Indians, or what people now call “Native Americans,” roamed the area Heber now occupies. The tribe that lived in the area was probably the Navajo tribe since Heber is closest to the Navajo Indian Reservation, but there could have been some from the Apache tribe as well. Some of the people who lived in Heber spent a lot of their free time looking for Indian ruins. Their success and the mystique of it all caused me to be on the lookout for Indian ruins or relics as well, as I roamed the hills around Heber.

I was never successful in finding burial grounds or anything like that, but I became pretty good at looking for pottery. On the hill north of town it was quite easy to find small broken pieces of pottery. The most common type of pottery was made with red clay the color of adobe bricks. As I played on the hill, I would pick up pieces of pottery that were an inch square or larger in size. They were the ones worth keeping. I put them in my pockets and carried them home where I had a bucket to store them in. There were lots of smaller pieces scattered in different places on the hill.

If I was really lucky, I sometimes found pottery painted black and white. These were much more special and I picked them up regardless of the size. I don’t know whether the two types of pottery were made by the same tribe or not, but the black and white painted pottery had designs on it. The clay colored pottery just had a pattern on it like overlapping shells or something.

On rare occasions, I would find pieces of an arrowhead or even whole arrowheads lying on the ground. Those were very special finds. I used to keep all the arrowheads or parts of arrowheads I had found in my desk drawer in the bedroom which was reserved for “special treasures.”

Down Buckskin Canyon from Heber was a place called the “Three Mile Indian Fort.” Charlie Reidhead and I sometimes went down there to look around. It was on the top of a hill that had sheer bluffs going from the base all the way up to the top. It would have been a good place to fend off an attack. I don’t know whether it was a real “Indian Fort” or not, but I did find an arrowhead there once. One time we also found a large stone used by the Indians to grind their grain. It had a smooth cavity in it where a special stone was used to grind the grain. We didn’t find the stone used for grinding but we did find the bottom part which unfortunately, was too large for us to move.
Another Indian relic fairly common in the area were the “Indian bath houses”. They were made by leaning short logs together at the top and covering the logs with dirt. The inside of the little “bath house” was probably four or five feet tall from floor to ceiling and maybe six feet across at the floor. There was a door  in one side. I never saw one used but the idea was that the Indians would heat the rocks from the creek in a fire, put the hot rocks inside the “bath house,” and then throw water on the rocks to create steam. The Indian would then sit in the house and essentially take a sauna steam bath. I never saw one in use but it was not uncommon to come upon them in the area around Heber. We knew where several different ones were located. They were obvious because there was always a stack of rocks outside the bath house. I assume the story is true.

Indians or Native Americans obviously lived around Heber  long before I was born. By the time I came along, the Indians were either living on the reservation or living in society off the reservation. Quite a number of them lived in Heber and worked in the woods cutting logs or pulp wood or worked on the mill.

When I was either fourteen or fifteen years old, the group of boys my age took on a fun “welfare project”. Our advisors at the time were Uncle Cyril Porter and Marion Despain. To try to help us learn to work, have some fun, and grow something that could be used by the families of the town for food, they came up with the idea of our growing “Dry Pinto Beans” for the families in town on the church farm. The “Church Farm” was up Buckskin Canyon and had been the homestead of the Crandall family. Many people called it “Crandall’s Ranch”. It had an old home on it that was falling down but it was fun to explore around in and there was the land surrounding it. I would estimate that there was probably ten acres of land around the house that could be farmed. Growing near the house were also a number of currant bushes.

To make the farming experience more “real” for us, our advisors worked out a deal for us to use Jay Crandall’s work horse to do some of the farming. As I recall, the land was plowed with a tractor and the beans were planted using our planter. We had one of the few planters in town at the time. They may have used our tractor and plow as well but I can’t remember.

Since our advisors had to be to work at seven o’clock, we worked out a plan where those boys who were going to work on the project on a particular day would sleep at “The Rock House” the night before and then one of our leaders would pick us up about six o’clock and drive us up to the farm and we would work all day and walk home in the afternoon. There were a lot of weeds so we did a lot of hoeing. When the beans and the weeds got a little larger, we were ready to try the horse and cultivator approach to weed control. Our leader would drop a couple of us off at Jay Crandall’s and we would ride the old work horse from his house over to the church farm. We learned how to put the harness on and hook up the cultivator and we thought we were pretty smart until we tried to cultivate.

We didn’t have any experience with farming with a work horse so the horse sort of went where ever it wanted to go . We finally figured out that if someone rode the horse and guided it, it would stay more or less between the rows of beans. The next challenge was to get the cultivator to stay between the rows too. We had some serious problems with that. Even with a boy trying to guide it, the cultivator went where ever it wanted to go with the boy hanging on for dear life to the cultivator handles. I think we ended up “cultivating out” more beans than we saved from the weeds. We tried it just a few times with the horse and finally gave up and went back to the hoes.

The bean bushes got about six to eight inches tall. We didn’t get much rain that season so they didn’t grow very tall. I don’t remember ever harvesting the beans. I don’t know whether they never put on any beans or whether it snowed and covered them up before we could harvest them. I guess it didn’t matter. We had a lot of fun and we learned to work and I have fond memories of working on a welfare project even if nothing was ever harvested. We became a pretty close group of boys and had lots of fun thanks to our leaders.

While we were walking back and forth to the farm (about three miles from Heber) we discovered some very nice wild grape vines. Later in the year we picked wild grapes and Mom made them into grape jelly. We also got to eat some of the currants growing around the old house at the farm. I had never eaten currants before but they were pretty good. They were apparently quite common in the early days of Heber. They were orange or red in color and about the texture of a cherry tomato but smaller in diameter.

Baseball and softball were the favorite summer sports in Heber. One or the other was played by almost all ages. The little kids played “Little League”. The youth, women and men played “Church Softball”. It is probably fair to say that some type of baseball or softball was being played five out of seven nights a week in Heber in the summertime. I was a part of many of those games either as a player or as a spectator.

We started playing some type of ball about as soon as we started to walk. By the time we got to be teenagers, we were pretty good at it. As with basketball, we played softball teams from the other wards in the stake. If we won the “Stake Softball Tournament,” we went on to a “Regional Tournament”. The region included teams from St. Johns Stake, Holbrook Stake, and Flagstaff Stake. If we won the regional tournament, we went to the” Area Tournament” which included teams from all over Arizona. And if we won that, we went to the “All Church Softball Tournament” in Salt Lake City that included teams from across the United States. During my youth, the team from Heber managed to get to the “All Church Softball Tournament” twice. We made it as far as “area” some of the other years. Needless to say, Heber took its softball very seriously.

I suspect that the positions I played in Little League more or less determined what positions I would play on the church softball team. I played mostly catcher and first base but I did actually pitch a couple of innings, too. I think that it was when I was about fourteen or fifteen that the church changed from playing “fast pitch softball” to playing “slow pitch softball”. It was a good decision. In fast pitch softball, if you had a good pitcher, no one ever even got to hit the ball. Only the pitcher, catcher and batter really got to play much. With slow pitch, that changed completely.

With slow pitch softball, the ball is more or less lobbed across the plate and almost everyone can hit it. The game gets everyone involved in making plays and is much more fun. It also has ten players instead of the usual nine so one more person got to play which was also good. Instead of having low scoring games that were typical with fast pitch, the slow pitch games could often have high scores like fifteen to ten. Everyone got to hit the ball and more people got to field the ball and be part of the game. It was an important change that fit church softball to a tee.

We had a number of different coaches over the years I played. One that I remember was Clarence Crandall. He used to bribe us to win critical games. He would promise us an enchilada dinner if we would win the regional or area tournaments and we enjoyed several such dinners. His wife Carolyn made really good enchiladas and stacked them instead of rolling them up. We all liked them a lot. The promise of an enchilada dinner was a big incentive to win.

The coaches that took us all the way to the “All Church Softball Tournament” were David Reidhead assisted by his brother Larry Riedhead. They worked a lot with us and we had a good team. The first time we got to the “All Church Tournament,” we were eliminated in the first or second game. We had a “really good time” anyway and maybe that was part of the reason we didn’t win. The next year when we got to Salt Lake City, we concentrated more on playing ball and we ended up winning several games. We were eventually eliminated but got fourth place overall. The umpire that officiated in the game we lost suggested that although we had been eliminated, we should stick around for the awarding of trophies, which we did. Our team ended up receiving the “All Church Sportsmanship Trophy” and we were really proud of that. I don’t know whether it is still in the Heber Chapel’s trophy case or not, but it was there for many years. We enjoyed playing softball together and we did it with good sportsmanship, which made it fun for everyone.

My career as an employee at the Heber Store began quite early. One vivid memory I have is of the “Grand Opening” of the new Porter’s Shopping Center after Uncle Donnie Porter bought it from Uncle Thomas Shelley and expanded it to its present size.

This Grand Opening was to be a very big event. Heber had a brand new “Shopping Center” and people would be coming from miles around to take advantage of the great sales associated with a Grand Opening. Sure enough, there were lots and lots of people there. Some of the special deals were really good. There were two that I remember very well. One was Refrigerator Biscuits and another was Frozen Bird’s Eye Lemonade. Both were on sale for “ten cans for a dollar”. You couldn’t beat it. In case you haven’t figured it out, that’s only ten cents a can.

Since there were so many customers, I was hired to be a “carry out boy”. Some other boys were also hired to help carry out bags of groceries. We thought it was pretty neat to be a part of the event.

The new store had wide isles, wide enough for two shopping carts to pass, and there were even shopping carts to be used by the customers. Since there were a lot of people shopping in the store at the same time, people would hurry and pick up the special sale items and then do the rest of their shopping. This was a good idea except for the canned biscuits. As people were shopping, we started to hear explosions. At first no one knew what was going on. When someone noticed biscuit dough oozing through the bottoms of some of the shopping baskets the explanation became evident. The refrigerator biscuits had heated up sitting in the baskets and had begun to expand to the point where they were bursting the containers they were in. Unfortunately, guess who got the job of scraping the dough off the floor and off the baskets? It is an event I will never forget. I also never purchase refrigerator biscuits first when I go shopping.

The second memory is about the frozen lemonade. One of my friends figured out that for ten cents we could buy a can of frozen lemonade. That frozen concentrate was just that, “concentrated”. It was STRONG!! We all bought a can of frozen lemonade (regular or pink) and sat out on the front steps of the store with a popsicle stick for a spoon. We pried the lid off and then stuck the popsicle stick into the lemonade and licked it off. WOW! WHAT A ZING!! One can of lemonade concentrate was about all we could eat during our break if we ate fast. We had discovered a new snack. Everything went OK until almost all of us started feeling a little sick to our stomachs. I guess the concentrate was a little too much for them. Anyway, we were all sick but survived. Eating frozen lemonade concentrate never appealed to me again. As I think about it, I guess it didn’t do me any harm but I wonder whether that concentrate somehow changed my genes so that my children prefer STRONG lemonade or punch. I guess we will never know.