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.

When I got in high school and got a driver’s license, I wanted a car in the worst way. I had taken some “Auto Mechanics” in my Vo‑Ag class and I thought I  knew quite a bit about what made them run or what to do if they didn’t run. All I needed was a “real live car” to practice working on.

I started looking around town for a suitable candidate. I didn’t really care whether the car could run or not, I knew I could fix it. I was pretty cocky then, but I guess ignorance is bliss. I finally found an old Desoto that still had a motor in it. It was up on blocks and hadn’t been driven for years. The lady that owned it gave it to me if I would drag it off, so I got Charlie Reidhead to help me and we hitched it to the tractor with a chain and we drug it from her house to my house. I finally had “my car.” Needless to say, I soon learned that its needs exceeded my abilities and my pocketbook so I started looking around again. I finally found an old 1949 Dodge Sedan. It was owned by a Mr. Reidhead. It did not have current license plates but it did run. I bought it for fifty dollars. Mr. Reidhead didn’t have a title to the car but he thought I could apply for an “Abandoned Title” since the car hadn’t had license plates for several years.

I was in “hog heaven!” I had my own car and it ran and it had a radio that worked sometimes and it could be washed and waxed and it was a deep blue color and the engine was a flat head six that I knew how to work on and I could drive it as long as I didn’t get caught by the deputy sheriff because I didn’t have current license plates. Life couldn’t get much better!

I spent a lot of time in that car. I figured out that the deputy sheriff did not drive on the dirt roads that went up the canyon or down the canyon. He did not travel the roads that were in the woods. If I confined my driving to those roads, there was little chance he would bother me. My car had good clearance so I could actually go about anywhere “Off Road” with that car. I did take it lots of places and I had a lot of fun with it.

Sometimes I would just sit in my car and listen to the radio when I could pick something up. At that time, one of the radio stations that came in the clearest at night was KOMA from Oklahoma City. It was a station that played all the popular songs over and over and over and over but I loved it just as most teenagers probably did at that time. I knew the words to lots of the songs and could sing along.

I tried to keep my car washed and shined. As I mentioned, it was a very dark blue, almost black, but the paint was so old it would oxidize quite rapidly. The oxidized paint was a lighter bluish gray in color and not too attractive so I waxed it quite often so the real color would show.

I have fond memories of running around the dirt roads leading to and from Heber and having a blast. We often went up the canyon to Black Canyon Lake since it was dirt road all the way. I knew ways to get to Overgaard without driving on the paved roads so I could go to Overgaard if I needed to.

I remember one night I decided to take my car to a football game in Snowflake. That meant driving on a major highway. The game was at night so I thought I would be OK and I drove to Snowflake. My car’s top speed was probably forty-five miles per hour so it took me almost an hour to get to Snowflake. I parked in an obscure place and went and watched the game. When it was over I started home. As I came over one of the rises in the road, I saw a bunch of cows in the middle of the road ahead. Somehow, and I don’t know how, I made it through that bunch of cows without hitting a single one. I think I might have grazed one of their noses with my car but it could have been a lot worse. I think “Someone” was looking out for me that night. It shook me up enough that I didn’t ever try that again. If I needed to go to Snowflake for something, I would ask Dad for the keys to the family car and use it.

I sold my car when I got ready to go to college at ASU. It still didn’t have any license plates and I didn’t have an “Abandoned Title.” I sold it to an Indian man for twenty dollars. I have always thought that sale was probably the best deal I ever made. I ended up spending thirty dollars plus gas money for two or three years of fun with “my car.” I hope it is resting in peace someplace because it gave me a lot of pleasure. I never did do much work on it. It just ran and ran and ran so I just drove and drove and drove. We were a good combination.

 

One of the high adventures when I was growing up was to “sleep out.” Sleeping out amounted to sleeping outside the house with my brothers or a bunch of friends. Maybe the reason it was so special was because I didn’t get to do it very often.

In the summer time when the weather was good. Mom and Dad would sometimes let us boys sleep out on the porch or on the wagon. We had a large flat bed wagon that we hauled wood and other things on, and we also had a bunch of old mattresses as well. If we asked nicely, Mom would let us put the mattresses on the wagon and then sleep out there at night. It was a real adventure. Laying on you back looking up into the night sky was quite impressive. The skies over Heber were crystal clear most of the time and the stars were bright. Most nights we could see lots of falling stars.

Sometimes, for special occasions, we could invite our friends to sleep out with us on the wagon. Usually if that happened, it involved an activity for the entire evening. It generally included a bonfire with hot dogs followed by games like kick-the-can, hide-and-seek, run-sheep-run and others. We usually had some quiet games and ended with some ghost stories and sometimes roasting of marshmallows for dessert. We could play for hours because bonfires were a common entertainment in those days so we knew lots of games to play in the dark or near dark. When the fire started to burn down low, Mom would come out and tell us it was time for bed. We would climb onto the wagon and climb into the beds made on the mattresses. Sometime we just slid into bedrolls but whatever type of bed we had, it was fun.

There was always a little goofing off for a while and then we would settle down and just watch the stars together until everyone went to sleep. It was a quiet time with something pretty awesome to share. If we got too loud, Mom or Dad would come to the back door and speak to us and we would settle down. If we slept out, we usually also woke up early. Everyone would get up and make the beds and then head for home. Later on when we got the shop built, we used to sleep out in the top of the shop every night. Charlie Reidhead slept up there with me all the time and sometimes others of our friends would join us as well.

Sometimes Mom and Dad would let us take the tractor and wagon and drive out of town a ways. We would find a quiet place in the forest and sleep there. A few times Mom and Dad also slept out with us but most of the time it was just us boys or us and some friends. I suppose parents today would be aghast at would we did when I was a kid, but our parents didn’t seem to worry too much about us. We were very familiar with the places around Heber and there was nothing and no one to bother us. There was always a group of us and we were perfectly safe. Those were good and uncomplicated times and I still remember how much fun it was to “sleep out.”

 

 

Heber had only the one small store with a limited selection of items. For other shopping we had to go to Holbrook or Show Low. When I was small, our family made a monthly shopping trip to Holbrook. Holbrook had a large Safeway store just around the corner from the old Navajo County Court House.

Mom and Dad would buy groceries at Safeway for the whole month. Because of the canning Mom did and the butchering of animals, we didn’t buy a lot of canned fruits or vegetables but we bought other canned goods. The meat we bought was usually ground beef or bacon. We did buy flour in twenty-five or fifty pound bags. We bought sugar in fifty or one hundred pound bags. We also bought other items like cooking oil, Jell‑O, crackers, cheese, fresh vegetables and other items that might be needed.

One of the good things about going to Holbrook to shop was the fact that they had a Sprouse‑Ritz Store which was called “the five and dime” store. It was a fun place for kids to shop who didn’t have much money to spend. It had one big section where items ranged in price from five cents to a dollar. We could buy caps, pea shooters, sheriff badges, squirt guns, balloons, cap guns, Lone Ranger masks, bows and arrows, dart guns, marbles and probably a hundred other things. We would go there and look and look and look and finally make a decision on what to buy with our dime or quarter.

Holbrook also had a Penney’s store. That is where we bought some of our clothes and it is where Mom bought cloth and cotton or dacron bats for making quilts. Penny’s also had shoes, thread, socks, ties and even suits. When I graduated from eighth grade, I think I got my suit at Penney’s. In those days it was fun to just watch the clerks in the store. The business office was apparently upstairs on the second floor so when the customer paid their money, the clerk would put the money in a small bottle-like container. This would be screwed onto another piece that was attached to a cord that ran from where the clerks were waiting on people to the area on the second floor where the cashiers were located. The small bottle-like containers were moved to the second floor somehow by the clerk pulling on a string or rope. When the rope was pulled, the bottle moved rapidly up the cord to the second floor where change was made. Then the bottle would come back down the line by someone upstairs pulling on the cord, and it would land close to the clerk and they would unscrew the bottle and get the change out for the customer. We spent lots of time just watching the bottles going up the cord and then coming back down. They also had a system similar to what drive up banks have but I think it came later.

Another favorite part of our trip to Holbrook was the bakery. There was a real, live bakery in Holbrook and most times Mom and Dad would let us buy a dozen doughnuts to eat as a snack. The bakery always smelled soooooo good. We would get the doughnuts or maybe they were spudnuts and then go and sit under the trees on the courthouse lawn and eat them. I think that’s where I developed my love of doughnuts.

Also located on the main intersection in Holbrook was the “drug store.” It had all the things a drug store was suppose to have like a pharmacy but it also had a soda fountain. I don’t remember ever sampling the ice cream from the soda fountain but it was fun to walk around in the drug store and watch others sitting at the soda fountain. If we needed medicine, that is where we got it most of the time.

Those shopping trips were not only a family outing, they were also necessary in those days. They took careful planning to be sure we bought what was needed during the month. I’m afraid most of us have forgotten how to plan ahead and shop for a month at a time like we did then.