Older People and Their Stories

[fc]

I wonder when you hit the point where you are the old fart with the neat stories?

 

[herfrds]

I miss the stories my in laws would tell me.

They both grew up in the 30's. My MIL's birthday was June 6th. Could never forget that date.
She was born in Kansas. She told me about Black Sunday the day of the Black Blizzard. She said she and her folks had gone out for a drive that day to relax. They were quite a ways from town when the storm blew in. She said she remembers how black it all was and the dust floating inside the car. She said the only reason they made it back safely was her Dad was driving and her Mom was looking out the other window. Driving slowly they were able to see and feel the road.
She talked about them renting places in Kansas, then moved up here to Montana and lived in a couple places before ending up outside of Cut Bank.
She told me they lived in a rather large looking house outside of town. Back then the school teacher would board with different families in the area. She recalled this one teacher that wanted to stay with them, but her Dad said they just didn't have the room. From what she described of the house I'm sure there was no room for the teacher. she was sharing her room with her younger brother, then her parents had their room and then there was the kitchen/living room.
well this upset the teacher and at the end of the year the teacher bought each of the students a nickle Herseys bar, but my MIL and her brother were just given a piece of penny candy. She said she always hated that teacher for that slight. this teacher was from back east.
She also told me a story about a family that lived in the area that had a brown horse they called Brownie. she said they could do anything with this horse. She remembered them putting 6-8 kids on the back of this horse and the one on the end sliding off over the horses tail. she said there was an incident that changed this horse. the guy was riding the horse across the river while it was flooding. The slid off to let the horse swim and he held onto his tail. Well something was under the water and got tangled up in the horses legs and was pulling it under. the horse paniced and started kicking and just kept kicking. The horse killed his owner. the family kept the horse and discovered that you could no longer touch this horses hind legs. One of the kids not knowing this touched his rear and was launched across the barn and into a pile of hay. kid was unhurt, but they stayed away from his rear.
She said they lived at the bottom of a steep hill in a valley area. They had this horse hitched to the wagon and were coming from town with a load of groceries when something broke on the wagon and the wagon slammed into the rear of this horse right as they were coming down. She said they had groceries scattered from the top of the hill to the bottom, but ever after that that horse no longer kicked.

My FIL grew up here in Montana. He had numerous stories about farming out here.
He told me about back in the 60's and the really weird weather they were having. He said everytime they saw a cloud it hailed. there was no hay in the entire area just thistle weeds. He said that is what they cut and baled up to feed their cattle through the winter. He said one day they were over helping a neighbor cut his crop of wheat when they saw one of those clouds come up. So they headed for home. They came back the next day and found the crop gone and when they went to get their combine they found that the hail had ripped off every single oil line on it. He said the swath was 1 mile wide. they had to leave the combine there for a couple weeks while they waited for the new oil lines to come in.
He said another night they had a bad storm come up. The neighbors that were about 3 miles from them hid in their root cellar most of the night. When they finally came out the next morning they found their garage had been turned a 1/4 turn.
He remembered when they used to harvest with a steam engine and a thresher. he told me how they used to ford the Missouri river. they would build up a full head of steam on one side of the ford, then put out the fire and start across. well one didn't get enough steam built up and stalled out in the middle of the river. They had to run some chain out to it and use another engine on the other side to pull it out. Sorry I cannot remember why they had to put out their fires to cross.
My DH and I have in our possesion the wood/coal burning stove his Mom bought from a wagon peddler back in the 1930's. He said she had bought it from the guy for $15 and paid for it with her egg and butter money. She pretty much helped keep this place afloat through the 30's by selling eggs, butter, milk, chickens and turkeys. We found a receipt for the sale of some of her turkeys and I think she sold 8 birds and got $18 for them.

 

[babymakes6]

A steam engine gets very hot. If it gets wet (as in, crossing the river), it very likely will explode.

 

[SacCityChickens]

I'm in my 60's. I remember a conversation with my 88 year old grandmother when I was a teen.
The amazing things she told me were:
All the 'old men war veterans' when she was a girl were 'Civil War Veterans'!
The things that came to pass in her lifetime, were:
electricity, light bulb, automobiles. airplanes, telephones, TV's. Man in space.
All that occured in her lifetime, she died in the late 1960's. R.I.P. Grandmaw!

SCC

 

[newfoundland]

My grandma was born in 1875. She worked from the age of 12 in a cotton mill in Manchester. I remember her telling me that she read about 'Jack the Ripper' in the newspapers and was terrified he would come up and stalk the streets of Manchester. Also she remembered the Titanic sinking as it was only a week after my Mother was born. She was a wonderful grandma, had a very hard life, but lived to be 90. She was so gentle and quiet, I think of her often.