Final Post of the Year

Christmas was wonderful this year with our three youngest grandchildren spending the night and opening their presents Christmas morning, just like they did when they were very small.  Of course the presents at this age are not what they used to be -- 3DX, DXi XL, laptop, video games -- and no early morning waking to get to their gifts.

This was our Christmas gift - having the young ones spend time with us.  We cooked dinner, enjoyed the meal, and spent the rest of the day playing video games.  They even had fun dancing to Just Dance 3.

Hope all of you had as great a holiday.  New Years celebration is fast approaching and I wanted to get off one more post before the final minute.  I wish to print these posts as a book for my family and this is my cut-off point. 

So what should I sum up the year with - I thought about posting information for kids on their father's family, the Earle's.  But I think I will leave that for the new year.  Another possibility was my husband's family.  His mother passed away last year and I've yet to do any posts on her family, the Wingate's, who were early settlers in the Treasure Valley.  But another that I will leave for the new year.  So I think I will stay with the immediate family.

There was one birth this year (nephew Jake finally got his son after two darling little girls), no deaths in the immediate family, two weddings (my brother Adrian's grandson, Michael in May and my sister's daughter, Christi in July), a family reunion (the Crawford family descendents meeting in Emmett in June), lots of birthdays and I hope I remembered all the events.  Our family is so thankful to live in Idaho where hurricanes, tornadoes, tsunamis, slides, and other natural disasters seem to avoid us - the occasional earthquake, forest fire, avalanche and winter storm, but not extremely severe.

New Years is a time to reflect on these things, so hope you take a few moments to think about what has happened with you this year and find what makes you thankful. 

Still Trying to Write that Family History

In my continuing saga of writing the 'story of my life', I purchased Lois Daniel's How to Write Your Own Life Story.  While this is a very good book in its fourth edition, it is still challenging for someone with either a poor memory or huge part of her life that she has blocked out.

The second chapter that she proposes you write (after talking about the details and significance of your birth) is about toys, first memories, and so forth.  So, I've tried to remember toys that I had as a child and, for the life of me, I could not think of any except the Barbie doll that my sister bought me in 1963, when I was 16 (I know, pretty old for a doll, right?). She was so tickled to be able to buy me a nice doll with her own money.

It is times like now that I really miss my sister, Christina, because in this situation I would just call her up and she would rattle off all the toys I had.  She was ten years older than me, don't you know, so she would remember so much more about my early years than I could ever start to, at least up until she left home.

I tried asking my brothers, but they could only remember toys that they had, and just barely that.  Roger remembered getting a bow and arrow one year and we all had memories of the cars and trucks we used to drive up and down the hillside beside our home in Garden Valley. Roger also thought he had a BB gun at one point or maybe a western gunfighter set.  He did finally mention that he thought I had a baby doll that you feed water and it wet its pants (Betsy Wetsy??).

Our family was really poor (and big) with my father's job cutting trees in the national forests only being during the summers and money being short in the winter time when Christmas came around.  So of course we did not get a lot of gifts at Christmas time.  And you would think, with a father that was around trees all the time, that our Christmas trees would be full, beautiful ones - not so.  Here's a picture of one of them that was pretty typical of our trees and not many packages for 8 kids (and about the tree selection, maybe he wanted to save the nice ones so they would grow into lots of board-feet for future cutting):

Well, anyway, back to my memories of toys - my last resort was to go to the internet and check for toys of the 1950s.  There I found a bunch of toys that I remember we had a one time in our home, whether they were family toys, brothers' toys or mine, I don't know.  The list includes the slinky,

Wooly Willy Magnetic drawing toy,

Pic-up Stix,

Jacks,

Thumbelina doll,

Tinker Toys,

and the hula hoop.

My husband shared that he had several Daisy Air Rifles sent to him over the years by his aunt (his father's sister Reta) who worked for the company in the Bentonville, Arkansas area.  He was the oldest of three kids, having a younger sister and brother so there weren't as many kids for which to buy toys.

Do you remember any or all of these toys?  Many of these are also toys my children were still playing with in the 1970s and 80s.  Not so today.  With the booming of the technology/electronic age, kids today would be bored to death with jacks or pic-up stix (unless it was a DSL, Wii, or XBOX game). 

I think I've mentioned before that my first memory was sitting on top of a chest freezer, gazing out the window at my brothers playing, confined to the house because I had measles, chicken pox, or some other childhood illness.  Other memories are jogged by looking at family snapshots taken of me during these times, but I don't recall a picture like this so it must have been an impressive memory.

Thanksgiving Season and more

Thanksgiving reminds me of my connections to the Mayflower, which I will repost here:

James Chilton - Susanna Furner
Mary Chilton - John Winslow
Susanna Winslow - Robert Latham
Hannah Latham - Joseph Washburn
Ephraim Washburn - Mary Polen/Pollard
Japhet Washburn - Priscilla Coombs
Chloe Washburn - Nathaniel Dexter
Lotan Dexter - Ruby Fish
Walter Marshall Dexter - Alida Jane Bennett
Mary Winnie Dexter - Thomas Elbridge Logue
Cecil Elbridge Logue - Rachel Helen Crawford

Francis Cooke - Hester Mahieu
Jane Cooke - Experience Mitchell
Elizabeth Mitchell - John Washburn
Joseph Washburn - Hannah Latham
Ephraim Washburn - Mary Polen/Pollard
Japhet Washburn - Priscilla Coombs
Chloe Washburn - Nathaniel Dexter
Lotan Dexter - Ruby Fish
Walter Marshall Dexter - Alida Jane Bennett
Mary Winnie Dexter - Thomas Elbridge Logue
Cecil Elbridge Logue - Rachel Helen Crawford

Today (November 26th) is youngest brother, Gerald's birthday, tomorrow would have been my father's 104th birthday and Monday is my 64th.  Mom would have been 98 on Dec 6th.

*  *   *  *   * *  * *  * *  * *  * *  * *  * *  * *  * *  * *  * *  * *  * *  * *  * *  * *

Sharing one more story, I often wondered why I have had such a fear of drowning - well not really drowning but being in a flood.  Watching the tsunami strike in Japan in March of this year, my memories of the nightmares I had as a youth came back vividly.  I know this fear stems from the winter that Smith Creek dammed up and when it finally broke loose, it flooded our home and forced us to spend Christmas across the river at my Uncle Walt's.  I believe this was 1957 or 58. We had to stay out of our home for several days and for weeks after it was cleaned up and we could move back, there were big puddles of water all around our home - where ever there was a dip in the ground.  

When we moved up the South Fork of the Payette, our home was near the river again, but not on the river plain or on a creek.  The house was placed on a bluff overlooking the river and was well above flood level.  But I still had nightmares that the river would flood over its banks and reach our home.  Other things that did not help this fear was the time my brothers drove into the river on the road to Banks (no one was seriously hurt, but the cars was pretty messed up) and the time that Cyril rolled off the road (while driving home from work), down an embankment and into the river up the South Fork from our home.  One passenger was thrown from the vehicle, one was killed in the accident, and Cyril broke his leg.

The Payette River, swollen by spring runoff and rain.

Japan tsunami

So I no longer have nightmares of flooding, but owning a couple homes with basements that have flooded and having lived through the flooding of our home in the 50's, I know how much damage even just a little water on the floor can do. 

Back Again, After a Short Break

I think I've written before that the family moved 'across the valley' in about 1960,  but really we moved from above Crouch on the Middle Fork of the Payette River [below on the first map, where it is marked Logue Home - near the present-day Terrace Lakes that wasn't existing at the time of our move] to a leased cottage site on the South Fork of the Payette east of Garden Valley [on the second map, by the present-day Garden Valley airport].  See the following maps.

The top of the first map is pointing west instead of North.  These photos are courtesy of the Garden Valley Chamber of Commerce.

I've also mentioned that my father purchased a house that had been used by the sawmill company for mill workers.  When he secured the leased cottage site on a 99 year lease, he decided to move the building to the new home site via logging truck.  As the truck crossed Smith Creek (the road just went over a culvert that channeled the flow of the water), the truck slipped off the road and the house slipped off the truck.  They had a difficult time getting the house back onto the truck so they could haul it the 8-10 miles to our new place.  I wish I had a good photo of this house.  My dad had to tear off two bedrooms to fit the house on the truck and it took him several years to add those rooms back (along with an in-door bathroom).  I still remember all the cold days having to make that trek outdoors to the outhouse.  And even after the bathroom was added, we kept the outhouse cause whenever it was extremely cold in the winter the pipes would freeze and with such a large family you could never guarantee the bathroom was going to be free when you really needed it.

Eventually dad and the older boys succeeded in adding on two bedrooms - after several years of them (the boys) sleeping outside on a mattress under a canvas tarp in the summers and inside an camp trailer in the winters.  [Being the only daughter - my sister was ten years older than I and had moved out long before this time - I remember spending at least one winter sleeping in the attic on a mattress with barely enough room to dress because you could not stand up all the way up there.]  The camp trailer was purchased for dad to take to the woods in the summers when he was logging in a part of the forest that he could not drive to easily from the house (which was most of his logging jobs).

Cyril and Gerald in front of camp trailer, c. 1960

 

The trailer parked in the woods during the summer.

Sometimes my brothers and I would be able to spend a week in the woods with dad while he worked.  It was fun wandering around in the woods, but we had to be careful because there was logging activity going on - trees falling, caterpillars climbing up and down hills, logging trucks racing up and down the roads.

It is almost Thanksgiving (here in 2011) and as I was going through old photos to try to find something of our old home I came across this photo of Thanksgiving dinner in 1964 or 65.  Around the table, starting directly in front, in the blue/red plaid, is Roger, Adrian, Cyril, Timmy, Christina (on one of her rare visits home - she was living with Great-Aunt Kate at this time), Gerald, Dad (carving the turkey), Mom (can only see her arms), and lastly Great-Aunt Kate (in her late 80s at this time).  I am the one taking the picture and to whom the empty chair belongs.  Missing is my oldest brother Tommy.

The turkey was one of about a dozen that dad had raised that year.  I'm surprised there was no birthday cake on the table, as Thanksgiving was usually a birthday for one of us - Dad's on Nov 27, Gerald's on Nov 26, mine on Nov 28, and Mom's on Dec 6.  So this was a big holiday celebration of us each year.

So have a Happy Thanksgiving and may your blessings be many.

To Continue on with my Story

Two of my brothers were over this last weekend and we talked about what it was like growing up in Garden Valley, especially up on the Middle Fork of the Payette River.  They recalled when our oldest brother, Tommy, took a gas motor that dad had taken from an old Maytag washer (replacing it with an electric one) and hooked it up to a generator to power car headlights so we could ice skate after school on the frozen pond down the road from our house.  The daylight on winter days in Idaho is really short and we didn't want to skate in the dark.

We also sketched a map of the area where our house stood - across the river from the portable sawmill.  You can't get to that place the same way anymore, as the bridge has been taken out and the road down to the river in that place has been gated and access is restricted.   See below the pictures I took this summer as I attempted to go down to view our 'old stomping grounds.'

We talked about where the barn where we housed out old blue roan milk cow was located - just over Smith Creek which we had to cross to reach our home after we went across the single lane wooden bridge that spanned the Middle Fork.  Roger remembered there was a shed in front of the barn that housed a corn mill/husker.  And next to our pump house was an old garage/car port with an abandoned Wiley's Jeep with fake wood-grained siding.  The reason he remembers it is because there were so many of us kids, he and Adrian would sleep during the warmer nights on a mattress in the back of this abandoned Jeep to relieve the crowding in our small house. 

By the time I was in Junior High, we had moved from the Middle Fork to the South Fork of the Payette River - up by the Ranger Station.  Again we were near the river, but at this place along this river, the riverbed was covered with rocks, the river was swift, and the water was oh so much colder than the water in the Middle Fork.  There was a fair-sized island about 6 feet out from the riverbank and by the time we had waded out to it, our teeth were chattering, but it didn't keep us away.  That willow covered island was our new playground when we weren't climbing the hills.
 

When I was in my high school algebra class (1962-63), our teacher, Mrs Thomas (second row left in picture below), was a unique lady that had traveled all over the world, had tutored in Hawaii for a wealthy family, had lots of fun stories to tell, and loved introducing us backwoods kids to the city life and culture.  She would take one or two of us at a time to Boise to 'operettas' (one of the theaters was putting on a series of Nelson Eddy and Jeannette McDonald musicals)

and out to restaurants to eat (Chinese, Mexican, whatever).  This was my first time experiencing this kind of life.  For Garden Valley had no movie theater, no drive-in, no bowling alley, no soda or hamburger shop, and no other typical teen hang-out that most people associate with the 1960s.

 On steps of GV High School my freshman year

I had spend one summer in Boise with my music teacher, Marcella Boylan (she gave me 8-10 years of accordion lessons, driving to Garden Valley from Boise once a week) to entertain her deaf daughter.  She had sent us to the movies (saw 'A Shot in the Dark' with Peter Sellers), taken me to a beauty shop for a permanent, and I accompanied them to a large wedding.  But most of the time I spent in her home keeping her daughter company.  This was in 1964 when I was a sophomore.

Another memory about my freshman year at Garden Valley High School (1962-63) - my history teacher was Mr. Lindsey, whose son Mark Lindsey was the lead singer for Paul Revere and the Raiders.  (The band appeared regularly on national television, most notably on Dick Clark's Where the Action Is, Happening '68, and It's Happening, the latter two of which were co-hosted by Revere and Lindsay.)  Mark's brother attended our school and was in my grade.  The rest of the family remained in Council.

I never really dated in high school (remember I was the extremely shy, chunky gal with all the brothers).  I went to one of the proms with my brother, Adrian.  I liked lots of boys and when I was a senior one of the boys I had liked had joined the army and he wrote to me a lot.  He was sent to France, which was a country I had always wanted to visit (I took French in school just in case I ever got to go).  His name was Tom Johnstone and he was related to a guy who owned a cattle ranch in Garden Valley, as well as Montour and Emmett (this guy eventually was involved with the initial planning for Tamarack resort in Valley County, Idaho and even has a park in Garden Valley named for him).  Tom's father, his brother John and his sister moved onto the ranch to work for their relative.

Roger's Story

My younger brother, Roger also added his recollections to my story - "I was named after a truck driver my mother knew and my middle name, Tuttle, was my grandmother's maiden name, on my mother's side.  I was born in Emmett Idaho on June xx, 19xx at 714 pm, I was 20 inches long and weighed 7 lbs. and 9 ozs.  My Doctor was Ed Newcombe.

 Baby Roger with older siblings

I have no recollections of my mother's parents. My father's dad, I only remember him sitting in a chair. But Grandma I remember quite well, she always had graham crackers on top of the refrigerator.

The first place I remember living was behind the Garden Valley Store. The store had an uneven wooden porch, and an old horse hitching post out front. There was a big beautiful yard on the one side and on the other a road went up and made a big loop. We lived at the top of the loop to the right directly behind the store. There was a couple of other building at the top of the loop and then a big white house on the left. This was where the Arterburns lived. In the center were some trees, one of which had a platform built in it, a tree house. Behind our house, on the way to the outhouse, was an old Model A car body, and a wood shed of some sort.

Roger (front) at house behind store in GardenValley

Down the road a ways was the schoolhouse. There was a very high slide, teeter-totters, and the giant strides. This was a tall pole that the top was free to turn and had several chains attached with one or two bars at the end. You grab one of these bars and run around the pole and swing on the end of the chain and take giant strides to keep going. [You had to really watch out, especially if some of them were shortened to just two bars across - they would hit you in the head really hard.  I still have knots on my forehead from being hit by the Giant Strides.  But boy did I love to play on them. Reba]  It was a lot of fun in later years but then I was too small to make it work right. When I was five they let me visit the school with my brother and sister. I remember going across the road to a hand pump well to get water in a bucket for drinking water for everyone.

 The Giant Strides

Across the road from the school, where the water pump was, there was an old building that used to be a stage stop. It was a big building with a porch all the way around it. Inside was a large room with several rooms along one side and a kitchen area at one end. The Taylors lived there, and we use to go watch TV there. It seems like always war movies.

 Beside the stage stop was a small house where Mr. Quinn lived, and between the two buildings was a wooden fence with a big gate. Through the gate were several old buildings one of which was a granary. It had a big piece of board missing from the door so we could sneak in and play in the grain bins. And it seems like I was always finding pennies on the ground around that door. We also found pennies where the old school burned down between the high school and the grade school.

One day Adrian, Reba and I decided to walk to the river, and we took off across the fields toward the river from the store.  We didn't get far before Tom (our oldest brother) came and got us. We tried to hide behind a hay stack but he had already saw us and came right to where we were, and took us back home.

I had quite a crush on the daughter of the store proprietors. One time Adrian and Reba talked us into kissing under a rug that her mother had put out on the line to beat the dust out of it. I went in one end and she went in the other and when we met in the middle we kissed. I remember her lips being chapped. As we kissed we heard Adrian and Reba laughing, they were looking up at us from the bottom of the rug. I was up in the tree house watching when the Arterburns moved away. I don't remember what my feelings were but it must have left quite an impression since I remember it so clearly.

The only other memory I have while living behind the store is one of my uncles buying my warts. I had several warts all over my hand and he said if he paid me a penny for each wart and I didn't spend the money they would go away. I hid them in a tin can with a lid, inside the bottom of the couch and my warts went away.

The summer I turned six, 1955, we moved to the other end of the valley, across the river, behind the old portable mill. Our house was a long house built on two big logs called skids, for a foundation.  There were two rooms in the main building, a long room that was kitchen, dining room and living room, a small bedroom at the end and another bedroom and a big porch built along side.  A wood shed along side the driveway and a garage in back and of course the outhouse behind the garage. The woodshed was more of a tool shed with a elongated roof in back where we kept our fire wood. It was all up close to the hill not far from a white cliff face, which can still be seen from the main road that goes up the river.

 Into Army 1968, trained for helicopters in Alabama military base.  Served in KY, Alaska, and Vietnam, getting out in 1970, after 13mos in Vietnam."


Roger told me this week that he is again attempting to write his life story for his children and grandchildren.  Maybe one day I can post that story on my blog also.  Til then, I will continue on with my story and genealogical research notes.

More Early School Years

Although Garden Valley was a small community, I found it very unusual that I went to school with lots of Lindas - Linda Ho..., Linda Al..., Linda Ed...., Linda La....,  Linda Wa..., Linda Mo..., and Linda Do... (last names hidden because all of them are still living and could possibly be reading this).  After all, when I was in high school there were less than 100 students in all twelve grades.  In fact there are four of them in the school picture I posted last time (third and fourth grade), two in the front row and two in the back.

School was always easy for me.  My elementary teachers were wonderful (my third and fourth grade teacher was sister to the first and second grade teacher, Mrs Harp), strict and thorough.  They taught phonics, drilling us until we could sound the letters in our sleep, and my spelling shows this.  I remember the countless hours of circles, slanted loops, humps and wavy lines as I practiced my long-hand writing (now called cursive by my grandkids).

All those hours of study made me a good writer, and looking at the diary that I kept in my senior year and all the journals I've found from different times in my life that is true, but don't ask me to write (hand write) a diary or even a letter today.  The lack of using a pen or pencil for anything more than a quick note or a grocery list.  And I've read lately that teachers now days are spending fewer and fewer hours per week teaching our children penmanship and failure to write well often results in reduced math and literacy skills.  

Years of office work on computers and emailing friends and families have led to a deterioration of my handwriting skills.  I lack the ability to think free flow and writing it by hand, so used am I to editing as I go by my digital communication these days.  Admit it, typing is fast while handwriting is slow.

So back to my school years, my favorite class was English and as long as I can remember I wanted to be a teacher - preferably an English teacher.  I had three aunts who were teachers (my father's older sisters and his youngest brother's wife) so I thought this would be how I would love to spend my life, molding young minds.  I suppose my school mates would remember me as the bright but shy, heavy-set girl that was always willing to help with homework for anyone who asked.  And because I have six brothers, I've always been able to get along with guys better than the girls, whether in school, in my careers, or in clubs and organizations.  The guys always seemed to think of me as 'one of the boys.'  It could also be because I was kind of a tom-boy.

Back to My Memories

The only time I remember my father spanking me was when I was five or six and I had gone with a young mother (who was probably 18 or 19 years old) to her folks' place up Alter Creek.  My mom and dad had said I couldn't go with her, but I went anyway.  The girl's name was Whitehead and she had a little baby. I guess my folks were worried sick about me and when I got home, I was spanked hard.

I had three brothers older than me and three younger, so I passed my time playing with trucks and bicycles, making trails in the dirt or when the weather was bad, reading books.  Most of our toys were second-hand that were given to us or found in the dump, or were just pretend toys made from cans and wood by the older kids.  I know my folks never bought us new bicycles - we had two or three that were pieced together from parts of old bikes found in the garbage and we had to share.

When we moved from behind the Garden Valley store to Smith Creek (several miles across the valley and up the Middle Fork of the Payette River), we lived close to the river and so from late spring to early fall, we spent all our time playing in the water (from 1955-1962).  We explored that river for miles and when we weren't in the water, we were climbing the hills.

Here's a picture of the bridge we had to cross to get to get to our home.  Our swimming hole was just on the other side of the bridge on the left hand side of the photo.  There was a nice sandy beach there and the middle pylon created an island in the middle when the water was down in late summer.  Trees and branches caught on that left hand side of the bridge would cause the water to push the sandy bottom and create a deeper hole - so deep that the older boys could jump from the bridge into it without fear of harming themselves.

To the right of the picture you can see the sawmill that was operating at that time.  My mother's brother, Walt Crawford, and several of the family were working this sawmill.  My father bought one of the houses that had been brought in for mill workers to live in.  It was a three bedroom house with no indoor bathroom.

I loved going to school because that is the only place I could go to have other girls to play with.  We lived several miles out of town and our closest neighbors were over a mile away, so the only ones I had to play with were my brothers.  My sister was ten years older than me and left home by the time I was seven or eight.  When I started school in 1954 we just walked over the hill passed the high school to the grade school.  When we moved to Smith Creek we were 8-10 miles from school and lived almost a mile from the bus stop.  

Third and fourth grade classes in the new school building - Mrs Search is teacher

Garden Valley was a very small community with no movie theater, a community hall where dances were held, the community church (non-denominational) and a Catholic Church.  It really was divided in Crouch and Garden Valley with each having a store and gas station.  Crouch also had a garage and a cafe/bar.  Because we were such a large family, we never ate out.  My father planted a garden (which the boys took care of), had a cow to milk and have calves each year for meat, raised chickens, and sometimes turkeys, and pigs.  My mother made butter, cottage cheese, and bread.  She canned fruits and tomatoes which were stored in the fruit cellar (in the hillside at Smith Creek and under the end of the house when we moved back across the valley up the South Fork and near the Ranger Station).

Garden Valley Ranger Station

My folks loved to dance and listen to music.  They went out to the bar every Friday and Saturday night that my father was home, especially when there was live music.  They never drank much - my father would drink a beer or peppermint schnapps and my mother would drink a "ditch", whiskey and water. When I got older, 13 or 14, they used to let me go with them and sometimes they would buy me a coke.  But generally I just listened to the music and once in a while my dad would dance with me.  My folks were great dancing together, whether it was the waltz, a polka, or the schottische.  (My dad was out on the dance floor the weekend before he died in December, 1983.  They had been married 50 years and still loved to go out and dance together.)

I Regress Momentarily

I thought I probably should do a timeline of my family's short history prior to my memories.  I had worked on this with my sister a few years ago and I think it is pretty accurate (my sister, Christina, was ten years older than me - the second surviving child). 

Cecil Elbridge Logue (b. 11/27/07 in Crawford, Valley, ID) married Rachel Helen Crawford (b. 12/06/13 in Alpha, Valley, ID) on April 16, 1933 in Cascade, ID.

1) They rented a cabin in Cascade in 1933.

2) Cecil worked on a bridge in Round Valley the summer of 1933 – (the famous Rainbow Bridge on the North Fork of the Payette River pictured below)

3) Marian Doris was born January 20, 1934 in Cascade, Valley, ID.  She died June 27, 1934 of pneumonia and whooping cough,

4) The couple lived in an old house of Herrick’s on Clear Creek.

5) Cecil then worked for Boise Cascade in Horse Thief and bought a house in Cabarton, but the company wouldn’t move it so dad quit.

6) Back to Cascade where they rented a house in the northeast part of town.

7) They then lived in a house owned by a lumber company that dad worked for on Piersol Creek (probably Percy Rutledge's logging company).

8) Back to Cascade to a little red house by the school, where Thomas Elisha was born May 4, 1935.

9) Dad worked that summer in south Donnelly and lived in a collapsible house (I think this is those tent homes - wood sides up about three feet then sides and top of canvas).

10) Back to Cascade for the winter in a house on a hill by a shop.  They bought the house and moved it to under the water tower.  Christina Winnie was born there March 18, 1937.

11) Moved to an abandoned house in Werley (unsure where this was).

12) Went to Tonasket, Washington to visit Aunt Alice (Belle Crawford Marshall).

13) Back to Cascade in a collapsible house; it burned down, so the family moved to MacGregor, living in a tent and piling brush for Boise Cascade.

14) They then moved to Emmett and bought a trailer house.  Cyril Ellis was born in May of 1941.  (Cyril’s doctor  was CE Carver and when mother named him the nurse who was the doctor’s wife came in and asked if she wanted to give him the rest of the doctor’s name C.E. – Cyril Ellis.  Mother had found the name Cyril in a book and liked it and Ellis is the only name she could find to go with it, so he wasn’t really named after his doctor even if it might have looked that way.)

15) They lived on Trail Creek in the trailer house (on the Salmon River) for three years, wintering in Cascade.  (There are pictures of the trailer with Cyril, Dixie, Tommy, and Christina – some with a tricycle, some with a trailer.  Uncle Cash must have worked there one year as Dixie is his daughter and she was in a lot of the picture.)

16) Then in 1944 they moved to Emmett, in a house across from a storage building.  Dad helped grandpa Crawford build a house under the bench where the graveyard is.

17) The family lived in Boise while dad went to sheet metal school, (Christina had measles and then pneumonia and was in the hospital in Emmett.  A lot of her stuffed toys were lost while they lived there)  then off to Walla Walla, WA where they rented a cabin while dad worked on the air base.  (Christina fell of a sign board and tore a large triangle gash in her arm.  She remembers going to a carnival, but not with dad.)

18) Rented a cabin in Lewiston.  (mother left father.  Christina started school in first grade at a church school.  It was about six weeks after school had started but because of the war and so many people moving in to work on the air bases they weren’t letting six year olds start school.)

19) Rented a cabin in Payette.  (Cyril had measles, mumps, and whooping cough, all at the same time.  It enlarged his tonsils.  Pictures of Christina’s birthday with Tommy, Cyril, and a boy friend – Christina did have boy friends.  We lived in Emmett a while in a small house on the river street right next to the canal.  There was and still is a pipe across the canal there and a very small shallow spot where we played in the water a lot.   Tommy, Cyril, and Christina stayed alone a lot and went to sleep listening to western music on the radio.  A kid who was allergic to poison oak had Christina and Tommy rub leaves all over them, but they never broke out.  The boy who told them what leaves to pick really got a bad rash.  Mom went back to Dad because she couldn’t get any help from her family to help support us.  Her parents wouldn’t even take care of us so mother could work.  Dad fathered a son to a woman in Boise, must have happened while he was there going to school because from leaving Walla Walla to going to Mountain Home was all one school year.)

20) Rented a house in Mountain Home while dad worked on the air base.  (It was really just a tent in a place like an unkept trailer park with what ever kind of temporary housing they could put up.  It was across the road from a service station and motel just south of the underpass.  Dad had friends named Bennett.  Christina learned about people of color.  We had a red-headed friend who’s parents whipped him until his legs were a mass of sores.  Then would baby him and doctor them until they healed.  We put coins on the railroad tracks so the train would run over it and flatten it.  An older lady lived in a very small trailer house with a Boston bulldog.  She was very upset and cried a lot when FDR died.  Christina had a spell where she couldn’t see and had to sit on the curb until she could see before going on home after school.  Her eyes were checked and they weren’t bad (I know now it was sinus problems)  Mom was the one who needed her eyes checked.  Our cousins lived in the same park for a while and their son killed our gold fish with a fork.  Cyril disliked eggs and if Tommy told him that cake had eggs in it he wouldn’t eat the cake.  Cyril didn’t talk much.)

21) Back to Cascade where they rented a house across from the school.  Adrian Dexter was born there March 23, 1946.

22) Worked summers in High Valley and living in a tent and wintering in Cascade or Emmett.  I was born in November 1947 in Emmett.  Adrian’s finger was cut off accidentally by Cyril while he was chopping wood, summer of 1948.  Lived in an abandoned house in Emmett where our younger brother was born in June of 1949.

 Adrian in High Valley, before the fingers of his right hand were chopped off.

23) Then worked at Dry Buck in a tent and wintered in Emmett.

24) And finally they moved to Garden Valley in 1950 living in a log house on Warm Springs Creek (now Terrace Lakes) for the first summer, then to a rented house behind the Garden Valley Store where George Alexander was born in 1952 (born in Emmett Mary Secor Hospital) and died after three days, possibly from pneumonia.  Then in May of 1954 the next brother was born (next to last).

Dad bought a house from Uncle Walter Crawford up the Middle Fork of the Payette, near his saw mill at Smith Creek, in 1955 or 56.  My youngest brother was born in Emmett Mary Secor Hospital on in November of 1956.

Thomas had married Charlene Smith the year before and had a son in February of 1956.  They had their second son in March of 1957.

So here I am all caught up - about 22 years in just a few paragraphs and pictures.