# As it was



## Deucemoi (Jan 27, 2017)

I posted something similar to this on another forum and the resulting
comments left MUCH to be desired.
I grew up in Missoula. Dad had a floor covering business in an old
store. We kids roamed the neighbor hood at will. 
Mostly we played cops and robbers, army or cowboys and indians.

There was a vacant lot we commandeered for our fort. We used
cardboard boxes for tanks, ships and if you were ingenious enough
you could make a plane. 

Sometimes we made a little to much noise and mostly we just
got shooed away except for the old guy who took a garden hose
to us. 
There was a snack chip company and if you took a paper bag they
would fill it with the bad burnt and otherwise nasty chips.
I learned that if you left that partial bag on the counter you
could gather nearly every variety of ant.

Grandma gave me a pair of strap on roller skates and I made
full use of them, skating down the cement sidewalks, skint
knees and elbows.

A school project was to take a mason jar and cut up a balloon
which you stretched over the mouth of the jar and tied it 
with a string. Then glued a piece of paper to the top for
a pointer. This made a barometer and worked pretty good.

One day I was snooping and found this little round tin 
inside of which were these little toothpick like things.
You could get a really great surprise if you put those
picks inside a cigarette and waited until someone lit the
cigarette. Needless to say this garnered me a day in my room.

Dad taught me how to make a crystal radio out of an old
oatmeal box, some salvaged copper wire, the earpiece from
and old phone, a piece of galena and a safety pin.

In the same block we lived in was a fruit company and you
could get broken watermelon (in season) cantaloupe, apples
oranges and lots of other stuff.

Several blocks away was a flour mill, my brother and his
pal spent hours there with a box trap trying to trap pigeons.
We raked leaves for a dime. You could get a lot of candy
at the little store down the street, two for a penny.


----------



## Ken N Tx (Jan 28, 2017)

Deucemoi said:


> I posted something similar to this on another forum and the resulting
> comments left MUCH to be desired.
> I grew up in Missoula. Dad had a floor covering business in an old
> store. We kids roamed the neighbor hood at will.
> ...



Thanks for the memories..(see the red above)


----------



## Timetrvlr (Feb 11, 2017)

When I was a little boy, I had a secret diamond mine…….

When I was a little kid, I found diamonds. Sometimes I found oval, opaque rocks and discovered that when I broke them open, they were hollow inside and crystallized so that they sparkled and glittered in the sun and shone in several colors. I was sure they were diamonds.  I planned to come back when I was grown and open my diamond mine and become rich. I never told anyone about this because I was pretty sure my folks wouldn’t believe they were really diamonds. Poor people didn’t own diamond mines. I figured that if I told anyone else, they might steal my diamonds. Years later, I learned that what I had actually found were geodes which are fairly rare but were not uncommon on the hills of our farm. I wonder if little boys still find diamonds?

I was a little guy during World War II. In those days, before we had electricity, we all listened to a battery-powered radio at night. We had no reception until nightfall and even then, it required a very long, complicated copper wire antenna positioned just so. I can remember my parents both hunched over the radio every night for the latest word on the Battle of The Bulge and later, the war in the Pacific.

We had a small herd of milk cows and my mother milked them by hand twice a day. My job was to carry water to the corral so my mother could wash their udders before milking.  I was so little that a half-bucket of water was awfully heavy. My father raised the alfalfa and grains that we fed the cows. Before I was old enough to go to school, we stored alfalfa hay in large haystacks. One time I found the hay knife, a wicked-looking blade about three feet long with very large coarse teeth and a handle at the top. I climbed a haystack and hauled the hay knife up with me, then proceeded to cut up the haystack. When I was done, I threw the hay knife over the side and jumped down after it. Apparently I landed on it for I had a nice slice in my leg just below the knee. I managed to get to the house and was taken to a doctor in the village. I recall he sewed me up with a cigar clenched between his teeth. 


For a while, mom separated the cream from the milk by letting it stand over night and the cream rose to the top. Then she dipped the cream off for making butter. Later, we had a mechanical cream separator and it had lots of parts that had to be removed and washed by hand. It was quite a job to put it all together again too, but it worked really well. My older brother was the mechanical one in the family and taught my mother how to take it apart and put it all back together again.

Mom churned butter in a two-gallon butter churn. The temperature had to be just right, not too warm or too cold, and it still took a lot of cranking to make butter. I got to help with that. When it was done, we had buttermilk! Mom washed the butter to get all the milk out and then pressed it into butter molds. Then she wrapped each one-pound block in waxed paper.

We did not have electricity yet, so we did not have a refrigerator either.  We had to keep the butter and milk cool so my dad built a cooler about the size and shape of a large refrigerator. It was a wooden framework with shelves. The outside was covered with screen wire with a couple of layers of burlap over that. This box was placed under a great Pepper tree and a galvanized number 3 tub was placed on top. The tub had a pattern of tiny holes in the bottom and the leaking water saturated the burlap.  Our was a desert climate, very dry, so the evaporation of water kept our cooler quite cool. My job was to keep that tub filled by carrying water from the pump up the ladder and dumping it into the tub.

This was during World War II. Butter was rationed and brought premium prices.  My mother would sell our butter and buy margarine for our family because it was cheap.  In those days, margarine was sold in its natural color, white. A small package of red coloring was included and you kneaded the coloring into the margarine to make it yellow.

There are a lot more childhood memories but that's for another day.


----------

