JM: What do you think of the picture?

CA: I don’t know. It’s a good picture, isn’t it? Someone said, ‘Oh, you sure looked cute when you were young, but you’re pretty good now.’

JM: Do you remember being photographed?

CA: I don’t remember being photographed, but as I look at it, I think I can remember that dress. My neighbor girl, she was in the eighth grade when I was in the first grade, and I got a lot of her hand-me-down clothes.

JM: At the time of that picture, what do you think your life would have been like?

CA: I can’t remember much of it. I went through my diary, and it’s very interesting. A lot of it was written in pencil, and a lot of people were referred to by their initials.

JM: I think most people would think you look thoughtful in that picture, maybe a little sad.

CA: I suppose. I was shy. I was an only child. When I went to school, there were no other kids who were the only child. Maybe it had something to do with that time being the Depression. But my folks had tough times before that. I was born in Seward. My folks lived in town then. They were married seven years when I was born. The first year they were married, they farmed. Her dad had died, and they moved into a small house. Mom worked in a grocery store, and Dad did different things. He was an ice man. He set the tent up for the mortuary. He worked for a nursery, making cuttings to make new trees and bushes. Then they decided to go back out and farm. That was about 1930. Dad owned the 80 where we lived, and Grandma bought an 80 across the road. I remember that it had hailed, and we went out and saw that we had lost the wheat crop. I could see the holes that had been pressed into the ground from the hailstones. We lived on Lincoln Creek. Dad cleared a lot of that land, got rid of the trees, and chopped a lot of wood. People burned a lot of wood in those days, either wood or coal. He sold some of the extra wood. He cut wood all his life. I remember going out there in the evening and he’d burn the stumps and the brush. He used a two-man saw. He was on one end, and Mom was on the other end, at least part of the time. He also had some brothers that helped him.

JM: What kind of work would you have been doing on that farm when you were 10 years old?

CA: Well, I don’t remember now. But I remember some of the other things we did. According to my diary, we had a theater in Utica, and Mom and I would go there. It probably only cost a dime. Then they had free movies once a week out in what was like a park. Someone in town would show them so people would go in and shop, and some would bring in their cream and eggs. In the evening, Dad listened to the radio. He loved boxing. And he subscribed to Successful Farming and Farm Journal. And Mom, she sewed and mended.

JM: What kind of house did you have?

CA: There were six rooms and a closet, but they were very small rooms. I think the house was 28’ x 36’, one floor. Later, Dad dug a cellar underneath it. He had a horse, and he hauled the dirt out of that hole. Then he got some bricks and bricked it up, and made a brick floor. He put some cement steps down to it, and they were pretty steep. Dad built a porch onto the house later so that he could put the cream separator in it. It had been in the corner of their bedroom in the wintertime. In the summer, they’d take it out to the garage. He built a one-car garage. He used it for the washroom. It was right next to the windmill, and he would pump the water, if the windmill wasn’t running, and fill the boiler on top of the woodstove. He’d go out in the morning and heat it up so Mom could wash. She washed about every two weeks. That was the year he got sand and cement and poured sidewalks from the house out to the windmill. It was a real narrow sidewalk; you couldn’t ride a little tricycle on it. And we had a sidewalk to the cave. The toilet was off that way.

JM: Did you have electricity then?

CA: We got it soon after that, in the early ‘40s. It’s in my diary. It says that they were stringing the wires for electricity. And then it says that we bought a Speed Queen washing machine and a refrigerator. But they didn’t have an electric stove till the late ‘40s or early ‘50s.

JM: When did you get indoor plumbing?

CA: Forty-four years ago, when my youngest son was two years old. We got running water at the same time, and then we put in central heat and air conditioning.

JM: Do you remember any tornados?

CA: They had a big one in the ‘40s. It took the roof off the amphitheater in Seward, when they were all out there watching the fireworks on the 4^th of July. The people had to scamper to their cars. It came down within four miles of us, but then it went in another direction. Our neighbors came over and went into the cave with us. We went to the cave quite a few times. That’s where Dad put all his potatoes. He grew lots of potatoes. In my diary, it says he had two wagon loads one year, the wagon that they put the wheat in to take to town. They were 50-bushel wagons. That cave was on the farm when we moved there.