Rock House and Heber Memories

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LITTLE LEAGUE

When I was eight or nine years old, “Little League” was introduced to our area. Some of the men got together and built a Little League ball field in Overgaard and we were introduced to a fun game. The ball field was leveled, but it was just dirt and there were plenty of rocks. For the first several practices, we spent about half of our time picking up rocks and throwing them over the fence to try to make the field a little smoother. I don’t remember all of our coaches but I can remember that Chink Crandell and  Uncle Mart  were two of them. We had only one team composed of boys from both Heber and Overgaard so we were called “Hebergaard.” I don’t remember any mascot but there may have been one.

We practiced two or three times a week and had games once or twice a week. To get to practice we would load up in the back of the coach’s or one of the parents’ pickup trucks and they would haul all of us kids from Heber to Overgaard and then home again after practice. Practices were usually late in the afternoon. The ball field was just outside the Heber Ranger Station fence and sometimes the men on the fire crews would come and watch us play or help with practice after they got off work. I cringe when I think about the number of hours we spent practicing baseball and the number of trips some parents made to make it possible for us to participate.

Since we had our own ball field, the teams from other towns came to Overgaard for some of the games. In the league we had teams from Snowflake, Taylor and Showlow. We sometimes played teams from Springerville in the all-star games. We were usually quite competitive and several players from our team were usually selected to be on the all‑star team each year. I was not a great player but I enjoyed playing ball and spent lots of hours doing it. Our team did have some really good players and we won quite a few games.

As with other things, I tended to follow in my brothers footstep. Terry played little league ahead of me. He played catcher. I played first base part of the time but mostly I also played catcher. I guess I could throw good enough to get the ball to second base from home plate so they let me catch, and I was tall enough to reach up and catch high throws to first base so I got to play first base part of the time.

We had some pretty good pitchers and it was my job to distract the batters and then catch the pitch when it came. I must have done OK because I don’t remember any one else wanting to be catcher. The catcher wore all the pads and a mask and had to catch the ball trying to look through the mask. I got used to it. We only had two good baseball gloves in our family for quite a while and one belonged to Terry and the other to Ted. Ted’s glove was a larger first baseman’s glove which worked well for catching too. Later on I got a glove of my own.

One of the things I remember about trips to Little League games is that whenever the team traveled, you had to make sure you had at least a nickel in our pocket. If we could get a quarter it was even better. Whoever was driving always stopped at Zane’s store in Overgaard or Hatch’s Store in Taylor or a store in Snowflake or Showlow before starting home and we could buy something to eat. If we had a nickel we could buy five pieces of bubble gum. One of our favorite bubble gums was “Sour Grapes” or “Sour Apples” or “Sour Cherries”. They were flavored gum balls similar to what we pay twenty-five cents for now. If we had more money we could buy ice cream or pop. If someone didn’t have money someone else usually shared what they had with them.

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MAKING SOAP AND WASHING CLOTHES

When I was growing up our family didn’t buy much laundry soap. We made it ourselves—or I should say, Mom made it with our help. The type of soap she made was called “lye soap.” I will try to explain how it was made although I may miss some of the steps.

To make lye soap you had to have a large pot or barrel (about fifty gallon capacity) for cooking the soap and a good supply of oil or lard or fat. You needed several cans of lye and wash tubs to pour the finished soap into for cooling. You needed a long stick for stirring and someplace flat like a floor, where the soap could be dried. I think it also helped to have a few kids around to watch the pot boil and to stir the soap mixture occasionally.

In the section where I describe the butchering process, I explained that when pigs were butchered, the layer of fat below the pig skin was “rendered” or cooked so that the fat was separated from the skin or other meat. The fat or lard or grease (whichever you want to call it) was placed in a twenty-five gallon barrel on the back porch. Other fat from cooking could be added to the barrel at any time. When the barrel was full, it was time to make soap.

Dad had cut a large barrel in half and we used one of those half barrels for the cooking pot. We set the barrel on top of several large stones or bricks and then built a fire underneath the barrel. We then poured the lard or grease from the twenty-five gallon barrel where we had collected it into the larger cooking pot. Once the grease began to boil, we could skim impurities off the top and discard them.

I can’t remember exactly the consistency required or the time needed to get the grease to the proper stage or thickness for making soap, but we stayed close by to stir the grease occasionally and to skim off any impurities that came to the surface. The process took several hours. Mom would watch and test the boiling oil until it was at the right stage and then she would add the lye solution. As far as I know, it was just lye and water but there could have been other ingredients. Lye is a very corrosive material and dangerous to handle so Mom did the mixing of the lye solution. Once the lye was added, then it was a matter of stirring the mixture until it turned to soap. As it turned to soap, it became a light creamy yellow color and got much thicker.

Once the soap was ready, we lifted the half barrel with the soap off the fire and poured the warm soap into two or three large wash tubs to a depth of about four or five inches per tub, where it was allowed to cool. As it cooled, it got thicker until you could cut it with a large knife. It was more or less the consistency of cheesecake. It usually took a couple of days for the soap to cool and become hard enough to cut. When the soap was cool, we cut it into square pieces about four to six inches square. The soap was taken out of the tub and the pieces were laid out on newspaper on the wash house floor to dry and cure. As the soap dried or cured, it became harder and shrank some in size. When it was completely dry, the soap was stored on one of the shelves in the wash house.

Whenever Mom was ready to wash clothes, she would take a piece of that soap and just throw it into the washer where the agitator was swishing and let it provide the soap for washing the clothes. When the wash was finished she would fish out what was left of the piece of soap and use it again the next time. It was not uncommon for one of us boys to find a small piece of reused soap in a pocket of our jeans. When the piece of soap got small enough, it could get hung up in a pants pocket and we would find it when the clothes were dry. Lye soap was very good for washing dirty clothes. It was so strong in fact that it ate up our clothes. Our Levi’s always had that washed out color and eventually the soap would just eat through the material and we would end up with holes in our clothes. Later on Mom used laundry detergent for washing some of the clothes but not until I was in high school.

The making of soap is another example of how Mom and Dad tried to be self‑reliant and thrifty. I don’t think I or any of my brothers came out any the worse for wear. In fact, we may have been cleaner than our friends who used Tide or Breeze or Cheer or some other sweet smelling soap.

All the time I was at home Mom used the old “wringer washing machine” for washing clothes. You have probably never heard of a “wringer washing machine,” much less seen one in operation, so I will try to explain how it worked. The machine itself consisted of a few key parts. The main part of the machine was a “tub portion” where the clothes were agitated to get out the dirt. The other major mechanism was a “wringer assembly” made up of two hard rubber cylinders that had a narrow opening between them. When engaged, the cylinders turned and the wet clothes were fed between the rubber “wringers” which squeezed the water out of the clothes as they passed from the washer to the rinse water or from the rinse water to be hung on the clothesline. The rinse water was held in a wash tub on a chair next to the washing machine and was not a part of the washing machine itself. The agitator and wringers were run from a small electric motor mounted under the tub. All water for the washing tub and for the rinsing tub had to be filled by bucket or we could use the hose and run hot water from the kitchen sink to the washing machine and rinse tub.

The dirty clothes were put in the tub portion where the agitator was. There was a gear lever on the side of the tub that put the agitator in motion or stopped the motion. When the clothes had been agitated in the tub long enough, the clothes were taken manually out of the tub and fed between the two rubber cylinders or wringers. The wringers squeezed the soapy water out of the clothes. The soapy water went back into the washing machine tub. The wash tub with clean rinse water was on the other side of the wringer so that the squeezed clothes fell into the rinse water. Someone had to slosh the clothes around in the rinse water to rinse out any remaining soap. The clothes were then run back through the wringer in the opposite direction to squeeze out the rinse water. The clothes were then hung on the clothesline to dry. We never had a washer or dryer when I was at home. All of the washing was done with the “wringer washer”. Care had to be taken not to get fingers in the wringers.

One of our jobs was to help with the wash. We carried water to put in the rinse tub and to fill the washer and we carried water to empty them when the wash was completed. We helped with hanging out the clothes as well. Usually everyone got to help. We competed to see who would get the batch of clothes with large items so we could hang them faster and get on to doing something we wanted to do. If you got the socks, it took forever to hang them out to dry because there were so many of them. When the clothes were dry, we had the job of taking them from the clothes line into the house for sorting and ironing. We learned to carry arm loads of dry clothes without dropping any of them on the ground. There was no such thing as fabric softener then because there was no clothes dryer. The clothes were sometimes pretty stiff when we took them from the clothesline. In the winter they sometimes froze on the clothesline. Because we had a clothesline and used clothes pins to hang the clothes on the line, we had a ready supply of clothes pins for making rubber guns, but that is a different story.

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CHILDHOOD IN “THE ROCK HOUSE”

I have nothing but fond memories of my childhood in The Rock House. I can recall that we always had some responsibilities around the house like cleaning a room of the house or working in the garden or carrying in the wood, but when the jobs were done, the time was ours to spend more or less as we chose. We spent time reading, making things, playing with friends or just wandering the hills around Heber without very many restrictions.

In Heber, everyone knew everyone else and many of the families were related in one way or another. The raising of children was a community affair. Parents watched out for, fed, taught or corrected not only their own kids, but any other kids who needed it or happened to be handy. Just because you weren’t in view of your parents didn’t really matter too much because some other adult was likely watching out for you. As a result, we could wander around town or play in someone else’s yard or barn and nobody seemed to care.

As a small child I played a lot at home (The Rock House) or across the street at Uncle Laurald and Aunt Vera Bigler’s house, saddle shop and barn, or across the back street at Charlie Reidhead’s house. The Rock House seemed to be a center of activity for boys my age because I had older brothers who were always doing something, or making something, or playing something, and others wanted to see what they were doing. I was lucky to have very patient older brothers who let me “tag along” or “help” with projects.

The Rock House was on the main street of Heber and it wasn’t paved. The main road coming from the east crossed Buckskin Creek on an old metal bridge that crossed the creek about a hundred yards south of where the highway bridge is now. The road ran in front of our house and in front of the store and church and crossed Black Canyon Creek and went on west out of town. There was no bridge over Black Canyon Creek at that time. The road went down through the wash. The logging trucks, which constituted the majority of the traffic on the road when I was a kid, would drive right in front of our house going to or from either the “Porter Sawmill” (which was located near where the Mogollon High School is located now) or the “Southwest Sawmill” located in Overgard.

One of our favorite activities was to “play trucks”. We built our own logging trucks by cutting a section of a two-by-four about eighteen inches long. We would nail a smaller piece of two-by-four about three inches long on top of the longer one to represent the cab of the truck A long nail represented the smoke stack of the truck. We then pounded a row of nails into both sides of the back part of the board behind the cab so that we could put “logs”(small sticks) in there and haul them around. The trucks had no wheels. They were just flat on the bottom and we would scoot them along the roads we built by digging into the dirt bank just outside the fence that ran across the front of The Rock House property.

We used old, broken hoes or spoons or sticks or just our hands to build the road system. We had a road that ran all the way from in front of Uncle Mart Porter’s house (the house to the west of The Rock House) to in front of The Rock House. It was a long enough road that every kid in town could work on it at the same time without encroaching on the road building of the person next to them. We often had several kids working on the road or playing trucks and hauling logs along the road at the same time. We got pretty dirty but we spent hours running our trucks up and down that road. We built bridges, had hills and valleys and we even put up signs made out of sticks.

Every time a log truck went by on the main street right next to us, regardless of whether it was full or empty, we got fresh inspiration and kept working. At that time, in our little minds, driving a logging truck was about the “ultimate job” and one we dreamed of doing when we grew up. We knew every model of logging truck, we recognized every driver, and we loved to watch them drive by in front of The Rock House.

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MEMORIES

Memories are interesting things. Some memories are very sharp and vivid, others are a little dimmer, yet both types are unique and special. Memories really belong to the person whose memories they are. Your memories are yours and my memories are mine. They can sometimes be shared with others but usually only in part, even though both parties may have experienced the same event. In this collection you will read or hear memories of my own and my brother’s growing up years in Heber, Arizona from the 1940’s to the 1960’s.

It is hoped that some of these memories may spark memories in the minds of readers or hearers who may have forgotten important, interesting or humorous incidents in their own lives. The sharing of memories is one sure way of generating new memories.

The accuracy of the details surrounding the memories included in this collection is not something to even be considered. Based on our memories, they are all 100% accurate. Each memory is unique and special as far as the one sharing the memory is concerned. What they remember was probably influenced by the circumstances surrounding the event and their fear and excitement or other emotions at the time the memory was being made. The person sharing the memory had a completely unique perspective given their level of involvement and even their understanding of facts at the time. Try not to get “hung up” on details. Just enjoy the memories and hopefully they will spark memories of your own to enjoy.

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HEBER THE TOWN

I grew up in the town of Heber, Arizona. Heber was settled by pioneers who moved from the early Mormon settlements on the Little Colorado River like Joseph City. My grandfather was one of the early settlers. He and his brothers homesteaded land near Heber and his family, including my father, spent the summers in Heber.

Heber is in a valley and is surrounded by hills on all sides. It is located at the junction of two creeks called Buckskin and Black Canyon. Black Canyon is on the west side of town and Buckskin is on the east side of town. Our home was located on the main street of Heber which at that time ran right in front of our house. Today that road ends in front of “The Rock House Museum” which is now at the end of a dead end street.

Heber was initially settled as a farming community, but later sawmills were set up and forestry and lumbering became the major industries. My father worked in the sawmill for a few years and then got a job with the U.S. Forest Service working as a fire guard on one of the lookout towers (Gentry Tower) used for spotting forest fires. Later he worked full time doing timber stand improvement (pruning the trees with long saws so that the lumber would have less knots and be higher quality) and in fire control. He was responsible for fire crews of twenty to forty men who fought the forest fires by hand. The crews were hauled around in large trucks that had a tarp over the back. The crews sat in the back with their equipment (axes, shovels and hoes). Most of the men in Heber either worked in the “woods” (cutting logs or hauling logs) or in the sawmill. One of the sawmills was owned by Uncle Donnie Porter and his brothers, and the other was owned by a company we called “Southwest”. I believe the full name was Southwest Forest Industries. In the 1960’s , a paper mill was built between Heber and Snowflake and many of the men took jobs there because it was year round work. The logging woods jobs were seasonal. When the snow got too deep, the woods closed down or if the woods got too dry in the summer, the woods were closed down. People worked hard while the woods were open and then managed through the periods when there was no work in the woods. Dad’s job was year round and our family missed out on a lot of the difficulties other families faced at times of unemployment.

The Heber I grew up in was mostly a “Mormon Town” as were most of the towns in the northern part of Arizona at that time. Latter-day Saints (LDS) members made up the majority of the population but there were families that were members of other denominations as well. Most of them were Baptist. The non LDS were mostly from Oklahoma or Arkansas. They were good lumbermen and found work in the woods around Heber.

At that time, because most of the population was LDS, most of the activities in town were sponsored by the church. Softball games, basketball games, weekly movies, rodeos, dances, plays or other activities were church sponsored. There were some school sponsored activities as well but they were less frequent. The LDS church building was the largest building in town so that is where most of the activities were held. I believe most of the non LDS felt comfortable participating in the activities and did. The only thing they didn’t do was attend the LDS church meetings.

There weren’t very many businesses in Heber at that time. There was the general store, a post office, a service station and a small café. If we needed any other services, we had to go to Snowflake, Show Low or Holbrook. It was not uncommon at that time for families to make a monthly trip to one of the larger towns to buy groceries, see doctors or do other business.

Because of its isolation, Heber was a quiet town where we entertained ourselves or went without. At that time, it was very difficult to travel to the valley. To do so one had to travel via Globe and Superior on highway sixty. Such a trip took about five hours so people didn’t go to the valley all that often. We usually went once or twice a year because that is where Grandma Scott lived.

When I was growing up in Heber there was only an elementary school. The school was located at the end of the road that goes south behind “The Rock House”. That street is now called Reidhead Street. The school had first to eighth grades. There were three rooms. Two teachers handled two grades and Mr. Capps had three. The principal of the school was Mr. Brown Capps. He taught sixth, seventh and eighth grade. His wife, Mrs. Capps, taught first and second grade. There was no kindergarten at that time. The other  teachers changed over time but Mr. and Mrs. Capps were almost institutions. They taught all of my brothers and taught for years after I graduated. At that time we had to travel to Snowflake to attend high school. Each of the classes in elementary school had about eight to ten students. The teachers would teach one class a subject and then teach the other class a subject and alternate back and forth all day long.

The two largest buildings in Heber were the LDS church and the school house. The school house did not get a gym until I was in the sixth grade. Prior to that time, the school teams used the church gymnasium for practice and games. Up until then, we had to play outside for recess. When I was in sixth grade a gym was built onto the school. It had a stage on one end and had a basket mounted on the wall on the other end. We thought we were pretty lucky. We could play games indoors when the weather was bad. When I was about eleven or twelve, the LDS chapel burned down. For several months we held church meetings in the school until a new building could be constructed.

One very important feature in the Heber I grew up in was the ball field. For years the baseball field was located down close to where the current LDS chapel is located. It was adjacent to the rodeo grounds. When I was thirteen or fourteen the church leaders decided to build a lighted ball field. Land that had been two dirt cow tanks was repurposed and a lighted ball field was built at the end of the road that runs in front of “The Rock House”. The ball field became the site for entertainment during the summer evenings. Prior to the construction of a lighted ball field, the Heber teams had to travel to one of the other towns like Snowflake, Taylor, Show Low or Holbrook to play ball games at night. Once we got a lighted ball field, the other teams traveled part of the time to Heber to play.

For years, the rodeo grounds were across the creek and up Black Canyon a ways. Finally the church leaders decided to build a new rodeo grounds down near where the current Rim Community Library stands. It was a much nicer rodeo grounds and had a grandstand for people to sit in. Prior to that, people sat in their cars or on the fence to watch the rodeo that was held each Fourth of July.