With James E. Kerns, interviewer

15 December 1980

Janet:  I was born November 7th, in the Eugene Hospital in Eugene.

James:  You were actually born in a hospital?

Janet:  Yes, I was actually born in a hospital.  It was on Willamette Street.

James:  That wasn't a normal thing back then, was it?

Janet:  No, it wasn't.  My grandfather took my mother and me home with a horse and buggy.  The horse had been my father's saddle horse.  His name was Major.  My grandfather drove him.

James:  Were there cars around then?

Janet:  Oh, a few cars, but not very many cars.  It was still horse and buggy, and saddle horses.  But the hospital was only about four blocks from where we lived in the Condon house.  It was 11th and High, I guess, below the university.

James:  How did you end up in the Condon house?  What was the Condon house?

Janet:  The Condon house was built by Thomas Condon when he was teaching at the U of O.  I think he started there in 1876, and he occupied the chair of geology.  There was a Condon Hall there when I went to college.  When I was about a year old, though, the Condon house was moved out to Jackson Street.  My dad moved it.  He was Thomas Condon's grandson.  He moved it out there.  It was kind of wild and woolly out there.  There was only about one house on every block.  'Course I grew up out there.—This Condon house had a toilet in it.  The tank was up quite high, about 5-6 feet off the floor.  There was a long pull chain to flush it.  It was very interesting.  It had a zinc bathtub.  Now, this was pretty good in those days because this was some of the nice things of life that most people didn't have at that time.  Mother said the water wasn't very good there and she was always pushing milk to us.  My brother Rod and I used to play around down by the pond, (it happens to be 13th Street now and it's all filled in), but in the winter time there was a pond there.  It was never very deep, oh, maybe about 2 feet deep at the very most when the rains were the heaviest.  Thirteenth Street is right by the fair ground.  It still is, and I think the Condon house is still there, but it doesn't look quite like it did at that time.

James:  Is the Condon house the one in that picture?

Janet:  Yes, I have a picture.  It was a very interesting place for a little kid to grow up.  There were polliwogs around in the spring.  The pond usually dried up in the summer.  When we were just little kids, we used to walk out to Grandmother's and Grandfather's.  It was perhaps a mile and a half.  I remember we had to walk in the lane to get up onto what is now 18th Street.  There was a big, bay horse.  He pulled the milk wagon that belonged to a neighbor.  The milk wagon looked just like the one that Kraft has on TV except that it was more like a pickup instead of a whole car, but anyway, that horse would sometimes get clear across this narrow lane.  It was just for stock.  We were scared to go past him, either fore or aft.  He was a pretty big horse.  So we'd have to climb up the fence on one side of him, get over the fence and pass him, then crawl over the fence on the other side to get by him.  It was kind of nice going out there to the grandparents because we slept in the room on the second floor.

James:  You’d stay there overnight?  How often would you do that?

Janet:  Oh, not very often.

James:  How old were you?

Janet:  Oh, probably five.  Maybe four and five.  We weren't very old.  Rod, of course, was a couple of years older than I was.

James:  How long did this go on?

Janet:  Well, it didn't go on too long because Grandpa died about the time of my fifth birthday, and after that Grandma moved to town and got a room.  It was during World War I, and she rolled bandages.

James:  Rolled bandages?

Janet:  Yes, for World War I.  But then Grandpa's house was vacant for awhile, and finally my folks moved out there.  They moved out of the Condon house and went out to this house that Grandpa and Grandma had built.  There were the big oak trees around it.

James:  Is this in the grove where my Grandfather McCornack lived?

Janet:  No, it was perhaps a quarter of a mile away.  After Grandpa died, Grandma commissioned her nephew, Ormond Bean, an architect, to draw the plans for her house.  That's that house that you remember.  I suppose the house is still there, but they're going to wreck it as soon as they want to build a big apartment house there.  They'll get rid of all those trees in the grove.  My grandparents planted hemlock trees and oak trees…

James:  What did your father do when you were a little girl?

Janet:  Well, he had a sporting goods store in Eugene.  He occupied three different areas.  I think it might have been on 9th Street.  He occupied one store, and then he moved over closer to the main (area)—Willamette in the second store, and the third store was right on Willamette Street.  And so when circuses would come to town, they'd give him big  posters to put in the window, 'cause he had this corner location.  Mother liked to go places, so she'd always take us and go to these shows because she could go for free.  The one I remember particularly was when Buffalo Bill Cody came to town.  He'd have his shows in a big tent.  They had cowboys and cowgirls that came riding into the tent, a whoopin' and a hollerin' on their horses and shooting off their pistols.  I suppose they had to have been blanks.  Otherwise there would have been holes in the tent.  I wasn't very old when my mother took me to these things.  It was just like a circus.  That's what I remember particularly.  I probably went to circuses, but I don't remember them as much.

James:  Well, you went riding with Buffalo Bill Cody, didn't you?  How did that happen?

Janet:  Yes, after my brother, Terry, got into the world, he was behind the eight ball.  He didn't ever look very healthy until he was five or six years old 'cause he lost so much blood soon after birth, and so the folks had trouble finding anything that would agree with him, so he'd gain.  So finally they took milk from a nice lady named Mrs. Wallace, who lived up on 11th Street in a very nice house.  She said her brother was Buffalo Bill Cody.  I guess Mother used to take the baby buggy, and we'd walk up there.  It was about three blocks away.  Mrs. Wallace said that the next time her brother came to town, she'd send him down, and he'd take us for a ride.

James:  How old were you then?

Janet:  Dad said I was three.  I can't remember too much about it.  I do remember that he had a little buckboard and a team of buckskin ponies.  Dad said that he came down the street, and drove up—'course it was just a gravel street—he drove up in front of the house, and Dad said he went out and lifted me up into the buckboard, and lifted Rod up, and he took us for a little ride—four or six blocks or something like that, and then he took us home.  But you know, it was a terrible thing.  Years later I read in the tabloid section of the Oregonian on Sunday that there was a podiatrist in Portland who looked a good deal like Buffalo Bill Cody.  He had long, flowing blond hair, and he also kept a whole batch of these buckskin ponies.  They were palominos, but they called them buckskins in those days.  He had several of them.  Of course he had a nice house and a pasture for them.  The idea was that when he got tired of being a podiatrist, he'd do some shows for Buffalo Bill Cody, as Buffalo Bill Cody.  So I guess I kinda think that was probably him instead of Buffalo Bill, although I may have seen Buffalo Bill Cody, but I can't remember too much about it, though.  Anyway when I guess I was in the third grade the folks moved out to Grandpa's farm.  It had been fruit, and I guess he'd milked cows and had chickens.  He also had a hired man.

James:  Did he still have a sporting goods store?

Janet:  Well, Dad sold it.  Maybe the sporting goods store wasn't so good with the war on, and such.  Oh, I remember Armistice Day.  They call it Veterans' Day now, but there were actually two days.  One of them was my birthday, the 7th of November.

James:  What year?

Janet:  You'll have to look that up.  Maybe 1918.  But anyway Dad got his bugle, and he blew the bugle out of the upstairs window.  He belonged to the Home Guard.  He used to go to the Armory and drill.  He was the bugler.  When I was a little kid, still living on Jackson Street, one Easter he brought home some Easter eggs.  On Sunday morning he went out and put them among the rose briers.  I told you it was still pretty wild.  He had a bird dog—a setter—and the bird dog ate them.  He had to go back downtown.  Another time he brought home some rubber bands.  My brother Rod and I got into a terrible fight over those rubber bands.  Both of us wanted the red ones.  So Dad had to get on his bicycle and ride downtown—it wasn't too far, about a mile, I suppose—and bring home some more rubber bands.  But anyway I was in the third grade when they moved out there.  It was quite a ways—about two-and-a-half or three miles to the school.  They moved out early in the spring.  They got me a little bicycle.  It had wooden rims for the wheels.  I had to ride clear into Eugene every day.  The war was still on at that time because I had a teacher that had a nervous breakdown, and I ended up with another older teacher.  This teacher who had the nervous breakdown, she decided that I should—I was only 8 years old—that I should go to the post office.  It was further than a half mile on the streets.  The streets were paved.  She put the screws on me to mail her letters to her sweetheart who was overseas.  She said, "Well, if you don't want to, then Clair will ride your bicycle down to the post office."  Well, I didn't want Clair riding my bicycle.  He  was kind of a baby, kind of a dumb guy, and so I had to go.  Well, when my mother found out about it, she was kind of shocked.  She said, "We never let you ride downtown."  I wasn't that old.  But out there in the country, finally after my grandfather's place was sold, Dad got a pony.  She was a fairly big pony.  She was a bay, I guess.  But they sold my bicycle, they said, to buy the pony.  So I had half of the pony.  I don't really know what happened to my money then.  I think it was kind of like this idea about "Why did my calf grow up to be Father's cow?"  But anyway we lived out there, and in the fourth grade I went to Bailey Hill School.  I walked a mile and a half.  It was strictly country.  There were lots of logging people.

James:  How many kids were in the school?

Janet:  I don't remember.  There were two rooms.  There was the big room, and then the little room.  They just partitioned off the little room.  But they had pretty good teachers.  I know the little room was quite crowded.  In fact they promoted my brother Terry out of the 4th grade because it was so crowded.

James:  How many grades were there?

Janet:  Eight.

James:  Two teachers for eight grades.

Janet:  And we had to take the state tests for subjects.  And then I had to go to high school in Eugene.  The folks got a 1922 Model T Ford Roadster for my brother and I to drive to school.  He drove it until he was going to college.  I was only 15 then for a couple of months.  Dad went to see a deputy sheriff, and he said he'd stand between me and the law, so I had to drive to school.  Rod would drive it every weekend and run the battery down.  I had some problems with it.  But, it was three miles to school, and I got along all right.  A lot of the kids had to walk that distance.  It was pretty wet walking.  I graduated from high school, but I've lost my diploma.  After I got through school, I painted Dad's barn that summer.  I was still only 17.

James:  (Did you paint it) all by yourself?

Janet:  My brother Andy helped some, but mostly I painted it.  There were three coats on the south and the west, and two coats on the east and the north.  It was still red 40 years afterward, but I know it's been wrecked since then because the town moved out there.—I started to Oregon State as a freshman in 1929.  Of course I was only 17 for two more months when I signed up for college.  After that term, Dad was going to the legislature, and he wanted me to be his clerk.  I got 5 bucks a day for being his clerk at the legislature.  I took dictation.

James:  That didn't last all year, did it?

Janet:  No, it lasted through January and February, and then in March I signed up for a month of schooling at Eugene Business College, but I wasn't learning anything there so I quit it and went back to high school for a while, and took some more shorthand, and then spring term went to the U of O.  That was really kind of fun.  I took some weaving.  I really liked that at the time.  The next year I went back there.  I went three terms to the U of O.  Tom and I got married that fall.  No, I guess we didn't.  We got married the next fall.  Then I went back to Oregon State for a term.  I helped him with his school work.  After he graduated, he'd completed the work for graduation, but we didn't have the ten dollars (for a diploma).  Things were pretty rough then, and you couldn't get a job at the school—everybody wanted jobs.  We stayed up at Eugene until after Jean was born at Corvallis.  I always said she was born out back of the barn.  That burned her up.  She should have been born in a hospital at least.  It bothered her.  It wasn't even a nursing home.  It was just a woman that took confinement cases, but it didn't cost very much.

She was born in a house—Oregon State College already owned the land—it was an old house.  I went down to this lady's house.  Her husband worked for the dairy department.

There's one or two great big dormitories out there (now).  Then we went back to Eugene for a little while, and Tom's brother Jack got him a job on the section—there were three fellows on the crew (railroad)—so we went to Wyoming on $45.  Tom had picked up a  Chevrolet Touring Car—I guess it was about a '26, and he paid $13 for it.  The reason he got it was because the young fellow who had it said he couldn't get it started, and Tom put gas in it, and it ran.

James:  Was that the first car that you owned?

Janet:  Yes, it was the first car he ever owned.  He worked the motor over, though.  You see, Grandma died when I was 18, so her house happened to be vacant then, so the folks had us stay up there.  Tom went out there in the grove, and he worked over the motor, and we went back to Wyoming on $45.  But his job only lasted until the rest of September, and October, and about the first part of November the job ran out.  It was cold.  But anyway he was a section man for that long.  He didn't exactly like it.  Of course living was pretty primitive then.  We lived in practically two rooms.  That fall they wanted to drive Tom's father's car, and his mother and father, back to Eugene.  Jack said he could do it—but he couldn't do it.  John said he could do it, but he wouldn't do it, either.  So I had to drive.  I was tired when we finally got into Eugene.

James:  Now, who was that again?

Janet:  Well, Tom's father and mother.

James:  Just the three of you.

Janet:  Yes.  They were moving out there.  Tom's father wasn't a bit well.  And after I got back, there was a squaw man's cabin on West Pass Creek, and there'd been an older couple living in it.  It was owned jointly by John and a neighbor there.  It had been Indian land.  So we moved to there.  It wasn't much of a cabin.  It looked picturesque, but it was cold—it was awful, awful cold—and I wasn't used to the cold, but we got along all right.  You just kind of hold up when the weather got really cold.  Tom didn't have any job that winter, and I had my saddle, and he fixed up a bridle off of some stuff that was at the folks' ranch, (the Murphys lived there then), and he rode a locoed horse with a halter.  Sometimes when we'd go places there'd be these big snow drifts up on top of the hill where the snow had blown, and sometimes this locoed horse would just lie down right in the middle of it.  It was hard goin' going through that.  Then the snow was three or four feet deep, I suppose, up there.  They have some terrific drifts there even now days.

James:  How cold would it get?

Janet:  Forty below, maybe fifty below.

James:  Was your house halfway warm?

Janet:  Not really.  We just had a dinky, little wood stove, and then there was an old kitchen stove that had a plow share in it to keep the grate up, but every so often it would fall out.  'Course there was no running water—well there was running water!  It was running by the house in the creek.

James:  You had to carry water from the creek?

Janet:  Oh, yeah.

James:  No indoor plumbing—no electricity?

Janet:  What are you talking about?  No!!  We didn't have any of those things!  They didn't get them even at the ranch house in Wyoming for years.

James:  What was your light?  Kerosene lamps?

Janet:  Yes, just the old yellow lights.  Later we were able to get an Aladdin light.  It was white.

James:  How long were you in this squaw man's cabin?

Janet:  Just that winter.  Along about March 1st the cows were starting to calve, and John Kerns wanted Tom to ride his pasture.  He got $15 a month riding his pasture one day, and the next day he rode Yonky's pasture.  That was a neighbor of John's on East Pass Creek.  And he'd go catch up horses out on the lease.  It was an Indian lease.  When we lived on West Pass Creek, we were in Montana, but when we moved up to the ranch, then we were in Wyoming.  It wasn't very far up to the ranch, maybe three miles, or something like that.  But anyway, we used to play bridge that winter.  There was this fellow Charlie Miller and his son, Ned, feeding their cattle and batchin' in a granary down the creek about a half mile, and they'd walk up there and play bridge.  I'd cook, and make cookies or something.  They were there for a month or six weeks or something.  Tom rode the lease every other day, and then in the summer along about the first of July, John told him he could ride after the cattle up on the mountain, up on Dry Fork.  We had to ride up West Pass.  The first time we went up there it took five hours.  We took a white milk cow.  She wasn't the best milk cow in the world.  There was a little silver cup that Tom's mother had sent, and so every so often (Jean was only a year old), Tom would stop and milk this little cup full of milk because Jean was already weaned.  It was kind of fun up there on the mountain.  The cabin was very primitive.  It had a stove of sorts, but you couldn't bake bread in it, and I had to bake biscuits once or twice a day.  I guess we had to eat hotcakes.  It was two miles from where you could drive, and then you had to pack all the rest of the way in from where the cars stopped.  There had been a hunter lost up there.  In October there'd been a bad storm, and two feet of snow down on the highway, and only the meat trucks got through—the big, heavy stuff.  He'd always been told to go down the creek.  So he started down Dry Fork, which was a long, old way before you ever got to civilization, and finally he stopped by a rock and put his sheepskin coat up over his head and died there.  So one morning there was one of the rancher neighbors, and maybe the sheriff came up, and his brother-in-law and his sister came, and they wanted to leave his sister with me.  I heard the whole life story of this young fellow.  They buried him there on a point above Dry Fork.  Tom said he had good teeth.  They'd packed up some boards on a horse.

James:  Dad had to help bury him?

Janet:  Yes.  They made a coffin, and buried him up there.  You see, it was quite remote.  We went down that fall and moved onto the ranch.  I think that the fall after that there was a special session of the legislature, and Mother wanted to see our baby girl.  She was getting around toward a year-and-a-half-old, so I went back on the train, and I clerked for Dad at the two-week special session of the legislature.  That wasn't so much, but along in January I got a paper that I had to sign before a notary public so that I could get my pay check.  People weren't driving in and out at that time in the winter—it was primitive—so one day Tom said he'd take care of Jean.  He fed the cows early, and he took care of Jean, so I rode down to Wyola.  I rode on this Indian pony that was supposed to be mine.

James:  How far was Wyola.

Janet:  They told me at the time that it was 17 miles—one way.  So I had to kick him into a trot, and we went across the hills—the divide between Day Creek and the Little Bighorn River, and I got over there on the county road.  It was gravel.

James:  Was there snow?

Janet:  Well, there was a certain amount of snow, but it wasn't bad.  It wasn't a particularly bad day.  That was part of it.  There's no sense in starting out in bad, cold weather.  In fact, Tom's mother, one time took Jack as a boy, down to Wyola.  He wanted to buy a Christmas present for his teacher.  She had to go by sled.  It was cold weather.  On the way back he got awfully sleepy, so she put him out of the sled and made him run.  Every time he'd almost get up to the sled she'd whip up the horses; but he didn't freeze to death, you see.  But anyway, I got along all right on my 34-mile ride.  I bought a few things there, and I signed my paper at the bank in front of a notary public.

James:  How much money were you supposed to get out of this job?

Janet:  I don't remember.  It was only for two weeks.  I think it was maybe about $60.  But $60 was quite a lot of money in those days.  For instance, the fall that Mac was born, the drought was getting pretty bad by then, Tom's Uncle Bill was over in August.  Tom liked the way the second crop alfalfa looked, and he wanted to save it for seed instead of saving it for hay.  Uncle Bill thought he could do it, so he saved it for seed.  So all fall long the neighbor had a small threshing machine, and he'd come over whenever this alfalfa was ready to be threshed.  He threshed it.  'Course I cooked for the crew, but it wasn't a very big crew.  It wasn't like (the ones) they had here—22 men.  It was only maybe six, or something like that.  Tom filled the big living room clear full of alfalfa seed.  It was kind of damp.

James:  The big living room?

Janet:  At the ranch house.

James:  Nobody was living there?

Janet:  Well, we were in the house, but we lived in the kitchen and the dining room, mostly, and the back porch.  Then in the evening Tom would go in there and I'd hold the light, and he'd shovel the alfalfa seed around.  Well, anyway, he got $1300 for it, and just to show you how people felt about money, people thought he was rich.  But anyway, the years got drier, and the last year we were there, we were up in the mountains with the cattle for awhile, and then the grasshoppers came along in May.  So Tom had the hay, and he got 30 tons of hay, and he was supposed to put up 300 tons there.

James:  Just because of the grasshoppers, or the drought?

Janet:  Well, it was both.  There wouldn't have been so many grasshoppers if it hadn't been so droughty.  Then right after the grasshoppers came the great, big, black Mormon crickets.  They were about 4 inches long and more than an inch in diameter.  They're  enormous, tough-looking things.  They'd go across the highway, and you'd run over them, and they'd eat each other up.  One of the ranchers said it was a good thing they came because the grasshoppers would leave.

James:  The grasshoppers would leave when the Mormon crickets came in?  Why?

Janet:  They had to, I guess.  But anyway, Tom had a nice, young field of grain, about a foot tall, and when they got through it was just as bare as the dining room table.  That's what the grasshoppers and the crickets did.  And the old apple trees, the Wolf River apples and such at the ranch, bloomed in the spring, and in September they bloomed again because all the leaves had been taken off.  So that fall Tom thought there ought to be a better place to go.

James:  What year was this?

Janet:  Well, it was 1936.  We heard afterwards that 1937 was worse—a drier year.  But 1937 was the last dry year.

James:  Did you people own some land there then?

Janet:  Well, his dad had given him 80 acres, but he traded it off to John somehow.  We had 216 head of cattle, with the bank, and John bought them.  John really wanted to get rid of Tom because he was the youngest son.  So we left about the middle of October.  Actually we were kind of like the Okies and the Texans, and people like that except that we were just further north.  We left there in a pickup with everything that we took with us.  We had to leave some furniture.  It was a new pickup.  It was a Ford V-8.  It was something in those days, but it wouldn't look like much nowadays.  We stayed with my folks for awhile.  We bought a place out on Kelly Creek which is a tributary of the Siuslaw River.  It's on the ocean side of the Coast Mountains out of Cottage Grove.  It was at Lorane.  We were there for 2-1/2 years.  Tom didn't get along very good there.  He had trouble breathing because of the mold.  Then Jean had been going to school for about a month.  She came home coughing.  It turned out she had whooping cough, and Mac ended up with whooping cough.  Tom had whooping cough, or something just like it.  It was companionable, anyway.  It didn't do him any good.   So we sold that place and left there in May, and got over here in this country on May 22nd.

James:  Was Jean really sick for a long time with whooping cough?

Janet:  She was out of school for awhile.  The house was kind of close to the road.  The bus driver used to stop out there and honk, and honk, and honk.  See, it was logging country, and the logging people didn't care whether their kids went to school or not.  He thought that was what I was pulling.  Along about Christmas she came home with the chicken pox.  She also ended up with the measles.  Of course Mac followed her, having these things.

James:  Let's back up now.  I want to know how you and Dad met.

Janet:  Well, he came out to see my brother, Rod, one time, and I'd been horseback riding.  He came in.  He had to take Mert Stein in, and I rode to town.

James:  Who was Mert Stein?

Janet:  He was Rod's friend.  He came from Lake County.

James:  Dad and Rod were good friends or roommates, or what?

Janet:  Well, they slept together for quite a while in school.  Tom moved into a boarding house (in Corvallis) that had been a fraternity at one time.  This woman, Mrs. Kate, had a boarding house, so Tom moved there.  Rod acted ornery, and finally got kicked out of the men's dormitory, so he moved down to Mrs. Kate's, and they slept in the same double bed.—It was kind of nice at Lorane.  Like all of Western Oregon, it was wet.  We had a few cows…

James:  Well, I want to know about your courtship.  How did he ask you to marry him?

Janet:  Oh, he just said that I was going to marry him.  He didn't ask.

James:  Where were you married, and by whom?

James:  Well, there was a reverend Clay Palmer, I think his name was.  He was a good friend of Tom's folks, but Tom's folks weren't in Western Oregon at that time.  But Bert and Virginia were there.  So Bert and Virginia took their little boy, John Robert, and went to the minister's house, and Tom and I went, and my folks came, and Reverend Clay Palmer married us at his house.  He had a little two-year-old boy, and I think Virginia took them out in the yard. And we had a honeymoon.  Virginia's sister and her husband had a cabin on the Umpqua River.  Rod had gone someplace, so we had his Model A Ford Coupe.  We were down there for two or three days.  Then we went to school.  We got an apartment on the north side of an old house there.  It was just off campus.  The fact that it was on the north side of the house bothered me.  It was actually only two rooms.  The landlady and her husband lived on the other side, the south side.  But I didn't get enough sunshine that winter.  I've kind of been chasing the sun ever since.

James:  Now tell me about Mac's birth.  You skipped over that.

Janet:  He was born in Sheridan, Wyoming.  It was kind of a boarding house, a woman that took confinement cases.  The evening he was born, there were some kids that soaped the windows because it was Halloween.  When Tom took me in, we had to leave Jean over at John's and Harriet's because Harriet was going to take care of her.  She was only two years and two months old, and she and Kenny Kerns were the only two little kids around there.  So when we got over there, John said, "Oh, take our Plymouth car," so Tom took me in the Plymouth car.  But the next morning when John wanted to go to town and get the Plymouth, they had to pull the old pickup—it was quite a pickup—it was an old, black, Chevrolet.  Things were tough.

James:  Back then, when you had babies, did they keep you down for a long time?

Did you have any help when you got home?

Janet:  Yes.  Mother helped.  I spent the most time down after you were born.  Dr. Hauser delivered you, and he wasn't very well.  They made me stay in bed for 10 Days!  They wouldn't even let me sit up.  I was in the St. Elizabeth Hospital in Baker.

James:  How about when Jean and Mac were born?

Janet:  I went home on the 9th day, or something like that.

James:  Did your mother come to help when Jean was born?

Janet:  I stayed there where she was born until about the 9th day, and Tom took me home.  Mother helped then, and then she came after Mac was born, too.  So when Tom took me home, I went in there, and Mother had been making pickles.  He'd taken her home the day before.  She'd stayed in town with Jean.  She'd been making bread and butter pickles, but the house just absolutely reeked of onions, it just reeked, and there was no water in the ranch house.  There'd been a good well at the ranch house, but during the drought it went dry.  It was awfully hard water.  Before we got there if you tried to wash our hands in the wash basin with soap, the soap would just make curds.  They had rain barrels, too, there at the ranch house to catch the rain.  You'd wash your hair in it; and if you could, you'd wash your clothes in it.  After Mac was born, Tom bought me a Montgomery Ward washing machine.  When he took me home, it was in the back of the pickup.  But then the first day I had to wash with it on the back porch—it had a gasoline motor—he had to go help work on the telephone line which was strung along the mountain side, and he showed me how to start it, and how to stop it.  I was still kind of weak.  Mother didn't think much of ranch life in Wyoming.  She was there a while after Mac was born.  She just couldn't get used to the men staying around the house so much, but that was the only vacation time the men really had.  Same with the cows.  The cows had their calves weaned.  'Course it was a dry year after he was born.  So the cows and the men could all rest for a little while until they had to start feeding hay.  They (the cows) ran out more in Wyoming than they can in this country because  the south slopes—the snow melts off—and there's grass on the south slopes, and I guess the grass is pretty good and strong.  But anyway Tom milked cows every morning, too, but he couldn't get along.  Terry wanted to buy the place.  He was graduated from college—so he did.  We came over here.  Jean and Mac were getting over the measles.  Jean had got them at school.  See these logging people were always running up to Longview, Washington on weekends, and if there was anything going around, they got them.  It was kind of a nice place to live over there.  We stayed at Arlington the first night.  That time we spent the night in the Ford V-8 pickup.  He'd fixed up a wagon.  It had Model-T rubber tires, and it had a red box which I'd painted.  Everything we brought over here was loaded in the pickup and this wagon—a trailer-like wagon.  We didn't have very much.  In fact when we first moved into the old house down there, we had some good bed springs and a mattress, and we slept on the floor of the living room.  But the kids—Mac had a cot, and Jean had the mini bed.  Things had been tough.  I paid taxes on that place that went clear back to 1934.  It was 1939 (when we moved there and bought the place).  Tom fed some steers, and then he took up milking cows.  For years he got up at 4:30 and milked cows by hand.  He milked as many as 17 all by himself.  And they were good producers.  He even had the dairy herd improvement man test the cows sometimes.  He fed them for production.

James:  Jersey cows?

Janet:  Mostly.  There was one angus, and she was kind of ornery.  I remember one time he was chasing her around with a rail.  There was a rail fence below the house.  He looked like he was taking 17-foot steps.  She was just being plain pesky.  He didn't hurt her, but she was certainly being ornery.  If he was really in a pinch, I'd go help, but he never thought I was much of a cow milker.  Lots of times I'd feed the calves.

James:  When you left Lorane, you didn't come straight here, did you?  Didn't you go to Enterprise?

Janet:  No, we came straight here.

James:  Where did Enterprise fit into the picture?

Janet:  Well, in 1942 or something like that, Mac was in the third grade, Tom decided that he ought to do something for the World War II war effort.  So he got a job teaching vocational agriculture over there at Enterprise.  But he was terribly unhappy.  He would have been a good teacher, but he said he'd farmed too long.  It had been nine years.  That's when he got his diploma—nine years later.  The Wallowa Valley is a beautiful valley, and it was nice living over there, but he and Mac just felt terrible.  Mac would come home from school, which was just across the street, and he'd say, "Well what do kids do in town?"  And when we got back here, Charlie Zimmerman asked him how it felt to be back in God's Country, and Mac thought that was really it!  He was back in God's Country!  Tom was so unhappy, and Mac was so unhappy, and we'd rented the place to a fellow, and he was no good.  So he brought me back on Armistice Day that year, and he stayed there and taught until the first of March, and got it worked out so that there was another teacher who took the job.  And he came back home.  He'd learned about—he'd taught about raising pigs—so that November he bought 12 gilts and a boar.  I fed them through the winter, and he had pretty good litters of pigs.  He had pigs ready to go at 5-1/2 months—ready to be sold—heavy enough.  Then he did other things.  We began buying up the hill here as soon as we could.  We didn't have any money—we were always hard up, because we always bought land.  Finally it got so big that he had to rent pastures.  He logged.  Tom Griffith got him started logging.  He had his own logging outfit.  Sometimes he trucked them, and sometimes he didn't truck them.  I kept the books.  But he started logging to keep the fellows busy in the winter time, to give them some work to do when the weather was right.  As time went on the government just wanted more things, more and more money, more and more forms to be filled out.  They even figured that we should pay into the unemployment compensation fund.  In other words he was going to keep the boys busy, but the government had to do it their way, and so he quit and began running beef cattle.  Once he had to sell off all the beef cattle because we couldn't raise any calves that year, on account of white muscle.  That was before they found out what caused white muscle.  Then after they gave selenium shots we went back to running cows.