Life for our famliy in the Dirty Thirtes

Life now had new & harder challenges. I was from a small country school in grade 6 as my parents had gone a second time for the winter to my grandpa's Phillips small farm in Ill. When they heard of this depression & the dust bowl where their daughter & family lived they again sent money for the Lincoln family to spent the winter with them. We now were a family of 6, as Ralph was a little over a year old. I am not sure of the month we arrived but we were there in time for Christmas. Again we had a Christmas tree with many well wrapped gifts hanging on it for all the children. In Sask we had few trees & only a few willows on our first quarter of land.

Mother sent to Eatons catalogue for bricked designed crapped paper which she used to make our old treadle sewing machine into a fire place, with a place to pin our stockings to and a place on top for home made decorations. In our stockings we got a tangerine orange some hard candy, also a small toy. There always were gifts from Grandpa, Grandma & Aunt Clara which arrived early in the mail, as they had sent shelled nuts from their trees & some home made baking. There were always one larger gift for each child of a special toy. That Christmas I got my first doll with eyes that open & shut, with home made clothes, I don't remember what the rest received but Christmas parcels arrived each year from our grandparents in the US.

We went that winter to meet our 4 cousins, mothers youngest sisters family Clayton & Mildred Mc Caws, John, Betty, Frank, & Herbert. They had been missionaries in Philippians. They were near each of our ages. John is a year younger than me. Uncle Clayton was now a minister in the Christian Church in Des Moines Iowa. Our family all slept in what they called a solarium - like our closed in veranda. I only remember walking & playing with our cousins, getting to put faces on them as previously we had only heard about them when we received the family round robin letters.

I was behind in my schooling. I didn't start school until the spring I turned 7 year in April & Cliff started at age 5 as he wasn't 6 until July 4. We both were very shy as in those early days you went by buggy & sleigh to church, 7 miles to town to shop for our needs. We attended a one room school house taught by one teacher, with grades from one to eight, also several older students took high school subjects by correspondence, the teacher gave help to some if she had time. I still remember how painful my very first day at school was. There were double desks so Cliff & I sat together, he didn't seem too interested so would half lay in his seat & swing his hair on the floor, I was feeling sorry for him but he was bored with school. The teacher took me up beside her on a bench, I believe she knew I was close to tears, put her arm around me, as she opened a box of very small letter cards of the alphabet. She named each letter as she handed me them one at a time. I knew some letters but she realized I needed to lose my fear of this large room of children of all ages. Now after missing a winter of schooling, in this school another teacher gave Cliff & I classes to help us catch up. I was loving learning & as mother had time she helped us at home. Cliff was smarted than I in some subjects, like spelling. This subject was hard because they had spelling bees, where everyone stood up at the front of the class, when I was given a word to spell my mind would go blank. Cliff was in his own world so he could spell it right quickly. I could write it correctly so the teacher noticed this so I think I wasn't chosen to spell in public. To this very day when I get tired I get a blank in spelling a word. We walked to school in the summer as we were only 1 & a half miles away to meeting with neighbour kids. In the winter each family drove their kids in a small sleigh, also called a cutter. As we got older Cliff drove us putting the horse in the school barn. His job was to feed & water the horse at noon. We had farther to go to school when we moved to the house on the quarter of land dad had bought. I remember one of the families who attended Dixie school, drove a pair of mules, they are temperamental animals. Some days we would find the 4 kids sitting in their buggy just waiting for the mules to move, yes I learned what it meant to be as stubborn as a mule. Christmas concerts at school was another time we learned to recite & act in front of a group of friends & neighbours. The school always gave a concert, as students spoke their parts & acted out plays, on the Christmas story. There was always a decorated real tree with real lit candles & gifts tied on it. Santa in full dress appeared with ringing sleigh bells & a big HO HO, which always frightened me. Each child received a bag of candy & an orange.

Now I will go back to our move from a country school to attending school in a small town, four roomed school & again Cliff drove us a mile or more to school going early to deliver milk to customers in town before school. Cliff put the horse in the town barn & cared for them. I carried the empty bottles into the school rooms storage closet to pick up after school & take home to be washed & sterilized refilled to deliver the next day. The dust storms got worse each day, as the wind piled the fence lines with tumbling thistle, which filled up with drifting soil. It got so high you could walk on top of the fence & touch the telephone line. The soil would come into the houses as this house was old so dust was in the air inside & outside, mother set the table & kept a cloth over everything until she put the food on for us to eat & even then you seemed to taste it. This old house just filled with the blowing soil. I got hay fever from the dust. We hear of a herb I could burn & inhale the fumes to stop my continual coughing, especially at night. We kids slept upstairs in this large house. The winds started on Easter Sunday and it was said that if the wind started on a Sunday it would blow for 7 Sundays & that is what it did that year. Cliff got a dry hacking cough so Dr would later send Cliff to the TB sanatorium in Fort Quepple.

We moved as a family to a neighbours second house in the town of Hazenmore It was only 2 rooms. I slept across the street on a closed in veranda with my girl friend from school, Joan Wright. They used to have a confectionery in this store but business was gone, they sold a bit of ice cream in the summer.

By fall dad had rented a farm yard and a set of buildings,one & half miles west of town just across the tracks. We could drive down No. 13 hwy to deliver milk in town. We must have had some moisture & the high winds stopped so we did have a good garden spot which Cliff & dad worked the land with horseand a hand held plow. Mum & dad did a lot of work to sterilize the milk bottles. They milked the 3 or so cows, filled the quarts bottles & hand pumped the large watering trough with fresh cool water from this deep well. They had to get up while it was dark to get the milk cooled before we kids went with horse & buggy to deliver milk & all four of us to attend school.

I was now in junior high, my room teacher took an interest in me she had me stay after school for extra lessons as I needed to be advanced in some subject to be able to take grade 7 & 8 together & with her help for the next two years I got grade 9 & 10 together, Miss Coats was such a good teacher & I liked her method of teaching. I became good in Algeria, & my life long friend in high school was Isabelle Keith who did that subject as a past time. When I got into grade 11 & 12 I had good study habits, as we girls did extra home work together. I had different teachers in the next grades & Algebra & Trig came easy for me & often the teacher got me to do a problem on the board explaining each move & why I did it that way. Isabelle & I were often top of our class in marks. We were pen pals even after we each were married with children, first we wrote each week then monthly & rest of our time yearly. The year I wrote my grade 12 final exams was for 50 points & our school didn't have all the library reading books . I had read only one so lost 25 points as the school only had 1 book. Then we only took french by reading the story & trying to remember words we were never taught to speak it. Most students failed but one student got 50 in 4 subjects so was the only one that past his Grade 12. Isabelle & I failed composition which we repeated on our own, I went some days & took Latin classes, & read the needed library books. I went to see friends in Swift Current, got a job on a ranch making meals & cleaning for this couple, but they had bed bugs, I was bitten every night so called home & mother told me to get some kind of powder to put on the bed frame which I did & it helped. I stayed until I had wrote my exam in the town of Cadillac. I had met some church friend who gave me a ride back to Hazenmore