In Alexander, the dam was several miles further east from where we lived in this little bitty town. There was a pool hall there, a school, a railroad depot, a post office, a general store and two or three homes. There were some railroad workers who lived there in their little yellow houses, and there was this one, well it would be considered an apartment house now - the post office was in one side and the lady that ran the post office and her family lived in the building and then our family lived in the other side. We had some upstairs rooms and some downstairs rooms. I don’t remember how many we had. The gas that was the post mistress was kind of a dummy. She lost packages regularly. I remember one year, a man that my father knew quite well had sent him a beautiful fruitcake for Christmas and after Dad didn't mention it for quite some time,he asked hi if he had ever gotten it. Dad said, no, and so we asked at the post office and the lady said, well I do have a box here for somebody named Jack Owen, but Dad's name is John, so it didn't ever occur to her to check if it was the same person. She didn't know that Jack was a nickname for John. When he finally got that fruitcake, it was a gorgeous thing. It had sugar icing and the icing was so hard that you almost had to take an axe to break it. We sure laughed about that.
But it was kind of a strange little town. I went to a two room school that had two teachers and a lot of students. We had some strange people! They came from all over and some kids had lived a pretty rough life. Once at school - because it was such motley people who came and worked on the dam, you never knew what kind of people you were going to get, there were some kids who were acting strange one day in class. One of them finally got sick and he admitted that he and another boy had been up in the foothills that were close there and had found a still and proceeded to get some liquor out of it and got drunk and were drunk in school and the one in front of me threw up all over his desk in the schoolroom. I got sick from just looking at him, watching all he was going through. So the teacher looked at me and she got my brother, Evan from the older class and told him to take me home, that I was sicker than the other kid was. So that's when I learned about not-too-nice of people. But, oh! That kid smelled awful!
We were active in the Church in Juniper but I can't remember ever going to Church when we were in Alexander or Soda Springs. The Church would have been in Soda Springs, but eventually we moved out of this little apartment thing and got a house out - oh probably about half way between Alex (Alexander) and Soda Springs in a town called Grace. It was a nice home. we lived right across the street from a big set of railroad tracks. This was 1925, I think.
In those days, it seemed like every place you ever moved into, you had to fumigate it first - do something to get rid of bed bugs because they were just there. They were terrible little beasts. They ate you and made you itch like crazy. And I can remember that we had to fumigate this house. We put something to burn in the rooms and closed it up and left it for about 48 hours before we could go back in. And then I remember my Mother had me painting all the bed springs with some kind of something to be sure we killed all the bed bugs before we took a chance moving in this house. You did that to every place you ever moved into. (said laughing) It was kind of a pain in the neck, but then you didn't get bed bugs that way. Now you never hear about bed bugs anymore. Thank goodness!
We had a neat old dog that we brought with us from Juniper to Alexander. He was, I don't know, several years old before we left Juniper and was a particular pet of Evan's and mine. He would chase a ball for you and he loved to be played with. Well, after we moved into Alex, everybody was gone all day; Evan and I'd be in school and my Dad and brothers were gone, and there would just be Helen and my Mother at home and life got dull for him, so he got so he'd wander around town and eventually made his way into the not-too-far-away pool hall and the men found out he would play with them. They just literally fell in love with him. They would get him to chase his tail and all the stuff and so eventually the pool hall took over and he got so he just didn't ever come home anymore. When we moved out to this little house partway in-between Alex and Soda Springs, he wouldn't move with us.
In fact when we moved from Juniper, he wouldn't ride in the car. You couldn't get him into a car. So when we moved, my brother, Wallace, who was the oldest, had driven a team with our furniture loaded in a wagon, and he had driven from Juniper to Alex. I don't know how far that is, but it took him several days. (Note from Arlene - looking on the Internet, depending where Juniper is/was and depending on what roads they had to take to go through Lava Hot Springs on the way it looks like Preston is about 60-100 miles from Soda Springs.) Finally when he got to Alexander and drove into the yard, we said, "Well, where's Shep?" He says, "I don't know. The last time I saw him he was back at Lava Hot Springs. He was just laying in the road." (chuckle) I guess by then Wallace was so tired, he wasn't paying any attention. So they got in the car and drove back to Lava Hot Springs and there was old Shep just laying in the middle of the road; he was so foot sore and weary. Wallace said, "I don't know what happened." He said, "He was chasing rabbits all the way." He had run, I guess he had made that trip three or four times just chasing rabbits while Wallace would drive along the road with the team, the dog would take off and chase all the rabbits he could find and then come back; he wouldn't even ride in the wagon with Wallace.
But when he got hooked on the pool hall and all his friends there, one day my Dad came home and he says, "You'll never guess who I saw riding in a car today." And we said, "Who?" "Well, Shep! Somebody had him in his car and Shep had his nose out in the wind and was just loving it." So we lost our dog to the "bright lights". (giggle) If you can call that pool hall the bright lights.
Another thing that we had out there that scared me to death was the coyotes that would howl at night. I was always just sure they were going to come and get me. The sound frightened me so bad; I hated it!
And another interesting dog we had there part of the time was, a friend of my brother, Sam, had a beautiful hunting dog. It was a gorgeous animal. He had been trained to protect anything that his man laid down. He'd say, "Major, you guard it." And Major would stay right there and nobody could touch it. So when we went out to the country, this man asked if we'd keep Major with us and we had him. Where Shep would play with us and was so graceful and lovely, Major was an awkward dog; he couldn’t catch things without just looking silly. But if you laughed at him, it hurt his feelings and if you laughed at him and he got his feelings hurt, he'd go hide in the corner and wouldn't come out for hours.
We lived in Alexander for, I guess, a couple of years and then we moved out to a little house that was between Alexander and a larger town named Grace. that was the most interesting country up there. There was such good fishing and we used to do a lot of picnicking after work; seemed like they got home at a nice time of day, and the men all loved to fish, and they'd gather up all the fishing poles and we'd get in the car and take a picnic with us - always raw potatoes. We'd peel them and slice them up fine and Mother would make camp style potatoes which was really just fried in a really big frying pan with onions and cooked over a sagebrush fire and they always tasted so good! I guess they picked up part of the flavor of the sage, and oh, they were so good. And they always caught fish, so we always had fish for dinner and a vegetable of some kind and it was always just a delight. Around Soda Springs there were quite a few places where you could picnic and they were, like the name implies, soda springs, they were springs that came up out of the ground that were made with soda water. But the flavor, just to drink it as water was quite strong and wasn't very palatable. So everybody would take either lemons and make lemonade, or root beer extract and you could make really good root beer. So we'd take a picnic and go to one of the soda springs and have a delightful time.
The area around Soda Springs had bottomless lakes. there were caves where you could put fruit and they would petrify over a period of time. One of the other things up there was quicksand. I remember my brother Sam walking across by one of these lakes and he could feel the ground springing under him, so he started jumping up and down. Drove Mother crazy! "Sam, stop it! You'll go through the crust!" He'd stand and laugh at her.
While we were in Alexander the doctors decided that Sam and I should have our tonsils out. He had his out first and when I came to have mine out, they decided that I had some very bad teeth. I was just at that age where part of them were baby teeth and part were adult teeth and so they pulled seven teeth and took my tonsils out at the same time. When I came out of the ether I felt pretty good and through the afternoon I felt pretty good. Finally the doctor came in and there was a big, what they called a Chautauqua*,
* Chautauqua (pronounced shə-TAW-kwə) is an adult education movement in the United States, highly popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Chautauqua assemblies expanded and spread throughout rural America until the mid-1920s. The Chautauqua brought entertainment and culture for the whole community, with speakers, teachers, musicians, entertainers, preachers and specialists of the day.[1] Former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt was quoted as saying that Chautauqua is "the most American thing in America."[2]
it's a traveling tent show, playing just across the street from the hospital and the doctor came in and was starting to kid Sam and I about going out to see the Chautauqua that night and when he looked at me, he said, "You look kind of pale." He said, "Are you bleeding?" and I said, "I don't know." He finally checked my throat and decided I was. The thing of it is, this man was a marvelous doctor, but he was terrible on tonsils. He did surgery that you'd swear he couldn't pull people through and he always did, but when it came to having tonsils out, he just did a really bad job. So from that I finally ended up having my tonsils out three times. He said I'd have to come back into him, and he tried doing a better job and didn't make it, and finally when we were, several years later in Logan, they said they'd grown back again, so I went in to a doctor and he just numbed it and did it with me conscious. That was terrible, too.
Anyway, this night, the doctor decided I was having a hemorrhage so he had me open my mouth and he took some stitches to control the hemorrhage. From then on, for what seemed a long time, I didn't have any energy. I got so tired at everything I did. I remember we went down to my aunt in Logan and she had a flight of stairs between the first floor and the second floor, and I went partway up and had to sit down and rest, I just couldn't make it. And I guess that weakened my body enough that I became subject to lots of ails and stuff after that because it wasn't too long after that I started to have arthritis that bugged me for many years to come.
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