WORLD WAR II WAS ON—WE WENT TO CALIFORNIA
Well, the Great Depression was not something we would want to live through again, but all in all it wasn't so bad. We were broke, but then, so were our neighbors. We had plenty to eat and wear—and we had each other. The lean years seemed to bring us even closer together; we had to stay together, we didn't have enough money to go our separate ways. And of course we had our children.
Dennis was ten and Anita was eight when Larry became one of the family in 1942. And then when he was six weeks old, the little tyke almost left us for good. He was one sick little baby. We took him to a chiropractor who gave him adjustments and told us to feed him goat's milk. I drove all over the country looking for a goat that was giving milk. After finding one I kept looking for more goats that would be giving milk after the first one stopped. It took awhile, but then I found a man with a whole herd of goats. He didn't need them because he was going to war, so we bought all twelve of them.
When we sold out a year later and went to California to get into war work, we bought goat's milk on the way out there and for eight months after we got there. In El Paso we bought milk from a man who owned a herd of registered goats. He sold goats for as much as $80 each. The ones we had at Royston were of the $4 variety. I was glad the El Paso milk wasn't registered; we couldn't have afforded it.
Bill Carriker, a neighbor at Royston, said Larry was sure going to be mad when he grew up and learned that his mama had been a goat.
When our two oldest kids were little bitty kids, and we had this two-holer off down there under the shade of a mesquite tree, Ima said to me one day, "I wish you would go down there and peep and see what those kids are doing. They've been in there a long time. No telling what they're doing in there."
I peeped, all right, and found them just sitting there, doing their thing and talking with each other.
As our country got deeper into World War II, the quality of kerosene went way down. It didn't burn well enough in our Servel refrigerator to make the box cold, and it left a lot of soot on the wick. So I mixed white gasoline with the kerosene to bring the quality back up. I told my neighbors the good news but they were afraid to mix the gasoline in. So they suffered with warm refrigerators while we enjoyed cold luxury. Again I was out front, but my neighbors thought I was crazy.
We heated our Royston home with oil. It was much more convenient than wood. And although we had plenty of wood, the oil proved to be cheaper than hauling and bothering with the wood.
We had an oil heating stove that heated all four rooms of our house. It would burn used lube oil with just a little kerosene mixed with it. Some filling stations in Hamlin saved their used oil for us. We lighted our heater in the fall and didn't shut it off until spring. I kept an expense account one winter and our entire fuel bill was $12.