Located at the rear of the rock house in Heber was the garage and the wash house. The wash house was on the west end of the garage. I guess it got its name because that is where the clothes washer was located part of the time. At that time, there was no addition onto the back of the rock house. All that was beyond the back wall of the house was a wooden porch. The wash house also had lots of shelves and a cellar underneath it.

Some of my earliest recollections of the wash house were when the wash house alone was on the west end of the garage. This was before we built the shop onto the garage. The old wash house only consisted of the portion above the cellar door and over to the wall of the garage on the east side.

The cellar door is in the floor of the wash house. The door opens up to reveal a set of stairs that lead down into the cellar. The cellar was always a fun place to work and play. It was where we kept all of the bottled fruits and vegetables Mom put up during the summer and fall of the year. Every year Mom would put up bottles and bottles of apples, apple sauce, peaches, pears, apricots, jam, jelly, green beans, sauerkraut, squash, pickles and relish to name a few. This was our years supply and we ate what was put up all year long.  Each year one of my jobs was to check all the bottled fruit and vegetables in the cellar and discard any bottles that were open or spoiled. I also often had the job of carrying the newly bottled fruit or vegetables to the cellar and arranging them on the shelves so that we ate the oldest food first. The cellar was cool and a little damp at times so the bottle lids tended to rust over time and every year some of them had to be thrown away. The bottles were kept to be used again.

Besides bottled goods, we also kept some bags of various items in the cellar. I can remember a few times when we had bags of dried fruit (apples, pears and apricots) in the cellar. One year we had a bag of almonds. We also kept a few boxes of canned goods down there.

The main part of the wash house housed the washer. At that time we filled the washer with a garden hose or by carrying hot water from the house. We had to fill the washer as well as a tub of water for rinsing the clothes. The wringer washer was used to wash the clothes and then they were hung out on the clothesline to dry. At some point in time we got a freezer and it was put in the wash house as well. Later on, the milk separator was also located in the wash house.

When the shop was built sort of around the wash house, the west wall was removed and the wash house became a part of the shop addition to the garage. Today you would never know that a separate wash house ever even existed if I hadn’t told you so.

 

Mom always thought that the most important thing a kid could learn to do was to read. She was convinced that kids who learned to read well would do well in school and go far, and those that never learned to read well would be very limited in what they could do and would struggle through life. I think she was probably right. Both Mom and Dad were good readers and Mom worked with us to be sure we became good readers as well. Dad read out loud to us a lot and Mom also had us read aloud so she could hear how we were doing and help us with difficult words. I learned to read and I enjoyed reading books of various kinds.

When I was growing up there were a lot of books for children in the school library and we had quite a few at home as well. I have mentioned in another section that we had the “Heber Library” in our home for many years so I had access to lots of books.

I had several different groups of favorite books. Many of them seemed to come in a series. One of our family’s favorites and mine as well were the books about “Little Britches.” Dad used to read them aloud to the family in the evening and we enjoyed them a lot. There were two or three in the series. They were about a family that moved to Colorado during the depression and their experiences, both good and bad. The book was written from the point of view of one of the young boys. It told about his growing up and ultimately becoming “Man of the Family.”

I also liked stories about animals. Dad read many of them to us as well. I liked “White Fang” and the other books about sled dogs by Jack London. I can’t remember the titles but there were several of them and they were all good as far as I was concerned. I also liked books like “Big Red,” “Where the Red Fern Grows,” “Lassie,” and other stories about dogs and boys.

I liked all of the books in the “Black Stallion” series and other stories about horses and boys and girls. I think I eventually owned all 8-10 books in the Black Stallion series. There were other books written by other authors who also told about horses and kids.

Another series I really liked was the “Hardy Boys.” Between Charlie Reidhead and I, we had most of the books. We would borrow them back and forth and other boys would borrow them from us. For a number of Christmases, I got Hardy Boy books for Christmas and my birthday and I was happy to get them. The Hardy Boys were teenagers who were the sons of a famous detective. They sometimes helped their Dad and ended up solving mysteries he was working on with the help of their friends. There were probably 40 books in the series at that time. I read most of them.

There weren’t any doctors in Heber. If you got sick, the closest doctor at the time was either in Holbrook or in McNary. Both places were at least an hour away by car. As a result, I didn’t go to the doctor much. Mom became the doctor in our home and she used her experience to treat us for various ailments.

If we got a sore throat, Dad would “swab our throats” with Ironite which was something like Iodine but safe to use internally. It was also used to stop bleeding like Mecurochrome or Methiolate. We had a big bottle of Ironite in the cupboard. Dad would take a long piece of kindling and wrap cotton around one end and then dip it in the Ironite and then swab it around in the back of our throats. It usually did the trick.

For colds, it was lemon juice and honey along with Vicks Vaporub and “4-way Cold Tablets” and “Aspergum.” I don’t think I’d have lived to reach my twelfth birthday without Vicks. Mom would smear it all over my chest and neck and back and then wrap a flannel cloth around my throat. Sometimes she would heat the cloth on the stove in the front room before putting it around my throat. The fumes opened the sinuses and I guess helped in some way.

I had some problems with asthma when I was little. I think most of us boys had problems with it. Vard was probably the worst but Terry and I also had it. We learned to lay in certain positions that made it easier to breathe. It was no fun and, in fact, it was pretty scary when I couldn’t take a full breath. I don’t remember being sick a lot but I suppose I was sick about as much as most school age kids. I had all of the normal childhood diseases like measles, chickenpox, mumps, etc.

One of the techniques Mom used to help us recover more rapidly was probably related to psychology more than medicine but it worked. Mom would ask us what special thing we would like to have that would help us get well. Those were golden words. I don’t remember all the things I requested but usually it was something from the store that we never got to buy under normal circumstances. I remember one time I told her that if I could only have some onion flavored potato chips, I knew I would get well. I had never tasted, much less eaten, onion flavored potato chips but Mom got me a bag. I found out I really didn’t like them very much but I had to get well anyway. Sometimes it was “store bought ice cream,” other times it was pudding or pie. Whatever the request, Mom did her best to arrange for it and I am here to tell you that I recovered in every case so it must have worked.

When I was about five years old, we got “Betsy the Goat”. Vard was allergic to cow’s milk so Mom and Dad decided to get a milk goat so he would have milk to drink. They brought her home in the back of someone’s pickup. She was completely white. She had curved horns and she liked to try to butt us when we grabbed hold of them or when we twisted her tail. She was part of our family for several years.

Mom or Dad must have done the milking. Anyway, we all learned to drink goat’s milk instead of cow’s milk and I guess it helped Vard. Goat’s milk is naturally homogenized and has higher fat content than cow’s milk. We learned to like it just fine.

Betsy had at least one set of kids (baby goats) that I can remember. They were quite cute little things. We had fun playing with them. When they got a little older and had a little size on them, they were butchered and we ate them. We learned that goat meat was also pretty good.

Now, living in Heber at the time was a big brownish black billy goat. For those of you who may not have figured it out, Betsy was a “Nanny” (female) goat. The male of the species are called “Billy” goats. (See my Ag training coming through?) This particular billy goat decided to frequent our neighborhood and made frequent visits to try to see Betsy. I guess he could smell her and knew that she was a nanny goat. The problem with this billy goat was that the whole town could smell him. He gave off a vile odor that permeated a good square block around where ever he happened to be standing or laying. He tended to hang around our barn and we couldn’t stand the smell. What a smell! We tried to chase him off by yelling at him, by throwing rocks at him or by squirting him with water from the hose but we were totally unsuccessful. Dad finally had to get the owner to come and pick him up and lock him up in their barn. Dealing with him gave me a better understanding of the story of the “Three Billy Goats Gruff”’. If they were anything like him, they were pretty mean.

We had Betsy for a number of years. We used to have fun playing with her. We would grab her tail and pull it and then take off running and she would chase us and try to butt us. I remember running and jumping inside a barrel or hiding inside the garage and she would stand outside and bleat at me, waiting for me to come out. We played hide and seek together many hours and she was pretty good at finding me. When it was rodeo time, we decided that we could practice for the rodeo by trying to ride her. She always bucked us off but we thought it was great fun.

I don’t remember the details of Betsy’s departure. I think we sold her to an Indian family and they took her to the reservation. Vard was in the valley going to school so Mom and Dad decided we could go back to drinking cow’s milk. Anyway, Betsy left us and was replaced by a milk cow. The cow just never did learn how to play the same games that Betsy knew.

One of my playmates as a child was Elsie Bigler. Elsie was my age and she lived just across the street from The Rock House. Sadly, the Bigler home is no longer there. It burned down years later and its ruins have been removed for the most part, but it was there when I was growing up.

I can’t remember exactly how old I was when this incident occurred, but I was probably four or five years old. Mom and Aunt Vera Bigler were good friends so when Mom went across the street to visit Aunt Vera, I tagged along most of the time and played with Elsie. Besides their house, Aunt Vera and Uncle Laurald Bigler had a saddle shop, a big garage, a big barn and lots of places for kids to play. They had a pretty big house and on the back screened in porch they kept their freezer.

Now why Elsie and I were in the freezer in the first place I can’t remember but in opening the freezer we saw that there was a package of frozen hot dogs. It was about that moment that fierce hunger must have struck us. We both just seemed to realize that we were close to death from starvation so we opened that package of hot dogs and each of us took a frozen hot dog out to eat. I am sure that if we had asked permission to have a hot dog Aunt Vera would likely have given us one since we were about to die, but we did not ask permission. We decided to steal the hot dogs and not tell anyone. I don’t recall how the hot dogs tasted or how much our consciences bothered us. I do know that we were found out and Aunt Vera told my Mom, and I got into trouble. I was given a spanking on the spot and sent home to wait for Mom to come home for more punishment. How much punishment awaited me I didn’t know at the time.

It may have been because I was already feeling guilty about getting caught for stealing or it may have been the Lord helping me learn a lesson or in retrospect it might have just been a prank by some ornery older brothers, but what happened next left an indelible impression on my young brain that “stealing does not pay”. In fact, stealing can end up being very painful.

While I was over at Aunt Vera’s playing with Elsie and stealing hot dogs, my older brothers were at home making frosting. Now everyone knows that frosting is made by adding milk to powdered sugar. I knew that and I also knew that I liked frosting very much. I often begged to lick the spoon or the knife when Mom made frosting. I had no idea and didn’t even stop to consider why my brothers were making frosting in the middle of the day and especially when Mom was gone over to Aunt Vera’s, at that. I now know they had decided to play a little trick on me. In addition to the regular ingredients for frosting, they had added a healthy helping of cayenne pepper. When Mom sent me home I was crying, so my brothers offered me a big spoon full of frosting to cheer me up. Realizing I was already a big “sinner” probably didn’t help my ability to resist another sin—that of eating non-approved frosting without permission—so I took a big spoonful in my mouth to eat it.

As soon as I ate it I knew I was really going to die. My mouth was on fire and I couldn’t put the fire out. I started to scream in pain. My brothers thought it was a big joke. Finally Mom came home and washed out my mouth with water and killed the burning sensation but I knew that my burning mouth and the pain I had experienced was a direct result of stealing hot dogs. After all, the scriptures tell us very clearly, “Thou shalt not steal!”