars, and a little more, as I needed some initial supplies of arsenic and glass eyes and other stuff, per their letter. It wasn't long before the whole course (a little booklet of about twenty pages) and the arsenic,etc., came, and I could launch my new hobby.
I'll have to give the school credit that the booklet adequately explained how to skin animals and birds, how to preserve the skin with the arsenic powder (deadly poisonous stuff!), how to put in glass eyes, and so on. What they couldn't do for me was show me how to put those animals in life-like poses such as I had seen in their advertisements. That requires real artistic abilities that I didn't have, or had never cultivated. But I struggled with it manfully. Here is where the pheasants, snowshoe rabbits, and great horned owls came in. I did learn to do a fair job of skinning birds, though the great horned owl I tried to mount proved to be very difficult. The instructions said that the skin of the head must be kept intact; in other words, the skin from the body and neck must be pulled over the head, without making any cuts. The book failed to explain how the relatively huge head of an owl could possibly be pulled through the narrow skin of the neck! It simply can't be done!
I did manage to mount an owl in a taking-off--or maybe it was a landing--position. I fastened the whole thing on a board, and proudly presented it to the school, where it was to serve as one of the objects used in Future Farmers of America club meetings. I was vice president of that club that year, and needed an owl as the symbol of my office, you see. Do you know that a few years later, in 1938, when I visited the school with the men's quartet from Northern Montana College, that old owl was still in use? He looked pretty bedraggled and woe- begone, but still had his wings stretched out as if he might fly!
I didn't have such good results with the big white pelican I shot and tried to mount. That was a messy job, trying to skin that big bird from a short slit in the skin on its stomach. When I got to the task of getting that huge head and bill and its sack out through the long neck skin, I was stumped. I decided belatedly that there was no way it could be done. So I just mounted the head and neck only, on a plaque to hang on the wall. I had to cut the neck skin at the back, but managed to sew it on the form without too much trouble. It really looked pretty good, in my opinion. It was something like a big game trophy.
But I had something new to learn. I had applied lots of arsenic to that pelican's head skin and the big sack under its bill, but evidently not enough. As it hung on the wall of my bedroom the next year, the sack under the bill began to change color. From a lovely yellow-orange, it changed to a pale green, and then to a bright pea green. At that point my Mom said it had to go! I hated to part with it, but there was no choice. With that my career as a taxidermist came to an abrupt halt.

BECOMING A CHRISTIAN
Quite "out of the blue" this Sunday afternoon (May 24th, 2009) I felt an urge to go back to tell that part of my life that changed my life so completely, it was as if I had become a new person. (Of course my wife could tell you that I am still far from perfect!)
During my years in high school, and in my first two years of college (I’ll fill in the gaps later) I was like a lot of young people--enthusiastic about the "fun" times in church and young peoples’ groups, but scarcely having a ‘deep’ thought about what it meant to be a Christian. We believed about Jesus and church and so on, but it was not a significant part of our lives. In 1938, unable to find work, I signed up for the Civilian Conservation Corps for about 14 months. Though I treasure my memories of that time spent in Glacier National Park (again, a separate story to come later) I had virtually no contact with anything of a religious nature.
By saving my money carefully, by the summer of 1939 I was ready to leave the CCC's and go back to school. I applied to Willamette University, a Methodist school in Salem, Oregon,, for help, or at least the promise of a job. But they refused to offer any help at all. I had about given up hope of getting back to school that year when out of the clear blue sky I received a letter from Linfield College, in McMinnville, Oregon, offering me a full scholarship and a job! That was due to the work of my friend from Havre, Al Mundhenk! He had gone there the year before, so was now a year ahead of me. He had told the school about me (and my grades at Havre had been right up at the top) and urged them to help me come there to school. I had never even heard of the school until that letter came, but it surely didn't take me long to accept their offer!
So I was back in contact with good Christian people again! We had mandatory chapel services in the morning two or three times a week, and I loved it. I went a few times to the Baptist Church in McMinnville, where Al went, but somehow decided not to attend there. I drifted back to the Methodist Church, began going with a girl who lived in the pastor's home, and again became active there, singing in the choir, and often eating Sunday dinner with the pastor's family and my new girl friend. On Wednesday evenings, my friend, Al, and a young woman from Billings, Mary Louise Tannehill, and I planned and conducted special chapel services, in the college auditorium. These were very sparsely attended, but I thought I was doing something great, I guess. I thought I was a Christian, but I wasn't!
Well, that school year went by all too quickly, and I was dead broke again--too broke to even get back to Montana and home. I found a job in an insurance office in Portland, and lived for a time in a boarding house. There were several young fellows boarding and living in the basement, and with one of them, Bob Brower, I began going to different churches around town. We visited many, but didn't settle on any. Bob, though he never talked to me much about his faith, I believe was a Christian. We visited his church one Sunday, a United Brethren church, and I sort of laughed to myself at all the women wearing those little white lace skull caps. I never went back there with him. Later he and I rented an apartment together, to get out of the boarding house where we had been living, and from there we sometimes visited downtown churches not too far from our apartment.
Then the war came! The day after Pearl Harbor I went down to enlist in the Air Force (I had been trying for over a year to get into the cadet flying program, but couldn't pass the physical), and went into the service in early January, 1942. During basic training I couldn't go to church anywhere, but when assigned to the Air Force clerical school at Fort Logan, Colorado, I used to go in to Denver to church with a young fellow from Tennessee-- Bill Adkisson. We had a great time, attending a small Methodist Church in Denver for several weeks. In those days men in uniform were very popular, and we seldom failed to have an invitation to dinner after the service. But no one talked to us about the Lord, and maybe it wouldn't have done any good if they had. I thought then that I knew just about everything! I've often wondered what happened to Bill, as we didn't keep in touch after we left the training school at Fort Logan. He had a beautiful voice, and probably the thickest southern accent I have ever heard. When we would be riding down to Denver on the street car, and talking back and forth, people would gather around and ask him to say something, anything, so they could hear his accent. He was a great pal.
After finishing clerical school, I was sent to Mobile, Alabama, ready to go overseas. While there in the early summer of 1942, I went down town in Mobile a few times to a big Baptist church with a fellow soldier. We weren't much interested, and were there only a short time. After that, I was sent to Officer Candidate School in Miami Beach, Florida, and believe me there was no time for church in that school! We were on the dead run nearly all the time, and could think of little else than survival!
So the years went by. Assigned in Wichita, Kansas, throughout most of the war, I went for a year or two to a small Presbyterian Church which met in a school. I became involved in their scouting program, and was assistant Scout master for a year or so. Also, I sang in the choir there. In June of 1945 Jane and I were married by a Methodist minister she knew (she went to the Methodist church quite faithfully), in a Presbyterian church chapel! Soon after we married I was sent to Dayton, Ohio, for a month or so, and then to Chicago. There we visited churches, a big Methodist Church in a tall building right in the heart of the Loop in downtown Chicago, and even went once to Moody Church. There surely we must have heard the Gospel preached, but didn't recognize it.
While we lived in Glasgow and Fort Peck in the early months of 1946, after I was released from the Air Force, we went some to the Methodist Church in Glasgow, where my parents attended. We had our son, David, baptized there, because it was the thing to do. Later that year I went back to school, at the University of Montana in Missoula, and while there I had nothing to do with any church. Jane went part of the time to the Methodist Church, but I didn't go.
At the end of 1948, after working for a time with the Bureau of Reclamation in Billings, Montana, I was tranferred (and promoted) to a job with the Bureau in western Nebraska, at a little town called Indianola. There we became very much interested in church again, helping at the Methodist Church. I directed the choir, taught the adult Sunday School class (not Bible teaching, just stuff from Methodist headquarters), and we both helped with others to completely clean up and redecorate the church, etc. I remember a guest speaker there one Sunday saying that what he liked about the Methodist Church was that one could believe anything he liked, and be a good Methodist! Something about that didn't sound right to me, but I didn't really question it.
Now I didn't know it, but God was using all this experience to bring me around to really knowing Him! In the spring of 1951 we moved back to Billings, again with a nice promotion, still with the Bureau of Reclamation. This time we started attending the big Methodist Church right away, and again I became involved, singing in the choir, and teaching a large adult Sunday School class, even teaching some from the Bible! I didn't know how blind I was!
About that time, my older sister, Jean, began writing long, long letters to us, telling us of the wonder of really trusting in Jesus, and that just going to church wasn't what we needed, and so on. She leaned so heavily on us in her letters I got to the point where I would ask Jane to read the letters, and only tell me the news of Jean's family; I didn't want to wade through all that stuff about Jesus. I was terribly arrogant at this point; I thought I knew the scientific answers to the Bible's miracles, and all that.
That was in 1951. At Christmas we went up to visit Jean and her husband, Wayne. While there, I came down really sick with stomach flu! While I was lying in bed, feeling miserable, Jean and Wayne sat on either side of the bed one afternoon and really got after me about knowing Jesus. I didn't really listen, I know, but I did respect their earnestness. Maybe I was beginning to be a little more open to the Gospel.
Back in Billings, soon after that one of my high school classmates, Marjorie Vogel Peterson, and her husband, Dave, came to Billings and joined the Methodist Church. At first I completely detested Dave Peterson--he was an insurance agent, and really acted the part (as I thought of insurance agents!), glad-handing everyone, bragging about breaking the fishing laws, and so on. Not long after that, Dave and Marge began attending a weekly home Bible study, in the spring of 1952, and began inviting us to go, too. I absolutely refused, and used as my excuse the idea that I would stay home and take care of the children; Jane could go, if she wished. And she did! The study was in the home of one Harold Tannehill--an older brother of the girl I had known at Linfield College years before! Jane evidently liked it--she often didn't get home until midnight or later. I couldn't imagine what would make Bible study so interesting!
Then she began working on me (she had become a real Christian sometime that summer of 1952) to go with her. The Bible study was held every Friday night. Finally--it was Labor Day week of 1952--I agreed early in the week that I would go just once. What I didn't know was that Jane right away called her friends from the Bible study, they called others, and all that week people all over town were praying for me, that I would come to know Jesus Christ! Friday came, we took the kids with us, and I went to the meeting.
And it was fun! We sang some old songs that I had known from my boyhood--those songs Mom taught us! We read something from the Bible that I remembered, too. Then they all got down on their knees to pray, and I did, too, though I don't think I had ever done that before in my whole life.
I listened to those prayers--everyone around the circle was praying--and I wanted to pray, but didn't know what to say. Then Harold Tannehill prayed something like this: "Lord, if there is anyone here tonight who has never really asked you to come into his life (he meant me, of course) let him pray and ask you in right now." I heard that, and thought I had never asked Jesus to do that. So I prayed silently and asked Jesus to come into my life; I knew I needed Him, or something.
When I stood up at the close of the prayer time, I was literally a new person! The next day the sky was bluer--it was as if everything was new! I can never thank the Lord enough for Harold, and for Jane and Marge and Dave, and all those who were so concerned for me. Now all those foundational teachings fell into place, like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle! Mom's careful training had finally paid off! I thank God for her, too, and for all those faithful people in that little Sunday School, for the American Sunday School Union missionaries, the vacation Bible school teachers--all of them who had a part in helping me come to know Jesus as my Lord and Savior. I know that's a long story, but I wanted to tell it, and hope that you will read it with understanding. If you are a follower of Jesus, I am sure you will understand. If you are not--why don't you stop right here and simply ask Jesus to come into your life? If you will ask, he will come in! And if you do this, and thus discover what it means to be born again, please let me know. OK?

My First Job Away from Home

What happened after my operation and seeing President Roosevelt made the rest of the summer memorable for me. I was hired on my first job away from home! The wheat allotment program was started in that summer of 1934. Because of the poor prices of wheat, the government was paying farmers money to let part of their wheat land lie idle, thus reducing production, and driving up the price of wheat. Under the program, each farmer contracted with the government to grow only so many acres of wheat, that acreage being significantly less than that of the previous years. Not trusting the farmers, the government determined that the land each farmer had planted to wheat must be measured, to make certain there was no cheating, no planting of extra acres of wheat.
A man from Hinsdale, a stranger to us, came to our place one day in early July, when we were haying. He came down to the hayfield where we were working, and asked for me! His name was George Nelson. He explained that he had been awarded the contracts to measure the wheat lands in a large part of Valley County, and needed someone to help him with the work. He had inquired at the high school, and was told that I was good in mathematics, and would be good help. He offered me great wages, for a kid who had never had a job away from home before: 50 cents for each farm that we measured, plus board and room! I would stay with him and his wife and little boy, and we would be working for a month or more. It sounded good to me, and with my Dad's permission, I agreed to work for him. Right on the spot he gave me money for train fare to go to Glasgow. He would meet me there in two days, and we would get started!
Wow! I was excited! I had never gone on a train trip alone (I had never been on a train since I was an infant), and had never before worked or lived away from home. I carefully chose what clothing I would need, and caught the little local passenger-mail-freight train in Hinsdale on the appointed day. I was thrilled to be riding on the train, and looked out of the window at our place as we went by. It was great fun. When I arrived at Glasgow (only a 30-mile ride), sure enough, there was Mr. Nelson waiting for me.
We drove out to his place in his Model A Ford sedan, in which I was to ride many miles in the next few weeks. He was renting a farm house just five miles out of Glasgow at that time. He told me we would be moving back to his farm northeast of Hinsdale after the first couple of weeks of work. First we had to go to a training class the next day, to learn how to do the measuring, and keep the required records.
I surely remember that evening, as I was already homesick. After all, I was only fifteen years old! Mrs. Nelson served us a good supper (she was a very good cook!). Then I walked alone down to the river bank, and threw rocks for a while, then just sat and watched as it got dark. Nothing bad had happened, but I surely wished that I were back at home!
The training class was fun. I was the only youngster there--all the others were grown men. We were issued our equipment--a wheelbarrow contraption, with a big front wheel that gave a loud click each time the wheel made a complete revolution. That was George's tool; he had to count the revolutions of the wheel. Knowing the circumferance of the wheel, we could then calculate the length of each side of the fields we were to measure.
George would carry a bundle of stakes on the wheelbarrow, to mark the corners of the fields. He would go ahead around each field, writing down the length of each side of the field. He set a stake at each corner. My job was a bit more technical, and this was where my knowledge of geometry fitted in. My "instrument" was a crude transit, made without any lenses. It consisted of a sharply pointed piece of steel three-quarter inch pipe, with a flat little table set on top, at right angles to the pole. On the table was a metal device that could be rotated in a full circle. On the top of the table was a graduated circle, showing the degrees from 0 to 360.
In use, I would set the pole in the ground, as nearly vertical as I could judge simply by looking at it, and close to the stake George had left. Then I would sight through a narrow slot in the metal device back to the last stake we had left, sometimes as much as a mile away. Next I would set the compass to zero, then swing the metal device around and sight it on the stake at the next corner, which George would have left. Then I read and recorded the angle of the corner where I stood. It required good eyesight, which happily I had in those days. Though simple, it was really an accurate device.
When we had been completely around a field, I would draw a diagram of the field, showing the distances on each side, and the angles of the corners. Here was where my geometry helped a lot. Lots of fields were anything but square--some had five or six sides. Fortunately, none were round! With what I knew of geometry, I could make a quick check to see if our measurements and angles were within the degree of accuracy required for the work. This data, for each field we measured on each farm (often several fields), was sent in to the County Agent's office for checking of the actual acreage against that farmer's contract. If our data was not accurate, we would be required to go back and remeasure that particular field. I'm glad to say that of our contracts that summer, we had to go back and remeasure only two fields--and on one of those fields our previous measurements were proved to be correct!
George really appreciated my knowledge of math, for he was totally unable to handle the calculations. He used to brag about me to the other allotment people; I was pretty proud. George believed in putting in good long days. We would leave his place early in the morning, with a plan for the day, going from one farm to another with the least amount of wasted time and mileage. We would check in with the farmer, or, if no one was at home, leave a note and go to work. George was a wheat farmer himself, and we had few troubles.
Although we always carried sack lunches with us, George would try to work things out so that we could either arrive or just be finishing at a farm about noon. Often we were invited to eat with the farm family, and enjoyed some mighty nice meals! I can recall a few of those special days. One day we were at the farm of our old neighbor on the homestead, John Goodmanson. He was a bachelor, so no meal was expected there. To top it off, John wasn't at home! We were desperate for something cool and liquid, so we simply went into his house, found a can of tomatoes in his cupboard, and consumed that. George left a note and some small change to pay for the food. In those days almost no one had a lock on their house door, and, if they had, wouldn't leave the house locked. We trusted each other completely.
On another day, we arrived at the farm house at just the right time. The farmer was away, but his wife invited us to take "pot luck" with her and the family, a swarm of little kids. Neither George nor I had previously met this lady. We sat down to a simple meal of meat stew and bread and butter. It was without question one of the best stews I had ever eaten! We both had two or three helpings.
Then, when we were satisfied, and George and this lady were enjoying a cup of coffee (I was too young for coffee!), she mentioned casually: "We sure hated to lose that colt; it got tangled up in some barb wire, and my husband had to shoot it. No use wasting good meat, though!" We didn't miss the point: we had been enjoying horse stew! So far as I know, that was the first time I had ever eaten horse meat, or even heard of people eating it. It was good, and the fact that it was horse didn't bother me at all.
With good luck we could measure the fields on three, or sometimes four farms each day. Because we knew exactly how far it was around each field, we calculated that we were walking twenty-five to thirty miles most days! It was really interesting work, and I enjoyed it. For me, the earning of $1.00 or maybe $2.00 in a day was like being in clover!
There were some disadvantages of the whole set-up, though. After we moved back to George's farm, about six miles east and a bit north of Hinsdale, I found I had nothing to do evenings. There were lots of gophers around, but I didn't have my .22 there, so couldn't shoot them, as I would have liked. I hadn't brought any books with me, and thus had nothing to read except some old pulp magazines the Nelsons had in their attic, mostly Wild West and detective stories. I didn't much like such reading materal at first, but became interested after a short time. Before my working time was over, I became enthusiastic about westerns, and read stacks of them.
George and his wife liked to get away from home evenings, and pretty often I found myself riding herd on their little boy, Billy. He wasn't a bad youngster, but he required much attention. I would walk around the farm with him, then read to him until he got sleepy, and then put him to bed. After that I could have some time to read what I wanted to. I was usually too tired to sit up late, though.
One interesting thing about George's house--they had Aladdin lamps. At home we had always had simple old kerosene wick lamps, so I had never had any experience with the much better lighting that the Aladdin lamps produced. The lamps made a soft hissing sound, as they worked with air pressure, and produced light from a mantle, similar to the mantles of gasoline lanterns.
George believed in a six-day work week, so I didn't get to go home but once or twice during the five or six weeks I worked with him that summer. I felt quite grown up, I guess, and really wasn't very homesick after the first few days. Going from farm to farm I often saw young people with whom I had gone to school, and that helped. Some of them were girls, and George was always teasing me of having very wrong interests in those girls. That embarrassed me no end, because I was too shy to talk to a girl, and certainly didn't have any girl friends.
One thing I enjoyed on some of our work days was shooting sage hens (sage grouse) for the table. George, like most other folks in those days, paid no attention to game laws. He usually had his big old twelve guage shotgun tucked away in the back seat of the car, under our measuring devices and boxes of records. When we would spot a bunch of young sage hens, with their mother hen, George would stop, get the gun out, load it, and carefully use one shot to kill two or three of the young birds. He didn't want to shoot the old birds, which were too old and tough to eat, and he didn't do any fancy wing shooting, either. He shot for meat. He would wait until several young birds would be bunched together, with their necks stretched out, looking at us, and then shoot into the bunch. We would do a quick job of field dressing the birds, and take them home to eat. Mrs. Nelson was always glad to have them to cook.
Well, the day came when we finished all our contracts, took our equipment back to Glasgow to the County Extension Agent's office, and were done with wheat measurement for that year. George asked me to plan to work with him again the next year, and I said I would. I don't remember just what I did with the money he paid me, but it seemed to me to be a small fortune. I probably bought clothing, and saved the rest. Our parents always encouraged us to save as much as we possibly could. I went back to work with my Dad, doing chores, helping with the tending and irrigating of our large garden, and the late cutting of hay.

Tonsils out - new president in

TONSILS OUT AND A NEW PRESIDENT IN
This summer was to bring something new to me--my first job away from home, and also the loss of my tonsils. Let's talk about the bad news first! For years I had been troubled with a sore throat most of the time, or so it seemed to me. After we moved from the homestead down to the Burke place, the same trouble followed me. My throat would get awfully sore, I'd be sick for a few days, and then it would go away. I had been to see Doctor Cockrell a time or two about it, and he had recommended that my tonsils and adenoids be removed. I was what was called a "mouth breather" (I usually had my mouth hanging open!) because the adenoids nearly completely blocked the nasal passages. Dad used to tell me to keep my mouth shut, but I couldn't--I had to breathe through it most of the time.
That summer of 1934 was a tough one for many people. Work was hard to find, wages were low, and expensive operations just couldn't be considered. Then one day in June, 1934, the doctor told my folks that there was public money available to help. He wanted several of the neighborhood children to have our tonsils out, all on one day, at the hospital in Glasgow. While I surely wanted to be rid of my persistent sore throat, you have no idea how I dreaded the thought of an operation!
The day came, and we tonsillectomy victims, a whole carload, went to Glasgow and to the hospital. I had never been in a hospital before, and can still remember that "ether plus lysol" smell in the hallways. We boys (the three Grant boys were also there) were taken to one large ward, and told to get our clothes off, and to get into hospital gowns.
Now you should realize that I had just turned fifteen, in June, and was enjoying those changes that happen to boys at that age. My voice was changing, and hair was growing in new places. I was acutely modest, honestly! When I found out what a hospital gown was, I was ready to jump out of a window. They gave us children's gowns, and the silly one given to me to put on, tied in the back as they still do today, came down exactly to my navel! My whole lower area was exposed to the world! Well, in agony we boys got into those things, and then crawled under the sheets to hide our nakedness. I had never been so embarrassed in my life!
Soon our Doctor Cockrell, who was to do the surgeries, came cheerfully down the hall to our ward, and asked who would like to be first. As you can guess, there was total silence. Then, because I wanted badly to get the whole thing over, I volunteered. I had to walk down a long hall in that miniature gown, right past open doors of rooms occupied by various people. I was sure they all were looking at me, and enjoying my discomfort and embarrassment. I crawled up on the operating table on my own, accepted the ether mask, and was soon counting, as they did in those days, while the ether took effect.
The next thing I knew I was back in the ward, in bed, with the most terrible sore throat I had ever had. Next to me were a couple of other fellows, still under the anesthetic, drooling bloody stuff on their pillows, just as I had been doing. Oh, that was a long, terrible day! We could have CocaCola to drink, and were given a little ice cream to eat, but mostly we were so nauseated from the ether we didn't want anything. We didn't want to swallow, or to do the opposite, which was happening all too frequently. We all survived, of course, and after a restless night were allowed to go home the next day.
That operation took place in the latter part of June, and the weather was hot and dry. Because of my delicate condition, I didn't have to work for a few days, at least, and so had a good chance to recover. But I wasn't quite through with the effects of the operation yet!
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, our new President, was touring the West that summer to show himself to the people. He was scheduled to stop in Glasgow, our county seat, for a ceremony in which he would be made an honorary member of an Indian tribe from the reservation east of Glasgow, at Wolf Point. This was a big event in that part of the country, and almost the whole population of the county gathered in Glasgow for a chance to see the President.
This event took place just three days, I remember, after I had come home from the hospital. The weather was very hot, probably above a hundred degrees in the shade, and there was precious little shade. Nevertheless, we all went, and found fairly good spots to stand along the main street in Glasgow, though we were a rather long distance from the depot where the President's train was to stop. We had brought a chair for Mom to sit on, but the rest of us were standing as we waited.
It was a long wait, and the hot sun was beating down on my bare head. I was very thirsty, and my throat was still very sore, but there was no water available. I'd just have to wait, Dad said. Finally the train pulled in, and from a distance of maybe two hundred yards we saw our President! He was helped down out of the Pullman car, seated in a wheel chair, and wheeled to the platform where he met the Indians. More than that I don't remember! As we were standing there, craning our necks to see all we could, I noticed the man standing just to my right begin to sway back and forth. Then he crumpled down in a heap. I turned to Dad, and asked him,"Did you see that?"
I didn't hear his answer! After a while I came to! I, too, had passed out from standing in that hot sun! I have no idea how long I was unconscious, but I know it was long enough to draw a crowd of people, all standing around looking down at me as I opened my eyes. Someone offered me a glass of water, which I quickly gulped down despite my sore throat. I couldn't imagine what had happened, until I was told that I had fainted or something. Whatever it was (the doctor said later that I had been overcome by the heat), I had a terrible headache, and the whole episode really didn't please me very much! But I had seen the President of the United States!

SECOND YEAR OF HIGH SCHOOL

SECOND YEAR OF HIGH SCHOOL
What I am about to say may sound crazy to you! The highlight of my second year in high school was geometry! Having always liked arithmetic, and having gotten along well in algebra, I was looking forward to geometry, despite the fact that the fabled Miss Dutch would be my teacher. However, I had gotten along very well with Miss Dutch in algebra. My only concern was that geometry might be too difficult to master.
As so often happens, my fears turned out to be foolish. Geometry was not like other mathematics courses--it was a course in thinking! I was really delighted with it, learning how to prove one theorem, and then use that proven fact to help formulate other theorems and prove them. I literally ate it up! Also I learned a lot about the relationships of angles and tangents, and the sides of various figures--triangles and rectangles, and how to calculate the area of all sorts of circles, rectangles, etc. This was knowledge that would be helpful soon.
I had other new teachers that year, also, and learned something from each of them. We had a new basketball coach, and though I still couldn't (or didn't) "go out" for basketball, I was very enthusiastic about our team. We had a new English teacher, Miss Mary McGee, a lady maybe fifty years old, who was a fine teacher. And then there was a new science teacher, Mr. Shaw, who was my biology teacher that year. He and his wife lived in an apartment in the school dormitory. He had shelves and shelves of books, and encouraged me to borrow books from him, to supplement my reading from the school library. I think of all my teachers in high school, Mr. Shaw probably did the most to encourage me to learn everything I could, in whatever area my interests might run. We were good friends!
In those days there were no objections to having Christian ideas expressed in school. As Christmas approached, Miss McGee was in charge of developing the high school Christmas program. I remember that she had Wyatt Grant, Ernest Copenhaver, and me practice as a trio to sing "We Three Kings of Orient Are" in the program. Also, for some reason I don't remember, I helped her arrange a nativity scene on the stage. We had some cut-out animals, but didn't have either an ox or a donkey. One day when she and I were talking about the setting, I suggested that we should surely have an ox. Unfortunately, she misunderstood me, and thought I had said "ass," pronouncing the word carefully with a very broad "a"--like "ahse." I was too embarrassed to try to correct the misunderstanding, so agreed with her, and we found someone to cut out a donkey in cardboard. Thus we had an "ahse," but no ox, in our nativity scene!
Apart from my high school studies, the choir at the Methodist Church was also important to me. I think it was in this second winter there that I had opportunity to sing a solo! In those days the church had only a little thin red hymnal, with perhaps one hundred fifty different songs, old familiar favorites. We young folks knew those books backward and forward. I'm quite sure, though of course I can't prove it, my song was number 139, "Oh Soul Without a Savior." My voice was just changing, and I tried to sing it as a bass. It was not what you would call an outstanding success, I know. I didn't attempt another solo in church until years later! Once was more than enough!
I was still working during the winter months at trapping weasels. That winter I made two unusual catches. The first was a magpie, which must have seen the snowshoe rabbit meat I had used as bait, and become caught in the weasel trap. It was caught by one leg, and was very much alive as I approached the trap. The poor bird screamed at me, and it seemed to me that it was really calling "help!" Instead of killing it (as I usually did to magpies whenever I had a chance), I let it go!
The second catch, also not a weasel, I would gladly have let go if I could! I had set a trap very carefully in an old hollow cottonwood log, with some strong and supposedly attractive scent placed back in the log beyond the trap. I had already caught one weasel there, and thought that morning as I checked the trap, that maybe I would have another good weasel. Sure enough--something was in the trap! I couldn't see the trap, but the chain was pulled tight back into the hollow log.
Very casually, expecting to find a frozen weasel, I pulled on the chain, and then gave a harder pull when the trap didn't come out easily. On that second try, I found what I had captured--a fine, very much alive skunk! Naturally, he used the only defense he knew--sprayed his scent much too quickly for me to avoid his aim, and then crawled back into the log! Well, that was another learning experience. I went back to the house to ask Dad what to do. He had gained some experience with skunks when he was a boy in Wisconsin, and said he would help. We took a pole about twelve feet long, fastened a hook of wire on the end of it, and went back down to where the trapped skunk was. With the pole Dad pulled the trap far enough out of the hole to expose the skunk, so I could shoot it without getting sprayed any more. Of course, my clothes had to be taken off before I could come in the house, and I had one very odorous skunk to skin. It appeared to me to be a fine skin, when I finally got it off the carcass, and on a stretcher, though it was a bit smelly.
When the skin was finally dry enough to ship to a fur company, I had the problem of how to mail it. With my sister Jean helping, I got the skin wrapped up and placed in a cardboard tube, and covered with wrapping paper. On my way to school one morning I stopped by the postoffice to mail the package. Unfortunately, the postmaster said the smell was a bit too much, and refused to accept the package! Having no place to leave it, I took it to school with me, thinking I would take it home and wrap it up better for another try.
Would you believe it--someone in school objected to the presence of that package in the cloakroom! It ended, if I remember rightly, in my putting the package down in the furnace room at the school for the day. (The janitor sympathized with me to that extent.) Well, I took the thing home, rewrapped the package, got it accepted for mailing, and awaited the check. Finally the fur company, Beckman Brothers, in Great Falls, rejected the skin. Not only was it too smelly, they said, but it was past its prime, and worthless! So I got nothing for all my troubles! That was the last time I skinned a skunk!
The school year went by quickly, with the usual marble playing in the spring, when the weather warmed up. Again I was busy taking care of the cattle, helping get the garden started, and doing the usual farm chores. Almost before I knew it, summer had come, and I was out of school again. My brother, Robert, was now taking a home correspondence course in higher accounting, from LaSalle Extension University. He worked hard at it, in every spare minute he could find. My sister, Jean, was doing well in school, and would be a senior in the fall. She, too, was apparently going to be valedictorian of her class. I helped in the early part of the summer with our large garden, haying, and spent a lot of time swimming in the river.
A surprise was coming for me--geometry paid off!