[ * Titles marked with an asterisk were added by the Editors.]
My father and mother started a Sunday school at the one room school house and that is where I first went to Sunday school. Later we drove horse and buggy four miles to McCabe. They had preaching services in the afternoon. The preacher preached at the Methodist church in Douglass in the morning, then came to country church in P.M.
Soon that new machine the auto appeared. One of the first I remember seeing was a high wheeled affair. The livery stable man, Mr. Dailey, was the first one to buy that contraption. Think I was about 12 when Papa bought our first Ford. I don't know why but they let him drive it without much instruction and he drove through a fence and into a field yelling "whoa-whoa" - think my brother Cy took over and learned real fast how to drive. I have a picture of Cy and I in that first car. We just used the car in the summer. In winter it was set up on blocks and radiator drained - in the days before anti-freeze. Also roads were often impassable - mud so deep it was all a team of horses could do to pull a wagon through the deep ruts. Then my father read about a drag for helping smooth roads, so he built one and for a number of years he dragged four miles of road after a rain - or when winter snows melted.
Living on a farm we had plenty to eat. Every winter butchered two or three hogs - rendered lard - ground sausage. Sugar cured hams and sides of bacon. Chickens and eggs, milk, cream, and we always raised a garden and my mother canned a lot of fruit, made pickles and all the other good things. My earliest memories of canning were tin cans sealed with red sealing wax. Later glass jars with zinc and glass tops. Sauerkraut made in big stone jars. Hominy but my memory of how Mamma did that is no more. We had lots of cottage cheese made from sour milk. We raised lots of potatoes and sweet potatoes. The sweet potatoes laid on a big canvas in the sun and cured for some time then put in a long box Papa made that fit under the old sanitary cot in dining room, as sweet potatoes had to be kept dry and warm. Irish potatoes were put in long bins in the cellar. Churned our own butter, worked the butter milk out and made a nice round pat and made a print on top with edge of butter paddle. When we butchered Mamma used scraps of meat and broth from boiling scrap meat to make mince meat for mince meat pies and all the pie crusts were made with lard. We also pickled the heart, tongue and pigs feet. Later my parents hired their butchering done. They also took load of wheat to mill and got their flour milled.
During World War One, things were severely rationed. When we took wheat to mill for flour we had to take some corn and get corn meal. My parents and I liked corn bread so that wasn't too much of a hardship but one day my sister found her two youngest sitting on the stairs and Opal was saying to her brother George "I don't like President Hoover, he makes us eat cornbread."
The spring I was in third grade everyone in school had chicken pox. As I think back on it, is a wonder some of us didn't become very ill. We walked to school and all our breaking out disappeared, then in warm school house we soon broke out again. I was over the troublesome breaking out, only a very few marks left, when Mrs. Clara Teets came to visit my mother. She had her twin daughters Faye and Ferne with her. I was delighted thinking I would have someone to play with but the little girls would have nothing to do with me; they were sure they would get chicken pox from my two or three little scabs.
Was about this time a nice new school house was built, still one room with cloak rooms and a library room. I remember the programs we used to have. Some of the young people joined in and put on plays. Even some older people took part, speaking pieces. My father usually spoke a piece. Sort of a literary society. That school house was bought and moved a short distance and made into a home for the Houser family - when the district was consolidated with Douglass and children bussed into town to school in later years. When I graduated from 8th grade all the eighth grade graduates went to El Dorado for graduation exercises. By that time Papa was a good driver, roads were improved so Papa and Mamma took me to El Dorado. I had a white lace dress, a navy blue spring coat and white straw hat.