THE OZARKS

We left on Lincoln's birthday, 12 February, 1935. Lawrence and I got down into Oregon. We had Jo-Jo with us too. He was our Boston Bull Terrier. We picked up Frank in La Grande, Oregon. Lawrence and I stayed overnight there.

The next day out of La Grande, we ran into a snowstorm. We didn't have any windshield wipers. We found a wrecking yard along the road. The fellow sold us one of those hand wipers for a dollar.

Then, on down into Oregon a ways, we stopped at one of those tourist cabins where you could get a cabin for a dollar a night. It was still bad weather.

I remember at that time Oregon had a law that didn't allow margarine to be sold in the state. You had to buy butter. When the old couple, who ran the tourist cabins found out we were from Washington state, they said, "I just wish we'd known you were coming, and we'd have had you bring us some margin. We can't buy any here."

We got out to the middle of Kansas and burned out a con rod on the old Overland. It was on Sunday morning and we were out in the middle of the country. We didn't know what to do.

There was an old shack of a farmhouse about half a mile away, so I told the boys, "You go up there and see if you can find anything in the shape of leather. I'm going to pull the pan off the crankcase and will see what we can do."

They went up there and the only thing they could find was an old horse collar that had some leather on it. I took the con rod off and wrapped that piece of leather around it and put it back on. We started on to the nearest town which was about twelve miles away. When we got to town, we found a little garage, but it was closed on Sunday. We had a tent with us so we camped all night beside the garage. The next morning when it opened we went up and told the man our story. He just couldn't believe it. I said, "Well, we did it and got into town. It knocked but it didn't hurt anything with the leather around there and I drove slow."

He took it in the garage and pulled it down. He said, "I'll have to wire to St. Louis for parts. I don't have any parts for this old thing." I ask, "How long will it take?"

He said, "Well, I'll wire today, and we probably will get it tomorrow. So it will be about three days before we can get it running."

We said, "Okay."

We had our tent so we just stayed there until he got the thing running.

We then drove on into Texas County. We came in to Mountain View from the west, about three o'clock in the morning. They had told us to take Highway 17 up to Arroll road and come in that way. Well, we couldn't find Highway 17. We drove around and still couldn't find it. Everything was locked up but finally we found a bakery that was open. A man was in there baking for the next morning. We went in and inquired. He said, "Well, Highway 17 is about a mile on the east."

We drove on east and found it. Then we drove to the Arroll road and on to Marion's place. We got there just a little after daylight.

We went on over to Lester and Gladys' place. That spring I stayed with Lester. Frank and Lawrence both went over and stayed on the Reed place that they had traded for.

Lester was splitting posts and rails to make fences. Lester and I split enough rails to put a rail fence around forty acres that spring. We were all busy. We had a sawmill and we sawed out a bunch of boards for some fencing. Then we decided to build a house on my place. The house on our place wasn't very livable. So we decided to build a house and to do that we first sawed out the lumber. We also put in some crops and a big garden.

In June, Peg and the kids, Barbara and Jack, came back. Before I left Washington I had bought a 1925 Maxwell, the last model they built--the same as Jack Benny's. Then just before I got fired from North Coast, I had traded it in on a Model A Ford. That's what Peg drove back to Missouri, with a trailer behind.

Pearl Reed helped her pack the trailer. While we were living out at the Kent place, Dad and I built a two-wheeled trailer to haul feed and stuff in. We had three hundred chickens, a pig and a cow to feed. Anyhow, that was the trailer Peg pulled back.

It was 1935 when we moved to Missouri. We had rain and fair crops that year but the next year, 1936, was a drought, hot and dry. Marion had an old Chevrolet truck that he bought in Washington and brought back when he came to Missouri. It was still in pretty good shape. He and Chris Padberg had gone down by Springfield to work in one of those camps that veterans could work in. He left his old truck there for me that summer. I had to haul water from Jack's Fork River for Lottie, Lester's and us. We tried not to have to haul water for the stock but we had a bull that we kept on a leash the we had to water. We also hauled water for the pigs and chickens. Most of the stock we drove over to the old Wilkie pond, over by Padberg's farm. After taking them over there a few times the cows got so they would go over by themselves. It was open range country. Then we would have to hunt them up at night. Our water supply was from cisterns and ponds and they were all dry.

I remember Vera Toll sent one of their kids to ask if I would haul her some water. We went down to the river and got five barrels of water and dumped into her cistern.

One time, when I was riding old Prince, chasing a cow down back of our place, I broke my collar bone. There was a leaning tree that the cow went under. I tried to make Prince go around it but instead he followed the cow under it and I broke my shoulder.

Times were hard, we didn't have much income from the farm, so for a year or two I ran a Sunday paper route. Marion had had the route and when he moved away, we took it over. It was a Springfield paper; the Springfield Ledger, I think. The daily paper went out in the mail but the Sunday paper had to be delivered and we had to collect for the whole deal. It was quite an experience because we picked up the paper real early in the morning in Summersville then went north to deliver to about sixty-five customers. We tried to get the route run in time to get back to church. Most of the time we did. We had to contact people to collect from but sometimes they were still in bed. But we made out okay. I think we cleared about five or six dollars a week after paying for the gasoline and all.

We raised some sorghum cane and had a sorghum mill over on Lester's place. We had an open shed with a roof where we cooked the juice into sorghum. We made sorghum for ourselves and all the neighbors. We found out that it took a lot of time to clean up at night and get started again in the morning. We got the Reeds to come over and help us. We started making sorghum day and night without stopping until we made it all up. We made several hundred gallons that fall. This was shortly after we moved to the Ozarks. It was the only year we ran it all night, but we made sorghum other years. The kids used to play in the pomace pile, the part of the cane that was left after the juice was squeezed out. The mill that extracted the juice was powered by a horse or mule that was harnessed to a big sweep arm so that the animal went around and around in a circle to run the mill.

We had a saw mill to saw our own lumber. There was a sawmill on Lester's place when we went there. It was run by a steam boiler sitting side by side with a steam engine on it. We had to fire that. When Lester and Marion both left and went to work at defense plants, "Happy" Langford came and borrowed the mill. They move it all away. Later Claire was down in the Ozarks and spent some time with us. He and I got the sawmill back, but it didn't have the old steam engine. It was gone. I don't remember what happened to it. Anyhow, we got the sawmill back. We went to a junk yard and bought a Buick automobile motor and hooked that to it. We ran it with that gasoline engine. That's the sawmill Peg got her finger cut off in.

Lester got a job in Summersville building houses and I worked with him. I had never done much carpenter work before. I remember I had worked with him several days, when one night Peg asked me how I was getting along. I said, "I must be satisfying him because I haven't heard him do any complaining." Then later he told Peg I was doing a pretty good job.

Later we started building stone houses. We built two or three houses for Dr. McDaniels, a couple for Marion, one for Jim Nelson and one out west of Summersville for Renfroes. When we built the house for the Nelson's, we cut down the trees off his place. We took them to a sawmill--we didn't saw them--and then built his house from that lumber. We picked up rocks off the fields and rocked up the house on the outside. He had eighty acres. We split posts, bought barbed wire and fenced his whole eighty acres. The whole bill was a little less than $2,500. Lester was making thirty-five cents an hour. The rest of us got twenty-five cents per hour.

When Lester and Marion left to go into defense work, I did a little bit of carpenter work around; but not much. When I tried to get fifty cents an hour, I had no luck. I did anything I could to earn some money. We could live off the farm, but we needed money for any extras. By this time we had electricity, so we had an electric bill to pay.

The first few years that they had W.P.A., I worked a little bit on W.P.A. projects. Lee Toll and I rode horses over to Arroll and worked there. There was another place over beyond Arroll where there was a school house. We tore the roof off and repaired it. I think we got $3.50 a day or something like that.

I had worked several weeks, then one day our foreman, who came from Houston (Missouri), came over and said, "I'm sorry, but you've been cut off."

I said, "What's the matter?"

He replied, "Well, when they got to investigating the records, they found out you have too much property and stock to be entitled to the job."

There were fellows working there that could have bought and sold me a dozen times. Anyhow, I got cut off from W.P.A. work.

One summer, the Bell school, our school district, wanted a new cistern dug. They had one cistern but wanted another one. I contracted that I'd dig the cistern: sixteen feet deep, eight feet across at the bottom, plastered with concrete inside, with a concrete curb on top and dispose of the dirt--all for thirty-five dollars. I did it and took the thirty-five dollars I got and bought nine spools of barbed wire. We had eighty acres. Forty of it was fenced and forty wasn't. I got the wire to fence that forty acres but we left before I got it done.

The last year or two we lived in the Ozarks, Peg and I sponsored a play night once a week over at the Bell school yard. We'd go over to the school on Saturday night and the young people would come in and play games and have a big time.

Before that, we had community sings at the school house. People would walk and carry their kerosene lanterns to light their way home.

We first started going to church at the Union Sunday School held at the school house. They use David C. Cook materials. They put me in as Sunday School Superintendent one year. I said, "Well, if I'm going to be Sunday School Superintendent, I'm going to get some material I like." I ordered some material from the Herald House. It didn't go over too well because before long they decided to break away and have separate services. Ruth Padberg was instrumental in the separation.

The RLDS members met at the school after the other group had their service. As they would be coming out of their meeting we would be gathering for ours. Sometimes they would come out singing, "When the Saints Come Marching In."

I remember when we were still going to the union meetings, every Sunday night different ministers from the area around would come in to preach. Lester used to take his turn at it. I think it was one night when Lester was preaching, at the close of the service, a fellow got up and said, "I'd like to make an announcement. Next Sunday, I'm going to preach." Then he misquoted some scripture he said he was going to use for a text. He wasn't a minister at all.

Chris Padberg told me afterward, "I don't know what he is going to tell us, but I've heard him use all the profanity under the sun. He used to work the road gang with me. He could swear to beat any fellow I ever heard. I don't know what he'll tell us."

I was ordained a priest while we lived in Washington. I think Marion and I were ordained at the same time. I was ordained an elder shortly before we left south Missouri. They didn't have a pastor at the time and I was acting pastor. Clinton Fields would come down sometimes to help us out. He was an elder who lived at Elk Creek. After we moved away, the branch of the church at Bell was disorganized, the building sold and later made into a dwelling. Then, sometime later, a branch was organized at Mountain View.

Everyone around was moving away to go into defense work or something. Mother and Dad and we were the only ones of the family left. We kind of got itchy feet to move closer to Zion. I told the folks, "I have a notion to sell out."

They said, "Well, why don't you sell the whole place if you can."

I got hold of Lee Toll and was talking to him about selling.

He said, "I have a sister and brother-in-law who live in California who might be interested in your property. Why don't you write him and tell him what you've got?" I wrote down what I had and I showed it to Lee.

"You sure make it sound awfully good," he said.

I said, "Did I tell anything that wasn't true?"

"No," he said, "but it sure sounds better than it looks."

He sent the letter and the Correls were interested. Casey and Eddith Correl bought our eighty-acre place. Their daughter and son-in-law bought Dad's forty acre place that lay next to ours.