Rock House and Heber Memories

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THE ROCK HOUSE AND THE MOB

The rock house was often the center of activity for the boys in Heber, especially the boys the ages of me and my brothers. I think there may have been several reasons for that but at least one of them was that we seemed to always have ideas about things to do. I think Mom also encouraged us to stay at home and do things rather than wandering around town getting into trouble. She could keep an eye on what we and our friends were doing if we were around the house because invariably we would need some supplies that were in the house and she could ask us what we were doing.

I can remember one time when we all decided to make “beanie flippers” out of clothes hangers and rubber bands. We had a supply of the required materials at our house so a lot of the kids in town came to our house to make their “beanie flippers”. Everyone knows that a beanie flipper is of no use unless it is shooting beans or rocks and we did plenty of that after they were made.

On one particular day, Brother Petersen from Snowflake who was on the High Council with Dad was working on the little house across the road from the rock house. He was remodeling it and painting it inside as I recall. Anyway, I don’t remember exactly what happened, but apparently one of the beans or rocks someone shot with their beanie flipper either hit him or near him or hit one of the windows in the house he was working on. Anyway, he came out and he was not very happy. We were just playing around in the yard having fun and didn’t pay any attention to him coming over to our house. He went in to talk to Mom.

As Mom describes the visit he came in and complained about someone shooting a rock or bean toward the house where he was working. Mom told him it was just a bunch of kids having fun and assured him she would talk to us about it. His response was “Sister Porter, do you have any idea how many boys are playing in your yard? You don’t have a bunch of kids, you have a mob!!” Mom said she went outside and counted and there were about twenty boys playing together. I think that happened many times. Vard had a bunch of friends, Terry had several also and I had a pretty good sized group of friends so if they all ended up at our house, it was a pretty big bunch of kids. I don’t ever remember us getting carried away and becoming a mob but we could probably never convince Brother Petersen of that fact.

Because there were so many kids, we could play lots of different games as teams. We played not only sports like football and baseball, we also played army, cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers and many other games where we needed teams. One of our favorite games was to put one team on the porch and another team scattered elsewhere around the yard and buildings, and then let the battle begin. The team won that had the last man alive. We killed a lot of people and used up a lot of ammunition in those games. I guess one of the advantages of a small town is that everyone knows everyone else so playing together was very natural. I don’t remember the older kids not wanting to include us younger kids in the teams although there were probably times like that. I do know they included us most of the time and we had lots of fun playing different games or building different things at our house. I think my Mom was pretty wise. With us close at hand, she could monitor not only the games but the way we played together, the language used and other things. She did it without our being any the wiser.

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THE GARDEN AT THE ROCK HOUSE

We always had a big garden at the Rock House. Mom would get one of us to plow and harrow the lot that lies on the west side of the rock house. That plot of land became our garden.

The major crop in our garden was sweet corn. The corn was planted by a two man team. One person was on the shovel and the other had the seed. The person with the shovel would dig the shovel into the ground three to four inches and then push forward on the shovel to open a slit in the soil. The person with the seed would throw two or three seeds down in the slit and the person with the shovel would pull the shovel out of the ground, take one step forward and repeat the procedure. This placed the hills of corn about thirty inches apart. If the soil was dry, then a third person was required. That person poured some water in on the seed before the shovel was removed.

Another popular crop was squash. We grew summer squash to eat out of the garden, but the majority of the squash we grew was “winter squash”. It was planted in the same way as the corn. Over the years we grew several varieties of winter squash. One of the favorites was warty hubbard squash. It was greenish in color and the skin was covered with bumps like warts. The squash was allowed to grow all season and just before frost, the vines were pulled up and piled over the squash to prevent them from being frosted. After the frost, the squash were collected and stored in the cellar or wash house. I think the cold temperature associated with the frost was suppose to make the squash sweeter. We had baked squash quite often and I liked it a lot.

Another crop we had several rows of was green beans. Mom always bottled green beans and we grew a lot of them. Most of them were bottled as green beans but sometimes Mom would let them get ripe and dry on the vine and we would pick them and shell out the not quite mature beans. They were called “shelled beans” and they were very good. Sometimes we planted real green beans but most of the time we just planted pinto beans and harvested them as green beans when the pods were not mature. They made a flatter green bean but they tasted good.

Besides the crops mentioned above, we also had a section of garden next to the house where we raised vegetables for eating as they became ripe. That garden had carrots, beets, green onions, radishes, turnips, lettuce and cabbage. Sometimes we also had cucumbers. The radishes always came off first and we used to have fresh radishes or green onions with bread and milk. It was really good.

My job and the job of my brothers was to help weed the garden, help water the garden by carrying buckets of water to each hill of corn and then in the fall, to help harvest the produce. We ate fresh corn on the cob and we always froze a lot of corn too. The squash were eaten baked or boiled. The green beans were bottled. If we had a good cabbage crop, Mom would make sauerkraut out of some of it. Mom made pickles and relish out of the cucumbers.

Mom and Dad were self-reliant and used the home grown vegetables to supplement the family food supply. We always had plenty to eat and we learned to eat a lot of different things. I like most types of cooked vegetables because that is what we ate all the time.

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HEBER HILLS

The town of Heber is surrounded by hills on all sides. Those hills were a constant source of enjoyment and mystery when I was a kid. Even as a small boy, I was allowed to roam the hills and discover all the neat places. Usually when I roamed, it was with Charlie Riedhead or some other friends but more often than not, it was with just me and Charlie.

The hill we spent the most time on was the one north of town that has the “Big Cave”. It was just across the creek and we could be there within a very few minutes. All we had to do was tell Mom where we were going and when we expected to be back. Sometimes we took lunches so that we could spend most of the day up there. The Big Cave was usually where we started our wandering. From the cave we could see the entire town. Someone had built fires in the cave so the roof of the cave was black from the smoke. The cave wasn’t very deep but there were lots of very important writings on the walls. At least they are important to someone. Most of them were Ann + Bill or Sue + Bob. It seemed that everyone who had ever had a boy or girl friend had it noted on the wall of the Big Cave. The rock was soft so it was easy to scrape initials or names in the stone for all future generations to admire. When we grew older and braver, we used to let ourselves down over the face of the cave on a rope. It was a good place to discuss the world’s problems or other problems from the perspective of little boys.

Fairly close to the Big Cave is a smaller cave that is quite deep (ten to fifteen feet). It too had a black roof from the smoke but fewer people went there because it was not as tall and you had to stoop over to walk in it.

The hill on the north had lots of pieces of broken Indian pottery. Most of it was just the plain clay color but once in a while we would find painted pieces (black and white). We also found an occasional arrowhead on that hill.

The hill on the west was probably the next most climbed hill. When we were living in Mesa for two years, we lived in the summer in Uncle Alma Bigler’s house which was at the bottom of the west hill. As a result, we climbed on it a lot. It is the hill we would climb to fly the ducks but that is another story. The west hill was unique in that it had a cave that went through a part of the hill (two openings) that we could crawl through on hands and knees. It also had a formation that was unique. It was a sort of pillar that was all by itself and out about twenty feet from the part of the hill we could climb on. There were all sorts of stories about that pillar. From the hill we could see a small white bag of something that someone had thrown over there. There was also a piece of cable. I guess somewhere along the line someone tried to climb up there for some reason. We used to speculate about who had climbed it and why. As far as I know there were no dead bodies or human bones on the pillar but who knows for sure. We thought the bag contained poison of some kind.

The east hill was the one climbed less often because it was farther from home but every once in a while we would check it out. It had a “chimney” (an opening that went up between some rocks that had fallen together). A small person could climb up through the hole to get on top of the hill. We roamed that hill as well but it was not our favorite. It was probably the favorite for those kids that lived closer to it. From any one of the hills you could get a good view of the town and feel in control of our relatively simple lives. After all, we could see almost all of our world at once, from any one of the hills.

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GAMES AND ACTIVITIES

 

Heber was a town where we had to think up our own entertainment. There was not a single TV in the town. Most people had radio’s but they did not provide a lot of entertainment to a growing boy. We had to find ways to entertain ourselves in other ways and we did pretty well. Since it was such a small town, if one kid thought up something to do, every kid in town was soon doing the same thing. We almost seemed to have seasons for various activities. There was a marble season, a jacks season, a stilts season, a track season, a beanie flipper season, a top season, a pogo stick season, a baseball season, a basketball season, a hunting season, a ROOK season, a pole vaulting season, a CLUE season, a MONOPOLY season, a cops and robbers season and so forth. I am sure there were others I don’t remember. I will try to explain some of these just in case you don’t know what they mean.

Playing marbles was a game kids learned very early in life. Marbles were inexpensive and almost everyone could own some. If you didn’t have money to buy some, someone was always willing to share some with you. I had a drawer in the desk in the bedroom that had the bottom covered with marbles of different types. I had cat eyes, clearies, steelies, and multi-colored ones. I also had different sizes from pee-wee’s to giant ones. We  played several different marble games. Probably the most popular was “holes”. It was played by digging four holes in an L-pattern. Three holes for the long arm and one hole at the end of the short arm. There was a line about six to eight inches long in front of the first hole. We determined who went first by lagging. Lagging was done by lining up everyone wanting to play,  about six feet away from the line and then tossing our marbles to try to hit the line. The one whose marble came closest to the line got to go first. The players had to shoot their marbles into the holes in order and then return in reverse order to the first hole. The person then shot their marble to the offset hole. When a person got there, his marble was  poison. If he hit anyone’s marble  after that, that person was dead and out of the game.

I also played “rings” where we drew a ring and put marbles in the center and tried to knock them out of the ring. Sometimes we played “keeps” where any marble you knocked out of the ring you got to keep. Everyone put the same number of marbles in the center of the ring and everyone had a chance to knock out their opponents marbles and keep them. I learned pretty quickly to play with people who were about as good as me so everyone got about the same number of marbles. Most people had a favorite marble they used most of the time. It was called the “taw”. Some people would chip it a little to make it rough so that they could get a better grip on it when shooting. A good taw was very important. Most people would trade several marbles to get their taw back if they lost it in a game somehow.

We usually played jacks during school because it was a “girls game” and we played it with the girls at recess. I got to where I could hold my own but I was never as good as the girls.

We walked on stilts at irregular times. When that fad hit, everyone either found their old pair or built a new pair of stilts. We walked all over town with them. It was especially fun to walk on them when the creek was running. We would try to walk across without falling off and getting wet. Sometimes we would walk on them when the snow was several inches deep so that we were above the snow.

Track season usually came in the spring when the schools began doing track. We actually dug a jumping pit in our yard and filled it with sawdust so that we could practice high jumping and pole vaulting. We also did long jumping. We would often have quite a few of the kids in town at our house to play in the jumping pit. In those days the jumping pits were filled with sawdust rather than having the large pads they have today.

Beanie Flipper season usually came in the summer when we had lots of spare time. Everyone knew how to build a beanie flipper and most people had several. We would roam around town or in the hills shooting small rocks at whatever target we selected. I got to be pretty good at hitting what I was shooting at. Most  beanie flippers were made out of a small wooden branch that formed a “Y” but I  also made some out of coat hangers and rubber bands.

Once in a while someone would get a new top for their birthday and we would have “top season” for a while. It amounted to spinning the top so that it knocked other tops out of the circle. It was like marbles but played with a top. I never was great at throwing a top but I was pretty good at jumping on a pogo stick. Several of us had them and we would see who could jump the longest. I used to enjoy jumping on a pogo stick on the front porch or the rock house or down the sidewalk to the gate and back. Some people didn’t have large porches with a concrete floor so our porch was a good place for jumping on a pogo stick if you didn’t jump too high.

Another season that usually followed “track season” was pole vaulting season. We would all make long pole vaulting sticks and run around town vaulting over things like fences, bushes and ditches. I got pretty good at jumping over things for fun but none of us were ever able to jump very high because the longest poles available were probably only ten to twelve feet long. We got the poles from the sawmill. They were 1″x 1″’s and they broke if they got too long.

The seasons for board and card games were usually in the winter time. Our family had a pretty good assortment of table games and we had several card tables so our house was the center for those sessions most of the time. I never did care much for MONOPOLY but I played the others.  We always seemed to had some activity going on at our house and a lot of our friends ended up at our house to play with us.  During the regular sports seasons we played sports with everyone else but at other times, we did a variety of activities and had a lot of fun on our own or with friends.

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EIGHTH GRADE AND GRADUATION

 

The school year of 1961-62 proved to be a momentous year. It was the year I graduated from the eighth grade. Graduating from the eighth grade in Heber was a big deal. There was a special graduation program and all the town came and the graduates dressed up in suits and nice dresses and presented the program. The role each graduate played was quite important.

To give you a little background, you need to know that everyone of my older brothers had graduated from the eighth grade in the Heber Elementary School and each of them had distinguished himself by being named valedictorian of his class. As the youngest boy in the family I was expected to uphold the family tradition. I had emerged at the top of my class in seventh grade and there was little chance of any one of my friends or classmates spoiling my record. Everyone had sort of settled in knowing their relative position in the class as far as academic standing was concerned. After all, there were only eight of us so it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out the class rankings.

This is where the plot thickens for early in the school year a new family by the name of Stockett moved into the quiet town of Heber . Now among the Stockett children was a girl by the name of June who was our age and as it turned out, she was a very bright young lady.

I should probably confess that I did not necessarily spend a lot of my time worrying about being valedictorian. It was just expected because  I was still doing good work in school and getting good grades. In fact, I didn’t think much about it until one day when several of us in the class were walking home after school and one of the girls mentioned that June had the highest average in our class. This information seemed to be generating quite a controversy  because many of the parents felt that it would be unfair for June to be named valedictorian when she had only been in the school for less than one year. We liked June and she had fit well into our group but to be named valedictorian????? It created quite a stir in a small place like Heber.

I don’t know how much lobbying went on or who all talked to Mr. Capps, but by the end of the school year, a decision had been made that June was not eligible to be valedictorian and I was named to that high position. I can’t remember whether June was named salutatorian or whether she was ineligible for that too. Maybe if I find a program to my graduation I can find out.

Bequeathed upon the valedictorian was the job of giving one of the major talks in the graduation ceremonies. I cannot remember a single thing I said. I think Mr. or Mrs. Capps wrote the talk and I memorized it. The theme of the graduation was something like “Reach for the Stars”. All I can remember is that we hung stars everywhere for decorations. The graduation was held on the stage at the school. I gave my talk and took my place as the last and final Porter kid from our family to be valedictorian of the eighth grade at the Heber Elementary School.

The eighth grade year was a fun year because we were the upper classmen and could get away with about anything. We had a good time as a group and we got to do some special things. At the end of school one of the parents took us all to Holbrook to buy a gift for Mr. and Mrs. Capps. I can’t remember what we bought but we went to the movie in Holbrook as a group and had a good time. We had been together for most of eight years.