JM: How did you know about these photos?

AC: About five years ago, there was a book called Hope in Hard Times, and that picture of our family was in there. The author (Mary Murphy) didn’t know who they were, so my sister and I went to one of the author’s lectures and told her who we were. I don’t know why the information was never followed up on.

JM: Do you remember being photographed?

AC: No. It was just a year after the flood, and I don’t suppose I was paying much attention.

JM: What flood are you talking about?

AC: I think it was in 1938. There was a heavy rainstorm in the mountains, and there were two creek beds that flooded. All that water came down around where our home was and took the house, the barns, and everything. It sent our big old tractors down the river a ways. Our farm was about three miles out of Laredo.

JM: Did you have to get out real fast?

AC: Yes. Dad saw it coming. He made everybody get out right away. Mom put the baby chicks on the kitchen table so they wouldn’t get wet. That didn’t help any. There were two other families living nearby. I wasn’t there at the time of the flood. I was staying at a friend’s house, with their daughter - their house was about 10 miles from where we were living at the time. And their son was staying at my parents’ home, with my brother.

Dad took most of family by horseback over to the Cooks, who lived higher up on the hill, and left them there. A few of them walked. I married Edward Cook, one of their sons, six years later. Then Dad went back and swam the horse across the creek far enough so that he could get members of the other two families, the Earls and the Couches, and take them up there also. There were over 20 people that the Cooks had to bed down. Some of them slept in cars, some in garages, some in the house.

The Red Cross and the Salvation Army helped us. They got us into an abandoned section house right away. The section house was a large, two-story home that had once housed the depot agent and his family. After the flood, the Red Cross bought the house for us. We had to move it because it was on railroad property. Dad bought a little piece of land a few hundred feet away, and moved the house there. The Couches and the Earls lived with us temporarily until they found homes to move into. We had been in the new house several years when the photographs were taken.

JM: You look pretty happy in the picture. Would your family have been in a happy situation at that time?

AC: I think so. It was just before my youngest brother was born. That was Charles. So he was the only child in the family that wasn’t photographed. I think that’s why Mom wasn’t in it, because she was eight months pregnant and was having an awful time with it. She may have been staying with friends in Havre.

JM: According to the caption, your family apparently got a loan from the Farm Security Administration.

AC: I’m sure they did. I remember that none of Dad’s neighbors wanted to take a loan. They figured that they would just get into debt. But Dad could see that with what he had, he could probably make it alright, and that hard times wouldn’t last forever.

JM: Did the Farm Security Administration loan benefit your family?

AC: It must have. They seemed to do quite well after that.

JM: What kind of farm was it?

AC: It was a Duke’s mixture.

JM: What’s a Duke’s mixture? I‘ve never heard of that term.

AC: That means a little bit of everything. Dad had all kinds of animals, and he did some farming.

JM: Were there any other houses around there then?

AC: There would have been a few. And there was a little grocery store.