The following memories were submitted by Janell Allred Blake:

My dearest memories are the ones I have of living in Heber in the 1940’s. Our house was across the street from the rock house and next to what once was the ranger station. Laureld and Vera Bigler lived there later on. The house we lived in is not there anymore. It was built by my father with lumber from the local sawmill where he worked for a time. I remember when electricity was first installed. We had one electric cord dangling over our table, the only power in our house. Uncle Wilmer and Aunt Zina Porter were very dear to me, as were Laureld and Vera Bigler and many others of the townspeople mentioned.

I have devoured the stories on the website and am so excited and grateful to know that the rock house has been preserved. I loved playing there with Ted, Vard and Terry Porter. I was baptized in Heber and went to school when there were just two rooms next to the old church. Rebecca S. Rogers was my teacher. My little sister died in Heber when a whooping cough epidemic went through town. My father was one of the real live cowboys and rounded up cattle with Laureld and Alma Bigler for the rodeos. I have wonderful pictures of him riding a huge Brahma bull. I played in the caves and waded in the creeks and climbed the old metal bridge. I could go on forever about my memories which were triggered by finding this exciting site.

I am 80 years old now but would love so much to see the old rock house again. I went through Heber two years ago and was astounded at the changes. Thank you for all you are doing to preserve that fabulous piece of history. So many of the people are my relatives too… the Porters and the Biglers especially. I have so much love for all of those dear, wonderful people and the influence they had on my life.

My father worked for the forest service and he also built saddles. Some of them may still be around there. I went to the Saturday night movies at the church in my flannel nightgown and hair done up in rags. We bathed in the old galvanized tub in the kitchen and had to use the outhouse out back.
I have a dear little story about my pet mouse that got loose on the stage and Aunt Zina killed it with a hymn book, because it startled her so. She felt so bad that she promised me the next one that she found in her flour bin. Dear, sweet Aunt Zina. She would have me come and thread her needles for her because she couldn’t see. Oh, the many stories I have. I must write them for my family. I apologize for taking up so much space. I couldn’t write fast enough and it’s all scrunched together.

The worst trouble I was ever in was when I took my little brother and little Terry, who were around three or four years old and walked all day to find the Bigler Ranch. Nobody knew where we were and had searched for us for hours. I was only seven but I was punished severely for that mistake. My birthday and Teds were a day apart and we had combined birthday celebrations a couple of times. We moved away during the summer of 1949 and never got to come back there to live, which was a huge disappointment. My memories are still very vivid and so very dear to my heart.

One of the fond memories of my childhood was going to the show (movie). When I was just a kid growing up in Heber going to the show was part of the entertainment we enjoyed. At that time there were two shows a week. There was a show on Thursday and Saturday evening. The movies came on two or three reels (16mm) through the mail in a film box that was held together by straps. Accompanying the movies were usually two or three small posters about the movie and the actors. The small posters were posted in the Post Office and usually in the Heber Store. If you wanted to know what the show was, you could check out the posters but most of the time people just went because it really didn’t matter what the show was, you just went if you wanted to do something on Thursday or Saturday evening.

Sometimes the movies were in black and white but most of the time the Thursday movies were in color. It cost twenty-five cents for kids to get into the movie on Thursday so we didn’t get to go very often. We could however read the posters and wish we could go.

There was always a movie on Saturday evening. I don’t know all the details, but if your family paid their budget assessment (money required to operate the church building) the Saturday night movies were free. If you didn’t pay your budget like those who were not church members, then the cost was twenty-five cents for kids and I think fifty or seventy-five cents for adults. As you can imagine, there were lots of kids at the Saturday night movies. The reason the members who paid their budget got in free was because the projector was owned by the ward and the movies were shown in the church gym. In essence, it was a church sponsored activity for the community. Most of the Saturday movies were in black and white although later many of them were also in color.

I believe the management of the shows was a church calling in the Heber Ward. The person who had the calling was Clarence Crandall. Clarence had the nick name of “Windy” because he liked to talk a lot. Anyway, Clarence had some tickets printed up that said “Windy’s Theater.” When the popcorn machines and the pressurized pop fountains came in, the ward bought one of each so people could buy popcorn and pop as refreshments. The concession stand also sold candy bars. I imagine the concession money and the admissions more than paid for the expenses associated with having the movies. When the church burned down, some of the things saved were the popcorn machine and the pop fountain although I don’t think they were ever used again. After the church burned down, the movies moved to the school until the new church was ready.

I can remember that Clarence liked boxing. At rodeo time he would set up a boxing ring on a wagon and pull it into the middle of the rodeo arena. After the rodeo was over he would entice the little kids to box by giving us tickets to Windy’s Theater. That’s about the only time we got to see the Thursday movies until we were old enough to earn some money of our own. I saw lots of movies and going to the show was a favorite entertainment all through my youth. I still like to see a good movie. We saw lots of westerns, musicals and love stories. I liked the westerns or comedy’s best . If we didn’t have money to buy popcorn, we could take a bag from home. The kids would sit on the floor in the front of the chairs that had been set up. The screen was on the stage. As you got older, you moved back in the audience. By the time you were a teenager, you had the back row staked out. When I was in High School, Charlie Riedhead, my best friend, was the projectionist so we went together to most of the shows.

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.

 

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.

 

“Heberisms” are terms or phrases that were commonly used by residents of Heber. They weren’t exactly a foreign language, but they did have special meaning to the residents of Heber. I will try to explain some of the ones I can remember.

Aunts and Uncles: A genealogist would go crazy trying to figure out family relationships in Heber. If you walked down the street in Heber you would hear the kids refer to adults they passed as “Uncle” or “Aunt”. When I was growing up in Heber it was common for kids to refer to any older adult in the church, whether they were related or not, using these terms. We lived across the street for “Uncle Laurald and Aunt Vera”. Our next door neighbors were “Uncle Mart and Aunt Ruth”. The actual relationship between me and these relatives was more accurately cousin or 2^nd cousin.

Heber was a small town and members of the larger families often intermarried at some point. Uncle Laurald was my real cousin. He was my Aunt Eliza Bigler’s son. Aunt Liza was Dad’s oldest sister. Aunt Vera was the daughter of Uncle Dobby and Aunt Alice. I think Uncle Dobby was probably my 2nd cousin or cousin once removed.  Maybe using the term “Aunt and Uncle”  was a way of showing respect to our elders, or maybe it was just because of the confusing relationships. Whatever the reason, I and every other kid in town grew up with lots of “Aunts and Uncles” keeping an eye on us.

Work in the Woods: This term referred to those who worked in the logging woods. They could be those who cut down the trees, those who skidded the logs, those who loaded or drove trucks to haul the logs or to anyone who was associated with either the Porter or Southwest logging operation. Interestingly, my Dad worked for the Forest Service in the woods but he was never classified as someone who “worked in the woods”.

Work on the mill: This term had nothing to do with building or repairing the sawmill. This term referred to those who “operated” the sawmill or worked there in any capacity. It did not refer to those who worked at the Pulp Mill for some reason.

Up the Canyon or Down the Canyon: These were phrases that indicated direction. Up the canyon meant going south “Up Buckskin” or Southwest “Up Black Canyon”. To go down the canyon was to go northeast “down the canyon” after they joined at Heber and flowed toward Holbrook.

Up on the Hill or Mountain: This term referred to the area called the Mogollon Rim. As you leave Heber and drive toward Payson you are going “Up on the Mountain” although the climb is quite gentle. The elevation difference between Heber and the Rim is about 1000ft.

The valley : The term refers to the Salt River Valley area not to other valleys closer to Heber.