It’s all good. My dad somehow has made it to 90, despite a 2-pack a day habit of Lucky Strikes. I remember as a boy in my early teens going down to the spillway beneath the resevoir and camping with my friends. We used our Boy Scout pup tents, and caught rainbow trout in a small stream that meandered through the flats beneath the dam. The stream wasn’t too wide, and we’d make a dam in it with rocks that forced the fish to go through. We stood in the water, and grabbed the fish with our bare hands, then holding onto the tail, whack them on a stone to kill them.

Make up a fire and while the coals got hot, fillet the fish. Cook them up in a small pan with butter over the fire and it was heaven.

It was a very different world. Like you, we had neighbors with an outhouse and a well. We thought nothing of driving to high school with a rifle and/or shotgun in a rack in the rear window of the pickup.

That’s the America we need back. Hopefully, there are enough of us who remember these things to help the younger ones through the hard times ahead.

Tim, me paternal grandma given to life in ’06 & passed into the clearing in ’03. Younger brother Roy did likewise 2 years later at 98. Pictures and memories of their stories as wee bairns with wagons, wood stoves, outhouses, and such. Grandma was scarcely 6 yr old when Titanic lost the fight with a big block of ice..
Me sainted (or not) Ma near to KE45 has a wood burning stove with a copper kettle atop. Once upon a time not so long ago whilst the power went on vacation in winter, said stove and kettle kept alive, fed, and warm those who occupied the humble abode. Without complaint, I might add…
Meanwhile, neighbors fared not so well…and spoke of it…often…but me Ma fared well…
The holidays brought negatives of Grandparents and Great Grandparents whilst in their younger years. Aaah, me. How nice that technology allows for transference of such images into a much more usable form today.

Both were well educated for the time. My father studied to be a veterinarian until a family death brought him back early to work the farm. My mother once taught a one-room rural school with a combined class of 7 year-olds mixed in with 14 year-olds, and all ages in between. Most walked long distances, or rode horses to school. Later, after working for the Dept. of Agriculture in Washington during the Depression, she eventually married my father. They farmed on Iowa land (and where I grew up) that my Irish immigrant, Great Grandfather had purchased with some of the accumulated gold dust he and his brother had gained from their prospecting days in California and Virginia City in the mid-to later, 1800s.

Although we had a few farm tractors and modern for then, farm equipment, my father kept a beautiful team of shiny black, (but spirited as I recall) prize workhorses along with appropriate horse-drawn farm equipment, just to keep the old traditions alive. And we used them often, to the enjoyment of many of the really old-timers!

Most of what we put on our table was home grown: Our own butchered livestock, milk, eggs, sweet corn or vegetables. Both the pork and prime beef we raised were better than I have ever had since. (We also had fish, but it was muddy river catfish, and not so good.)
Wednesday night was always rabbit night in season. I would open up the back door and shoot some cottontails that always gathered by some bushes 30 ft. away with my .22. Together, Dad and I would dress them in the basement, next to the warm and burning, coal fed furnace. Mother had a wonderful fried rabbit recipe, and would quickly cook ‘em up. Fond memories. We also ate a lot of pheasant and some squirrel, but deer there were scarce then.

Fortunately, we had indoor plumbing, but many of our neighbors did not. So visiting friends or helping out on a neighbor’s farm was not always so pleasant.

We also had a “party line” phone line with about maybe 8 or more families on it. When the phone rang, it rang in code. As I recall, a 1 long ring with 2 short rings was ours to answer. Others had their own code, like maybe 3 short rings. Of course we all could listen in on each other’s conversations, and many did. But at least three families were of German descent and most always spoke German on the party line, so the silent eavesdroppers couldn’t understand.

Dad – a 3-pack-a-day smoker of unfiltered cigarettes – died too early while in his late 60s. But he had lived and witnessed a lot, was a fine and respected man, and was very proud of my sister and me. However, my mother lived on for another 28 years, never re-marrying and on her own until 93, as sharp and feisty as ever until the day she died.

Sorry for the long TMI. Sometimes it just flows.

Both my parents are gone, both born in 1913. I STILL call it the “icebox” as that was what I was raised on. (I’m 64) Funny, although I grew up in a rural community in Illinois where guys used to rabbit hunt before coming to class in the morn in HS, and my wife on a farm just outside Opelousas La., we’re both “big-city” kind of people. But the rural–or semi-rural in my case, I grew up on a college campus–life is a great way to raise kids. At least in the late 40s-early sixties. No drugs, low crime, unlocked doors, roam the town all day by myself on my bicycle in the summer –a different world indeed…..a lost world, really….