We are:
Betty
Dave
Richard
Ruth
Barbara
Cliff
Christi the facilitator
Today's topic: Your First Transportation
Dave: "When my Dad was courting my mother she was still in high school. He gave her a horse. She rode it to school after that. They teased my Dad that he married my mother to get the horse back."
Ruth: Had a horse, half mustang, half Arabian. "She would try to bite me in the rear whenever I cinched up her saddle. She was a spirited animal but when kids came from the city she would go slow because she didn't want them to fall off."
Cliff: "I didn't have any money . . . we were dirt poor. Walking home through the city dump, I found a discarded bicycle. I started a project to collect parts so I could build a bicycle. Then I had to learn to ride the thing!" (Laughter from all.)
"Twelve years old . . . the height of the depression and nobody had any money."
Q: "Did you ride it?" A: "I rode that bicycle until I graduated high school."
Richard: "When my older sister got married, he had a car! Nobody had a car then! I liked to drive under the bridge with a train going by above us. I was about 10. We thought that was great; he'd buy a new car every two years."
"I had a red flyer wagon I used to ride in and my sister would pull me."
Betty: "My husband and I were living in Japan. We could ride bikes around the rice paddies. Our little boy, Eric, would ride on the back. That's how we spent our Sundays."
Q: (Richard) "What were you doing in Japan?"
A: "Clifford was stationed there."
"Living someplace for a long time, you absorb the life that is in that place. I was only 19 or 20 when I went there."
Q: "Did you speak Japanese?"
A: "I could, a little. (Incidentally) Little kids who speak bilingually always know which language to use with which person."
Dave: "I lived in the country . . . a 'metropolis' in Eastern Oregon called Irrigon. You had to irrigate to have crops. The community developed through the irrigated lands.
When I got a bicycle in high school, it had a tank on it."
Q: (Richard) "What was it used for?"
A: "Nothing. Just decoration. Made it more like a motorcycle I guess.
Dave: (Continuing) "We lived between Irrigon and Umatilla. Thirty-five people in the high school. We had a 40-piece band . . . they dipped into the grade school Everyone was expected to be in the band!"
"A six-man football team was started the year I was in high school. We had a swimming pool - not commercial, but with rocks around it. Going to a friend's house overnight, bicycles were a good way to get there."
Betty: "We lived in Madras. Farm kids came on buses. We lived across the street from the high school. Mother never knew how many people would be in our beds! They could stay with us. They always trusted the McKenzie family. There was always another plate. My Mother - we called her Mother Earth."
Dave: "That was farm life. Everyone was generous and kind. We knew all the people in high school . . . and we knew their cat's name!"
Barbara: "Like Ruth, I had a horse. My mother was an entrepreneur. We bought houses, fixed them up, and moved. So we moved a lot.
I grew up in Spokane, moved there when I was six months old.
The first horse I remember - I was three or four years old - I got to ride on the big workhorses. Later on, I had my own horse until I went off to college.
In all this moving around, I look back and remember my age by what house I lived in. When I was five, Mom bought 30 acres and six cabins on Newman Lake.
Mom would get 125 baby chicks, and in the spring we'd chop off their heads, put them in hot water, and pluck the feathers. We'd rent lockers. In those days you didn't have freezers."
