Monte Boggs Oral History Interview, August 2008

MONTE BOGGS: I'm Monte Boggs. I've lived around this country most all my life, for 80 years or so.

GARY BLANCHARD: When were you born?

MB: I was born in 1924, August 11th in Toledo. My family was from here. Anyhow, this is the intersection of Llewellyn and Peterson Road. We're on Peterson Road, and this is the old place where I grew up at. This is the orchard that we'll talk about later on, where the old prune dryer was and all that. We'll cover that later on. Anyhow, this is a storage building where we stored the dried prunes at and allowed them to cure. That's a big walnut tree. There's walnut trees, big walnut trees all around here. There's one that's dead. This was all in prunes. Part of this orchard back from about from where those trees at, 00:01:00clear on back was planted on a 40' spacing of walnut trees and then prune trees was in between, which gave you 3 prune trees to every 1 walnut tree. The idea was when the walnuts got big, the prune trees came out. Well, the walnuts didn't grow very good, so, it left kind of a mess, I think. Up there you see that big tall fir with the top laying out? Our old house sat just to the right of that, or to the north of it. We got that fir tree pretty well dug out when I was a kid. It's a wonder it hasn't fell over by this time. The house is still there, so it ain't fell over. There was some cherries on this place. I see a cherry tree right there, too, by that old building. The orchard is not hardly anything left. There's a prune tree there. There's one or two down 00:02:00the corner. This is some kind of a seedling apple.

Getting back to my parents, my mom's name was Apple and my dad's name was Earl Ray. Everybody called him Blackie. He had dark hair when he was younger. I had a brother by the name of Keith. He's local here, too, in Philomath. Quarter of a mile down this way, across the 40-acre field, I had 2 uncles, bachelors that lived down there. Of course, it's them and dad and them they always worked together. They did all the farm work, the cultivation and all that. That's a lot of work on them prunes. It's a year-round job, because they had the prune and same with cherries and apples. Then harvest. The cherries they had to harvest the cherries. They was always busy working at something. They had some cows. They had to make hay. They had some fields 00:03:00that they farmed for grain. There was always work, lots of work. When these prunes get ripe, take this what we call a shaking pole. It's got a hook onto a limb and shake it and prunes fall off on the ground. Then they'd go around with this bucket here and pick them up, put them in a box, and then they would go out with a horse and wagon and load the boxes up and haul them into the prune dryer.

Now, this happens to be one of my prune picking buckets, one of the original ones. I read them and I see some kind of axel grease was the original bucket on this thing. About 3 ½ bucket full would fill one of these boxes. Most people picked them off 00:04:00on their knees, although some of the women would bend over and pick up and then off their knees and back and forth. These buckets varied in size. This was the ordinary size. Okay, this is a hand truck we used to move boxes of prunes, the stack of boxes of prunes like these here. These are about 69 pounds, box and prunes, 60 pounds of prunes and about 9 pounds of boxes. This thing, pressing this down that brought these in. This one opened it up. I'll repeat it. That locked them on. This one opened it up. This mostly is all homemade. It was made in a forge. 00:05:00There's no cutting torch, no electric weld or anything else. My dad built it all in a forge. Then you line it up the stack of boxes, push that down, tip the whole thing back, move them to where you wanted them, set them down again, push that down. That opened them up. You go get the next. This AGA, I don't know where that came from. Western Oregon Packing Corporation was in Corvallis for many years. It was out where the old Cannery Mall is at now. That was Western 00:06:00Oregon Packing Corporation. Like I said, these are made out of wood. Every year we had to rebuild them. They always got mixed up, different people you'd get a load of empties and you'd have all kinds of and the point was you took so many back and nobody seemed to worry much.

Alright, this place here had a prune dryer and it was noted, this was what they called a Crabtree place. This is the only original box I could find. That's one of the Crabtree boxes. That's what the C is on there for. That predated probably about somewhere in the early '20s when that box was built, so it's been around for a long time. Then there is Western Oregon down there. This center box here is Conser, and I can remember when Dad went out and bought a whole truckload out north of, well, out north of Jefferson then somewhere. 00:07:00I think there's a community out there called Conser.

Okay, this picture here of the prunes on the ground and the girl picking them up is one of the Melby girls over in the Beavercreek. It was done a year after the Columbus Day storm, which would have been 1963. Most all trees back in them days had that kind of a crop on the ground. So, there was a lot of prunes. Some of our pickers could average 50 bushes a day. In fact, Mrs. Melby could, Dave Decker, she could average 50 a day. I think that she one time she made 80 boxes in one day. These are the drying trays. When these prunes came into the docks and then they was put into a washer that washed them 00:08:00and conveyed them up in a little conveyer type deal, and put them on the shaker. They go on these prunes this thing would shake it and a guy taking care of it would kind of make sure everything got filled up. He didn't want no blank spaces in there. Then they was taken here at that time and put into the dryer. But normally they sat on a little cart with wheels on it. They had a whole stack of them. Then when the dryer man pulled the dried ones off down and below, and then he'd call the numbers out on the rows and you'd push them down that far and put new trays on there, prunes fill them up like that.

My uncle, he caught onto the fact that when they dried some of them'd be dry, some of them'd be soft. When they sorted those prunes, they took they'd take the soft ones out and then redry them. Well, he'd just dump them all on another tray 00:09:00and make two or three trays on one and put them back in the dryer and every few hours and everything was dried like it supposed to be. He'd gain a lot of extra space that way and dried more in the dryer. Then when they dried these things, they had a tendency to want to stick because prunes have a lot of syrup in them, sugar. Sugar would come out of prunes, then you'd use this thing and scrape them off. Then from there, after they were in those bins, then they would sort them out and take the soft ones out and the bad ones and whatever they had to do with them. They went different places. Then they went down, they had a grater that had screens on them with different-sized holes. 00:10:00I took the littles ones out and the next size and next size and next size. Then they went from there out to a place that we always called a warehouse. That's where the prunes was dumped and they sat there for 3 weeks or so until they cured. Then they were sacked up into these gunny sacks and sewed up and loaded and sent up to Portland. Then up in Portland, they're on a hand truck, like this hand truck right here, and that guy, they would be about 5 or 6 sacks high. The guy that took the samples would just slice that sack like that [holds up a burlap sack] and get his sample. He'd do that on two of those sacks. Those would end up and we'd get them all back down home again, which nobody used because they were done. 00:11:00They'd take them up, about 8-ton load of prunes up to Portland. Quite a bit of trucking to do.

That pretty much covers the prune dryer, but when that was all over with we had probably 40, 50, 60 sacks of walnuts. We dried those in that dryer, plus some dryer people had some nuts they wanted to dry. Interesting thing about them walnuts back in the '30s, they was under a government program that they had too many of them. They would, if you sold them in the shell, you only got paid for 70% of them. The other 30% was destroyed. But if you shelled them out, cracked them and shelled them out, then you got paid for the whole amount. Of course, Dad wasn't about to give 30% of the crop 00:12:00to the government to throw away. So, many a day was spent hammering those walnuts out and getting the meats out of them, all by hand, too. But Dad could take one of them sacks of walnuts, and about an hour he was set up where he had them right in front of them with a stand between his legs, a piece of pipe up just right, put a nut on it, bang, bang, bang. He'd go through a gunny sack in about an hour's time. Then it took Dad, Slim, Whitey, my mom and us kids on weekends and at nights and take them out of the shells. That took care of the walnuts. Incidentally, there was a walnut dryer up the road from us, too. Gregor, the Rasmustins had a dryer. They had quite a few walnuts and they dried their own walnuts. There was several dryers around. There was ours at the home place. 00:13:00There was one on Crabtree Place. Jay Hendricks had a dryer. Peterson, over in Evergreen had a dryer. There was a dryer in Schreiber's over on Marys River out west of Philomath. There was a lot of prunes in this country. A lot of acreage of prunes and nobody had a dryer. They would have them custom dried. Folks would dry them or Hendricks would dry them. They'd get dried someplace.

Alright, when these prunes came out of my orchard and went up to the dryer, there was a dock that they set on. Several hundred bushes would be on that dock sometimes. These prunes were taken over and dumped into a vat of water that washed them and they had a conveyer that came out of that machine that would put them onto the trays, 00:14:00which, in turn, would shake this tray and we'd level them out on there and make sure the tray would get full so we had a good, full tray. Then the trays sat over onto a little cart with some wheels on it and they put a stack on them so we could move them around. Well, the water came down from up at the house, out of a well, where it was pumped from a well up into a water tower. Then, it would feed out of that water tower clear down to the dryer to be able to wash these things. Well, at night back in them days for some reason we didn't have no electricity. So, to compensate for that, the dryer was plumbed with carbide gas, which is a gas that's made from carbide. It's the same gas, same carbide, that they make the gas for the mines out of. Them little lights 00:15:00that the miners used to carry on their caps, those were the same thing. We had carbide lights down there, but they was a very poor light, and, of course, you couldn't move them around. Then you had these lanterns that you went down to put wood in the stoves and so forth. This one here put out quite a bit of light. This one, not very much, but enough you could tell where you sat it down at when you sat it down someplace. You could find it pretty easy. That took care of the lights. Then the wood. The wood was quite a story about the wood. They'd go out and they'd get stumps somewhere. They'd cut them four-foot lengths and split them. They liked fairly even-sized logs, because they could split them and get 3 or 4 chunks out of them. 200 cords a season they would cut. Then they'd haul it down and put it in the dryer and stack it there 00:16:00and they stacked some over at their second dryer. That was one heck of a lot of work and a lot of wood. Sometimes they'd go to a sawmill and they'd get slab wood, which was a very poor wood but it was better than nothing. They could get it a lot easier and they could split it, regular wood. They would use that to feed the stoves that dried the prunes in the dryer.

This is our old prune dryer at home and it had no electricity. In fact, electricity didn't come until, oh, towards the middle of 1950s. My dad wouldn't sign a right away because he didn't want the power company putting powers and guidelines in the orchard that he had to cultivate and farm around, because they kept the orchard neat, clean. So, we didn't have no electricity in there and 00:17:00everything had to be done by lantern or carbide lights. This was Beavercreek School and it's located about 6 miles south of Philomath. Basically at the intersection of Peterson Road and Decker Road. There's a picture of a class of 1933, basically probably when we started to school in 1932. I'm over here towards the left hand side back 3 or 4 kids in the middle. Some of these are still around the neighborhood, some of these children. We got a change in school teachers this year. We got a male teacher: Clyde Blodgett. If you notice 00:18:00our hair ain't too well combed or anything, as good as it was when we had a woman school teacher. For some reason. I don't understand that. But Clyde just didn't care about combing hair. Quite a few of these children are still floating around today. Here's a picture that was 1931. Here's a picture of it in 2008. Basically, the structure is about the same but there's been some additions on it and a door was widened out, but it's almost identical.

GB: Gary Blanchard. I'm here on the top of Flat Mountain with Monte Boggs. Flat Mountain is a pretty prominent local landmark. It's about 2,600 ft. in elevation. It's at the head of Beavercreek and Monte had a lot of 00:19:00experience with Beavercreek area growing up. Monte, why don't you talk a little bit about that?

MB: Well, I went to school at Beavercreek for all 8 years. There was quite a few kids. They run better than 30 a year down there. A lot of them came from up here in these hills somewhere, but it's hard to say where. I guess there was people lived all up and down some of these canyons, wherever they had water. I suppose water was their main thing, thinking about it. They had wood and everything they needed and plenty of wild game, deer mostly. There was a lot of deer I ate back in them days. When I first started the school, there was 34 kids that year going to that school, one room, one teacher. At that time, in the early '30s, 00:20:00we could still hear the whistles of a train and so forth up here. At that time, they called this railroad grade. In fact, even today, a lot of people refers to it as railroad grade.

GB: Because of all the railroad logging that was done here?

MB: Yes. There's a lot of people, I know you mentioned Flat Mountain, they don't know what you're talking about.

GB: Yeah.

MB: I've run into that several times. But you could hear the logging going on up here. I think Corvallis Logging Company had it, logged it.

GB: I think that's right.

MB: Every once in a while somebody'd get hurt or killed. In fact, one time when a logger up here got killed and the kids was in school and they come, took them out of school, because he got killed that day. Of course, logging was a lot more deadly back in them days than it is now.

GB: Yeah. I guess they came back and forth to work on the train, 00:21:00didn't they?

MB: That's what I understood. When somebody got killed or something they usually took him out on a train in the evening shift, but I don't know how true that is. They wasn't going to run a special train to get out earlier. But I've heard that story many times that they waited until the train run out.

GB: Yeah.

MB: Not many years ago, this was probably all old growth up here, and they took it out by train. No such thing as a logging truck that I know of back in them days. The train run down south and then out into Corvallis. I can remember some of them trains, and they was big logs on there, too. Apparently, it's been logged off and then logged off again and now you see what you got coming up again. I don't know how many times it's really been logged off, but probably twice 00:22:00anyhow from that time. This is my immediate family. I'm on the left by Mom and then my dad, my brother, Keith, and sometime we talked about that big old growth fir. That's right behind us there. They got married in 1923. I was born in 1924. They moved, actually, they moved out to where I live at now in 1927. Then they moved over to the home place in 1928. They lived there until Dad died in 1948 and Mom lived there until sometimes towards the mid-'50s and then she moved into town and they sold the place out there.

I left home when I was 17, my senior year of high school. I'd been to high school 00:23:00about a month, I guess. From there, I went over to the coast and I had friends that moved over there that I went to grade school with. We knew quite a few CC [Civilian Conservation Corps] boys from Marys Peak and some of our local girls married them. Anyhow, after I was over on the coast for a little while, I decided to join the CC camp. I went to Toledo, and back in them days it wasn't hard to do anything like that. Guy wanted to know how old I was. I told him 18. Didn't use 17. I said 18. So, I was a CC boy almost immediately. They paid $30 a month. They furnished all your clothing, all your food and they gave you $7 out of that $30. The rest of it went into a bank and be held for you. Or, it went home if you had 00:24:00a poor family. You got to keep $7 and that was to buy your shaving cream or whatever you used, or your tobacco if you smoked and knick knacks and so forth. I was in a CC camp down below Yachats, and in November we moved up to what's known now as Angel Job Corps Camp, and that was newly built when we moved in there before December towards the end of November and we was in there when war broke out in December 7th. Meanwhile, I kind of forgot about something. We had a chance to finish our high school in the CC. Waldport sent instructors down from Waldport High and they instructed us in our senior year 00:25:00and we got some credits for things that we did in the CC, all the manual arts that they taught in school. We got credits for all of that. That way I got my diploma at Waldport High. That worked out good.

About that time was when I left the CC and I went to work for the City of Waldport Water Department. I worked there for two or three months. Then I went up into the shipyards. There's one of the ships that I worked on, on the oil tankers. A 520 ft. vessel, about 40 ft. beam and I think 39 ft. from bottom up to the main deck. It was the first ship that was built at that shipyard. That was on Swan Island. It was the largest ship that was ever built in this area: 00:26:0016,000 tons. In January it was a real cold spell, they launched it and it was over in the outfit and it got real cold and the engineers that built it that take in consideration the shrinkage of steel, wasn't enough, and it broke in half in the mill. Both ends went down. You could actually row a boat. The bottom part still held together. You could row a boat underneath it. Both ends went down. I was one of the crews that took some of the dignitaries under the boat for them to look at and see what the damage was, and they ended up cutting in two, taking the two halves up to outfitting dock out north Portland and they patched it back together and it sailed the seas all the rest of the war. They used it.

Well, while I was working in the shipyards there, we was on our about fourth ship or so, I guess, 00:27:00in July they drafted me. So, that ended my shipyard working until the war was over. I went from there up to Ft. Lewis and from Ft. Lewis went down to Texas, took my basic training and went from Camp Fannin in Texas and went home on a furlough for 2 weeks and went and reported at Fort Ord, California. From there we was shipped overseas to Hawaii. At Hawaii I joined the 27th Division, 165th Infantry. Then we went to Saipan from there and fought on Saipan. Then from Saipan we went down south of the equator to New Hebrides, kind of a training and relaxation type deal. Then we went left the New Hebrides, went back up north and landed 00:28:00at Okinawa. At Okinawa I got wounded twice, ended up in the hospital at Guam and came back to Okinawa, and then the war more or less got over in August. It got over and they asked, Japanese asked for surrender on the 14th day of August. Pardon me, in the 10th day of August they asked for surrender and the 15th they surrendered. My birthday was on the 11th. In fact, I had a birthday cake there in the camp. We at it that night. We didn't wait until my birthday. On the 15th, that happened to be my brother's birthday, so everything happened kind of neat there. Then the final papers and everything was signed sometime later on, probably into September when they signed them on the battleship. I don't know when. I got discharged. 00:29:00I said I went in there in July, the 31st of July. I got discharged on the 6th day of January of 1946. We went from Okinawa into Japan. We was in Japan for a couple months and then came home and got discharged almost immediately. When I got wounded in Okinawa and went back to Guam, I was there for 5 weeks in Guam. I still hadn't fully recovered. They sent me back to Okinawa. Most anytime, I could walk and get around. I wasn't laid up like that, but I got hit in the back along the backbone and that kind of, it didn't heal up like it should. I got, previously I got burned with phosphorus.

Anyhow, when I got discharged I got an Asiatic-Pacific 00:30:00Service Medal, a good conduct medal, of all things. Most people disagree with that, and a victory medal and a purple heart with one oak leaf cluster, which meant the same thing as two purple hearts. That took care of that pretty well. We had casualties. We had casualties on Okinawa. We was down 35 men one time. In a company of 165, we had 35 men left. We got 35 replacements. In just about a week, most of them was gone. We backed down to 36, 37, somewhere along in there, 35. That's when I got wounded down that stage of the game.

When I got home, I stayed in Portland most of the time. I knew people up there. I went back working shipyard. I worked in shipyards for 2, 3 months, moth-balling LSTs. In fact, right after the war, they mothballed all the ships they could, 00:31:00because I guess they figured on a big war coming along from the Soviet Union. So, they mothballed those ships. All we done, really, is move scaffolding once an hour so the guys with the sandblasters could sandblast the sides. Anyhow, when that ended then I went with people I knew in Portland. They moved down to Coos Bay. I went down to Coos Bay and we built a shop down there and did a little mechanical work. Then I went back up to Portland and a guy that I worked with in the shipyards, he had a garage up there and he sold gasoline and oil and he also was working carpenter work somewhere, and he offered me a chance to take care of the pumps, and I could use the garage for a repair shop, which I did. That was only about, oh 4, or 5 blocks from where Mabel's market was, where she was. I go 00:32:00down to that market and buy the cigarettes and stuff that I really needed and so forth.

Then from there we went ahead and got married, and this is a picture of her and I very shortly after we got married. That's a picture of her market where she was at at that time. Then shortly after that, why, we moved back down here and been here ever since, and that was in late November of 1947 when we came back here. So, we've been married now for almost 62 years and lived right here on the same place for the last 62 years. Here's another picture of her. For the life of me, I don't know where that was taken at, but there it is. 00:33:00Okay, then I went to work on sawmills and what not around here, and I ended up in a machine shop out between Philomath and Corvallis, closer to Philomath and worked for an old guy by the name of Jack Haines. I did most of the welding and he did most all the machine work. He'd run the lays and all that kind of stuff.

Anyhow, TJ came along and wanted us to build a tree planter. So, that's what you're looking at there is a tree planter. There's a picture of Jack Haines, a mighty fine old fellow. Real good machinist. Up in Washington he was listed there in Lamb's. Lamb's Machine Work in Washington was a big, big machine shop. During the war, they made ship 00:34:00propeller shafts and stuff like that, big stuff. Jack was twice in that catalogue as an all-around machinist, which meant that he could walked up to any machine and operated it, and that was quite a thing during that period of time right during the war like that. He was a good machinist and full of ideas and very little education, high school education, but he was a smart man. He could figure good and everything.

Anyhow, we built that tree planter. This is a picture from the year on that tree planter which is what we call packing wheels. The idea of those, you drop a tree and if you look real close on it right in the middle you see a little tree almost in between those packing wheels 00:35:00and that packed the dirt around that tree tight enough so it could, didn't dry out. That was the packing arrangement on that tree planter. This is what we called the plow that plowed the furrow. It was split, so you could drop a tree right in it and the dirt would full right around the wheels and the packing wheels would pack it. That's how you planted trees. A man sat on that seat and he knew, I think they had a counter somewhere. Every so often something would happen. He knew where to drop his tree at to make it come out right without having to measure it or anything. Some places it worked real good and some places it didn't work. This country here, the soil sometimes you got a window that you can plow soil, maybe one day a year. 00:36:00This is a gate of timber, the one we built at [?] canal. One of the biggest differences is this corner post is up in the air higher and the guy come off and run down out this way more, but it's the idea and it's a railroad, a rail gate. This is a little bit different. There are extra holes in there. Now, these gates used to come in a shop quite often, and I imagine he's the one that wanted these gates put in because the pattern, the idea is very similar. 00:37:00It's not like exactly the ones that we built.

GB: TJ used to say his idea was for gates wasn't to keep people out but was to protect the things behind. What he meant was, I think, if people had been responsible, he wouldn't care if they came onto his property. But being irresponsible, like a lot of them were, he was concerned about the damage that they might do or were doing.

MB: They even packed two pieces of rail together here.

GB: I can almost tell you what happened with that patch, and that was that gate was 2 feet shorter at one time and we moved that short post out and added a couple feet on there.

MB: I joined the fire department in 1952. At that time, 00:38:00we had a truck repair shop right across the street in the fire hall. There was a fella by the name of Howard Lootz that owned a service station there and there have been several times when the fire alarm would go and we'd all drop what we were doing and all 3 of us would be gone. Service station was wide open, the shop was wide open, the tools was there and everything, and we'd be out fighting the fire. If somebody wanted something, there wasn't nobody there to buy them gas or anything. We never seemed like we ever had any trouble, but we're looking at quite a few years ago-52 some-odd years ago, and people were a little different back then. I think that people across the street and what not probably kept an eye on what was going on over there. If somebody'd fool around too much, there would have been something happen. People looked out, I think, like that a lot better than they do now. But, there was quite a few people around town. 00:39:00There was Keith, my brother, and Stan Phelps. Quite a few of them Morgans. There was three Morgans in the fire department. One of the Morgans was a fire chief at one time. Roy Scott was the fire chief when I joined. He'd been in there for many, many years. Remington was in there and a lot of those guys are gone now, Fred Plash. It's hard to remember, bringing all those names up all at once, but they were there. I was in the fire department for 29 years and they gave me this thing for volunteering for 29 years.

Yeah, out of all them prune trees 00:40:00we had, there's not one of them left. I took the last one out just this spring. It died last winter, last prune tree I had. It was one that I had planted, too. The original ones was gone before. The Columbus Day storm took a lot of the original ones out and there was three acres of cherries on this place, and I hadn't mentioned that, but there was three acres of Royal Anns, Bings, and Lamberts, mostly Royal Anns. Black Republicans and Governor Woods cherries is on there. Black Republican and Governor Woods were pollinators, and the rest of them were good cherries to sell.

Anyhow, they finally, the cherry price dropped down to nothing, and the trees was a whole, all them trees was way old. They dated back before the '20s, because this house was here probably built in 1919 or so. It went back a long ways on them and them trees was old and I finally, 00:41:00when I decided to give more and more ground for Christmas trees, I have a fella that rents property, Ross Frederickson, to take cherry trees out, take them out of there, and that took care of all that. This right behind us where all the trees are right now, the little fir trees, that was pretty much an orchard that I had set out. Those trees a deer had killed them off, pretty much, and they come up the root and it was mostly plum. It took all those out, then they planted Christmas trees in there so it give them more space for Christmas trees. Well, it was a continuation, was apple orchard that's here. We planted these in about 1955, I guess. There are several different varieties and some varieties I've lost, but these four trees over here that's all grown together 00:42:00kind of, they are, 2/5 are fir trees on the far side and these two are what they call a Red Gravenstein. Right there you can see the apples, the red apples in the tree. They're beginning to get ripe. I forget what this next one is. Then there's another Gravenstein apple and a pear tree and there's an apple behind us. But they're all getting kind of old, too. Sure crop of Gravensteins this year.

This is the southwest corner of Mabel and I's property. We moved here in 1947, so we've been here for quite a few years and the folk's farm that ever since 1928 and the first time I ever lived there, I lived in the old house in 1927 00:43:00for two or three months. I've been here for a long time. This place over here, where the ash and what not is, that used to be a field of oats and stuff in there. Years ago we used to thrash it and had a thrashing machine and binder and thrashed it. We used to thrash this, except this was all in prunes until about 1936. Then they took them all out. Pulled them all out of here, the top of this hill. It wasn't a very good prune, and then they went to plant, oh, at that time before the war they planted a lot of oats and thatch. Thatch was a cover crop. It went down south all the time. You got quite a view from here. You can see the, all clear down the end the Independence neighborhood and follow along that 00:44:00road and that goes on into Philomath. On a clear day, you can see the mountains over there, Mount Jefferson, Three Sisters, real plain, bright. Mount Hood. Can't see them now. It's foggy, smoky. But after they took these trees out, then they planted the grain and what not. We used to bind it with a binder and thrash it out. It's a beautiful view from up here. You can see clear to the north there where the Christmas trees all are.

These trees back behind me was planted toward the end of 1950. 00:45:00They was planted for Christmas trees and they're really close together and never was taken care of and just let grown. They still grew pretty good. Big old firs is down there for years. Our house is down over the side of the hill there. That's just dust down there. Some farmer's farming something down there and making that dust. You're looking over at the evergreen hill. Usually, there's a lot of times, it'll be raining over there and it won't be raining here at all. A lot of times we're completely in the dry. These little fir trees are maybe two years old, 00:46:00going on two years now, but those trees back there, Mabel planted most of them fir trees back in that strip. I worked it down and plowed it and leveled it off and she sat them out. That was quite a few years ago. Neighbor over there planted Christmas trees and cedar and they just grew, and that's what he got out of it. I've always liked the view from up here, and even down at the house it's a pretty nice view, but not as good as is up here. However, I probably don't appreciate it 00:47:00as much as I should because I don't come up here that often. It is one real nice view. The years, lots of fir trees and farm land and clear over toward the north, of course, you got a view of Philomath, the east end of Philomath. It's been a nice place to live for 62 years now, going on 62. My wife and I came here in 1947. It'll be 62 years in November. Things change. Houses change.