When I was in elementary school I used to look forward to the day when I would be able to ride the school bus to school with all the big kids. I looked forward to the adventure with great anticipation. We never got to ride a school bus in elementary school except for one or two field trips. Heber did not have a high school at that time. When we started high school we had to travel to Snowflake as did all the high school age kids from all the towns within fifty miles of Snowflake. Each town had one or more school busses. Heber had one big one. Pinedale and Clay Springs had one small one. Show Low had two large busses. Students from Taylor and Snowflake had to get themselves to school

Riding the bus was quite an adventure at first. Our bus driver was Phil Webb. He was a good driver but he didn’t put up with students breaking the rules. If we tried to change seats while the bus was moving or if we stood up to get something out of the rack above the seat, he would hit the brakes and sometimes we would end up one or two seats ahead of where we had been sitting. If we caused any problem or didn’t obey him, we got to sweep out the bus when we got to school instead of heading for our first class.

The bus ride to Snowflake took almost exactly one hour. The distance was only about thirty-five miles. The bus reached our bus stop which was on the street behind our house at approximately 7:10am. Ours was not the last stop in town. After leaving Heber the bus went to Overgaard and then back to the main highway to Snowflake. If you missed the bus and had someone to take you, you could catch the bus at the Overgaard road junction when the bus came back from there. Some people did that quite often but we did not have any way to get to the junction so if we missed the bus, we just missed school for that day. That never happened in the four years I rode the bus. By the end of the first month of riding the bus, it was no longer an adventure. It was simply a “necessary evil.”

Since the bus left so early in the morning, the girls used the bus as their “hair salon” most mornings. Since I didn’t have sisters, this was quite educational for me the first month or so. The girls would get on the bus with curlers in their hair and then fix their hair on the bus as we were traveling to school. Seeing a girl in curlers was not a big shock to me later in life when I began to look for a wife since I’d spent four years riding the bus with girls in curlers.

The girls’ hair style during those years was “ratted hair” glued in place with hair spray. The girls arranged themselves on one side of the bus so that the girl in the seat behind them could “rat” their hair while they were “ratting” the hair of the girl in front of them. The boys that were not going steady with one of the girls tended to sit on the opposite side of the bus. That is where I sat. I just watched in awe to see how big a mass the ratted hair would become. After ratting, the very outer edge of the hair ball was smoothed flat so that the hairdo was smooth on the outside with a mass of ratted hair on the inside. Then the hair spray was applied liberally to glue it all in place. It’s a wonder we all didn’t die of asphyxiation from inhaling hair spray fumes. When it was all done, the girls’ hair looked quite nice but I learned to be careful not to touch it or bump it. If it was touched, one of two things would happen. Either it would break into pieces or your hand or shirt would be glued to some girl’s hair. Since I was afraid of girls, I tried very hard to avoid both consequences.

As a result of my bus riding experience, I came to appreciate smooth hair that was not coated with hair spray. After the hairdo came the make‑up. I could not believe what girls put on their faces and on their eye lashes. Those were the days of heavy mascara and bottles and tubes of “Cover Girl” did their best to hide all of the girls who rode the Heber bus but didn’t do a very good job of it. Needless to say some of the girls were better at applying make‑up than others. I learned to appreciate girls who used very little make‑up or had the more “natural” look without the heavy make‑up.  After a few weeks of watching the girls, it became routine and I spent the time traveling back and forth to Snowflake studying or visiting with friends or trying to sleep on the bus. A lot of people slept on the trip home at the end of the day.

In winter, the bus became a battle ground because there were only a few heater vents on the bus. Usually the bus driver would allow the bus to run for a few minutes before beginning the pick-up run, but by the time it got to our stop the heat was still barely beginning to come out of the heater vents. You could tell immediately when you got on the bus where the heater vents were. There would be a group huddled in the seats around the vents. The battle came in trying to displace someone near a heater vent so that you could get closer to the vent to get at least some heat. Ruses, bribes and physical assaults were all used to try to get someone’s seat close to the heater. If you were lucky, you had a friend who boarded the bus earlier than you who would save you a seat next to the heater. As you can imagine, saving seats was not popular and was often ignored. The heater usually had the bus warmed up a little by the time we got to Snowflake. If not, then there was a mad rush off the bus to get to one of the heaters in the school to thaw out before classes began.

After riding the bus for four years, I would not wish that torture on anyone. It was always a great relief to be able to drive myself to school or ride with my brother. When we moved to Texas I heard the proper description for those busses. In Texas they were called “Yellow Dogs!” I will have to agree that it was a “dog’s life” when I was forced to ride the bus to school day after day.

 

Behind The Rock House we originally had a garage and a wash house. When I was probably about nine or ten years old, Mom and Dad decided to add a “shop” onto the wash house. I don’t remember a lot about the construction. I think Dad and the boys did most of it. It mostly amounted to extending the garage roof further over and adding a shop room onto the back and side of the washhouse. We also put an upstairs over the shop room where we could put mattresses so people could sleep up there.

I don’t remember whether the motivation to build a shop was because we needed more sleeping space in the summer when Vard came home, or whether it was to provide a place where Terry and Vard could work on projects (both of them had taken shop in school and were always building something), or whether it was a way to teach construction skills to all of us. Whatever the reason, it was built. We built some stairs on the west wall that provided access to not only the room above the shop but to the attic of the garage as well.

The upstairs of the shop became a favorite place to sleep in the summertime because it was cool and we could have our friends over to “sleep out” if we wanted. I think I slept up there every summer until my brothers left on missions or for school and a bed became available in the house in the summertime.

The shop also became a busy place. It was a place where we had a workbench on which to work and construct “things”. We organized it so that the tools were on a peg board on one wall. Terry had a “shopmate” that had a table saw, sander, lathe and drill press all in one, and we used it a lot. We spent lots of time in the shop, either downstairs or upstairs. The wash house wasn’t used much except as a place for the freezer and for storage. It also became the location of the “separator” we used to separate the milk from the cream (see “Separating the Milk from the Cream”).

Later when I took shop I also used the shop at home for doing things. Dad and I overhauled the Volkswagen engine in there and I had a small welder. It was a fun place to work and create. I can remember Terry and Vard building a motor scooter that never did work very well. We also tried to put a motor on the back of a bicycle to make a “motor bike” but that didn’t work too well either. I think Terry was more successful with some of his wood working projects. We used the shop to good advantage when we were in scouts as well.

Later in life I realized the value of having a place where kids could putter and create “things.”

When all of us kids left home, Dad used the shop a lot himself. He bought some new equipment and used it to work on various projects. He reorganized the tool storage and made it more user-friendly. When I think about the shop I still have fond memories of the time we spent there, both upstairs and down. The last time I looked, the homemade sign Terry put up under the electrical switch box still had the same message we became familiar with as we went in and out of the shop. It simply says, “Douse the lights!”

 

Probably because of my interest in agriculture, my parents allowed me to become a “farmer” in a small way. I got to drive the tractor at a young age. We owned a 1949 model Allis‑Chalmers tractor. It was orange in color and was about as temperamental as a mule. My interest in machines and mechanics may have also had something to do with my getting that “privilege.” Along with the tractor we owned a flat bed trailer, a two‑bottom disc plow, a harrow, a cultivator and a two‑row planter. We also had what was called a “buzz saw” that was operated using the tractor. We seldom if ever used the cultivator, but we used most of the other implements. The tractor and plow were a special team.

I don’t know exactly how it got started, but I assume Dad must have been the first one to use the tractor and plow to plow garden spots for various families in Heber. He was followed by Ted. Later Vard got the job, then Terry, and finally me. Since there were few, if any, other tractors or plows in Heber (maybe one other one) we plowed our own lot beside The Rock House so we could have a garden. Several others in town also planted large gardens so we would be hired to plow their lots as well. Some were regular customers and some only once in a while. I think the charge was about ten dollars for plowing and harrowing for a normal sized lot. Usually the job would take a couple of hours if everything worked right. That was where we often ran into a problem.

The first challenge was to get the tractor started. It didn’t have a starter so it had to be cranked. You had to be a certain size to be able to crank the tractor to get it started. Sometimes it would start right up and sometimes it wouldn’t start for love nor money.

Once you got it started, the next challenge was to hook it up to the plow. You had to back the tractor over the plow since it hooked onto the tractor underneath. Oh I forgot—you had to first remove the draw bar because the plow attached at the same point where the draw bar attached. If you were strong and lucky, you backed the tractor right over the plow and you could line up the attachment without a problem. More often than not, you had to spend a lot of time either re‑backing the tractor or trying to move one wheel without moving the other so that you got everything lined up right. There was certainly some skill involved but also a lot of dumb luck as well. Most of the time it took at least two people to hook on the plow but I got to where I could do it alone.

To plow you usually started in the middle of the field and just went around and around until you reached the edges of the field leaving a furrow around the edges of the field. If preferred, you could start at the edges and end up with a dead furrow in the middle. The plow did a nice job of turning the soil over. You just put the wheel of the tractor in the furrow and the tractor would almost drive its self down the field. You only had to pay attention when you got to the end of the field and had to turn around. Sometimes the tractor would just quit running for no obvious reason. Sometimes you could get off and restart it and sometimes it refused to start (like a mule). I finally learned to just walk away and leave it for a few hours and then come back and start it again and finish the plowing job. Depending on the “attitude” of the tractor, a plowing job could take two hours or a full day.

After plowing the field, you had to take the plow off the tractor, put the draw bar back on and then hook up to the harrow. The harrow was like a large rake that you pulled over the plowed ground in different directions to break up the clods and to leave a nice flat seedbed for planting. The harrowing was the easy part. When you finished harrowing, the field was ready for planting. It always gave me quite a sense of accomplishment to see a field ready to be planted as a result of my efforts and patience with the tractor. It was also a way to earn a few dollars on the side which always came in handy for a high school student.

 

Growing on many of the bluffs around Heber and in the surrounding canyons were lots of wild grape vines. Some of the vines had lots of grapes on them in some years and some were just mostly vines. One of my jobs as a kid was to find the grape vines that had grapes and then to keep an eye on the wild grape vines so I could tell Mom when the wild grapes were getting ripe.

Just down Buckskin Canyon was probably the best grape vine around. It was easy to climb up into it and it was easy to pick the grapes when they were ripe. There were also several good grape vines up Buckskin Canyon and also up Black Canyon but they were farther away from home and it was more difficult to climb up to them. When the wild grapes were ripe, we would pick several buckets full of them. Usually they were not uniformly ripe but were a mixture of ripe and semi‑ripe grapes. These grapes were very sour but they could be made into wild grape jelly that was outstanding.

After picking the grapes, we had to pull the grapes off the bunches. Mom had a colander which could be used to squeeze the grape juice out of the grapes. The grape juice was then combined with sugar and cooked until it was the correct consistency. Sure-gel was added and then it was put in pint jars. In a good year, Mom could bottle enough wild grape jelly to last the family for almost a full year. Grape jelly was a favorite of our family. We, therefore, took care to find out which grape vines had lots of grapes and then to monitor them to see when they were ripe.

Other families in Heber also made grape jelly so it was a bit of a race to see who got the grapes picked first. If someone beat us to one grape vine, we would just move to another one to pick our grapes. Mom made wild grape jelly most years when I was little.

Also growing up Black Canyon was a grove of Black Walnut Trees. Most years they had nuts on them and sometimes we went up and picked walnuts. The Black Walnuts were pretty small, about the size of a large marble, and they were really hard. It was very difficult to crack them and then to dig out the meat of the nut from the shells. I can remember shelling Black Walnuts several different times but it was not a very rewarding experience.

It was much more rewarding to harvest Pinions. Pinions are small nuts (sometimes called pine nuts) that grow in the cones of the Pinion Tree. In the fall of the year the cones open up and the nuts fall out onto the ground. Sometimes we would spread blankets or tarps under the Pinion trees and shake the trees to shake out the pinion nuts. The Indians were very good at harvesting pinions and they sometimes came around selling them as well. Over the years I ate a lot of pinions. I learned to shell them and spit out the shells and just eat the nuts but for a few years when I was pretty small, I just ate the whole thing, shell and all. I suppose if anything ever goes wrong with my insides, they may trace it to my eating too many pinion shells when I was a kid. Some people learned that rats were the best at collecting pinions so they would locate the rats’ nests and they would be full of pounds of pinions. We never were very successful at finding rats’ nests so we used the tarp method of harvesting.

The other wild fruit that we sometimes gathered was prickly pears from the prickly pear cactus. Prickly Pear Jelly tasted good but the prickly pears were full of lots of tiny stickers and I never did enjoy harvesting prickly pears much.

When I was moved by Mr. Capps and my mother into fifth grade without going to the fourth grade, I found myself in some difficulty at school. I couldn’t do the math the fifth graders were doing. I hadn’t even heard of multiplication or division but the teacher, Mrs. Bankhead, didn’t slow the instruction down or try to help me catch up in any way. My Mom set about to remedy my math deficiencies. She made up some flash cards and I began to learn the multiplication tables with her help.

At that time, we were selling milk to some of our neighbors. I don’t remember how many different families bought milk from us but I had the job of delivering two or three quarts of milk a day to different families. We had a small box that was painted blue and it would hold the quart bottles of milk. Mom would put the bottles in the box and then she would assign me one of the multiplication tables like “the 4’s.” By the time I got the milk delivered and came home, I was suppose to know 1 times 4= 4, 2 times 4=8, 3 times 4=12 etc. all the way up to 12 times 4=48. The next day I would get another number and repeat the routine. I don’t think I learned all of the multiplication tables in twelve days but I learned them pretty fast. If I had difficulty with a few specific ones like 6×7=42, I would deliver the milk repeating to myself all the way, 6×7=42, 6×7=42, 6×7=42, etc. By the time I got home, I had memorized that 6×7=42, never to be forgotten again. Once I had the multiplication tables memorized, then it was on to simple division with the flash cards again. The end result of all of this was that I didn’t flunk out of fifth grade. By the end of the year I had caught up with the rest of the class. I guess my success was such a disappointment to Mrs. Bankhead that she just up and died part way through the year and a new teacher named Mrs. Miller came in and took her class. Mrs. Miller was willing to help me so I survived. I have often wondered since what people thought when they heard me walking around town repeating to myself 7×9 is 63, 7×9 is 63 or 12 divided by 4 is 3, 12 divided by 4 is 3. Maybe only the dogs paid any attention.

I enjoyed the fifth grade once Mrs. Miller became my teacher. One of the most interesting subjects for me in fifth grade was geography. I had not had much, if any, geography before that and Mrs. Miller opened my eyes to the wonders of geography and different places. I can’t remember whether it was U.S. geography or world geography but which ever, I enjoyed it. Later in life I got to visit many parts of the United States and the world and I enjoyed that as well but it all started in fifth grade.

When I moved to fifth grade, I had to make friends with an older group of kids. Instead of the boys my age, I was in the class with Farrel Holyoak, Gary Duncan and Bill Batson. The girls in my class were Judy Brewer, Ann Patrick, Rosealynn Riedhead and Carol Sue Hollowell. The classes in elementary school were not large. There were usually only eight or nine students in each class up through eighth grade.