The Old Ford

1919: L-R: John P. Lind, Lynn Clark, Philbert, Oscar & Laurence

On the ranch, in the shed below the road was an old 1916 (?) Ford Touring car, which used to belong to Grandma (Emma) Lind.  I think that it was the one that Uncle Oscar bought and after his death became the property of Grandma.  I don’t know if she ever drove it, but none the less it belonged to her.  Anyway many a happy hour was spent as a young boy as Doug and I pretended to drive the dusty old car.  It had a fold down top on it, four doors and two leather seats, the top was never put down.  I don’t remember if we were ever bank robbers, but we would chase the bank robbers and try to catch them.  Sometimes I would even get to pretend drive and that was very exciting.  We would get to go to many different places on exotic vacations, anyplace that our minds could think of to go.  It was a wonderful old car.

When Oscar was about 16, Dad told the boys they could have the old car if they could get it running.  Oscar and Dwain were the chief mechanics, Doug figured he was as good of help as they could find and Me, I was a good shade tree mechanic, most of my ideas went by unheeded.  After all I was only eight or nine and to older brothers didn’t know much.

The car was pulled out of the shed and work on it started in earnest.  First we got the motor running, because if the motor doesn’t run you can’t go very far.  After the motor was running and bands in the transmission were going, then we decided what to do with the body of the car.  It was decided to strip it down and make it into a pickup type vehicle.  The body was cut off behind the front seat, the back seat and the top were discarded.  A wooden platform was built on the back behind the seat that we could sit or stand on, so now we were ready to try it out.  The tires were no good as they had rotted while sitting in the shed, so the maiden voyage was made on the rims.

One of the interesting things about our “hotrod”, was that it had a Ruxstell gear in the differential.  This was kind of a low speed gear when you pulled on the floor mounted shift lever, giving it a two speed effect, high and low.

After we got tires on our auto, we were able to drive it all over on the roads at the ranch.  Oscar even taught me how to drive it, which I really appreciated.  We took it fishing, coyote hunting and one time we even decided to drive it to Grouse Creek to the 4th of July celebration.  There were about six of us that piled on to it and we were off.  Dwain was the chauffeur for us on that eventful day.  We putted down the road and up the mountain, as we started down the other side everything was going fine.  We came around Lower’s Curve and down to Poison Creek, as we were going down the grade by the creek, it started to pick up speed.  Dwain pushed on the brake and nothing happened, he tried everything he could think of, nothing worked.  We might make it around the gentle curve 1/4 of a mile ahead, but there was no way we could make it around Scott’s curve on ahead and we would go off the grade and down the hill.  The only alternative at this point, was to try and go up over the bank on the left and up the mountain.  Dwain grabbed the Ruxstell gear lever and gave it a hard pull, as he did this, every thing on the car seemed to work.  The sudden jerk almost threw us off, but we had been saved from serious injury or worse.

We went on to Grouse Creek and spent the day visiting with our cousins and friends.  The rest of the day was relatively uneventful.  The trip home was made in good order.

Oscar and Dwain went into the Army in World War II, Dad, felt sorry for a family with several boys in Moulton and gave our car to them.  They got it running and had lots of fun with it.  Us boys were really not very happy campers over the situation, but all turned out well in the end.

Our Trip To Yellowstone

In 1940, after the alfalfa hay was all in the stacks and the fields watered, our family (Philbert’s) and Uncle Raymond’s went to Heglar Canyon, east of Malta, Idaho to buy timber to build two A frame derricks.  After talking to the man who ran the saw mill and making arrangement to get the timber, we headed towards American Falls.  When we got to Highway 30 at Cold Water Camp, Idaho, they stopped to decide what to do and which way to go.  All of the older kids wanted to go to Yellowstone Park.  The folks, said they were not prepared to go to Yellowstone, they didn’t have enough ready cash to make that trip.  We had all of our camping gear, so the kids didn’t see why we couldn’t go.  It was finally decided that we would go as far as Blackfoot and see if they could cash some checks and if they could, we would go to the Park. 

Just outside of Pocatello, Uncle Raymond’s car overheated and stopped.  We received permission to camp in a freshly cut alfalfa field.  There were a lot of trains running on the railroad tracks, just across the road south of us.  There was an airport just north of us, they were training pilots, just prior to World War II.  They flew just as long as they could see in the evening and started as soon as they could see in the morning.  We, Country Kids, had never seen so many planes or trains.  We lay on our stomachs with our hands under our chins and counted the cars on the trains as they went by.  Between the planes and trains and kids counting, I don’t think any body got much sleep, but we had fun.

In Blackfoot, Dad and Uncle Raymond both got them a hair cut from Wayne Bird, who had lived in the Junction Valley some years earlier.  He was glad to cash a check for each of them, so we were off on our great adventure.  I don’t know how Aunt Mildred made out, Nila was only a few weeks old and they didn’t have disposable diapers back then.  At night they would pull the cars side by side, away’s apart, we would lay out our beds between them.  Dad and Uncle Raymond would sleep, one on each end, Aunt Mildred slept in the car with Nila, I don’t recall where Mother slept.  We kids just slept and didn’t worry about a thing.  Our meals were cooked over the campfire.

As we left Yellowstone, we drove through the Tetons and down through Jackson Hole.  When we arrived at the Snake River, we were amazed to see the bridge we would have to drive on to cross the  river.  As I remember it, it was just planking on poles driven and used as piles.  Two sets of planking about three feet wide, with a gap of about three feet in the center.  There were no guard rails on either side.  The road going down the canyon was under construction and very rough.  I don’t know how many were afraid to cross this bridge, but I certainly was.  I remember putting a quilt over my head and praying that we would be safe.  If we were going to fall in the river, I didn’t want to know about it.  The dad’s were good drivers and made it across safely.

When we got to Alpine, Wyoming, we camped for the night.  Some of the kids soon found a pretty black and white animal.  We were busy chasing it, trying to catch it.  When people saw what we were doing they started yelling, telling us to leave it alone.  We chased that scared skunk through a fellows campfire, upsetting his coffee pot in the fire.  The man wasn’t happy at all with us, our folks, well, they were grateful that we didn’t get sprayed.  We did have a good time on the trip.

Christmas in Lynn

L-R: Philbert holding Virgene, Aunt Julia, Ellen, Aunt Otilia, & Uncle Lawrence

Christmas was always an exciting time in the Lynn Valley.  I don’t remember as much as I probably should, but none the less we always had a good time.  One of the things we liked to do was to go caroling, we would get on a bob-sleigh and go from house to house and sing Christmas Carols.  We enjoyed doing this and the people whose houses we went to seemed to enjoy it also.  When Laurel Hill was teaching we took Dad’s horses and bob-sleigh, sleigh bells were fastened on to the harnesses.  Simon Baker Jr. was driving the horses.  We had quite a caravan, we had a big sheet of iron hooked behind the sleigh, it was about four feet wide and eight feet long, the front of it was curved up so that it would ride over the snow.  We also had some individual sleds tied on behind and we took turns riding on them.  When we got up by the reservoir, Laurel, tipped her little sled over and hit her forehead on the edge of the big metal slide and when her head started to bleed, we were sure she was going to die.  Needless to say, this stopped our fun afternoon.

The ward met in the school to hold church activities so it was kind of hard to remember which activities were church and which were school.  We used to always have a Santa Clause party and Santa would come with presents for the kids.  We would always try to guess who Santa’s helper was, Aunt Julia was always a dead give away because of her thumbnails which were short and squatty.  We didn’t have electricity, so everyone would bring a lantern or a lamp, or both, to light the school.

We had grades one through eight in the school and everyone would help decorate the room.  Mostly it was paper chains that went crosswise from corner to corner, pulled up in the center and a large bell hung in the center.  The chains would also loop from window to window.  The school program would consist mostly of stories or poems given by the children.  Some years we would put on a one act play.

The folks would generally make their last trip to town to get supplies for the winter sometime before Thanksgiving, then we would be snowed in until some time in April when they would plow the snow out of the road.  One year not long before Christmas, Douglas and I had gone upstairs to bed.  There was a knock on the door and Dad went to see who it was, it was Clement Simper, he said that he was going to Burley tomorrow and wondered if Dad needed any thing.  Dad told him that he had a coaster wagon layed away at Western Auto and he wondered if Clement would bring it home for him.  The next night we had gone to bed and there was a knock on the door.  It was Clement with the wagon.  A few days later the road was still open, so Dad and Mother decided they would go to Burley.  Doug and I stayed home, after the folks were gone, we decided we would find the wagon.  We hunted in the basement, in the garage, the granary, the sheds at the corrals and all the small building, but we couldn’t find any wagon.  Christmas morning when we went down stairs to see what Santa had brought, the wagon was under the tree.  Years later, I asked Dad where he had hid the wagon.  He said he knew we would be looking for it, so he had carried it up to some tall sage brush between our place and Uncle Raymond’s and hid it.

As I mentioned, we didn’t have electricity, so when we, Uncle Raymond and us, decorated our Christmas Trees, we put candle holders on them with candles.  We only put about six or so candles on ours, and when we lit the candles, Dad would have a big bucket of water handy, to put out the fire if one started.  Uncle Raymond had a lot more candles on his.  They were the most beautiful sight I had ever seen when they were lit.  We had our tree up from December 15 to January 6.  Santa’s helpers would come again New Year’s Eve and leave candy and nuts again.

Our Pet Deer

Having grown up in Junction Valley on the ranch, we were surrounded by the high mountains with the large reservoir, mountain streams and broad blue skies.  We enjoyed a country lifestyle with our cousins close by.  We had many adventures with wild animals, many varieties of birds, and fishing was a favorite pastime.  We liked to catch the crawdads at the creek and make willow whistles.  We had trap lines in the winter and in the spring we waited for the eggs in the magpie nests to hatch, for the bounty was better on the little birds.  It was a great childhood.

The folks first home was a little three room house near Grandma Lind at the Lind homestead.  The joy of having a pet deer began early in life, probably even with Dad and his brothers and sisters.  When Oscar was only about two years old, he liked to feed the bottle of milk to his pet fawn and walk around holding on to it’s tail.  They were friends.  Mother said that she always knew when Tom Sherry was in the neighborhood, because the hair on the pet deer’s back would stand straight up and then the dog would start barking.  For some reason the deer didn’t like Tom.

I remember us having several pet deer that we loved, one about every year.  Dad would go out riding and find a little spotted fawn laying under the bushes and bring it home. We would feed them on the bottle and they would follow us around and live around in the yard and pastures.  As they grew up they would take off to live in the wild of the hills.

One Sunday in the fall when I was about seven years old, we were on our way home from church at the school house and as we got up by Uncle Alex’s place we spied a buck deer with horns standing in the pasture by the side of the road.  We called for Dad to stop the car so we could get out to see him.  We were sure he was one of our pets.  Dad stopped, but warned us to stay back away from him because he was a wild animal and not one of ours.  But we were sure he was as we all hurried out of the car in our Sunday clothes and started toward him.  He stood still watching us and we were able to walked right up to him and pet him.  He remembered us!  We were so excited to see him all grown up.  We didn’t want to leave, but the folks finally convinced us to go home for dinner.

We always worried that our pet deer would get shot with the wild deer at deer season time.  We had one that we raised that had four prongs on each side of his horns and we wanted to protect him.  When deer season came along that fall, Dad got a big piece of red cotton cloth and tied around his horns so he had a big red bonnet.  It saved his live for that year, at least.

The habit of having a pet deer continued down through Virgene’s teen age years as well.

Deer Hunting Memories

I was in the 2nd grade when Laurel Hill came to teach at the Lynn School and she began to live with our family.  It was probably that fall that the following incident happened:

One clear crisp Saturday morning in October, the family was making plans for a day of hunting.  Mother invited Laurel to go along with her for the day.  I was riding behind Mother on her saddle horse and Laurel rode alone.  We rode up on the West Mountain through Uncle Laurence’s pasture, high on the mountain near the River of Rocks.  We were riding along up Deep Hollow and I was the first to see him.  I said, “There he goes, Mum!”  She moved quickly from the saddle, pulling the old lever action 32-20 rifle from the scabbard hanging from the side of the saddle as she stepped down.  She moved back, took careful aim and BOOM, she got him with one shot!  She had learned to ride, hunt and handle a gum during her growing up years in Grouse Creek.  I was so excited and yelled, “Ya’ got him, Mum, ya’ got him”!  We rode over to take a closer look at our prize buck.

Then came the job of preparing him to take home.  All that Mother and Laurel could find to cut his throat was a little pen knife of Laurel’s with a tiny 1-1/2 inch blade and so they took turns hacking away at the bloody throat to let the big animal bleed out.  By the time they were ready to load him onto the horse Dad came along the mountain to give a hand.  We really went home that day with bragging rights!  He turned out to be the only deer bagged by the family that day.  It was really an exciting experience for a little boy of seven. 

Mother always shot left-handed and preferred to carry the old pump-action twenty two.  In the 1960's Dad bought Mother a new left-handed bolt action rifle, which later became mine, being another “lefty”.

1964 Deer Hunt at hunting cabin

Through the years, Deer Season was always a gathering time for friends and family at The Ranch in Lynn.  The folks build the little family hunting cabin on the west mountain in 1954, so our dear friend, Dr. LeRoy Wirthlin of Salt Lake would have a nice place to stay when he brought his friends and family out for hunting season each year. He had covered several medical issues for our family while refusing any payment.   He’d drive out in his old Packard car loaded down with hunting gear, supplies and his sons, to meet his friends at the cabin, Steve Buckmiller, Bob Stewart and Abinadi (Bin) Tolman from Brigham City.  To them it was ten days of hunting bliss with no phones to interrupt their solitude.

One of my favorite memories of deer season and gathering at the ranch was in October of 1996.  VaLayne brought her little boys and came to Idaho.  Ellen invited us up to the ranch for the Friday night Dutch-oven dinner with the request to bring Mother along, by then in her 93rd year.  That afternoon we drove up to Lynn.  We sat in the old family kitchen, Mother in her favorite old rocking chair in front of the kitchen window.  A fire burning in the old fireplace and surrounded with love, laughter and great hunting stories.

As we drove down through the valley that evening, bright lights flickered from all the homes and yards. The roads were filled with cars and trucks pulling horse trailers coming in.  The valley had come to life once again.  Hunting season was in the air. It was a fun ride back to Burley as we sang old songs and reminisced.

Just ten days later Mother passed away suddenly at her little home in View leaving a pot of homemade soup simmering on the stove.

The Porcupine - "our best pet"

The porcupine was probably the best pet we ever had.  I don't remember that he had a name, maybe "Porky."  My older brother, Oscar, brought a gunny sack to school one day.  After school he was going to Buck Hollow (on the East Mountain) to see Heb (Heber) Simpson.  Heb kept his sheep in Buck Hollow and Oscar was going to go see if Heb had any leppy lambs he could have.  Leppy lambs have been abandoned by their mother and need to be bottle-fed to survive.  The sheepherders don't often have time or supplies to bottle feed the lambs and so will give them away.  Oscar was riding his horse toward Buck Hollow and noticed a mother porcupine walking with two baby porcupines following her along.  Oscar got off his horse, picked up one of the baby porcupines and put it in his gunny sack to bring home - but didn't go to get any lambs.  I remember that night when Oscar pulled a little black ball about two inches long out of the gunny sack.  We could hardly believe what it was.  I think my parents were tickled about having a porcupine to raise.

My sister Ellen was about four years old and she donated her "Betsy Wetsy" baby bottle to the cause and we fed him with cows milk.  When we first got him, he had black coarse hair - kind of like horse hair.  As the porcupine got older, his hair grew to about one inch long and then the quills started growing up through the hair.  After the quills grew in, we couldn't pet him like we had before.  He liked to be petted on his head.  We would hold out our index fingers a few inches apart and the porcupine would come over and put his hands on your fingers.  Then we could lift him onto our laps and pet his head.  He was a very good pet and never tried to strike us.

I don't think Uncle Raymond was "tickled" we had him.  Uncle Raymond had just planted a row of pine trees and our porcupine liked them.  He'd climb up in the trees and nibble on the bark.  Uncle Raymond would bring him back to us in a bucket every now and then.

Laurel Hill was our school teacher and she began planning a pet show at school.  Our porcupine was about a year old and we wanted to take him to the show.  After school, we decided we didn't want to take the porcupine home and we'd play with him the next day.  So we walked around the school yard checking the fence.  We plugged any holes in the fence, so he would be safe and stay put.

The next morning we found him laying dead in the road.  He was in the middle of the road where there is the main road through the valley and then it branches off and goes over the mountain to Grouse Creek.  We were so sad.  We'd left him at school and he'd been trying to come home when he got hit.  Before school started that morning, we held a little funeral and buried him in the school yard.  We found out later that Curtis Nelson had been in Burley that day and was on his way home that evening and ran over our porcupine in an unfortunate accident.

Through the years, we had lots of wild animals as pets: coyotes, bobcats, owls, deer, and lots of lambs - but the porcupine was our favorite.  I think we tried more kinds of wild animals as pets than anyone else did.  The Baker's had deer pets.  Uncle Raymond's family didn't have wild animal pets, but one year he had the Brownies write us a note at Christmas time asking us not to chase Uncle Raymond's geese.