Relda W. Leavitt interview, March 18, 1976: transcript

UNLV University Libraries Relda Whitney Leavitt 1 An Interview with Relda Whitney Leavitt An Oral History Conducted by David Steele Broussard Ralph Roske Oral History Project on Early Las Vegas Special Collections and Archives Oral History Research Center University Libraries University of Nevada, Las Vegas UNLV University Libraries Relda Whitney Leavitt 2 © Ralph Roske Oral History Project on Early Las Vegas University of Nevada, Las Vegas, 2020 UNLV University Libraries Relda Whitney Leavitt 3 The Oral History Research Center (OHRC) was formally established by the Board of Regents of the University of Nevada System in September 2003 as an entity of the UNLV University Libraries’ Special Collections Division. The OHRC conducts oral interviews with individuals who are selected for their ability to provide first-hand observations on a variety of historical topics in Las Vegas and Southern Nevada. The OHRC is also home to legacy oral history interviews conducted prior to its establishment including many conducted by UNLV History Professor Ralph Roske and his students. This legacy interview transcript received minimal editing, such as the elimination of fragments, false starts, and repetitions in order to enhance the reader's understanding of the material. All measures have been taken to preserve the style and language of the narrator. The interviewee/narrator was not involved in the editing process. UNLV University Libraries Relda Whitney Leavitt 4 Abstract On March 18, 1976, collector David Steele Broussard interviewed Relda Whitney Leavitt (born April 3rd, 1917 in Saint Thomas, Nevada) at her home in Las Vegas, Nevada. In this interview, Mrs. Leavitt discusses growing up in Saint Thomas, Nevada before her family moved to Las Vegas. She also discusses moving to Las Vegas, Nevada and her family’s dairy business in Whitney, Nevada. She speaks about the different changes and growth she has seen in Las Vegas over the years. UNLV University Libraries Relda Whitney Leavitt 5 Alright. I’m David Broussard, and I’m a student of history at University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and I’m a senior. And today I am interviewing Relda Whitney Leavitt, who is a native Nevadan, born in Saint Thomas, the 3rd of April, 1917. And she’s lived in Southern Nevada ever since then, except for two years when she was on a Mormon mission to the southern United States from 1936-38. And the topic of today’s conversation will be pretty much Southern Nevada prior to 1945, because that’s where most of our information is lacking. What are your recollections of Saint Thomas? Did you go back to Saint Thomas very often? Yes. I spent most of my summers in Saint Thomas during my very young life. We moved here when I was eighteen months old. But I spent my summers with my grandparents and my aunts and uncles that lived in Saint Thomas. And it was a great, fun place to spend the summer. We spent the time swimming in the irrigation ditch. We used to bury potatoes under hot coals, and have potato roasts. And we used to have huge floods that came down the Virgin River. And the most fun we had was to go down to the Virgin when the floods were really rolling with high waves, and it was really a lot of fun to watch. And the water would be just as red as red could be. But we rode horses, we had taffy pulls, we did all of the fun things that kids did in that day. We made up all of our own fun. There was nothing there for us to do, it was the things we dreamed up and could do ourselves. What kind of a community was Saint Thomas? Actually, Saint Thomas was a farming community. And I’ve always called it a sleepy, lazy little town. But the people who started Saint Thomas were sent there by the church to start another UNLV University Libraries Relda Whitney Leavitt 6 colony, or another city, because the farming was so good, and there were many opportunities there for people who raised cattle, raised lots of grain and hay, and the things that people in Las Vegas needed. Mm-hmm. How many stores—did they have a main street in town, did they have a few stores? They had one store in Saint Thomas. Not always owned by the same person. There was one hotel in Saint Thomas. There was one school house, and that served as a schoolhouse, as a meeting place for the entire community, and also for church. What grades went to school there? They went—all of the grammar grades went there. And as they started into high school, they went about eight miles to Overton to high school. But my mother remembers going to school in the first school that was started there, and it was in a tent. A tent? A woman teacher had every grade from the first to the eighth grade, and it was a tent. How many rooms were in the schoolhouse? One. It was just one big tent. Uh-huh. And that’s where they learned the few things they learned at that time: reading and writing and arithmetic. That was the main thing they were taught. Was there a post office there? Yes. There was a post office. Uh-huh. There was a post office there right from the beginning. UNLV University Libraries Relda Whitney Leavitt 7 So it was an established town? Yes. It was an established town. Uh-huh. One garage. Just about one of everything. And actually, the people raised and produced most of the things that they lived on. And during the summer months, when there was a lot of fruit, people had their cellars in their basements, and they canned thousands of jars of food to last them through the winter. So they didn’t have cellars and basements in the houses at that time? Oh yes. My grandfather had a basement as large as his house. And he had really the nicest home in Saint Thomas. And the basement was just as large as the main floor of the house. Made out of brick, it was just a beautiful home. I see. And how much land was around the house itself? Around the house itself, there was probably fifteen or twenty acres. And then he had a lot of property and fields that were farther away, that they would go to to cultivate and grow their crops on. Did he have any livestock? He had livestock. They, of course, they produced their own milk, made their own cheese, butchered their own beefs. They would peel pork, salt the whole thing down into salt to last them through the winter. Made their own sausage, their own head cheese, smoked their own bacon. Did they have a smokehouse? They had a smokehouse that they smoked the bacon in. And as things were very crude in that day, he had a large threshing machine, and he did practically all of the threshing of the grain in UNLV University Libraries Relda Whitney Leavitt 8 Saint Thomas and up in Overton and the entire Moapa Valley. One time he was working in his little blacksmith’s shop. They sharpened all of their own tools. He had the big bellows that he heated and did all of the work that had to be done shoeing his horses and his animals. And at one time, he had an accident and cut off his index finger. And he went in the house and got a needle and thread, and sewed his own finger back on. Oh boy. With no anesthetic. With no nothing. And even though he didn’t have the use of that, it still healed enough to the place that he always had that finger there. That’s fascinating. What was the center of activity in the town during the summer? I mean, social activities. Social activities were just things that people initiated themselves. I remember we had a lot of hayrides in the evening. Everyone went to bed very early, except some of the teenagers that of course were out doing things that teenagers have always done. But actually, you invented your own fun. Mm-hmm. There was no movies, no automobiles, they were still using the Model T and buggies and wagons. But really they had more fun than kids actually have today with all of the grand things that we have that we can do nowadays. The town itself, were there—was there just one main street or were there cross streets? UNLV University Libraries Relda Whitney Leavitt 9 No. There was cross streets, perhaps, four streets running in both directions. And, of course, they were all skirted but with fields of alfalfa and gardens and everybody had their garden in their backyard, right in the middle of the city. My grandfather’s home and two or three others were made of huge cement block. But many of ‘em were made out of the red mud adobe that was very common in that time. Mm-hmm. And they actually made the adobe’s themselves. But there were lovely homes in Saint Thomas, and beautiful gardens. Were the streets in the town grated streets or were they just buggy tracks? No. Just—they were wide. They—when they laid out the town, they laid the streets out wide and there was irrigation ditches on both sides of the street. So kids grew up knowing the dangers of falling into the irrigation canals. Of course, they weren’t cemented in any way, they were just dirt ditches, and the crew went around every so many months cleaning the weeds and grass out of the ditches so the water could run clear. ‘Course, any place in this part of Nevada, water is a big problem, so they all had an irrigation system. Every person owned so many shares of water, and he was allowed the water for so many hours according to the number of shares of water he owned. Oh, I see. It was allotted to each family, and you bought your shares of water so you could irrigate your crops. Well did the Virgin River flow all year long? UNLV University Libraries Relda Whitney Leavitt 10 The Virgin River would dry up at times in the summer. Then they’d have a glorious cloud burst and the water would come roaring down. And even though it was two or three miles out of the town, you could hear the water roaring before it ever got there. What community activities did the—how large was the community at that time? Can you recall? I would say between three and four hundred people most of the time. Many of ‘em were related. A lot of the people were related. And because so many of ‘em were Mormon people, they actually—everything was centered around church activities. The women did their Relief Society work and had their quilting bees and all of their handicrafts, and met together. And young kids went to Primary, did their thing together, and they were sort of put into groups and, of course, all of this was overseen actually by the church. Mm-hmm. Where did they do their relief work? The Relief Society work was done right in the schoolhouse. There was a room in there that they would go to to do their (unintelligible) if it wasn’t held in a home. Mm-hmm. And where would they send their quilts and that sort of thing? Actually, they held bazaars and once a year they held a big bazaar and sold them right in this bazaar. It was a fun thing. They had cooked dinner, and they sold baked goods, and quilts, and beautiful hand work, and anything that anybody could do, they would put in this and use the money to do something to help keep down the expenses of their church (unintelligible) Mm-hmm. Do you recall much contact with the Indians that lived in the area? UNLV University Libraries Relda Whitney Leavitt 11 I can remember when I was a small child and they excavated the Indian village across the (unintelligible) and great pageants for about four years were held in these excavations. And some of the most magnificent productions with covered wagons and Indians and pioneers were presented there that I guess have ever been seen depicting Indian life. My father, long before I was born, was sent to find four braves who had attacked someone in Saint Thomas and one of the men had been killed. And, of course, in that day they believed in eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, and they knew that they would be back to take someone’s life in this community. And they sent my dad out to arbitrate with these Indians and try to convince ‘em that this was an accident and that taking another life wouldn’t really be justified. And he was able to do this, not knowing when he went, whether he would be the one who would be sacrificed or what would happen to him. But he had a very good way with the Indians and communicated with them very well. And because of his going out and finding ‘em, they pardoned his friends. That’s fantastic. What kind of a role did your father play in the community at that time? My father has been a—was a—drove an eight span of horses all through this country hauling ore from all of the mines out in Good Springs, down in Flourite, Arizona, and he made his living for many years before he moved to Las Vegas as a freighter. But it was all done with horse and wagon. And my grandfather, when he passed away with actually the last of the Pony Express riders in this part of the country. He was the last, the oldest one that we had any knowledge of. So he was a Pony Express rider. (Laughs) Back in the early 40s, the Flamingo Hotel had a contest to find the couple who had been married the longest in the state of Nevada, and my grandparents had been married for sixty-six years. And they hosted them at a fine banquet and UNLV University Libraries Relda Whitney Leavitt 12 gave them three days at the Flamingo Hotel. I remember Gabby Hayes was the toastmaster. It was really quite a thing for them. I can imagine. I can imagine. When you moved to Las Vegas from Saint Thomas, you moved to a farm? We moved to a ranch in Paradise Valley. My father has always been a farmer more or less. And we stayed on this farm for several years. Later on, the church bought the farm for the first LDS church farm in this county. But we raised wonderful gardens out there. We had fruit trees, we had huge watermelon busts as we called them—for people from town would come out. That was still the day of the Model T and even though I was just seven or eight years old, I remember the Model T so well. And people would take hours coming out on a dirt road, the eight miles to the farm, just to swim in the reservoir and eat watermelons and just visit. People had time to visit and enjoy each other at that time. There was nothing to distract you. That was all you had to do. Can you recall anything of—was there any kind of a community in Boulder City at that time or? Oh no. Boulder City wasn’t started— Henderson? No. There was nothing between Las Vegas and Boulder City up until the time the Boulder Highway was built. And of course that was built so that they could start work at Boulder Dam. And this was done in the very center of the Depression. And we drove eight miles from Las Vegas to Whitney, and I can never remember my father passing up any man that was hitchhiking along the way, because those men were literally starving to death. And he would take them to the UNLV University Libraries Relda Whitney Leavitt 13 ranch in Whitney—they were only out eight miles, but he always provided a good meal for ‘em. And if they wanted to stay all night, we had a shed out in back, and you fixed the bedroom. We really tried to take care of a lot of those people. Never lost a thing by having something stolen or anything. You know, we weren’t robbed in any way. It was during a time when people were humbly grateful for a good meal. Mm-hmm. These men you say, were they people going back and forth to—? Looking for work. Just looking for work? They came here on freight trains, they hitchhiked, they came any way they could. Because literally, Las Vegas never knew there was a Depression. I can remember that we, we’d go to school in the morning, but before we went to school, we had a milk route, and even though I was in high school, we still delivered the milk to all the houses in Las Vegas. And I can remember there was very few days that we didn’t have a dime. Now a dime doesn’t sound like very much right now, but you could buy almost anything for a dime. I can remember that a hamburger was five cents. You could have a hamburger and a huge root beer for ten cents. You could buy a pair of ankle socks for a dime. You could buy a pair of tennis shoes for forty-nine cents. Yardage was selling for about a dime. So unless you’ve been through this, you don’t relate to how little people actually had. Mm-hmm. A nickel bought a big loaf of bread. UNLV University Libraries Relda Whitney Leavitt 14 Well you should remember then, the actual development of the—how large was Las Vegas township itself at that time, or the city of Las Vegas? Las Vegas was probably thirty to forty-two hundred people. There was no paved streets in Las Vegas. No sidewalks. Homes were all along Fremont Street up to Second Street, instead of being industrial, that was right in the middle of the home section of town. And of course, through the years, we’ve watched all of our friends homes being moved away, and buildings put in, and all of the development that’s taken place. Uh-huh. What was the major economy around Las Vegas prior to this beginning of the dam? Before the dam, actually the thing that kept Las Vegas here was the Union Pacific Railroad. This was a stopover between Los Angeles and Salt Lake. And they put the Union Pacific yards where they repaired the trains and did work on roads between here and Salt Lake, and here and LA. So it employed quite a few people and kept ‘em busy. But that was the main—that was the main thing that kept Las Vegas here was the railroad. So it was very similar to the old days of the old Spanish Trail, when all the Spanish caravans would stop here from Santa Fe to Los Angeles? Right. Uh-huh. That’s right. The thing that really started the influx into Las Vegas was the building of Boulder Dam (Hoover Dam). And it employed so many people. You said they constructed a road from Las Vegas to Boulder Dam (Hoover Dam) or the Boulder City area for construction, do you recall the building of that road? UNLV University Libraries Relda Whitney Leavitt 15 Oh, I remember all of that very well. They changed the route of the road a little bit from here out to Whitney, but with the building of the highway, our farm was divided completely in two. We had half of our fields on one side of the highway and half on the other. Of course we watered the fields by irrigation, and after the highway was put in, it was impossible to water on the lower side of the highway, so my dad subdivided and made just a town site out of it. Oh, I see. So that’s how the town site got started. Uh-huh. That’s how it got started. Then out a ways farther, they started Henderson. And then out a ways farther, after the war, they started Henderson. But I can remember when there were only tents out in Boulder City. It was just a very sleepy, little community to begin with. Mm-hmm. It’s always been a very beautiful city. Can you describe your farm at that time? What it was like, the buildings, what you grew, what you (unintelligible) Because we had a dairy farm, we had a barn that—we had a large barn on the farm because we had to milk the cows indoors. We had haystacks, several large haystacks on the property. And the kids in high school (unintelligible) came out to the Whitney Ranch and sleep on the haystack. And my mother was an artist at homemade ice cream and she always made lots of homemade ice cream. There was a large (unintelligible) where all the kids went in swimming. No swimming pool, just a (unintelligible). But we had a—back then was considered a very nice home. It only consisted of five rooms, but it was made of—constructed with lumber. And I can remember my UNLV University Libraries Relda Whitney Leavitt 16 father owned a car called The Star, one called the Mormon, and then I can remember we bought the first Ford station wagon that came to Las Vegas. Who was selling Ford’s in Las Vegas at that time? A.C. Grant. He passed away just a few years ago, and for many years was a regent at the University of Nevada. Were there already trees on the farm when you took it? Or did you have to plant a lot of it? No. Everything—you struggled for everything you raised out there because the soil was full of alkali. There was times when the water supply dried up completely. It was just free running water. And during the summer months, there wasn’t much rain. We had absolutely no water. My father put down two wells, but they weren’t big enough that you could even pump water of them to irrigate the field. Just for the household to have water? Yes. Uh-huh. Yes. Of course, we had no indoor plumbing. We had no electricity. We used the old kerosene lamp, the old wood stove. And for washing, we did the hard way, over a big huge boiling pot, and you’d poke the clothes to get them clean, and then scrubbed them on the board to make sure they were clean. How large was your family? There was eight of us in the family. My mother and father had three girls and three boys. The girls happened to be all older than the boys, so we did a lot of chores and a lot of work that girls ordinarily wouldn’t do. UNLV University Libraries Relda Whitney Leavitt 17 Mm-hmm. But in our day and time, when we were growing up, it really took a family, if you lived on a farm, to make a living and keep everything going. I can imagine. Because a farm needs one thing, a lot of work. It certainly does. Did you have specific assigned chores or did you just all chip in and do things together? Because my father was in the dairy business, we did have assigned chores. And our day started before four o’clock in the morning and went until six or seven o’clock at night. And it didn’t matter whether we—the days we went to school of course, we came home from school. We didn’t participate in a lot of things part of the time, just because the cows had to be milked, the milk had to be bottled. The bottles had to be washed and sterilized, and there was just always too many chores to do. Mm-hmm. You said there was free running water on the property. Where did the water come from? It was water that seeped and run down the crick right below where the school out here on the hill, I can’t think of the name of it. Vo-Tech? Vo-Tech is located. Mm-hmm. UNLV University Libraries Relda Whitney Leavitt 18 There’s a crick that runs just below that and water seemed to just seep out of the earth and run down that crick. And that’s where we got most of our water supply. Do you recall the artisan wells that were in Paradise Valley at that time? Yes. My father built two wells himself. Mm-hmm. One he pumped, but we didn’t really get too much water out of them. But water has always been a problem in this country. Do you recall whether or not Vegas Wash was running all the time? I realize that the springs—Las Vegas Springs—created a flow of stream capacity that flew down, or flowed down through the old Mormon Fort area. Did that flow on down into Vegas Wash? And was that far from your property or? No. That water doesn’t flow—didn’t flow into the Las Vegas Wash. Now what I call the Las Vegas Wash went right down past Whitney. Of course, that’s where the—where that is today, but actually, that just skirted our property out there. You mentioned going to the school. How far did you have to go to school? Well, it was eight miles from Whitney to Las Vegas. I remember when I was in kindergarten, that we stayed from Monday through Friday with my mother’s sister to go to school when we were tiny. But when there were so many of us, in a year or two, they had to start commuting back and forth to get us into the school and back again. I started school in Las Vegas, and we didn’t have kindergarten at that time. In the first grade and went through the entire school system UNLV University Libraries Relda Whitney Leavitt 19 as did all four of my children. I was a graduate of Las Vegas High School when the building on Eighth Street was completed. I was a freshman that year, and I was actually the first—in the first graduating class that went through Vegas High as we know it today. And then all four of our children also were graduates of Las Vegas High. Where was the first school that you went to? On Fifth Street. Fifth? Had a big school on Fifth Street that has been torn down now for the county building that’s there. Was that all grades in the one school at that time? There was one building that has the kindergarten and first grade, then there was the Fifth Street Grammar School, and just over to the side of that was the high school. And there are quite a few in Las Vegas right now who graduated from that building up on Fifth Street, graduated from high school at that time. I could name several that live in town today that have graduated from that school. There’s quite a few natives in town, but they’re just hard to find. (Laughs) What kind of subjects did you cover in school? In high school, we pretty well had—we had very good schools in high school. At least, I think they were very good. I took three years of Spanish, I took home economics, mainly I took tennis. I lived on the tennis court every chance I could get. If I wasn’t in class, they knew exactly where to go to find me. When Jack Kramer was going to Vegas High at the same time, and I used to play tennis with Jack Kramer all the time. That was my thing when I was in high school, was UNLV University Libraries Relda Whitney Leavitt 20 tennis. I loved it. I can remember when we were in high school, of course, the postmaster Bob Lyas graduated when I did. His wife Margaret Santon Lyas graduated the same time I did. And of course, he was a big football player. And our thing for a football halftime was to have Clara Bow, the it girl, who is the mother of one our attorneys here in town, come in for the halftime presentation. It was always a thrill to get to see her. And during that time while I was in high school, it wasn’t too unusual to go down Fremont, and in the lobbies of the hotels were right up on the street and all glass, and I can remember seeing in Clark Gable’s car, and Wallace Berry’s car, and seeing them sitting in the lobbies of the hotel. And so many of the movie stars came to Las Vegas, although there was very little here, they still came here to visit and going through, and we got to see quite a few movie stars. We thought that was great. How much do you recall of other farms or ranches in the area? Well I can remember in Paradise Valley, the McGriff Farm, and they specialized in fruit. In fact, they supplied the entire town with fresh fruit. And the—you can see out there today where the swimming pool was, and there’s a few stumps from all of the old fruit trees. But they had some of the most beautiful fruit trees I think I have ever seen. And they really produced tons and tons of peaches, and pears, and apricots, and—. What was the growing season then, in the spring or was it right through the summer? Right through the summer. The peaches probably—I know they matured in July and August, because if you bought fruit, you picked it yourself, and I can remember with no type of air conditioning, no way to cool yourself, we would go early in the morning to pick peaches and stay there in the orchards all day. And you’d get covered with peach fuzz all over you, and you’d UNLV University Libraries Relda Whitney Leavitt 21 sting and smart, and you still kept picking peaches. And then, maybe when you got through, you paid two cents a pound for all of the fruit that you’d picked that day. Mm-hmm. Then there was the Gilcrease Ranch, but it was on the opposite side of the valley. No cattle ranches anyplace that I can recall. But the McGriff ranch really raised the fruit. My dad always had a garden, and of course had dairy cows and supplied the milk. He had the Whitney Dairy. Other than that, there weren’t too many farms. The Shaw’s owned a farm. And then Bill Tomiyasu produced a lot of the garden stuff that was used in Las Vegas. He had a (unintelligible) farm and grew vegetables of every kind. I went to school with his son Nanyu and his son Kiyo. And Kiyo was one of the boys who was instrumental in producing the atomic bomb. One of the main scientists in that project. What was his name again? Kiyo Tomiyasu. And also, Bill—the two main scientists involved in the atomic bomb were both raised in Las Vegas. I can’t think of Bill’s name as well as I know. Kiyo was a scientist and had a lot to do with the invention of the bomb. How did you—you mentioned your father had all the milk for the area, how did he handle his milk route? Door to door delivery? Door to door—everything was door to door delivery. I can remember when we got seven cents a quart for milk. And— Did you have a truck or a horse drawn wagon? UNLV University Libraries Relda Whitney Leavitt 22 No. We always had a truck, station wagon, and delivered out of that. But all of this delivery had to be done before any of us went to school. So we got— And what time did school start? Eight o’clock. So the cows had to be milked, the milk had to be bottled, in the truck, breakfast over, come into town, and do the delivery before eight o’clock. You didn’t have a pasteurization process then, did you? We didn’t have a pasteurization, but as the milk bottles were washed and rinsed, they were placed in an enormous vat, probably eight feet long, and maybe five, four or five feet deep. And we would gather firewood, and this had to be heated to a certain temperature. And you couldn’t even stand to be around it, but you did have to sterilize every bottle. And your milk was tested regularly by the health department. And my father was always so proud. He had the lowest bacteria count of anybody in the county or the state. But we did sterilize—you did have to sterilize. And then, of course, as you bottled the milk, you just chilled it completely in ice water. And that was the day and time when you had no refrigeration of any kind. You hauled the ice. And the Union Pacific Rail way out to the range. You had a basement in the ranch house also? No. We didn’t have a basement. My dad did build a cellar, just burrowed out a cellar in a hill that was maybe 300 yards away from the house. And we could put anything down there and it’d remain cool all the time. And it was just dug right into the hill. It made a terrific place to store the fruit and the vegetables and things that you’d can during the summer for the winter months. Where was the bottling shed? Was it right next to the barn or (unintelligible)? UNLV University Libraries Relda Whitney Leavitt 23 No. It was between the barn and the house. Mm-hmm. And then we had a room where we had the big burner to sterilize the bottles. We had huge tubs there that we washed with soap and water in one and rinsed in another. And we had some solution that we had to put in the rinse water to make sure the bottles were sterilized. That was my job. (Laughs) We had no cream separator, and separated the cream every morning. My dad put up his own cream, and I know that his thing in life was every Thanksgiving and every Christmas to give every customer a half pint bottle of whipping cream. Now in order to get this whipping cream out of the bottle, because it was the old time days, you took a knife and ran it around the cream when it came out, just so thick you could dilute it probably three times and still whip it. It was that rich and delicious. Oh my gosh. You mentioned you had to have wood for the fire, and also you had a wood burning stove. It must have been a problem to gather wood in those days. You spent part of the summer doing nothing but going out and cording wood and hauling it in on the wagon, and you know, having a good wood supply. That was one of the things you had to get done in your summer, was bring them a good supply of wood to last you. And did you collect it from here in valley or did you go to Mount Charleston? Oh yes. It was—no. No. Never thought of going—at one time all of this desert was just full of mesquite wood. There’s no better burning wood than mesquite wood. But, of course, a lot of these natural things have all been used up with over the years, but we had no problem getting wood at all. UNLV University Libraries Relda Whitney Leavitt 24 Did you have a separate wood storage shed? We—not a shed, no. We just stored it in the open. We stored it in the open. My dad raised a lot of pigs out in the Whitney, besides his cattle. Did you have your own chickens also? We had our own chickens, had our own eggs, had rabbits. We had just about anything that would help to bring food to the family. We had—we just did everything you could. Produced all the food we could. Pretty much self-sufficient? Yes. Uh-huh. I remember one thing that would be interesting to people where there was no refrigeration, no way of cooling. We used to, ea