Move to Bayard

A couple of months before Dad moved the family down to Bayard, he took me with him to spend the summer. Nights we slept on his brother Erwin's farm. Days we spent in Bayard at his DX service station. Bayard contained about 800 people, nearly twice the number that lived in Gilmore City. The garage stood at the end of main street. It had two gas pumps and a large garage. Uncle Albert ran the gas station. Dad served as the mechanic in the garage. A good part of his business came from three or four local stock car drivers, who needed motors rebuilt, roll bars installed, and leaky gas tanks welded. Dad always extended them credit. By the time he sold the business a year later, the drivers owed him several thousand dollars, nearly all of which was never repaid.

I spent the summer hanging around the garage. Dad made the mistake of showing me how open the back of the candy machine. From then on I had free candy for the taking. At lunchtime we always went across the street to the local cafe. Mashed potatoes, peas, roast beef and pie cost 85 cents a plate. If Dad was too busy, he would count out 85 cents and send me to get my own lunch. On those occasions, I always bought a hamburger for 25 cents, then went up the street to Head's Five and Dime and spent the rest on candy.

I especially enjoyed hanging around Uncle Albert. He was only thirteen years older than me. When not pumping gas, he loved to mess around with a couple of motorcycles he had bought. The smaller one - a doodlebug he called it - was just my size; and he often let me ride it up and down the back alleys of Bayard. One afternoon, just before quitting time, a few of the locals were in the station office with Uncle Albert, all matching nickels. I happened to have two nickels in my pocket so I joined in the fun. By the time the game was over I had won 45 cents. At home that night Dad insisted that I match nickels with him. In a very short time he had appropriated my entire 45 cents. I thought he'd return the money, but he said "No, I want to show you that gambling doesn't pay." It was a lesson he hoped I'd never forget.

Before school started, Dad moved Mom and the rest of the family down to a farm place four miles north of Bayard. There was a barn on the place, an old chicken shack, and a house with a large kitchen and living room, one bedroom downstairs and a long room upstairs. We kids slept upstairs - one bed for the boys and another for the girls. My younger brothers Tom and Charlie were wee little ones at the time and would often wee-wee on the mattress. Many a night I woke to a peculiar cold and clammy feeling and had to move over to the opposite side of the bed.

Lois was nearly eleven at the time and was often left to babysit the rest of us. She would cook up a gigantic dinner, then put the younger kids to bed. When it grew dark, she and I would sneak upstairs to scare them. We'd moan and growl and sometimes wail: "Who's got my golden arm?" in a takeoff on a popular ghost story. It was all great fun. When daylight came, we'd carry fruit jars out to a field near the chicken shack. There we'd collect the giant black and yellow spiders that spun their webs on the weeds. In the evenings we'd chase fireflies, either placing their glowing bodies on our foreheads or else capturing them in a jar to light up the dark.

We stayed in this house about a year. After Dad sold his garage, he got a job working for a machinery dealer named Burdette Laughery. Laughery owned an old house about a mile from town, which he rented to us. It was a big old farm house, with eight rooms and no electricity or plumbing. There was a pump in the kitchen, but it had to be primed before use, so we got our water from a nearby artesian well, which we shared with the cattle. Near the house was a two-hole outhouse and wood shed, a chicken shack, a corn crib, and an old broken-down barn full of hay. A large grove of trees surrounded the buildings on three sides. On the fourth side was a large swampy area that led to Willow Creek.

Here we lived for three years. It was an especially hard time for Mom - no electricity, no phone, no running water. Dad worked twelve hours a day, six days a week, Out of his $40 paycheck he had to spend $15 dollars for rent and another $15 for groceries. Money was scarce. Sometimes we went to bed a little bit hungry. Sometimes we had holes in our shoes and no winter coats or mittens. After awhile, the townspeople started giving us their old clothes and the school district began providing free lunches in the cafeteria. Each Christmas the Chamber of Commerce dropped off boxes of candy and gifts. Even the parish priest came out one day with his pockets full of money. He gave me $5 and another $25 to my Mom. In exchange we had to promise to clean the church. But it was hard to accept charity. One day, after one of these do-gooders had dropped off his donation, I discovered my Mom in the kitchen crying.

My jobs were to chop wood for the stove and carry water the half mile from the artesian well. These two jobs always took a couple hours a day. Every Monday I stayed home from school to help Mom with the weekly wash. Twenty or thirty buckets of water had to be heated on the wood-burning kitchen stove, then carried out to the old Maytag washing machine, with its cantankerous gas motor. Afterwards, the clothes had to be rinsed in cold water and hung out on the clothesline to dry. It was a full day's work. Many times we were still working when the rest of the kids came home from school.

All in all, it was a hard life, but I loved it. I was nine years old - no longer a baby but not yet a teenager. Mine was a world of imagination, of Indians lurking in the trees, of cowboys with their tall hat and smoking six-shooters. Lois was growing up, with boys and clothes and other things on her mind, so my younger sister Connie became my playmate. Together we built baled-hay forts in the loft of the barn and attacked each other with corn cobs as ammunition. We found an old 4'X6' wooden crate, attached a rope to the front, and drug it behind us like a covered wagon. We went down to Willow Creek and waded around in its muddy water, trying to catch fish. We climbed trees and caught fireflies and threw rocks at snakes. But mostly we just played at Cowboy and Indian.

My dream was to own a cowboy suit, replete with vest and chaps and six-shooters. The night before Christmas, 1948, Dad called me downstairs after all the other kids were asleep. He had bought me a pair of cap pistols. They were silver and white, with holsters and gun belt, and had obviously cost him a full day's pay. He was so proud of his gift that I could not bear to tell him what I had really wanted was the cowboy suit itself. But I got over my disappointment and wore those pistols around my waist until finally the belt broke and the holsters rotted away.