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.