Rock House and Heber Memories

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FAVORITE BOOKS

 

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.

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HEBER RODEO

 

During my entire childhood and youth, Heber always had a rodeo on the 4th of July. It was a town tradition when I was a kid and it provided some entertainment for everyone in the middle of the summer. It also came to symbolize the beginning of the rainy season. When I was small, it was purely a ranch type rodeo with stock brought in from off the range. Contestants were mostly local cowboys or “cowboy want-ta-be’s” doing most of the events. Later the rodeo became an amateur rodeo with the stock contracted from a person who supplied stock to several local rodeos and with more amateur cowboys who made all the rodeos in the area.

For several years the rodeo grounds were across the creek up Black Canyon. The thing that made it a rodeo grounds was the pens for the animals and the chutes for the bucking broncs and bulls. There was also one concession stand and above the chutes was an announcer’s booth. There was no grandstand for spectators. Everyone just parked their car around the outside of the fence and watched from their car or came and sat on the fence closer up to the holding pens and chutes. There was limited space on the fence so you had to get there early to get a seat. Some of the kids (including my brothers and me) watched from the roof of the concession stand.

Since we didn’t have much money for concessions, Mom and Dad would buy each of us a quart sized bottle of pop from Holbrook. That was what we had to drink during the rodeo so we drank it reeeeal slow. We could select the flavor we preferred. I think a quart bottle of pop cost twenty-five cents at that time. If we had made homemade root beer in time, we used that instead of buying pop. (see another section for details on root beer)

Later the rodeo grounds were moved down to about where the new LDS church building is currently located. That rodeo grounds was a lot fancier and the rodeo got more sophisticated. They would hire more professional stock and the contestants got better because the prizes were larger. People would come from further to participate. Only a few of the local cowboys participated in the events when the rodeo moved to the new location but the fans were always glad when a local person won the event prize money. The new rodeo grounds had a grandstand and on one side next to the hill, they had dug out two levels of parking spots so people could still sit in their cars and watch the rodeo, but they had a better view.

At the old rodeo grounds, the events were calf riding for the kids, steer riding for the teenagers, calf roping, team tying, wild cow milking, barrel racing, bronc riding and bull riding for the adults. In the riding events very few stayed on. If a kid wanted to try to ride they would put them on a calf. Usually they fell off as soon as the gate opened and the calf moved. I never did try it myself but some of my friends did with little luck. I liked the wild cow milking contest the best. It was done by a team of two or three people. One member of the team would grab hold of the cows head, another the tail to hold it still while the other tried to milk the cow into a pop bottle. The team with a bottle full of milk in the shortest amount of time won. It was usually a blast because the cows were straight in off the range and they were pretty wild.

At some of the rodeos they had a greased pig chase for the kids. There were also various types of foot races and other contests for the kids to participate in. We had lots of fun. Winners won prizes from the concession stand or tickets to Windy’s Theater.

When the rodeo got more professional, events like the wild cow milking and calf riding and steer riding fell by the wayside as did the races and the greased pig chases. There was more bull riding and bronc riding as well as roping.

The rodeo was put on by the Heber Ward to raise money for the budget. When I got to be twelve, and until I was eighteen, the young men helped out in the corrals or in the concession stands. We all had shifts and it was fun. We got pretty good at selling hot dogs, hamburgers, snow cones, pop and candy. The closest I came to participating in any of the events was some of the races and a boxing exhibition which earned me tickets to Windy’s Theater. I never rode a cow or horse and I never ate dirt. I guess I may have missed something but I can’t say I’m sorry. I still have all my teeth and other body parts.

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MEDICAL TREATMENT

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.

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MY CAREER AT THE HEBER STORE

 

I will tell you about my early career in the Heber Store. When I was about eleven or twelve years old, Uncle Donnie Porter bought the Heber Store from Uncle Thomas Shelley.  He enlarged the store to about twice or three times its original size.  When the store was finished and stocked, it was a nice place to shop. It was the largest store in the area. There were two stores in Overgaard (Weech’s Store and Zane’s), but they were not nearly as nice as Porter’s Shopping Center.

Uncle Donnie hired Terry to do the janitorial work and clean up the store each night after closing. I helped Terry as his assistant. I don’t know if Dad or Mom had anything to do with it, but we went to work. Terry would have been fourteen or fifteen at the time. Each night we would sweep the floor using the red or green colored sawdust sweep compound that was common at the time. The sweep compound was treated with oil so that it kept the dust down when you swept. The colored sawdust helped you know you had swept all of the floor. Before starting to sweep, you scattered the sawdust all over the floor and then you started at one end of the store and swept all the sawdust to the other end of the store. When you were finished, you had swept all of the floor. The oil also kept the floor shiny if it was waxed well. The compound kept the dust down so that dusting the shelves did not need to be done so often.

Our other jobs were to clean the bathrooms, take out the trash, and mop the floor about once a week. Every so often we had to wax the floor and buff it using a large rotary buffer that was about as big as I was. We learned how to put pressure on one side or the other to get the buffer to do what we wanted it to do. I don’t remember exactly how much we were paid but it didn’t matter—I was in the “BIG TIME” and I was earning my own money.

Terry was later moved to being a carry out boy and then a stocker and then produce manager. I followed right behind. When he was gone or when they needed extra help, I worked as a bagger and carry out boy and I also helped with stocking the shelves. Later when Terry graduated from High School, I took over his jobs and I did produce, stocking, checking, and about everything there was to do. I even worked in the butcher shop some of the time. I guess by the time I left to go to college, I was pretty close to being something like an assistant manager. I could do about anything in the store and knew how everything worked.

I didn’t work in Mesa while I was going to college but when there was a vacation or long weekend, I would return home and work in the Heber Store to get a few dollars to keep me going until the next opportunity to work.

I worked for and with a lot of different people while working in the Heber Store. Some of the ones I can remember are Uncle Donnie and Aunt Folvia,  Lewis and Mary Tenney, Sheila Webb, Jean Porter, Chine Hagerman, Jo Riedhead Beecroft, Mr. and Mrs Wolfley and Mr. and Mrs. Eckhart (both managed the store for a few years), and Mr. Wilbur from Pinetop who owned the store when it became “Wilbur’s Shopping Center” for a few years.

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BETSY THE NANNY GOAT

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.