I began high school in 1962. The high school was in Snowflake and was called Snowflake Union High School or SUHS. It was made up of students from Snowflake, Showlow, Heber, Overgaard, Taylor, Pinedale and Clay Springs as well as students from all of the other smaller communities in the area like Linden, Burton and Shumway. I think the total student body was less than five hundred students.

One of the traditions for new high school students was a “Freshman Initiation” that was held a few days before school began in the fall. The seniors did the initiating and the freshmen were the victims. They had us whitewash the “S” on the side of the hill outside of Snowflake. If we did something wrong, they threw us in the cow tank at the bottom of the hill. It was mostly a lot of fun and a big water fight. At the end we all ate watermelon and everyone went home soaking wet. Terry was a senior when I was a freshman so my initiation wasn’t too bad. Some of his buddies sprayed me with the hose but that was about it.

I had become interested in agriculture and so I took Vocational Ag and became a part of the FFA (Future Farmers of America). I also took English, World Geography, Algebra, Seminary, Typing and PE (Physical Education). At that time, PE was a required subject. If you were in band you didn’t have to take PE. If you took Vo Ag it counted as your science class so you didn’t have to take biology. Everyone took English, some type of math and some type of social studies.

We rode the bus to and from high school. We caught the bus at about 7am and got home about 5PM. It took just about exactly one hour for the bus to make the trip although it is only thirty-five miles from Heber to Snowflake. By the time it made all the stops on the way and wound through Overgaard too, the ride took the full hour.

The class I enjoyed most as a freshman was Vocational Ag. We had an excellent teacher by the name of Mr. Angle and he taught us lots of neat things. He would also take us on field trips to visit farms and dairies. He didn’t put up with much guff and required a lot of work but he also taught us a lot.

I never did participate much in extra-curricular activities as a freshman. I rode the bus home and went to work at the store until it closed at six o’clock. I went to a few football and basketball games but they always had a dance (sock hop) after the games and I didn’t get home until almost midnight so I didn’t go to very many games. I didn’t dance much and it wasn’t much fun just sitting around waiting for the dance to get over. I was a pretty good student and got mostly one’s. At that time you got a grade of one, two, three or four in each class. A “one” was the highest grade and was equal to an “A” and so on. I enjoyed most of my classes in school. I made lots of friends in high school and became part of a group that was in Vo Ag and most of the other classes together and we sort of ran around together as a group all the way through high school.

I was not in a lot of clubs in high school, but one that I was quite involved in was FFA (Future Farmers of America). Most of the boys who took Vocational Ag were also members of FFA. At that time FFA was restricted to boys only. Girls were not allowed as members but each chapter had a “Chapter Sweetheart” who was an honorary member of the organization.

To get into FFA we had to go through an initiation as freshmen. That is where I learned about ‘Colonel Puff’. It was a drinking game (with water) that we had to get correct or our cups were refilled over and over again. Some of the boys got quite sick from drinking too much water. I learned the routine fairly quickly and didn’t have to drink too much water. The older boys did lots of things to us that I won’t go into. In the end, we became new members of the club. We could order the blue jackets with yellow lettering with our names on and I was quite proud to wear that jacket. Each year we were in FFA we got a little medal to attach to the jacket just above our name. The first year we were called “Greenhand Farmers,” the second year we were called “Chapter Farmers”. I don’t remember what we were called the third and fourth years.

The FFA has a very formal opening ceremony at the beginning of each club meeting. There were a number of officers (advisor, president, vice president, secretary, treasurer, reporter, sentinel, parliamentarian etc.) Each had a symbol at their place and as roll was called, each gave a little statement about their responsibilities and how it related to the symbol. For example the advisor’s symbol was the owl because it was a symbol of wisdom. Part of what we learned in FFA was parliamentary procedure. I can’t remember many of the rules now, but at one point I was pretty good at it. I served as secretary and vice president of the club the last two years. Our fourth year we went to the state convention in Tucson. We had leadership training, elected state officers and had lots of fun. Our “Chapter Sweetheart” was elected as “State Sweetheart.”

During the year we competed in different contests at FFA Field Days. I can remember competing in soil judging, welding, dairy judging, weed identification, meat judging and there were probably others. I think the highest I got was an honorable mention in poultry judging. Each chapter could have a team entered in the different contests and the contests took two days to complete. At the end there was usually a banquet where awards were given out. Usually ASU and U of A each sponsored a field day and sometimes one of the chapters would sponsor a field day for the schools in the area. Since we were the only chapter in northern Arizona, we seldom competed except at the statewide contests. They were a good excuse for an overnight school trip. Wow! What a thrill to ride a bus for five hours or more? We played crazy eight or other card games on the trips or just talked or slept. Sometimes we got to take the “Big Bus” that had the motor in the back that was usually reserved for the athletic teams. We thought it was pretty special!
The FFA group had some “wild hares,” but most were good guys and we enjoyed each other’s company. There were enough with some common sense to sort of keep a lid on the others. Mr. Angle didn’t put up with much goofing off and everyone knew it so they toed the line pretty well. I learned a lot through FFA and I think my love for agriculture was strengthened as a result of a good experience in Vo Ag. When it came time to choose a major in college it was not difficult for me to choose an aspect of agriculture.

One of the “experiences” of high school life was eating in “Gerty’s Cafeteria”. Gerty was the name of the lady who managed the cafeteria where most of the students ate lunch each day. Most of the students traveled to school by bus and instead of carrying a lunch, we ate a hot meal prepared by Gerty and her helpers in the cafeteria. The helper ladies would put a helping of each food item on a tray. You couldn’t pick and choose. Everyone got exactly the same thing.

As I recall, the cost for lunch was thirty-five cents. If we wanted an extra carton of milk, it cost five cents extra. We could either pay by the month (which my parents did most of the time) or we could pay each day. One of the ladies who worked for Gerty kept track of who had paid and who ate lunch each day. She knew us all by name by about the second week of school. She would mark off one of the days on a card until you had eaten thirty times, then we had to bring her another check for the next month or pay as we came through the line. More than once I had to borrow money from Terry to pay for my lunch.

Gerty’s reputation reached my tender ears when my brothers were in high school. Both Ted and Terry attended Snowflake Union High School before me, but any high school student could relate “ tales of horror” about the cafeteria. Gerty had been the “cafeteria lady” for at least a hundred years by the time I got there. Gerty was known for a “no-nonsense approach” to feeding a bunch of students. Cutting into line was not allowed. If caught, you either went to the back of the line or didn’t eat. No one got extra food until everyone had eaten. You’d better not be critical of Gerty’s food where she could hear you, or you might end up in tomorrow’s meatloaf. Gerty ruled the kitchen with an iron fist and the cafeteria helpers knew it.

Gerty’s food ranged from “really good” to “pretty awful”. Probably the best thing she cooked was her dinner rolls. Her rolls were “really good.” She would paint the tops of the rolls with melted butter so they were served pre buttered. We usually got two rolls with our lunch. A couple of other things she cooked that were pretty good was a sort of tamale pie served with shredded lettuce on top, and she also made a fried bread similar to a sopapilla that most people liked. They were hollow and we could eat them with honey. The only problem with “Gerty’s Cafeteria” was that you never knew what she was serving until you got down to the cafeteria. Most of us didn’t have much time to eat or much choice about whether to eat in the cafeteria or not, especially when we were poor freshmen and sophomores. We just had to eat whatever she served. Most of it was probably nutritious but it wasn’t much for taste. I don’t remember anyone dying from eating the food, but I know there were some upset stomachs from time to time.

By the time we were juniors and seniors, we had learned how to get a little more of the “good stuff” from the workers and Gerty. A little flattery went a long way. If you bragged something up, she would sometimes give you a little more of it or an extra piece.

Thinking back, I suppose Gerty was unnecessarily maligned. She was really a pretty nice lady when you got to know her a little bit and if you obeyed her rules. She had to put up with feeding about three hundred hungry and grumpy kids each day and she had to do it in an hour and a half. She probably really did a good job feeding us with a balanced, if not tasty, diet for a minimum cost. We would never have admitted that at the time. When I smell freshly baked rolls, even today, I think of “Gerty’s Cafeteria.”

One of the things that is unique to little boys is their attraction to guns. This takes the initial form of pointed fingers with accompanying sound effects and progresses through cap guns to BB guns and eventually to actual weapons that shoot real bullets. I was no different than most boys.

I won’t spend much time on the pointed finger stage, but after that my brothers and I and our friends moved on to the rubber gun stage. Rubber guns could be made out of a piece of board and an old car’s inner tube. The tube was cut cross wise making bands about one-half inch wide. The rubber rings were the ammunition. The gun could be shaped almost any way the owner wanted it. The trigger was a clothes pin. It was tied to the handle or stalk of the gun and the rubber bands were stretched over the end of the barrel and clipped into the clothes pin. To fire the rubber gun, we just pressed on the clothes pin to open it. A good rubber gun could shoot fifteen to twenty feet. They didn’t hurt much unless you were really close to the shooter, but we spent hours playing with them. We used them to shoot at targets and at each other and at whatever else we could think of to shoot at.

About the same time we were into rubber guns, we also used the metal cap guns. I had a number of different cap guns. I had the typical forty-five revolver model like the cowboys used in the movies. I even had holsters to carry them around in. One of the other cap guns I remember was a little silver one that had a single long trigger without a trigger guard and two short barrels. It took a special type of cap rolls that were narrower than the normal red caps. Those particular rolls of caps came in colors other than red. That type of gun popped almost every cap and you could shoot it very rapidly and it almost never had a cap misfire. It was pretty inexpensive yet it was a neat little gun.

When I was about eleven years old the toy makers came out with miniature guns that used round single caps only. The guns were miniature replicas of different guns including revolvers, Winchesters, Tommy guns and other types. I had a Tommy gun model. You cocked the gun, inserted a single round cap and then fired. The resulting pops were very loud. We used to hang out of the car windows driving down the road and shoot at passing objects or we would use them to play around the house. They were very small (three to six inches long depending on the type of gun they were trying to copy), and easy to carry in our pants pockets.

When I was pretty young I got a BB gun. Charlie Reidhead also had a BB gun and we would wander the hills or wander around town and shoot them for hours or until we ran out of BB’s. One of the favorite places to go shooting was to the Heber dump. It was located across the creek to the north of town and up a draw and it was full of old bottles and cans. We would line them up and shoot at them. Later, we both got twenty-two caliber rifles and we used to spend a lot of time at the dump, shooting at bottles and cans. The only problem with the twenty-two rifles was the cost of shells. As I recall, it cost about one dollar for a box of fifty cartridges so we had to be selective about how much shooting we did, but we had fun with the rifles. My brother Ted had a twenty-two caliber pistol and sometimes he would let me shoot it. He also had a thirty-thirty Winchester but I didn’t get to shoot it much.

Probably the “ultimate weapon” we ever fired was my brother Vard’s cannon. Vard had made a cannon barrel in metal shop. It was about eighteen inches long and about two or three inches in diameter. The hole in the barrel was about a half inch across. There was a small hole drilled in the top of the cannon that went through to the hole in the barrel. We could put a fuse in that small hole, then pour gun powder down the barrel and then add cloth or paper and tamp it nice and firm using a ramrod. The explosion that occurred when the lighted fuse hit the gun powder was pretty amazing. We used to shoot it off on the Fourth of July to wake up the town and I think it did a pretty good job. It was a not-so-subtle way of punishing those in town who were too lazy to get up for the “Early Morning Fourth of July Flag Raising Ceremony”. They were awakened whether they liked it or not.

We even tried shooting bolts with the cannon. If you look closely there is a hole in the garage door at The Rock House where a bolt we shot went sideways through the garage door. When we saw the power the cannon had, we quit shooting objects and just settled for making loud noises with the cannon. Vard may still have the cannon he made. We had a lot of fun with it.

One other experience I should relate is the time my brother Ted put a bullet through the front window of The Rock House. It occurred shortly after he got his twenty-two caliber pistol and holster. He liked to practice the “quick draw” and play with the gun. One day he had it in the front room. I guess maybe he was practicing with it. Terry was asleep on the couch in front of the big front window. Ted initially aimed his pistol at the sleeping Terry and then raised his pistol to aim it at something across the street thinking the gun was empty. When he pulled the trigger, the gun went off and the bullet went right through one of the narrow window panes of the front window of The Rock House. I think it scared Ted more than it did anyone else in the house. He realized that if he had pulled the trigger when he had it aimed at Terry, he might have shot his own brother. He was much more careful after that and we all learned an important lesson about being sure guns were unloaded when they were brought into the house. The window was never replaced. The bullet hole is still there to this day as a reminder to all of us about gun safety.

Heber is in an area of Arizona where “wild animals” were numerous and common. It was not unusual at all to see wildlife as we drove to Snowflake or Holbrook or as we drove through the forest. Most common were squirrels, chipmunks, rabbits, skunks, buzzards, deer, and coyotes, but once in a while we would also see wild turkeys, raccoons or elk. Although we seldom saw a live mountain lion, they were in the forest and occasionally someone would kill one and we would see it in the back of their pickup. Uncle Alma Bigler killed several of them. There was a bounty on mountain lions at that time so some of the men hunted them in the winter when there was snow on the ground. I think they were paid one hundred dollars for killing a lion because the lions killed the cattle and calves and could do a lot of damage to a herd.

Although we saw wild animals quite often, my older brother Vard decided that he wanted to have a wild animal for a pet. I think somewhere along the line he had seen a pet bobcat someone had, and it sparked a desire in his heart that was very strong. Nothing would stop him from trying to find a wild animal to be his pet. The rest of us were recruited to help find one.

I can remember our plotting and planning. We decided that the best options would be to find a baby raccoon or baby skunk to make into a pet. We knew that baby skunks didn’t develop their “stink” until they were older and we figured if we could catch one before it did develop the ability to spray, we would be OK. Raccoons were another option. We also knew that the best time to see wildlife was after sundown and before it was too dark to see.

With this information in mind, we went out night after night and roamed the hills around Heber looking for a baby skunk or a baby raccoon. I don’t remember how many nights we looked, but our search was in vain. We never even saw a mother skunk or raccoon, much less a baby one. We finally gave up.

We finally did get to have a baby wild animal years later. To learn more about that, you can read the chapter titled “Savage Sam”.