Lillian Morrison interview, 1996: transcript

An O r a l H i s t o r y Interview with L i l l i a n M o r r i s o n 1996 F b ;o / H 7 H < U <$: -34? 7 76? Lillian Morrison, 1995 1 photo courtesy of Lillian Morrison | Photo g f a |> h s following batfo, 1. Lillian Morrison, 1995 frontispiece 2. Lillian Morrison [3 portraits, ca. 1909-1926] 1 3. Baldwin Family portrait, 1934 2 4. Baldwin Family farm [3 views, ca. 1910s and 1934] 8 5. Lloyd and Lillian Morrison's 25th wedding anniversary [1953] 13 6. Babcock & Wilcox Company plant near Hoover Dam [ca. 1933-34] 25 7. Boulder Canyon Project Federal Reservation gate, 1932 27 8. Boulder City [aerial view, 1934] 27 9. Don Morrison [two portraits, 1935 and ca. 1947 28 10. Avenue M, Boulder City, 1932-33 [3 views] 38 11. Lloyd Morrison and Paul Webb's basketball team, 1942 40 12. Grace Community Church, 1945 43 13. Parson Tom Stevenson and his Sunday School class, 1932 43 14. Manix & Vaughn's Department Store, 1932 60 15. Ida Browder, 1960 62 16. Franklin Roosevelt at Hoover Dam, September 30,1935 [2 views] 67 17. Tourist convoy at Hoover Dam, 1941 70 18. Employee badge checking station at Hoover Dam, 1942 71 19. Porter Womack homes in Boulder City, 1942 and ca. 1945 76 20. Lillian Morrison at work at Hoover Dam, ca. 1950s 79 21. Lillian Morrison, ca. 1947-48 81 22. Bureau of Reclamation's city staff, 1956 86 23. Lillian Morrison at work for the National Park Service, ca. 1965 and 1968 91 24. Boulder City staff of the National Park Service, 1965 94 25. Lloyd and Lillian Morrison, ca. 1991 97 * * * * ii A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s I d like to thank Mrs. Morrison for generously spending her time with me so that I could conduct this oral history interview—with her help, our knowledge of local history is greatly enriched. The staffs of the Boulder City Library, the Special Collections Department of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas library, and the Nevada State Museum and Historical Society at Lorenzi Park in Las Vegas were helpful in compiling the annotations. Leslie Peterson of the National Park Service in Boulder City gave me use of her transcribing equipment, while the excellent photo reproductions were made by Chris Dittman at Desert Data in Boulder City. And I would particularly like to thank Teddy Fenton for providing funds with which to complete this oral history transcript. * * * * iii B o u l d e r C i t y L i b r a r y O r a l H i s t o r y P r o j e c t I n t e r v i e w w i t h L i l l i a n M o r r i s o n conducted by Dennis McBride February E and 10, a n d July 29, 1996 This is Dennis McBride and I'm with Lillian Morrison in her home at 616 Avenue I, Boulder City. Today is Monday, February 5 [1996], and I'm starting an oral history interview with a lady I find very interesting. And I think she's got a lot of very interesting and important things to tell me about Boidder City history and Hoover Dam. But first I ivant to know about your background—if you can tell me when you zvere born and where you were born. I was born on an Iowa farm in Tama County, November 9, 1908. And I lived on a farm all of my life except two years before I came out here. And, of course, I've been in Boulder City ever since 1935, really. February 1935. Did you have a very large family: brothers and sisters? I had three brothers and no sisters. And I have lost all of my brothers. Even my youngest brother. L i l l i a n Maude Baldwin [ M o r r i s o n ] Top: a babe-in-arms, ca. 1909-10 Left: 11 years old in 1919 Right: 1926 [photos courtesy of Lillian Morrison | What were their names ? My oldest brother was Charles, and he was just 15 months older than I. My next brother was 3-1/2 years younger, and his name was Donovan, which I named my son. And we have never called him that. We call him Don. And my youngest brother was Dick. It s not a nickname. My grandmother's name was Mary Emily Dick, and my dad named [my youngest brother] Dick, for his mother. What were your mother's and father's names? My dad's name Ernest Baldwin, and my mother's name was Edna Rebbeke.l That's an interesting name. She came out there into the rural area from Toledo, Iowa. She came out to teach school in the district where my grandfather was the director of schools. After he'd interviewed Mother, he said at the dinner table that night—of course, Mother wasn't there—he said, "I interviewed a young lady today and some fella should take pity on her and change her name." And my dad did! [laughs] We lived on the farm eight miles from Grundy Center, Iowa where, eventually, I went to high school. There I met ... . It's a small town. It was only 1800 [people]. We knew everyone and that was the place we'd always gone to church, so it wasn't a case of me meeting Lloyd later. It was a case of just always knowing the family. I didn't necessarily know Lloyd, but I knew the family and I was the chum of his youngest sister, Genevieve. I'd been attending a country school all except three years of my elementary school education. When you say a country school, how is that different from a city school? Oh! It was a one-room school, all eight grades were in that. And sometimes there were 16 children in school. There were never less than that during the years I went. And sometimes there were [students numbering] in the 20s, depending on as the families moved in and out of the area. standing, 1-n Donovan [1912-1985]; Charles [1906-1992]; Lillian [b. 1908] seated, 1-r: father, Ernest [1883-1959]; Dick [1921-1993]; mother, Edna [1884-1976] [photo courtesy of Lillian Morrison] Baldwih Family 1924- Was there just one teacher for all those students? Just one teacher. And she was the janitor. She had to get there early in the winter time. Of course, everything is consolidated back there now. No more country schools. But country schools are not as bad as they sound. You hear the same thing taught for eight years and it's got to get in your head. So she didn t teach different courses, different subjects for each grade? No. She taught them for each grade, but you're sitting there hearing that. Eight years you hear that. Well, I didn't hear eight years because there was a short time we lived in town and I went to a town school there. But my dad lived on the farm where he was born and he died on the farm where he was born. What kind of farm was it? What did he raise? Everything. You see, we had, maybe five milk cows and we sold the milk that we didn't use. And Dad raised ... they called them bacon hogs. They're Hampshire hogs. [He raised them] for Rath Packing Company in Waterloo, Iowa. They contracted with Dad for his hogs. And then we put up our own hay, and we used a binder. We didn't even combine back in those days. What's the difference between a binder and a combine? Well, a binder .... The machine cut and tied [the grain] in shocks. And it would just dump the bundles off as they went around and around the field. And then you'd have men shocking, because they [the shocks] had to be weather proof. They had to shed rain. And then the threshing crew would come around and thresh out the grain, and you'd haul the grain to a bin or a crib, whichever, and the straw would just go out in a pile and you'd use that for bedding for the animals. Now, they go out there [to the fields] and they cut it and thresh it and haul just the grain into town. They leave the straw? No, they bale it. They go out with another machine and bale it. But now the combine does all of that. We had a binder. When Lloyd and I left there in '34, we were still using horses and binders. Cutting the grain and shocking it and then threshing it. Well, now, of course, every farmer, if he doesn't have a combine himself, has a neighbor that has one who'd like to do the work to pay for his machine! Do you know what a hayrack is? The farmers had what they called threshing crews, and that would be six farmers or more [who] would go together and they would buy a threshing machine, a small one. And then when everybody was through and had [all the grain] shocked, all the neighbors in the crew would come over to your house and they'd have their hayracks and a man called a pitcher. He would throw [the grain] up to a man [who] would load this hay rack. There's a knack to loading a hay rack. If they didn't load it evenly, the darned thing would tip over because, you see, the hayrack was much wider than the runners of the wheels. The hay rack was much wider. The men would pitch the bundles of grain into the machine, and there would be a guy there with a grain wagon catching the grain, and the straw would go out someplace else. Then it was a great cooperative effort among all the farmers? Oh, yes, it was. Even the women had to cooperate because no woman could get a meal for that many men. The farmer usually got along with one hired man and occasionally the women had help in the house, like when their children were little. She was called the hired girl. So there would be one girl to help Mother, [because] maybe you were getting a meal for 20 men, you see. Did your mother have a hired girl? Yes. My mother almost always had a hired girl. [Mother] wasn't very well—we kids wore her out, I guess. Besides that, Mother was a town girl. Why Dad married a town girl, you wonder, and took her out there in the country when she didn't know anything about it. It wasn't easy for a girl who was raised in the city. Well, it wasn't a city, [it was] a small town. She wasn't used to taking care of the chickens and doing a garden and raising her kids [all] at the same time. So the women would come in, like, two of the neighbor ladies would come in the day the threshers were at our house because they had to serve [a morning] lunch and a noon meal, and an afternoon lunch and an evening meal. The [men got] that because they came in from four or five miles around. But they changed that. The last I remember they discontinued the morning lunch and they had dinner, and an afternoon lunch, and then the men went home as they finished. Like the first man in with the hayrack full of grain to thresh would be through an hour and a half before the last fellow, so he might as well go home. So it wasn't quite so hard for the women. What kind of food did they serve? And did they serve it in the house or did they have a place outside? They served it in the house. They put benches outside with buckets of water so men could clean up a little bit before they would come in. They always wanted Mother to serve Swiss steak. They had favorites. Like, some women did well with one dish, [some women with another]. I remember the mend say, "If we go to Baldwins, we're gonna have Swiss steak." She'd bake her pies—very seldom [did she bake them] the day before. Almost always she got up at four o'clock and prepared the food. Pie would be your dessert. Coleslaw was a big thing during that season of the year because everybody had fresh cabbage. I remember everyone always served coleslaw. And potatoes and gravy. Did she have a wood stove or an electric stove? She had wood. Occasionally we had coal, but almost always we had wood. In the summertime it was miserable because it made the house so awful hot. A lot of the farms—my grandfather's farm, the one we lived on after the grandparents died—had what they called a summer kitchen. And it had a big range, we called em, wood range. And Mother prepared the meals out there, so the house didn't get hot. But the meal was served in the house. The summer kitchen was a separate building? Yes, a separate building. When they were doing all the harvesting, the threshing and binding, were you involved in that? Did you ever get out there to help them? The boys did. I was kept busy in the house. That was one of the times Mother got me instead of Dad. [laughs] But the boys did. For instance, they would be pitchers out in the field because there was always a little bit of risk for them and the boys started in quite young doing that. You had to throw [the bundles of grain] quite high. They loaded those hay racks quite high. So the boys did that. 1 had to help in haying. Putting up hay was a miserable job. How do you put up hay? What does that mean? Well, every farm had a big barn, and the top of the barn was the hayloft. Usually there was a driveway through the center of the barn [motions on the tabletop]. They would pull the wagon, full of hay-and that was another job: bucking the hay loader out in the field. It was a machine that raked it up off of the [ground], and it went up like a conveyor and dropped on the hayrack. And the guy whose wagon it was would put that [hay] around the shape of the wagon [motions laying hay] till it got as high as he wanted. Then they took it into the barn, pulled in to the driveway. And my dad used a harpoon. Some hayforks had two tines. Dad used a single harpoon. [He'd push it down into the hay], then when he pulled the little latch the [fork] would catch the hay. And then it was a pulley system. When Dad would give the signal, we would pull [the line], and the hay would go up, hit the track up above, and it would go to whichever side of the barn Dad was loading. When it got to the [hayloft], the fella up above had it dumped at the most convenient place. He'd yell, and Dad would jerk the rope and those little gadgets [on the harpoon] would come up and the load would fall. Was it like a gantry crane that would move through the barn? Oh, yes. It was on a track. That's right. And since the driveway was in the middle it had to be so that Dad could direct it wherever he wanted it to go. Now, 1 had to drive on the hay fork. I didn't like that at all because I always had the worst [horse] team, [laughs] The worst team was given to the person because that's all those horses had to do, was to pull that one hay fork load up. When you say the worst team, what do you mean hy worst? Oh, I mean the old spavined2 horses that really should be retired. Dad figured they d earned a rest. He had stock in the pastures that were too old, just because he was chicken-hearted. He didn't make glue out of them or anything, [laughs] And then if the boys were in the field, Dad would come in and say to Mother, 1 d like to use Lillian for awhile." And Mother'd say, "All right." One of the days Dad came in and said, "We're going to mark and ring the pigs." Now, instead of a farmer separating his herd into the breeding stock and the ones they were gonna market, they would let them all run together. Not only that, Dad was very particular, since he was raising pigs for Rath Packing Company, to get good stock. So instead of trying to divide 'em out into pastures, he had a system of marking the sows so he could run 'em all together. So he came in and got me and took me out into the barn. We ran them into the stall, a box stall where we could shut the gate. The smaller area made it easier to catch the pigs And we would get them in there. And Dad had an iron ring for the nose of the pig. You d get it into the pig's mouth—he'd stand perfectly still because it hurt him to move. Then dad would put the ring in the pig's nose. That's to keep him from digging out [of the pen]. They're great diggers, pigs are. It didn't hurt them. And then he gave me a shingle about so wide [measures about six inches] and a strange knife that had a blade about that long [measures about two inches] and was sharp every which way. That was for me to use for the marking so he could tell which sows he was keeping. And I was to put the shingle under the pig's ear and stick that knife through it just that far in, just 3/4 of an inch in and give it a little jerk. There's no nerve or blood or anything in a pig's ears if you stick the knife in the right place. So it didn't hurt the pig? Well, I hurt it before the day was over! Oh, the barn was just bloody around there and I knew I was doing something wrong. I don't know how many we did that to. Maybe 25. And at the dinner table that night—supper, it was supper on the farm—Dad said, "Well, we've got some sows out there with three ears." So then he told that I was getting wobbly—you know, that was bothering me! I don't know how old I was, maybe 12. And he said, "Lillian was getting so she'd put the shingle there and she'd stab and sometimes she'd cut the ear almost [off]." [laughs] Surely that hurt them. I'd cut across the one vein. And of course, I had blood all over everything! I wore coveralls when I helped my dad, and Mother said, "Well, why didn't you send her to the house?" And Dad said, I had to get the job done. " [laughs] I was supposed to just nick the ear. Because, you see, as it would heal it would spread just a little bit. And if it had been done properly the nick wouldn't have been any bigger than that [measures a half inch]. Well, some of 'em had three ears by the time I got through. Even after I came out here, if I went home in the summer, I drove the tractor that the binder was hitched to—Dad had a tractor by then. But I was raised on the farm. It wasn't as if you took some girl out of Boulder City and took her there to do the work. Was your father's farm prosperous? We had ivonderful land. His subsoil, you know. Some places in the low lands he had 18 inches. He had like 12 to 14 inches of black Iowa soil. It would do, like, 200 bushels of corn to the acre. You see, my grandfather had a lot of land because he homesteaded. There was no high school [then], so Grandfather sent Dad to Ames, Iowa [where there] was an agricultural school. In six years you got high school and college. Well, after Dad had been there like two years, he was 18 years old, he went home and he was my grandfather's manager for all these farms. At age 19 he took that on. Do you remember how many farms or how many acres [your grandfather] owned? No, I don't remember. There were five farms and some unimproved land. An unimproved 80 is what Lloyd has there now. Lloyd's estate, Lloyd's father's estate, when it was divided up, Lloyd and his sister were assigned one 160.3 Genevieve wanted the house because her husband was a farmer, so she took the land with the house on it. And Lloyd has what we call [an] unimproved 80. And then you don't have any buildings to keep up, any fences to put up, anything. So that's what's back there now. So Grandfather had, maybe 1200 acres. I'm not sure. Baldwin Farm, Iowa Top: barn and silo, ca. 1934 [on the bike: cousin Art Jensen and baby Don Morrison] Center: Hampshire hogs Ernest Baldwin raised for the Rath Packing Company, ca. I910s-20s Bottom: hayrack, 1910s [photos courtesy of Lillian Morrison | As time went on, I'm thinking about into the 20s and getting into the late 20s when the Dust Bowl started forming in the Midwest-was your family's farm affected by tint at The only effect we had was these huge dust clouds would come up from the Kansas area. And they would settle. And after that we had weeds that we had never seen in the state of Iowa before. Maybe not just weeds, but all types of that kind of thing. But we didn't have dust storms in Iowa. They didn't originate in Iowa—we just got the fallout. Now, we had sand storms [in Boulder City], but they were nothing like the choking dust storms that the people had back there in the Middle West. Some time during our very early years out here [in Boulder City], during '35 or '36, a lady who did not drive needed a driver. She wanted to go home [to] Kansas City. Someone said, "Lillian Morrison goes back there to visit her folks." And so [this lady] contacted me and we made arrangements that I would drive her car for her, take [my son] Don, and go back to Kansas City. She would pay my train fair from Kansas City up to Marshalltown, Iowa where my folks would pick me up. We were traveling through Kansas. It was in the afternoon between two and three o'clock, because I remember it was much too early to stop driving if we were trying to make any miles that day. But the air got so bad and it got so dark that we [had] to stop at a motel. They weren't very nice motels back in that day as I remember it, but they were adequate. We were going to spend the night there and then hope that it was going to be clear in the morning so that we could go on. Don was just four or five or six years old, right in that age, and he went to sleep quite readily. But I was worried about the dust. We were gritty. Our teeth were gritty. [The dust] just sifted in every place that it could. It just covered everything. I was worried [about Don] inhaling this. So I took a damp cloth and lay it over his face. To show you how dead tired he was, it didn't disturb him in the least. He slept right through it. I would keep checking to be sure [the cloth] was still in place or dampening it again. Where his nostrils were, it got black with the dirt and the dust. I can remember nothing about when I went to bed what I did, except that I breathed through a wet cloth while I was awake. In the morning, it was clear and we were able to go on. Your farm went on producing rather well all through the Depression? Lloyd and I went broke. We got married in '28 and we went to farming. We had to borrow from the bank, and you just signed a note. Then when the banks went broke they just told the young farmers like Lloyd, "Pay your note." Of course, you had to have a crop. We didn't, so we went broke. It took us 10 years to get out of debt after we came out here, and we only owed $3000. Can you imagine? See, we started up just at the wrong time. '29 is when we started. And by '31 and 32 the banks were going broke and closing. They actually closed. One interesting thing about that. My dad had money in a bank there, I don't know if it was savings or not. And Lloyd owed that bank. That was where we had borrowed our money. So my dad went to that bank and said, "I would like you to take my money that's in the bank and put it against Morrison's loan." They said, "We can't do that." Well, he didn't know why they couldn't, but they didn't do it. We owed them $3000, its true. But my dad got 10<t on the dollar out of that bank with the money he had. Dad didn t lose any land during the Depression, but he turned off the electricity and we went right back to living rather primitively. The farm went on producing excellent crops they just didn't bring anything on the market. Let me back up just a little bit. Tell me how it was that you first started getting romantically involved with Lloyd. Do you remember dating and dancing? He wouldn't dance. I was on the high school basketball team and Lloyd was very interested in athletics. After he graduated from high school he went into the farming business with his dad. See, we all went to the same high school: my brothers and Lloyd's brothers and sisters all went to the same high school, but Lloyd was out [of school] before I ever got to high school. He was farming with his dad, so when all the girls his age, you know, went off to school or went teaching or got jobs someplace, he started chasing the high school [girls] around, and I was one of them! I think I was about 15-1/2 or 16 when Lloyd started paying attention to me. He played on an organized ball team back there then, and that's about all we did, go to sports activities. I went to teacher's college and Lloyd gave me a diamond ring and when I came home, my dad said, "Does that ring mean business?" I said, "Yes." He said, "Then you're through [with] school. I've got three boys to educate." And back in those days it was the man that made the living. It wasn't like it is now. Now you wouldn't think of stopping a girl. But Dad had three sons. We definitely knew Charles was going to farm because that's what he wanted to do. But the other two boys didn't want to and Dad had them to educate. So I finished the term and went home. I had foolishly promised Mother that I wouldn't run off and get married or anything like that. Did you lesent your father saying you were done with school? No, that was the way it was back then. So it didn't even occur to you to question? No. Huh-uh. No. We didn't get married for about eight months after that because I had promised Mother that I would stay home awhile before I was married. I was an only girl and my mother was kind of a baby about me, and so I was going to fulfill that promise that I'd made to my mother. Dad didn't get any education because he'd made this deal with Grandfather. But every one of Dad's sisters—and he had six—received a college education. That was rather unusual for those days. Two of them got married and used very little of [their education]. But two of them never married, and I can't remember what happened to them. And Dad was the only son, and, of course, Grandfather wanted him there as his manager. So, no there wasn't a bit of resentment [in my case] because I wasn't going to use an education. You see, Lloyd was seven years older than I and he was ready to get married and settle down. And I think [my] folks resented that, too, that I was going with a fellow that much older than I. For a high school kid to go with somebody in their 20s is too much difference and maybe they saw the handwriting on the wall more than I did, you see. So that's the way it was. You never thought twice about marrying Lloyd before you married him? I thmk I thought twice a couple of times. [laughs] I was just a starry-eyed kid. I fell in love with him long before he did with me. He was engaged to another girl when he started going with me. I shed many a tear [over that]. I just fell in love. And I knew he was a farmer and I was a farm kid. I was raised on a farm. It's true that at least 70% of the kids in the high school were farm kids. Maybe a bigger percentage than that. So most of my girlfriends were farmer's daughters. But with a town of only 1800, you see, and farms of 160 acres, you had an awful lot of farms around there. And every foot of the land in Iowa around there was farmed. Were there rivers nearby? Well, the Iowa River wasn't very far away. And the Des Moines River, of course, was 70 miles away. See, we don't have any irrigation in Iowa. It's all rainfall. So, of course, our farm had what we called a creek through it, and when the water was high, it was a good place to go wading and we used to even try to swim in the thing. Did you keep a reservoir or did you strictly depend on the rainfall? No. We depended on the rainfall. That's what I find interesting about that period, then, of the Dust Bowl. That you continued Imving decent rainfall. We never had, in the part of Iowa I lived in as far as I know, they never had what you call a complete failure. Sometimes we would only get 3/4 of a crop if we were hailed out. They used to worry about the rainfall, come to think about it. But we used to have tornadoes and cyclones, thunderstorms. Iowa really is a terrible climate. It's wonderful for the crops: corn wants all of that stuff. But people don't. Did your mother at all prepare you for marriage as far as sex, as far as what a marriage was, what was expected of a wife by a husband? You see, this was back in the 20s. I graduated from high school in 1926, so it would have been in those years '25 to '28 or so. And we just didn't talk about those things. Did you have an inkling? Sure! I tell ya, you can't live on a farm [without] knowing all about reproduction m ammals. And you grew up being aware of that. I can't even explain why that didn't affect a person more. But it didn't. You just automatically .... Im sure that we didn't know the mechanics of the thing, of reproduction in humans, I m sure we didn't. Lloyd had been in love with this girl and he told me that he would be sure that I wouldn't have any more children than I wanted. He told me all of these things before [we married]. I just trusted him. I wondered afterward why in the dickins I did. [laughs] There are not a lot of children in our family. Lloyd's twin brother only has two. One of my brothers has one and the other one has two. And the third [brother] has two. So there aren't a lot of children in the family. I can't even remember of not knowing [about sex]. So you weren't surprised after you were married? No. Well, that's not quite right. Marriage has got to be a little bit of a shock. But 1 wasn't frightened or unhappy or embarrassed. I wasn't anything. In the first place, I was in love. [Mother and I] talked about it afterwards, after [I] was grown. And Mother said, "Well, Lillian, you said ... . " And then she told me something I'd said about sex life. And I said, "Well, I lied." If my mother ever came close to asking me a question, I would give her an answer. But it wasn't always the truth. And after I was older I could tell her why. I wasn't ready to answer that question to her. I can't even remember what it was now, but I remember how shocked she was the first time I said to her, "Well, I lied" What was your wedding date? August 29 in 1928. It was between haying and harvest, you know, corn-picking, not the harvest of the small grain. And [Lloyd's] father said .... We were going to get married after the season, like in the wintertime. And he said, "If you Lloyd and Lillian Morrison celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary at the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas on August 29, 1953. Seated across from them are son Don and his school chum, Ed Moromoto. [photo courtesy of Lillian Morrison] kids want to get married, you can have some time off now." And so Lloyd came down to the farm and told me, so I went in the house and I told Mother, "Lloyd and I are going to get married in three weeks." [laughs] Well, that kind of threw her. You cant get invitations out or anything [in three weeks]. It ended that I had to write hand-written invitations to the few people that we were going to invite to the house. I was married on the farm at home. And then Lloyd and I took six weeks and went on a honeymoon and went to the Black Hills and Salt Lake and Reno and San Francisco and Los Angeles. That s quite a long honeymoon. Yes. Six weeks we were gone. And I got homesick and cried. He thought that was an awful let-down for him! [laughs] That I would cry on my honeymoon. And then farmers always move. I don't know what they do now. But moving day was March 1. If a farmer was going to change from this farm to that farm he moved and the other fellow moved and the guy ahead of you moved. Everybody moved on March 1. They switched farms? Like if a farmer retired or died or something, that farm would be for rent. So maybe there was no one moving off except the family that lived in the house, but there would be this moving. And so Lloyd and I were going to have a place to live in March. We got home in October or something like that. We just lived at my folks until March 1, and then we went onto one of my dad's farms. What kind of house was it you lived in when you and Lloyd moved onto the farm? I've never lived in a house that wasn't modern. Even when I lived in Iowa. Now Charles, my oldest brother, was born in a little shack while Dad was building a house for his new family. The new house had about nine rooms. One of these square farm houses that you've seen? That's what it was. Four bedrooms upstairs and one bedroom downstairs. And then usually you had the corner of the house built over the cistern, or the cistern was underneath a corner of the house because you had a pump out there that pumped soft water. But you bucketed, you carried, the hard water in that you were going to drink. But you used soft water, and any pipes that went to the bathroom were usually rain water. We called it rain water. How did you make the water soft? Oh, it was rain water. It was rain water. The cisterns-every house had eaves and spouts, rain gutters, they were about this big around, 3-1/2 inches. And [the water] would run down and run into the system that ran into the cistern. And if you had ram like they did in Iowa, you never ran out of water. I can't ever remember. I remember of us having to slack off and be careful because the cistern was getting low and we'd watch the clouds to see if it was going to rain. But that's what it was, rain water. Lovely, soft rain water. So the water that came out of the ground was the hard water? Yes. And what did you use the hard water for? Drinking. Cooking. We watered the garden with it. Washin