1: Interview with Bill and JoAnne Fitzgerald

Narratives of Our Lives

Family Stories from the rural community north of Liberal, Kansas from the early 20th century to 2020
Interviews and writings compiled by Donita Priefert Payne

Date: April 2008

Place: The Fitzgerald home on the farm north of Liberal, Kansas

Interviewer: Donita Priefert Payne

Part 1

Part 2

BF: I am John William Fitzgerald. Everybody calls me Bill. I was born May 23, 1925. I live on the north half of section 8-34-33 Seward County, Kansas.

DP: If you would first talk about what you remember about the Dust Bowl years.

BF: Well, I remember the Dust Bowl days very well. Black Sunday, April 14^th or 15^th of 1935, I remember it especially well. Day after day we’d have the wind and the dust. We had a dog, ol’ Shep. He would go hide. My brother and I’d look this place over and we never did find the hiding place. But when the wind went down, dust settled, ol’ Shep would be back outside. We had a wind charger tower that was over 50 feet tall and the thistles would blow into that thing clear to the top. And I remember my brother would get on the horse early of a morning and go bring in the milk cow or two that we had, and it would just be blowin’ and windy as the dickens. He lives in Wichita now, and he is a retired MD. His name is Joe, E. J., Joe. He is 3% years older than I am.

We went to school at Liberty in the old original building and I don’t know what year it was built but it was 1/4 of a mile north of our house. We hauled the water up there in five-gallon cream cans and a red wagon and we were paid $16 a year, eight months in the school year. One of us would push and the other one pull. Everybody drank out of the same tin can. [Laughing] Never were sick. One of the biggest things to do at recess, if we had a little snow, we’d play fox and geese, or Annie Over the Schoolhouse where you threw a ball back and forth and a lot of the times the boys just wrestled. [Laughing] Occasionally, a stray dog would come along. One time there was somebody let out a mother dog and some pups. Well, everybody brought their lunch and we kept that dog fed well from our lunch pails. I remember Edwin Mortimer and Jean and Evelyn Mortimer, Verna – well they had a half-sister and she is still alive here in Liberal, but I can’t think of her maiden name. She is Verna Hoffman now. And there was Lloyd and Bob Fisk, Wilma Gentzler, Alfred, Ann Marie and Bill Henry. Wilma had a sister but I don’t remember her name. The first day of school when Mrs. Fisk brought Lloyd and Bob to school, they didn’t want to stay. They just, well they wouldn’t stay so Bill Henry had an old cart and a horse, so they put Bob and Lloyd in that cart and whipped the horse up. Their mother drove off. Well, they just jumped out of that cart and went after their mother. They didn’t stay that day in school. But Slim, their dad, he gave them an attitude adjustment that night and they come back to school the next day and stayed. We had a lot of fun. ‘Course they built a new schoolhouse in 1935 and it wasn’t quite finished at the start of school in fall of 1935. We went to school the first month over there a mile east in a vacant house on Sewell Hill. Then later that fall my father passed away, September 19th, 1935 and I moved to town. I didn’t go to school out there anymore. Leon Graham was another member of the school. Vera Turpin, that was her name, she was half-sister to the Mortimer girls.

DP: How many children are in that picture? [Looking at picture of the school] 12 kids would have been in school that year.

BF: We got an earlier picture. When Joe was in the first grade there was quite a lot more students.

JF: Show her how cute you were when Joe –

BF: That’s me, that’s Joe, Edwin Mortimer, Wilma Gentzler, Lloyd Fisk, Alfred Henry, Wilma’s sister, Evelyn, Jean. I guess that must be Beatrice Colby. She was younger than Johnny and the older sister, and this is Verna Turpin.

DP: You moved to town then. You lived in town during those major Dust Bowl days?

BF: Well, no l wouldn’t say-. It was plenty bad enough from “31 to “35 and then the Dust Bowl, it didn’t start to get better until about 1937. But I don’t think there was ever a year that my dad didn’t raise some kafer corn bundle feed. I remember one year he hired his wheat cut because it was so short he couldn’t cut it with a 20-foot combine. He hired Earl Groves to cut his wheat. Earl lived 10 miles north and a mile east. We had that 32-volt light charger wind charger and the batteries and all. My dad wasn’t a worrier. When the dirt storms were blowin’ and he lived in that dug out, why he told my mother that he just got in there and closed the door and let it blow. He came to this country, he said he got tired of scraping the mud off of wagon wheels every time he went to town in Illinois. He had some first cousins that stopped in Dodge City. He had Eddie Cavenaugh, a first cousin, and then he had a first cousin that was a woman that lived south of Spearville. Her name was she married a Frenchman – Langloise was her last name. Once or twice a year my dad would go up there. She wrote to everybody back in Illinois and he would go over and spend the day and find out what was going on back in Illinois where they came from. He had Mrs. Ed Tynin, a first cousin of my mother’s, and Fran Cavenaugh and Jim Cavenaugh both came to Liberal and they were first cousins. Jim was killed in a car wreck in the ’20s and Fran sold his land here and moved five miles east of Elkhart. He had, Ithink, 10 or 12 quarters of land right there in one place.

DP: What year did your father come to this place?

BF: My dad come to Seward County in 1904 but he didn’t buy. He lived two or three different places, but he bought the north half of this section in 1908. It is a hundred-year farm this year. He and my mother were married in 1921. He was 43 and she was 27, I think. There was several years’ difference.

DP: He lived in a dug-out on this place for how long?

BF: I don’t have any idea. I wish I did.

JF: He built the house before they were married.

BF: Oh yeah. He’d had the house. But that dug-out was covered with cement and there was a little window in each end. It couldn’t have been over 12 by 14.

DP: It wasn’t exactly a primitive dug-out.

BF: He had it plastered on the inside. Then in later years he’d make home-brew down there. I remember one time some businessmen and friends come out and stopped and Daddy wasn’t here and they went down there and they had a little beer and gave me a little and I just really got dizzy. [Laughing] But my folks, like most people, I couldn’t have had better folks. My dad didn’t have the ground all paid for, but my mother kept it all and we still own all of it today. He was just a very successful man I would say.

DP: Very hard worker?

BF: Yes, yes.

JF: I admire his mother. In 1935 she was left with two little boys and this farm and she kept it all. She was a very intelligent woman.

DP: How did she get along – how did she live? Was it income from the farm? Or did she have some other sources?

BF: No, when Daddy passed away, she kept farming for four or five years and my Uncle Ralph [Wasson] worked for her.

DP: So, she was the one that kept the farm running?

BF: Oh yes, she was a good businesswoman. We always had everything we ever wanted. My dad, I don’t know where he learned all that, but he knew how to butcher a hog and they made pickled pigs’ feet and head cheese and done all that. They never milked cows other than just enough for our own use. He handled a lot of cattle, but they always kept a lot of chickens, I suppose 200 layers or something like that. Well he had, Ithink, about 165 head of steer when he passed away. They kept those cattle through the winter, and it was as dry as the dickens. The next spring, they shipped those cattle back there to Nixa, Missouri and summered them there and then sold them. I remember that.

DP: Your mother came from Missouri?

BF: My mother was born just outside of Nixa, just 12 mile south of Springfield but it has all grown together and in fact most of my grandfather’s farm has houses on it now.

DP: How did your parents meet?

BF: I wish I knew a little bit more about that. My brother probably does. She had written an article in some kind of a paper or magazine or something and he happened to read it and he answered. He wrote her and I don’t know how many times they saw one another before they decided to get married. They were married in Wichita.

JF: Tell what she said before she-I was so sorry I wasn’t that smart.

BF: [Laughing] She said that if I marry you, I want to spend the month of August in Missouri with my family. That’s when they have the reunion. I don’t want a garden. And there was another rule but I don’t remember what that was. [Everyone laughs]

JF: Can you imagine a farmer woman just going south for a month!

BF: Mother always said she would go out to do something, you know, and my dad, would say “I’ll do that.” She’d say I guess he didn’t want anybody to go by and see her outside workin’. [Laughing] Henry Colby worked for my dad for a long time and she done the cookin’. Then later they bought the southwest quarter in that section right across from Liberty School.

DP: Johnny Colby was Henry’s son?

BF: Yes and he was about the same age as your dad and they always remained good friends.

DP: I know at the end of Johnny’s life my dad would go visit him. Fairly often. The last pick-up Johnny owned, I don’t remember what model it was, but my dad bought that from him and then gave it to my son who was going to school at Wichita State at the time. He did yard work and trimmed trees. He had worked for a tree fellow in Kansas City for a little while, so my son thought he knew a lot about trimming

trees, and he used that old pick-up. Then when he went from Wichita State to Arizona State, he took

that pick-up with him. When he moved from Arizona to Seattle, he took that pick-up with him. He used it until just a year or two ago. He finally had to give up on that old pick-up. [Everybody laughs] In some of my folks’ pictures there was a picture of Johnny Colby and I always said I should frame that picture and hang it up in that pick-up for him to be remembered. [Laughing]

BF: Well, they moved up there, in fact, Henry Colby passed away a year or two before Daddy did. I do remember going up there when he had passed away.

DP: Henry Franz family lived here for a long time.

BF: Yes, and I can’t, I’m going to say they lived here from about 1940 to “46. I got home from the Army in ’46 and they had moved that spring. Down to Turpin.

DP: So your memories of those Dust Bowl years, you lived in town during most of that time?

BF: No, we had a lot of those dust storms after we moved to Liberal. In fact, we had two or three, they didn’t last as long as that Black Sunday, but they were just almost as bad, but they were shorter.

JF: Tell them what you did on Black Sunday.

BF: We were up at Slim Fisks’, a mile and ¼ north of here and % mile west when we saw that cloud comin’ and Joe wanted to come home and I said, well we had seen them before so we didn’t come home. It was about 10 o’clock that night before it kind of cleared up and we got in that ‘28 model Ford truck and drove home. My folks were down at Tynens, where Gary Warden lives now. They owned that section there. They didn’t seem to worry about us I don’t guess.

DP: Did your parents have cash to spend in those years?

BF: Yes, every time I got a chance to go to town with my dad why I sure went with him and he always had a nickel for me to go to Smith’s Drug Store and buy a Snicker candy bar. [Laughing]

DP: I talked to some people who lived in Nebraska during these years. [See the Klingman interview]

There were nine children in that family, and they said there really was no cash, but they had a little bit of crop and they would take a load of wheat into town and barter for flour and for the things they needed. But there was no cash. Their story was like yours. They always had a little bit of crop, always something to feed the cattle, but their living was pretty self-sufficient.

BF: Well, in later years my dad had a man that worked for him for quite a long time, Frank Stuck, and he paid him 51 a day and room and board. Frank had a wife and two children. He’d walk into town. He lived probably at least six miles, a mile past 2″d Street. He was glad to have the job.

JF: Tell them about Joe riding a bicycle.

BF: When Joe graduated from the eighth grade here “till we moved to town, probably the first semester of high school, Joe rode a bicycle to town. If it was blowin’ a gale Mother would take him in. Henrys lived a mile west. Lawrence Henry, they had an Essex car and they would go through on the section line south. Joe would grab ahold of the offside back window. Bill would say, “Hang on Joe” and off they would go and then when they got to the 4-mile corner Joe would cut loose and ride the bicycle on home. [Laughing]

DP: There is a picture, it may be in the Liberty School things, that says “Ed Fitzgerald’s mule team”. Do you remember anything about your dad having mules?

BF: Oh, he had. I don’t remember that one particular team, they are grey, great big mules. But I remember Kate and Jack and Dan and Dewey. They were cutting wheat over on what we call the Kelly quarter and they had a mule named Mike, a brown mule and he got too hot and he died. I remember they dug a hole right out here and buried him. I’ve had people tell me that Dad knew a good mule, he didn’t raise them, I don’t know where he got them, but he had good mules.

DP: Is that what he used to farm with at the beginning?

BF: Yes, JoAnne go get that photograph album. I’ll show Donita those mules.

DP: Why don”t we go ahead and talk and then look at pictures.

BF: Okay. He had, we have a picture and there must have been eight or 10 mules pulling an International combine. He had a motor but the mules pulled it. Then there was a grain wagon there with mules ready to come up and unload. They stopped to unload. But my dad had, when he farmed with mules, I expect he had 20 head of mules.

DP: Isn’t that unusual? That was not a common thing?

BF: No most people didn’t farm that much. Lots of people, two quarters was about all you could handle. JoAnne’s dad when he farmed with mules, he said, I think he used horses, he’d make six half-mile rounds in the morning, go in and feed your team, put them in the barn and let them rest for two hours and do the same thing in the evening. That was all they could stand.

DP: You wonder how they farmed as much land as they did, don’t you?

BF: That is very true. I remember John Priefert [Donita’s grandfather] going by here with a team many a time going up north there. Finally, he put a cab on his wagon so he wouldn’t be in the wind and the dirt.

DP: Probably to protect from the sun too.

BF: I don’t think he was worried about the sun. I remember Billy Bartlett lived up there.

DP: Yes, I remember him. When I was a little kid.

BF: Did John plant his broom corn for him or did Billy Bartlett?

DP: I don’t know that. I know that he had broom corm and he made brooms.

BF: Well, that is the way he made his living. I don’t suppose he lived too high on the hog, but anyway he made a living.

DP: That little house where he lived was what you would call a shack. He didn’t have a car when I was a kid.

BF: I don’t think he ever had a car.

DP: He was a trumpet player. Did you know that? He had played in a circus band and that had been his profession. Major circus bands. Was he a WWI veteran? I think he might have been but I am not sure about that.

BF: I didn’t know he was a trumpet player. I imagine he was a WWI veteran. Would be my guess.

DP: I think he had a drinking problem.

BF: I don’t remember that.

DP: He was an alcoholic.

BF: Do you remember when they used to play softball, all the neighbors?

DP: That was a little before my time.

BF: The neighbors would all go up there on Sunday afternoon and play softball. [DP: l think this was the pasture at Bill Bartlett place. That quarter was owned by John Priefert. Bill Bartlett lived in the house on that quarter.]

DP: Well, there might have been a little bit of that when I was a kid, I know my Grandpa Fraim loved to play ball and they had ball teams when he was a young man, a young married man in the community.

BF: I can understand when every little old town had a ball team and people were interested but for me to watch a pro baseball game, I’d rather watch the grass grow. It is just too slow. But if it is somebody you know and your neighbors why that’s a different thing. But it has gotten to be a high-dollar thing.

DP: The book, The Worst Hard Time, centers mostly on Dalhart, Boise City and Springfield, Colorado. It talks about people dying of dust pneumonia. Did you ever know anyone or hear of someone who died of dust pneumonia from this area?

BF: I don’t remember of anyone dying of dust pneumonia. Your mother [JoAnne’s mother] had –

JF: She had, my little brother was born in 1933 and it was during that period they said that she had dust pneumonia. But I can’t remember, I think maybe all she did was wear a gauze vest. It must have had some kind of salve on it or something.

BF: I don’t remember people dying, but I am sure that the farther west you went the worse it was. I read every once in a while, the Capper Weekly, that somebody in Eastern Kansas sayin’ about how bad the Dust Bowl was back there. They don’t know what they’re talking about. But I do think, and I don’t know why those people up around Spearville, I think they raised less crops than we did down here. That ground is a little bit tighter and it just didn’t produce like here. But out in that country, well, Uncle Ralph moved over there on that place we own over there, it’s 18 miles straight east of Elkhart, and about 35 rods over into Oklahoma, just off the state line. The dust was even with the top of the two-by-fours that went across the roof joists. We got up there and dug that out with a coal shovel. People back over in there, well we had a half-section of land there in Kansas that laid north and south. Well the dust blew into the thistles and they would just keep backing up, must have been a rod-and-a-half or two rods wide there they wasn’t even farmin’. One man that farmed that ground of Mother’s for three or four years, he farmed 28 quarters of land with one old tractor. You know he wasn’t doing too great a job. [Laughing] But anyway, he saved and become very wealthy, but it just was worse over there. Drier.

DP: The book talked about the dirt blowing and they would have to shovel their way out of their houses, my folks never told stories like that.

BF: No. But I do remember when Uncle Ralph moved over there I went over there a lot of weekends and in the summertime went over there and worked for him and I remember three different places on the 2^nd Street road that was just about half covered up with sand. People walked off and left them. When a piece of ground got to blowin’ back then you know, now you get out there with a big lister and a tractor and you can stop it pretty quick if you want to. But back then they didn’t have those big tractors. If they even had one, they didn’t have gas to put in the tank. A lot of people just had to leave.

DP: Do you know the story about how your dad helped my dad get started in farming for himself?

BF: How what now? [Bill is a little hard of hearing]

DP: How your dad was instrumental in helping my folks get started on their own?

BF: I know how he helped your dad rent –

DP: He did. My mother was helping your mother clean house, and this is the story my folks told. A letter came one day from Finchem to your dad saying he was looking for someone to farm that Finchem land over there and my mother went home and said to my dad, “You could do that.” My dad said, “Oh I don’t have any equipment, how would I do that?” She said, “We will figure out a way.” So, they came down and talked to your dad. He took them to Pratt where Finchem lived and that is how they got to rent that land.

BF: I know my dad helped him rent that place but I didn’t know all those details about it.

DP: And that got them going. That was their start.

BF: Well, the Skinners, you don’t know them, but there was three of those brothers, Harry and Troy and Elliot. They came from the same place in Illinois where my dad came from. I think one of them lived on that place for a short time. I don’t know whether my dad helped them rent that or not and I don’t know which one it was. And then you said Carmen Burns was a good friend of your dad’s.

DP: Carmen Burns and Roe Bruns and my dad were pals when they were young men.

BF: I didn’t remember Carmen, but Roe and your dad they each had the same kind of a Chevy car.

DP: They probably did. When my folks got married, my dad had a car and he had S5 in his pocket. They gave that to the preacher that married them. [Laughing by all] My folks had gone together for several years. My mother was 13 when they started dating. My dad always said that her mother figured out how to entice him. My mother did a Highland fling dance for Grange. You know they had programs and people did all kinds of things. My grandmother had made her this costume, and my dad said that’s how Grandma Fraim figured out how to entice him to notice my mother. [Laughing by everyone] Carmen and Evelyn had planned to get married on a certain Sunday. They were double dating this Saturday night before that and Carman and Evelyn said to my folks, “Why don’t you come along and get married too?” My dad said, “Oh, Lowene’s parents would never let her do that.” They had gotten a marriage license and carried it around for a while. I don’t know how old you had to be to get those in those days. He said, “Okay, you go ask your folks and if they say you can then we will.” She did and they said, “You just as well, you’re together all the time anyhow.” That is what my dad’s folks said too. My mother was 17. They were married in June and she had graduated in May 1932. Of course, they had no money, times were hard. They lived with my dad’s folks for a while and then with my mother’s folks for a while. Of course, my dad was helping his dad with the farm. His dad had some land in Texas down in the Rio Grande Valley, some citrus groves of some sort, so my grandparents would go down there in the wintertime some and my folks were at their place here. My grandad, during the depression, lost that land in Texas. I think that is the only thing he ever lost.

BF: You know they hauled people from this part of the country down there and sold the land. My folks bought 70 acres down there and they spent one winter down there. Anyway, that never did pan out. My dad traded 60 acres of it for a tourist camp in Pampa, Texas. We still got 10 acres down there. You can’t see it for the prickly pear and the brush. The taxes are about $5 or $6 an acre on it. I keep payin’ ‘em thinking that maybe they had oil on it, but I think I just as well quit. There was a lot of people went down there.

DP: Well, I haven’t heard that before. I have wondered why he did that.

BF: There was just several people in Seward County and I am sure not only Seward County, every county

around there. We have been down there several times.

JF: Joe started first grade down there.

BF: That’s right. He did. Caterina is the name of that little town and it is in Demit County, Texas, big wide streets. Wider than Plains up here. They was going to raise cantaloupe and peaches and grapefruit and I don’t know what all.

DP: What kind of John Priefert stories do you have?

BF: Let me tell about your dad first. I worked for him during harvest when he lived up there on the hill. [On the Finchem place] He had the quarter, or had the house rented there, VanGessen’s old house, and there was an old man that worked for him that run the combine and I drove the tractor. He was farming the Shives quarter, just north of there. Your dad told me when you go down through there, he said, you’ll come to the wheat, part of it is summer fallow and part of it was stubble ground and he said you drive the tractor through on the stubble ground part instead of knocking down the summer fallow. Well heck, when I got there it all looked the same to me. I don’t know why he didn’t tell that combine. I went right down through the summer fallow wheat. He wasn’t too happy about that. And then another time, I was working for your dad and I was on the schoolhouse quarter up there. He took me up there to list. And then he come back to pick me up. Of course, I had never listed, and I don’t guess he had any markers and it just wherever. He said, “Well, you need to get out behind the barn and practice.” [Everyone laughs] I helped John Priefert during the harvest one year. He milked three cows and I milked three cows and separated but he was just a good egg you know, and he would tell a joke or something and he would just die laughing. I remember he was farming that half section across the road south of Dean”s at that time. John was, and I remember in the afternoon I’d get so sleepy I just had to fight to stay awake. Oh, they was nice people. I remember that swing in the basement down there you know and then he had a big pool table and then he and Mrs. Priefert would get in an argument and he would say, “Now Mrs. Priefert, you know that is not right.” And then after Della lost her eyesight, he would write Mother a big long Christmas letter. Well, my mother did too. Anymore, writing a letter is about a lost art but my mother had three sisters and they just all wrote each other all the time. It’s too bad but, you know you can talk to somebody on the phone and you’d think “Now what did they say?” If they wrote a letter you can get it out and read it and see for sure.

DP: When I get emails from my daughter who lives oversees, I save those. I don’t delete those. A person should really print them out and put them in a folder. She sends them to several members of the family, telling them about their life there.

BF: I had a first cousin, her daughter is married to a guy I’ve forgotten how long they were oversees in a compound where just Americans, I don’t know whether he was working for an oil company or what it was, she had kind of an interesting experience.

DP: My grandad was a very sociable person. He loved to talk and to visit. I have a picture of him and he is sitting in a straight chair and has his overalls on, of course, and his legs are crossed and I can just hear him slapping his leg and laughing about something.

BF: I remember Kenneth Brown said one time that John was on a trip to California, and he decided he didn’t think his car was running quite right so he just pulled over to the side of the road and got his tools out and then he couldn’t get it started. [Laughing] I don’t know what he done but I guess somebody finally come along and helped him.

DP: You know my grandparents [the John and Della Priefert] took a trip from here to California. My father was 12 years old when they did that. They had one of these old cars, kind of an open touring car, and there is a picture of him and he has his arm slung over the back of the seat and he just looks like he is ready to take off to the moon, waiting for this adventure. [Laughing by everyone] There were really no roads, just kind of sandy trails, roads of a fashion but nothing like what we have now, probably not even gravel in a lot of places. They camped along the way.

BF: We”d go to Missouri every year and it was a two-day trip. From here to Wichita there were just a lot of square corners, you know. Mother would say, “I’m not going to eat that guy’s dust,” and she would just speed up and stay ahead.

JF: In 1925 and before that there weren’t many women that would have driven from here to Springfield, Missouri. It was quite an adventure.

DP: She had to be independent and take care of herself didn’t she?

The Eickmans, my Grandmother Priefert was an Eickman, there were six girls and one boy in the family, so those girls worked outside and helped their dad just as if they were boys. The women in that family are very strong in-charge women, a lot of them. There is a picture of Grandma and Grandpa Eickman. They liked to take a vacation. They are down, I don’t know where it is, maybe even Mexico [Actually, it is Texas I learned after this interview] and there is an ox pulling a little cart and guess who’s driving? It’s Grandma Eickman and Grandpa is sitting in the back just kind of enjoying himself. But I have said that picture tells me a whole story, it tells me that the women in that family were equal partners, they were not second-class citizens and as I hear now the women in my dad’s generation from that family talk it is a very clear image that these women had status, they were equal partners with their husband. They were not the second-class women that the feminist movement talks about. I think most farm families are like that.

BF: Oh, I do too.

JF: Oh, the women had to be as strong as the men.

BF: No, if you don’t have a good wife why you – pretty tough to make it.

DP: Both of your mothers are very strong women.

BF: Well we have been blessed with our family. Had to go down to the police station a time or two but I never had to get any of the boys out of jail!

JF: Luckily, we were friends of the Chief of Police. [Everyone laughs]

BF: They hadn’t done anything –

DP: Four boys, you would expect a few little incidents.

BF: Well, yes. I am sure they done things we never heard about.

JF: We are finding out more things. Aren’t you?

DP: Yes. And ifI had known at the time, I would have blown my stack.

BF: My little angel doesn’t do that!

DP: Well, I didn’t call him an angel –

Would you like to talk about your going to the military service?

BF: I was in the service two years to the day. I spent 18 months overseas in the tank force, 756 Tank Battalion. Most of the time that Battalion was attached to the Third Infantry Division which has never been deactivated. The Third Infantry has been over there in Iraq, I guess, ever since they’ve started that war. The company I joined had landed in Italy with the Third Infantry Division and they had fought across Italy, Africa, and then up through Italy and when I joined ‘em as a replacement it was in what they called Alsace Loraine, kind of a little strip of country between France and Germany. When the war was over there was very few in that company that lived through all of it and they were the cooks and the supply sergeant and the mail clerk. Everybody else had been killed or wounded. But being in the tanks, in my opinion, was much better than being in the Infantry. I’d take my hat off to anybody that served in the Infantry anytime. Their food was poor, they were wet, and they were cold. In the tank core if we got to go to bed, we had a good bed roll that tied on two big old motors in that tank and they were nice and warm if we got to go to sleep. People can’t realize what it is like. It’s dark out there and the Germans are over there in those trees and here you are, you’re going after them, you know. I was very fortunate, I got a little mortar shell fragment and spent 30 days in the hospital. In my thigh. If I had been just a little bit higher up it would have been a different story. There was a big hole in my outer garment but when it got down to me it was about the size of a dollar.

DP: You were in for two years and spent a lot of that in battle area it sounds like.

BF: Well, I spent 18 months overseas. Went through basic training and they shipped us right over.

DP: Then when you got out of the service what did you do?

BF: I come right home and went to farming. I didn’t have any machinery, but JoAnne’s dad loaned me an old tractor and I hired the wheat drilled the first year. And Mother rented some of the ground out for the first year. Been here ever since.

DP: And you and JoAnne were married –

BF: I got out in June and we were married in October on her folk’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.

DP: Did you write during the war?

BF: She wrote me every day.

JF: I was in the Cadet Nurse Core. I wrote to him all the time. Kind of slowed up after a while.

DP: Joe Brown said that Dorothy wrote him a letter every day.

BF: I think a lot of women did.

DP: That was a main support during those times.

BF: Yeah.

DP: That has given people of your generation a bonding experience that a lot of people haven’t experienced. Don’t you think? It has given couples a special bonding experience.

JF: I saw him in the fifth grade wasn’t it?

BF: You’re telling the story. Every time she goes to griping, I tell her it is her own fault. You kept after me.

JF: I think it is kind of interesting. Bill was born on this place and I was born three miles down the road. We didn’t get very far from home. I’ve had a charmed life, really. My name is JoAnne Boles Fitzgerald and my folks are Earnest and Vaughn Sankhauser Boles of Liberal. I was born January 24th, 1926. I was born on a dairy there on Tucker Road, you know there was a dairy there. Bill tells a story that Daddy told him. It was so cold in January that night. There was a lady coming from Hooker to help Mother and so Daddy went to town from that Tucker’s Corner to the railroad station to pick up this lady, it was so cold he didn’t put water in his car, drove it down there, drove it home and it didn’t hurt it. That was a Model-T. We didn’t live there very long because Daddy sold that dairy and we went to California in 1926, when we got out there it was 1927. I was a year old, we got there on my birthday. He sold Singer sewing machines door to door and they had an apartment and Mother just went down to the beach, it was in Santa Barbara. She said it was beautiful. But they only stayed a year. They couldn’t stand it. So, they got in the car. Mother sent off and got these cards, Shell Oil or something, each day that we would go and then she kept track of how many flat tires and things they had, and I have got that. Anyway, they came back home, and I guess Daddy bought the Oliver thing –

BF: He worked up at some guy up at Ulysses or Satanta –

JF: No that was after he had it. He bought that Oliver dealership. It was during the Depression. I remember he got a lot of the combines back. There had been a good year in there sometime and he got this whole back lot, the store is still there on South Kansas, full of those combines and tractors. Repossessed. We didn’t have hard times. We always had enough food and clothing. Well, I don’t know what to tell you. [Laughing] So Billy Fitzgerald – he’s the one! Got married and had a lot of babies.

DP: Tell us about your babies.

JF: Well, we were married, and Mike came the day before we had been married a year. Then 14 months later we had Martha. Well, it was just like that for 13 years. I had babies about every two years. It was wonderful. We didn’t have to worry about money, about feeding them and we lived out here on this farm. How long was it until we built this house? We grew out of the old house.

BF: We built this in 61. And we were married in ’46.

JF: So, we built this house which fit that family just fine. I thoroughly enjoyed the kids. I never had to work, I don’t think I could have – outside the home. I really just enjoyed my whole life. The kids, I was very organized and I had to be. Those children took naps every day if they wanted to or not. Of course, after the boys got old enough, they had to go to work. The youngest boy said, “l had to take a nap until was a senior in high school.” [Laughing] I’d get those kids laid down to go to sleep and then I’d lay down in 15 minutes and go to sleep. My hobby was sewing for them. I’d get up and sew all the time. I think this is kind of interesting, maybe. What year did we start over west? What was it, an uncle left, he got too old or something. We started over there. It is 40 miles, straight on 2″d Street Road. I took lunch over there during harvest and Eldon Wyatt worked for us and the house was still there, it was a real nice house. The furniture was still there. I would leave here at 11 o’clock with a fried chicken dinner. Martha and Elizabeth were 14 and 13 maybe, I don’t know, they weren’t very old. I left here with a huge meal already cooked. Of course, there were those three little kids we called them the three little kids ‘cause there was a gap of two years in there. By the time I got home at 2 o’clock those little kids were in bed, the kitchen was cleaned up. I don’t know how many years we did that. It worked out just fine and all the kids learned how to work. They had to. I had always had hobbies. I was a collector of a lot of things, I painted, and I love to read.

BF: Well, we never had to raise any of our grandchildren. Now then a lot of people have to do that, or their great grandchildren.

JF: I am so glad that didn’t ever happen to us. I guess you would do it if you were called on.

DP: Talk about where your family lives now.

JF: The four boys all wanted to farm. John went to the west farm, he married and had a little girl. That marriage didn’t work out and then he married again and had two little boys which he raised by himself. They all got educated, graduated from college and got jobs. Really good kids. The second one died. His children are all a success. Mike the older one is 60 now. He had two children, they both got education and one, the daughter, lives in Edmond, Oklahoma. She just had a new baby, our great grandchild. She and her husband work for OU, Oklahoma University. The son is in animal husbandry. He is a foreman for my brother on a ranch north of Liberal. He has a little girl, Bentley. His wife is a nurse who works in the hospital here. Next, Martha lives in Trinidad, has two children. One lives in Alaska the other one is in Wichita and is a florist. Elizabeth lives in Hays. She has a degree in library science. She and her husband, he is a teacher, he is a superintendent of a little school district south of Hays. She doesn’t have any children. Tom lives over there, not a mile, he lives on Sewell Hill. He doesn’t farm with the other boys. He ranches. He has ranches leased down on the Beaver River and he owns some land down there too. But they still help each other. They have three boys. A child, Luke, is being born as we speak. He has two other sons, one is an attorney in Liberal, works for Yoxall, and he has another son that works at the ethanol plant. Then Marie. Hope I’m getting it right. Marie got her degree in speech pathology and she worked in that field for 20 years. Her husband is an electrician and started his own business about two years ago, so she quit teaching and is helping him. They have no children. He has two children and he didn’t want any more children. And then there is Mark. He lives a mile over here. He runs the farm. He and Mike do the farming. He married and had one daughter. She has graduated. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia. Her degree was in business. Mark got a divorce, and then he married a widow that had two children. He has raised them, and we just think they are our children. He farms. He lives over there where Freda [Thompson] lived. A mile further east is where Mike lives. Is that all of them?

BF: I think so, if it isn’t it ought to be.

DP: Alice –

JF: Alice, my baby!! She has the mostinteresting life. She has never married. She has her Master’s in business, and she teaches. She spent five years on the Navajo Reservation and loved it out there. Taught out there but she said it was 40 miles to the dentist. It was longer than that.

BF: It was 80, 90 miles to Flagstaff.

JF: She liked the people and she loved the place and made some lifetime friends out there. But after so long she wanted to come back. She worked at the newspaper at Durango, Colorado for a while. Then she came back. The funny part about it, first Martha called and said, “l quit a job and bought a house.” Bill couldn’t understand that – you quit your job and then buy a house! Well, Alice did the same thing. Where did she live?

BF: Whose house?

JF: Alice when she sold her house and said, “I’m quitting my job and I bought a house in Trinidad.” She lives in Trinidad. She taught on the Reservation, she went to Greece on a trip, she went to the Netherlands, she is a bicyclist, now she is a runner, and she goes on all these marathons.

BF: She has been to Japan on a teaching deal.

JF: Oh yes, a Fulbright, Japanese. Well she got one of those and she spent the summer in Japan. And then she comes back to Trinidad. She has a house there and she teaches in Raton, 18 miles over the Raton Pass every day, all weather. She picked, the interesting part, she picks up a guy off the top of the Raton Pass. He is a mile down this canyon and in the wintertime he has snowshoes to come up. She sits there, she doesn’t have to wait on him, he is usually sitting there. She takes him to school and then drops him off there. His wife raises –

BF: Well, she trains dogs.

JF: Trains dogs for handicapped people. She’s down there with all these doges You know there’s bears, lions and everything out there and Alice said a couple of times he has taken a pizza down that hill and the smell of that would just draw the – But he hasn’t ever complained about it. They all come home, very often, the girls do. I hope I have covered them all. “Cause we have been blessed. All of them get along together. I have three daughters-in-law. Instead of four daughters, I have seven daughters.

BF: Have about 30 here Christmas Eve. Christmas Day they stay at home or go to their in-laws.

JF: They just started it last year and are going to do it again this year. They go camping. Most of them have some kind of a little camper. Two of the girls out there have a retro, those little round trailers, and they decorate them like in the ’60’s. Like the Airstreams – those little funny things. There is one, Martha and her husband, go to tournaments or whatever and they hang little parrot lights and they have those pink flamingoes they set there in front of the trailer. They have it decorated, you look in a magazine it looks just like back in the ’60s. Several have pop-ups. So last year we went to the Black Mesa. They got us a Bed and Breakfast. We spent the weekend, more than a weekend, and those girls and those little campers and they brought a lot of food. We just had a wonderful time. Now this year we are going to Scott County Lake “cause we want to get in the water. Bill thinks he has found a camper for us.

BF: I want to buy one and I want to take it to Missouri.

JF: I am not going to Missouri.

BF: She’s not going to Missouri. I’ll have more fun without her anyway. [Laughing]

DP: Humid.

JF: I can’t do it.

DP: Bill’s family was Catholic, and they were the only Catholics in this community. JoAnne came from the Boles family and they were Quakers. I am asking the question, how they dealt with the issues, or how they felt about that? Your personal feelings and how you interact with your families on these matters, and then your personal experiences.

JF: Well, I can say that I know it was hard for my parents. They liked Bill. We got married, and we had a lovely Catholic wedding the folks put on. But the thing Ithink was interesting then at the time when the children were little, in the mail you got this Catholic-like Sunday School, and my dad helped my kids. He was this Quaker and he said, “There isn’t any difference here.” We got along beautifully.

We had a place in Colorado, Cuchara. I usually got out there once a year. But my folks would take five children and keep them for a month. They took them to Mass every morning – every Sunday morning. That’s the way we got along.

BF: I don’t think JoAnne’s great-grandparents, the Rucks, now those people, they were very anti-Catholic I think. But I think WW2 done more to change the outlook of most people. When you’re in the foxhole with a guy and your life depends on it, you don’t care whether he’s a protestant or a Jew or Catholic, or what he is. I think it broke down a lot of barriers.

JF: Can I tell this one story about Uncle Christie? Uncle Christie Ruch, he was my mother’s uncle, her mother’s brother. They were all big Germans. They were so against Catholic. I think they lived at Fowler. Uncle Christie sent a book in the mail. Mother sent an announcement of our wedding. So we got this package in the mail, I was getting presents in the mail. This was from Uncle Christie. Mother opened it first and it was some book, an old book, something anti-Catholic or something. She just took that up and took it right out to the trash. I would love to have that book back. Wouldn’t that be something! Boy that made her mad. But his wife, Aunt Laura, sent me a lovely gift. He sent me the book! No, out here in the community, I never felt any feelings. We had a lovely neighborhood. The school was wonderful. We all worked together. Bill and I have had a charmed life really.

DP: I know you are still devout Catholics, all your life. Very faithful.

BF: Yes.

DP: Is that a really important thing to you?

BF: Well, yes, if it wasn’t important, I wouldn’t be going.

DP: There have been a lot of changes in the Catholic church.

BF: That’s true. I guess some of them are good and some of them are bad. The Catholic church has made a lot of mistakes but I guess the others have too.

DP: Oh yes.

JF: We have a wonderful church now. We have had a Redemptionist group of priests. Seven years ago, they sent five priests out here to this church. They are missionaries. They have been wonderful. We have one that sounds just like a Baptist preacher, he jumps up and down and he yells. We tease him about it. They built up our church and everybody likes them but they have to go. So, we don’t know what we will get. We have a lovely church. We do have quite a Spanish population.

BF: We would not have been able to build that church if it hadn’t been –

JF: They have five masses a weekend. I don’t see how two priests are going to take care of it. Besides the funerals. With so many people here, there are a lot of funerals.

DP: Do they have a lot of Christian education type things going on?

JF: Oh gosh, yeah. They have a program going on now, wooing Catholics back. I guess that has been a very successful one. Then there are all ages of children and adults. There is a Guild that Bill’s mother – it is the last Guild. They just have Altar Society now but this one Guild, it has 20 people, little old ladies. I’m supposed to be in it, but I never have. They read on a Tuesday at one person’s house. These Redemptionists, there is one Brother, he is an historian. I wish I’d gone during the five or six years. They say that is just a wonderful class. There are a lot of educational classes in the church.

DP: As you drive past churches in Liberal on that Sunday morning time, it seems like all the action is happening at the Catholic Church. The other main-line churches just seem very dead.

BF: Some of the Protestant churches, their membership is way down. I don’t understand that.

JF: I have a friend who lives in Sublette and she was saying she was worried. Well maybe I said something. Well you know they [Catholics] are really working on getting boys going to seminary. And there are more coming now. Well she said (she is a Methodist) there are no young people wanting to be a minister.

BF: I think part of that is they don’t make any money. Heaven knows, the priests don’t make any money. Well, I don’t understand it. I can understand why you don’t want to be a priest. The Orders that we have here now, the Redemptionist, they send out four together. That way, four of them together they can play checkers at night –

JF: These guys, one of them is a cook and they are always saying what he cooks. Then this Brother, he has just taken up playing the piano. He said he has been working on it for about 10 years now. He is getting good and they just tease him. They say something about it almost every Sunday “Brother Larry –

DP: What kind of music are they using these days?

JF: They have a beautiful piano. Bill loves to go to the Mexican Mass ’cause they have guitars, it’s real jazzy.

BF: Oh, those Mexicans can play an instrument! You can’t understand what they are sayin’ but they are good.

JF: We have a fairly good little choir. They are working on it. We have three pianists who take turns. One of them is a Protestant. His wife is a Catholic but he comes over. Mark Strange. Do you know him? But he is one of those who kind of plays by ear, all over the piano, it is beautiful. One woman is a trained musician. She is beautiful. This other girl just kind of picked it up. Then there is Brother Larry. But it is wonderful. One guy plays a guitar once in a while. Our music has finally come –

BF: We’re gaining. Do you go to church regularly?

DP: Yes, I do. I have gone to so many different kinds. I have gone to the Episcopal church for quite a few years. When I lived in Kansas City, I had gone to the Episcopal Church for about 15 years. In Seattle I have tried a couple and they just – I decided that the one I was going to wasn’t the one for me but I didn’t quite know what to do. My son, Andrew, and his wife had started going to a Mennonite Church. I thought I will go with them. My oldest granddaughter came with me and joined the youth group. That is where I have been going a year and a half. Very, very different than anything I have done before. When you tell people the Mennonite church, they have this image of what the Mennonites are like. Well, this church wouldn’t fit that image at all. They are very urban people. I have said I have never been in one place, one group of people, where there were so many PhDs in my life. A lot of these people have ties to Kansas. I think that is one reason it feels like a comfortable place, because these are people like the Midwest. A lot from around Newton area. Of course, the Mennonites are much into social action kinds of things. For years they have had disaster relief and the development programs and those kinds of things. My guess is that this particular congregation is one of the most liberal congregations in the whole Mennonite organization. It is a small congregation. There are almost no old people. There is one other couple older than I am. Otherwise most of the people are in their 50s, a lot in their 40s and 30s and some in their 20s. They have the Mennonite Volunteer Service house in Seattle where eight young people come to work for a year or two, that feeds younger people into their congregation. It is an interesting place. I don’t know long-term what I am going to do. There is no hierarchy at all, consequently to get anything done they need someone with a vision and some focused leadership. They have a ministry to the homeless, in fact they have hired some staff people to do nothing but work with homeless. That is a good thing, but you can’t build your congregation that way. I don’t know how it is going to go. Their strongest part is their singing. They have no paid musicians, but their congregational singing is just phenomenal. I go on Sunday morning for the singing if I don’t go for anything else. [Laughing] You do become a part of a group of people and there is potential for that. A lot of churches I have found you just go, you really don’t get to know people much and there is nothing very personal about it. As a new person, I need to make some new friends and in so many places the people that are my age have their circles already and they are not interested in incorporating anybody else. It is difficult when you move to a new place.

JF: I bet it is. We wouldn’t know what to do.

DP: Yeah. And as a single person it is even more difficult.

JF: Do you go to Senior Citizens?

[Some problem with the recording]

JF: – and telling jokes, some of them kind of shady. Like the teacher said, I don’t know how much art you’re learning but you are learning a lot – Well, there are people older than I am there. I play bridge once a week. That is my social life.

DP: I do take cello lessons. I don’t practice as much as I should, but I do practice. There is a little community string orchestra that I am part of. ‘Course I am the oldest person in that orchestra.

DP: I wanted to ask you about a paragraph in this book. Page 310 in The Worst Hard Time:

The United States was founded as a nation of farmers but less than 1% of all jobs are in agriculture now. On the Plains the farm population has shrunk by more than 80%.

This is what I want you to react to:

The government props up the heartland insuring that the most politically connected farms will remain profitable. But huge sections of Mid-America no longer function as working, living communities. The subsidies system that was started in the New Deal to help people such as the Lukas family stay on the land has become something entirely different, a pay-off to corporate farms growing crops that are already in over supply pushing small operators out of business. Some farms get as much as $360,000 a year in subsidies. The money has almost nothing to do with keeping people on the land or feeding the average American.

I would like your reaction comments about the subsidy system.

BF: Well, I think they need to limit the payments. Some of the big farmers get, as the article said, get $200,000 or $300,000 and I don’t think that is right. In fact, I guess down in the Mississippi Delta some of those farms where they raise sugar cane and lots of cotton, I guess it is way higher than that, maybe over a million dollars. I don’t think those farms need that kind of help. Of course, it is true that fewer and fewer people are farmers because the machinery is bigger and it costs more and it just eliminates the little guy. A young person that would like to farm, unless he has help from his family. I think they ought to limit the subsidy. In this area I think $150,000 ought to be tops as far as I am concerned. If it wasn’t for so much government payments, why maybe somebody else would have a chance to farm too.

DP: Do you think there is a reason for subsidy payments to be continued?

BF: Well, I think up until just the last year or two with grain prices so low I think they were necessary. You couldn’t replace your machinery or do anything. But now it’s a different story.

DP: But that has been just for one year that the prices have been way up.

BF: Yes. But I really think it is going to be high for another two or three years. With so much grain going to ethanol, it has brought the price of corn up. They are using milo, and I guess there is a worldwide shortage of wheat and still is. Our dry land prospects in this whole area from here to the mountains is very poor unless you happen to be in a little spot that it rains to where you got it sowed and got it up.

JF: Sorry, I have to leave. I enjoyed having you and come back. Sorry I didn’t feed you.

BF: There’ll be some irrigated wheat but most irrigators are planting most of their ground, if they have the water, to corn. The yield is so much greater. Why that is that you can’t get that kind of a yield or close with wheat I don’t know but 50-60 bushels is pretty good irrigated wheat. “Course last year was very unusual that the dry land wheat, lots of it made 50-60, some of it 70 maybe. Unbelievable.

DP: What is your feeling about using the Ogallala aquifer and it’s depletion? How do you feel about the current use of that and what do you think the future for that is?

BF: Well, I think this country, if they shut down irrigation here, we would be in terrible shape probably. We didn’t start irrigating ourselves until maybe 12 years ago. Most people – well some of them got wealthy and some of them went broke. It is pretty good insurance that you are going to raise something, but you spend a lot of money doing it too. You know that from your own experience. I think the Ogallala, as I understand it, right in this particular area, we’ve got the best supply of any place, any place close anyway. Now in Nebraska, I think eastern Nebraska maybe, there’s a different story up there. Maybe it is a different aquifer they are pumping out of, I don’t know.

DP: Have you seen a decrease in the water level in recent years?

BF: I really don’t know that much about it. I know they measure certain percentage of wells every year. But I think, before we run out of water, the cost of pumping it is going to stop irrigation before we run out of water. Can’t imagine $3,000 or $4,000 a month to run one of those darn irrigation motors! That gets pretty expensive. It has been a great thing for this area because the feed lots and all that. Now the ethanol plants are using a lot of grain. People argue back and forth about that whether it’s a good deal or not and I am not sure which way, who is telling the truth, I don’t know. [Laughs]

DP: What do you think about the development of wind energy?

BF: I think that would be great but I don’t know all that much about it. I guess it is terribly expensive to put in one of those things and you’d have to have a transmission line to move it somewhere. I think that’s one of the big drawbacks for a lot of places. They can’t sell it, don’t have a line.

DP: I came through Spearville on my way and those things were running so I stopped. I am kind of nosey and seemed to be able to go in and ask questions. I talked to a man who was kind of a maintenance person, we talked for quite a while. I asked what the cost is. He said, I think it was a million dollars or two million, I have forgotten, per tower. Now that included the whole system, not just the cost of the tower and the arms themselves but includes the station and the whole system. Would you like to have one on your farm?

BF: At $2,000 a tower, I certainly do. I’d like to have one at $1,000 a tower.

DP: I went to the Southwest Kansas Royalty Owners meeting, when Bernard Nordling, the old man was still alive, and he gave a presentation. He was saying that people should be getting like $7,500 a tower, the landowner. Now that was kind of the beginning of that era. He thought people like at Montezuma had signed for far too little. He says, if it comes your way be sure you get expert advice as to what you should sign up for. Don’t cheat yourself.

BF: I really thought those guys got $2,000 a month.

DP: I think it is so much a year. I don’t know and I asked the man at Spearville what kind of arrangements they are doing these days. And he said there are all kinds of deals. If a person got involved in that you would want to really find out what is going on and what good advice is and someone who knows what that business is and what is reasonable and fair to both parties. Sometimes it is like so much a year and a share of the product. Just like a regular royalty interest.

BF: I think it is a great idea if somebody has the money to finance the thing. I know there was a big cattleman in Wichita that Joe kind of knew and he had a ranch east of Wichita and they wanted to put a wind farm on it. He said fine, but the state said you can’t get a permit and build this wind farm until you have the electricity sold. Heck, it wasn’t any time at all ‘til, what’s that power company at Springfield – Ozark Empire – they just bought it right now. I don’t know how many towers or anything.

DP: Kansas City Power and Light is involved in the one at Spearville.

BF: There is one here in Gray County. You have been by that one haven’t you?

DP: I came past that one and it was not running the day that I –

BF: Well, you know I don’t understand, I don’t know how that works. Then down on 64 Highway, that’s north of Turpin and you go east to Alvin, there is a wind farm down there somewhere I don’t remember where it was, but when we went to Missouri last summer, it is a mile or two south of that highway.

DP: I saw a lot of them as I was coming from Seattle. I think in every state.

BF: Really. Well, we know of, Matt married a girl, folks own a ranch out in Colorado about 25 miles east of Trinidad. Well, she has her place leased to a woman who has a ranch of her own there somewhere and they are putting a wind farm on that ranch and she told Matt’s mother-in-law that’s going to pay for that ranch. Well, Matt’s mother-in-law sent in application for her place and they said it wasn’t enough wind.

DP: I know they study sites for the best sites.

JF: How could we miss! [Laughing]

DP: They should have one every 15 feet all over this country!

BF: By gosh, if they had been running yesterday –

JF: There’s no wind (today).

BF: Well, it is just kind of ashamed of itself, that’s what Aunt Nora used to say. There’d be a terrible day and the next day it would be pretty and she’d say, “Just acts like it’s ashamed of itself.”

DP: Now I want to ask you another question. You know, this country all has natural gas wells. I am sure you have some just like my folks did. Seems like the production in those is certainly going down. Over in Stevens County the wells that-. You know my grandmother had a quarter over there which my mother had, by the time I took the depletion on the Stevens County royalty income (after my mother died) there was a net loss of $229. It tells me that the production is really going down over there. At the time of her death you figure value over seven years, so you deplete over seven years.

BF: We haven’t had that experience with any of our wells. Now, they are going down, the old wells. That is very true. But every once in a while they come along and drill a new one.

JF: Look at the Jerry Salley well, just covered it up.

BF: Well, out there in the middle, anyhow they are big suction compressors. These wells are weak and they got those motors up there and they suck that gas. We have hooked this half-mile sprinkler to the original well on this section and it got to where it wouldn’t – not enough gas and so they let us hook on the newest well, right southwest of the house. They put the tanks and all on the section line. They let us hook on down there and we have 50 pounds of pressure now and that is plenty.

DP: You know they drilled a new well over here that has been really good. But I am wondering how long that is going to last. Browns said they had one that was quite phenomenal. I was teasing Dan about it and he drew a chart. You have your lines going up and down and then across and he said the line across is time and the straight up is production, and he said it started w—a—y up here at the top at the beginning but then it fell way down without too much time. I think he said a year or something. So, who knows? It has been a salvation to the farmers – all that royalty income.

BF: Oh yeah. There’s a lot of us that wouldn’t be farming if it wasn’t for that royalty income. The first gas well we ever had was over in Texas County and that was drilled ’39 or ‘40 and it is still a good well. One of the neighbors over there told Mother at the time that was the best well in that whole country. I’ve bought wells several different times and there has been one or two that have been duds but the rest of them-. And l keep thinking, and l know that will happen eventually. Somebody will come along and drill another well. I can’t understand why the people would have sold them.

DP: Some offer comes in the mail. I put it in the trash. The new well that is producing is actually drilled in a hole that they drilled years ago that they just sealed up and never produced. They drilled another well and it was dry, at least they sealed it up and didn’t do anything with it.

BF: I didn’t ask any of Bruns but I was talking to Henry one day when he happened to be down there and he said they drilled a well out there behind Roe’s house in ‘66 or ’67. I think that is about the time they drilled the well here and called it – just plugged it. In fact, they drilled two wells just east of their house, all on different quarters. I don’t know how good they are, but I do know that Mark was talking to Browns and I guess those wells on that Eubank section they were going to have to buy a 520,000 pump to pull enough gas to keep their sprinkler running.

DP: Do you think this is a good place to live?

BF: If I wasn’t living here, I’d be packing up to get here.

DP: Even after the wind blew like it did yesterday?

BF: At my age I can stay in the house. [Everyone laughs]

JF: It used to be there were no cabs on the tractors. It was terrible. One night it blew like yesterday. There used to be more trees out here, we called it the grove for years. He’d have to go out and work it and one time he came in, it was a terrible night. He broke his collar bone on the tractor. Another really bad time I was pregnant with Tom, and Eldon and Bob Wyatt were over here. They were building fence – you had to have your back operated on.

BF: Well, I went to Kansas City –

JF: Well, the dirt was just blowin’ and the wind was blowin’ and I was pregnant and to put him on the train to go get his back fixed. That was a really low point. My mother felt really sorry for me so she came out. That one little bedroom, we decided to redecorate it for the girls. We painted the walls and made curtains, we made bedspreads all the time he was gone.

BF: The trains still run at that time and you could get a roomette. I had an appointment in Amarillo and it was just such a dirty day I couldn’t go and so I called my brother. I couldn’t stand up long enough to go the bathroom. He said I know a good doctor here. He operates out at the VA, but you’d have to go through some red tape. I said I don’t have time to go through red tape. I went up there and that guy operated on me and I come home in a week.

JF: Carrying his suitcase. Was I glad to see him!

BF: But yeah. That was a low point in my life. I thought here I have a wife and five kids and I am not going to be able to work. Scary, you bet.

JF: We sure had a cute bedroom.

DP: It has been delightful visiting with both of you today.

JF: You have been fun.

DP: I look forward to seeing you when I come back.

JF: Well Sheryl, she’s the one that I know most. I think about her every once in a while. How old is she now?

DP: We’re going to talk about Grange.

BF: Everybody in the neighborhood belonged to Progressive Grange. We met up at the Antelope Valley School house, the foundation is still up there. My memories of it is kind of Joe’s, there must have been 30 kids and just went outside and wrestled and played hide and seek and what have you. It was a great time for everybody. I remember when they organized the Grange, I don’t know what year that was, Opal Fraim told Ross, “Don’t take an office.” Anyhow she didn’t go but Ross did, and they elected him Master. My dad was the insurance agent for years and years. I don’t remember who the other officers were. At one time the Patrons Mutual Insurance Company was a pretty big thing. I guess the Grange in certain parts of the country is still very active. I don’t know of any Grange around here anymore.

DP: Who was in Grange? Can you remember the families that were a part of that?

BF: My golly, Prieferts, Fraims –

JF: How about Browns?

DP: Dan and Dean, I don’t think they were ever a part of that.

BF: No, I don’t think so. Dang it, Maxine and Cliff Browne, Rices, Swans –

JF: You’re getting up into our time with Rices.

BF: But they were members before we got married. Just about all the old timers belonged to the Grange. Bert Tucker. And they had a Christmas program. Mother and Ed Mortimer’s wife, I can’t think of her name, they had a big program. And Bert had a big beard and they wrote this little song:

Bert Tucker went to town one day and on the corner he did pause

Along came some kids and thought that he was Santa Clause.

Don’t you remember that? Mother told that. I’m not sure it is true.

DP: I have a Bert Tucker story. I was a little girl. You know he worked on water wells, domestic water wells, and somehow I was fascinated with that man and he came in and ate dinner with us.

BF: Oh that is a well man’s stock and trade. They eat dinner with you.

DP: And then came evening time and I wanted to go home with Turk Bucker. When they didn’t let me go home with him I cried and cried. [Everybody laughs] I remember west of where you live, he had a house, over there someplace, a shack.

BF: Well, it’d be then the northeast quarter section of where Dan lives.

DP: He was a very eccentric person apparently. Just lived in primitive conditions. He’d open the door and the chickens would go in and out.

BF: I don’t know whether his wife got a divorce or whether she just lived in town, but there was a big family of those kids, several girls and I think just one boy.

DP: Well, just – not very sanitary, as I recall. He didn’t smell too good!

BF: And the machinery was all covered with dirt. Metcalf’s own that now and they finally cleaned it up.

JF: Now, l get, l think it is the Colbys – . But your mother made the wedding dress for –

BF: It was the Corrigans. They lived up there at the 12-mile corner and a mile west.

JF: Did he work for your dad? How come your mother made the wedding dress?

BF: No, he didn’t. I think the connection there is that they were Catholics. Supposed to be anyway. Vester Corragin, the old man, died and left, I think five quarters of land and he left it to where they couldn’t sell it. Vesta was one of the boys, went to the judge and said we’ve all got kids and we need that money and so the court let them sell it. One of those deals.

DP: Your mother was a member of Grange for a long time.

BF: She joined just as soon as-I don’t remember what year that was.

DP: I remember when they used to have a ceremony in that meeting room over a Dillons store on the corner. Upstairs was a hall.

JF: That is where we used to dance.

BF: The Odd Fellows Hall back in those days.

DP: It was a ritual ceremony. The women all wore formal dresses. There are some pictures of those. They are lovely pictures. They had decorations. There was a ritual that went with this. Things you had to memorize for certain levels.

JF: That wasn’t Grange was it?

DP: Yes, that was part of Grange. Those meetings, you had to be members. If you weren’t a member you would have to wait outside until they did all of that.

BF: It was quite an organization. That day and time it was kind of like going to church. That was about your only activity.

DP: It was a major activity. I remember, even when I was a little kid, the Grange was very active and there were lots of people in it. People from farther north. Lee and Ruth Swan, Charles and Roma Swan, Ben and Lou Jerman, some Sniders. Seems like there were a couple of families of Sniders and Sam and Opal Pittman, Cliff and Maxine Browne were always a major part of that.

BF: There was a Grange or two up north of the river and then back east were Lloyd Lambert and his brothers lived up in there and I don’t know what the name of the Grange was but there was an active Grange up in there.

DP: They’d have their meeting and as you said, the kids were all runnin’ around outside, chasing and whatever.

JF: And nobody worried about them.

DP: No. That is where we called that girl “Pancake Flipper”. Now the adults should have known about that and put a stop to that. They had these programs afterwards and the kids all came in for that. Those were probably phenomenal things that the community did. Recitations of poetry, debates, talks about this or that, a lot of music. I remember there was a barber shop quartet, the Swans and the Sniders, Chet Snider and I think Lee Swan. They were good as I recall.

BF: No, not Lee Swan, I think it was Chet’s brother. Darn right that they were good! Willard Downing and the two Sniders and Chet Hockensmith.

DP: Okay, those names are all familiar. They had debates. I remember Lee Swan was quite a reader and quite a talker and he would give talks sometimes. Then of course skits. Silly, silly skits. My dad and Pete Gentzler used to do a lot of that. My Grandmother Fraim was good at writing these little kinds of skits. Kind of Saturday Night Live type skits. [Laughing] I remember the women did a Black Face presentation. As a matter of fact, they went to the State Grange meeting and did that Black Face. Maxine was musical and my grandmother was musical, a lot of people were very musical. They would tell jokes and sing songs. Of course, that wouldn’t go over today but I remember that. Of course, my mother did that Highland fling dance!!

BF: Well, the neighborhood certainly changed since we have been married.

JF: You know, that little school, I played the piano. There wasn’t anybody else in this community and I

am not that good. I helped with all the programs. I’d go up there and I’d have a baby or two and they sat

in the back row while I would work with those little kids. It was fun.

BF: I remember Delbert and Kenneth Brown and I were on the school board and we’d go over to Nash Finch and we’d buy 50 pounds of nuts and 50 pounds of various candies, and oranges and apples then sack them all up.

JF: We had Easter parties and a lot of times the wind was blowin’ in the ‘50s.

BF: We had a 4-H Club.

DP: Oh yes, I was in 4-H for quite a few years. Sunset 4-H. Were your kids a part of that?

BF: Yes, some of the older ones. Three or four of the older ones.

DP: It was very active for a while. Kapps, Paul and I, Grahams some, Sealey kids who lived up north, Mary Ann and Mona, Marilynn Grimsley, quite a bunch for a while. The Guttridges were part of our club for a while.

JF: At Liberty school, we had track teams and we would go to track meets and all these little rural schools. Blue Bells, we called them Dumb Bells. We printed T-shirts. I don’t remember how we did that then. Probably painted them. The kids all had their T-shirts and usually it was blowin’ dirt. We had fun!

BF: Several of the rural schools, we went over, there was a Mennonite school over by Meade, they had a church and a school and five or six houses there for their teachers. We went over there for track meets several times. They still have the church there, but I know they haven’t got a school now.

JF: Blue Bell, Dumb Bell, that was a song.

DP: East of town too, they had a very active 4-H. And so did Wide-A-Wake. There were three strong 4-H Clubs at that time.

BF: There aren’t any kids in the country anymore. Lynn Schmitt was the only one, his kids all stayed in 4-H. He took lambs to Denver to the stock show for years.

DP: Those were strong community days. Don’t know if we will ever see that again.

JF and BF: No. Afraid not. Well TV –

DP: Yes, I know. The population here, as I drive around there are a lot of houses around here. More than when I lived here, I think. It may be people that have lived in town that have come out.

JF: Yoxall and Farmers. You should buy Yoxall’s house, it is for sale. Move back.

DP: Afraid I don”t have that much money. Too much to take care of. My little house is about right.

End of tape. Appreciation was expressed to Bill and JoAnne for their time and their wonderful stories and memories.

Postscript: Bill died in 2012. JoAnne died in 2017