Don and Eunice Davis Oral History Interview, November 30, 2007

DON DAVIS: Hello. I'm Donald A. Davis and I was born in 1922 in Corvallis and lived in Blodgett most all my life until I got married and moved to different places.

EUNICE DAVIS: I'm Eunice Davis, and my maiden name was May. I was born in 1923, December 27th, in Alpine, Oregon, at home. I had four older brothers and two older sisters. I was the baby of the family. My four older brothers was Roy, Joe, Sam, and Louis. Then I had older sisters, she was the oldest in the family. Her name was Ruth. My other sister was Florence.

DD: I had a bunch of brothers and sisters. The oldest was Cy, then Ben, Wilma, 00:01:00and myself, then Ernest and Anetta, Bob, Donna, and Phil. They scattered all over the place. Well, we lived on a farm down on Marys River. The Tum Tum River ran right through there. Kids used to play around down on the logs and stuff and it's a wonder we didn't, some of us drown. I remember fell in the river one day and my brother, Ben, pulled me out. I don't know whether I would have made it by myself or not. Anyway, we run up and down the railroad tracks and run around the old mill building down on Aldridge. They were pretty shaky. It's a wonder we didn't get hurt there. One time we crawled up on the water tower that watered 00:02:00the locomotives. My brother pulled a lever and all the water came belching out down the railroad track. Couldn't get the darn water shut off, so we just hop footed away and let it run [laughs]. Went back later to see it washed the rocks away from under the ties and everything, but we had quite a time growing up. My grandparents used to live out at Blodgett. That was mostly my mother's side. They made an unseen deal with some outfit and traded property and went back to Connecticut and they got it, they ended up with pretty much a rocky bunch of property I guess. We went back there when I was about 3 or 4 years old for a 00:03:00visit and stayed for a while and then come back home on a train that cut through Canada. Had quite a visual trip there seeing the country.

On the Davis side, my grandfather was a blacksmith in Philomath. My grandmother was just a homemaker, made quilts and that was about the size of them. My dad and mother, they bought, I guess Dad bought this property, arranged for it anyway, where we was raised and lived right on a railroad track, and in his younger days he, after he was married he went around to the different sawmills and he fired the boilers on some of them. He'd get up early in the morning, he'd 00:04:00build a fire and we'd get the pressure going up and run back home and do the chores and milk a few cows and whatnot. Other than that, it was farm work amongst their neighbors. Him and his brother, Raleigh, they eventually acquired a thrash machine and thrashed the grain around through the country. I helped do that. I ended up being a sack sewer. My mother, she just was a homemaker. She loved to be outdoors working with the cattle and messing around better than doing the housework. So, she was busy raising the kids and taking care of the stuff on the farm. Mother's name was Sarah Boswick. She had 3 brothers, named Bill, Cyrus, and Benjamin. One of the boys was electrocuted. He was working on 00:05:00power lines. Somebody threw a switch that activated the line and it burned him out. My uncle Ben, he was back out here and visit, ended up down here at the Filling Estate as a groundskeeper there for a while before he died. I don't remember what happened to uncle Cy. I know my dad had 2 brothers, Raleigh and Oran. Oran ran a Mobile gas station by Blodgett for a good many years and they had one boy named Will and nicknamed him Pete. Raleigh he had a dairy farm that joined my dad and they had a pasture where they kept their herd bulls and they 00:06:00put the cow in a booth with a little old lock and the job would try to separate the bulls that get out there and they'd fight and raise heck for a while afterward. They had, they registered jerseys and they'd take them to the fairs and show them. Had quite a thing going there. Oran had that station for a good many years. He worked in the lumber industry before that hauling lumber and what not.

ED: Okay, well, my parents they came down here to Oregon from Canada. I was the only that was born in Oregon. The rest of my brothers and sisters were North Dakota and Canada. My parents' names were Charles May and my mother was Susie Hollingsworth May. I was the youngest of 7 and we lived on a little farm out of 00:07:00Alpine where I went to school for 3 years and then went up to Mountain Home for a year. Then we moved up to another little place, up Deadwood, where I was the only student in my class for 4 years. When I graduated from there, there was no high school for me to go to school down there. So, I come up and lived with my sister in Blodgett. Went to Philomath High School, and that's where I met Don. Then we moved back to Cottage Grove, and I went 3 years there, come back and graduated at Philomath High School. That's where, then we was going together pretty steady by then and was married in August 26, 1943. Started our married 00:08:00life there, but when I was little we just, it was during the Depression. I can remember people talking about the Depression. I know my dad and brothers worked for $1 a day with their team of horses, but we never was without food. We raised our own, Dad raised beef and had chickens and we never went hungry. But I know a lot of people that didn't have food during that period of time. But my early years was, I just had fun playing-I was kind of a tomboy following my brothers around and my sisters were 13 and 18 years older than I, so they weren't home. They were out working and I just played with my brothers' friends and always thought I was having a good time. Didn't take much money to have fun in those days. Back to the Depression years, when I was in high school some of the kids 00:09:00that lived in town talked about they didn't have enough to eat and parents couldn't find work.

DD: My mother, she got raising chickens for selling and hatching eggs. I'd have to feed them, of course, chickens on the way to school and I'd usually, I hated feeding the darn things. I'd fool around there, and I'd always get to grade school late in the morning, but nothing ever come of it. It'd get around harvest time, well, I was working the thrashing machine and we worked, my dad, Raleigh, and his kids, they had 2 boys. We'd put in the hay together. They had the machinery between the two of them. They'd mow the hay with two team of horses on 00:10:00each pulling a mower and would shock it and put it in the barn loose. I eventually got to working for some of the other farmers around there. One job as cutting a bunch of vats that laid flat on the ground, and I drove the old boy's team of horses, the mower. Anyway, you'd tell what was cut and what wasn't by the tracks the mower left on top of the vats that was already laying flat. I don't know, they'd run that through the thrashing machine, but a lot of the seeds was split and busted. I guess they paid off a little bit, but they didn't raise that crop again. We'd look over the hillside, Dad was piling it with a team of horses and you'd see the little old black strip across the hillside. 00:11:00He'd got a walking plow. He'd walk behind it. Maybe by the end of the day you'd see a wide enough strip you could tell where he had been. He went from the team of horses to a Fordson tractor that he bought. He figured on getting property eventually and he got a good buy on this deal, an old tractor and a disc and I believe a plow. So, I got to use that around there. He wanted us to use it, figured it was better than having an old tractor and equipment sitting not doing anything. So, eventually he got a Case tractor and their row crop deal. We did a lot of farming with it. We moved from down on the river up along the highway and he bought a farm up there, and did a lot of tractor work then. It went from the 00:12:00thrashing machine for harvesting grain to combine, and that changed things quite a little bit. So, Phil would ride the combine and throw the sacks and kick them down the slide and leave them in 3 or 4 sack bundles to pick up later. On the thrashing machine, we just took the sacks and piled them all on one big wad there, and sometimes they'd load the straw in the shed and sometimes just out open on the ground, they'd have a big straw stack and stock would get into it in the winter months and eat the straw and fill them up.

ED: For electricity, and we had a fruit room that had all insulated with sawdust. It was nice and cool, so they just set the milk in there and let the cream raise and then Mom would skin the cream off and make butter and cheese and 00:13:00like that.

DD: We'd separate the milk and the cream and sling the cream cans on the saddle on the horse and take it down to Alder where there's a little railroad stop and they'd ship the cream into Corvallis. I think it was Winkley's Creamery. I'd go to down, well, they'd stop by and collect the money for their cream and then they, later they got so that Winkley's sold out I think at Green Valley. Every so often they'd take the cream up to my Uncle Raleigh's place and whoever was going to town would take the cream in to deliver it to the creamery, and that was the spending money they had was just from the cream they sold. It didn't 00:14:00amount to much, but they had to get butter from the creamery. I suppose it was probably a better price than normally for other people. Anyway, we had lots of the cream to eat there at home. I always remember eating sliced tomatoes and put sugar and cream on them. A lot of people didn't think of that as being very good, but it really filled the vacant places.

ED: I remember when we were married in 1943 out there at Blodgett, these folks gave us 2 acres of ground down below their farm. We lived in a little trailer, probably 10' long, while we built on our house. By the time he had to go into the service then in '44 we had our house built, and our baby daughter was only 4 00:15:00months old when he had to leave to go into the Navy. She and I, we stayed home there and kept the home fires burning, and he was gone for 2 years in the service. While he was stationed in California, Karen and I went down and stayed down there with him until he shipped out. He was out at sea for 13 days when the war ended. So, we was real happy about that. Then they sent him on to the Philippines and he was over there until it was his turn to come back home. He got back home in 1946 out of the service, discharged.

DD: Yeah, I went to the bootcamp, the boot training at Farragut, Idaho. After 00:16:00everything was over with, we ended up traveling and I took my wife through there, Eunice. We'd go on shore some of the places where we did our training, and I didn't know it but they had torn the camp all down and made it a Boy Scout camp in there. There wasn't even the concrete foundation. They just cleaned everything out of there. So, I went from Farragut to Gulfport, Mississippi to basic engineering and then they had a diesel school there. I went through that. Then they sent me up to Cleveland, Ohio, to an advanced diesel school and that was the best duty I had in there. Would go downtown, we could ride the city transit systems for free and go to movies free and go to the pool halls where 00:17:00they had some contest going. One time we watched the fellas shoot pool. But the people was really good to servicemen there. The guys that did drink could go into the bars and they'd never have to buy a drink. Somebody would pay for it. It was a good, good time in there. When I went overseas we was on a Dutch ship that had been converted from a freighter, I guess. Over the hold, they'd put I think it was 2'x6's with blocks in them for spaces. When I went out of Frisco Bay to head for the Philippines, we'd had pork chops for that evening meal. Those of us were rowing pretty good and the guys were getting sick and burp here 00:18:00and there. Down in the hold where we slept, boy they had GI cans pretty well filled up with vomit and a stinking mess. I'd never seen anything like it before. When I was in bootcamp at Christmastime, some of the fellas who lived close could go home. Most of us didn't. They had put out the biggest bunch of grub I'd ever seen in my life, turkeys, and we just, I don't know, all that good stuff. We'd take a plate and help ourselves with what we wanted and a lot of the kids that had been filing up on stuff from home, the cakes and cookies and candies and whatnot. The boys didn't think they was pretty hungry, their eyes was a lot bigger than their stomach. They'd pitched whole turkey, drumsticks and stuff into the garbage. It'd just make you sick to see it discarded but they 00:19:00couldn't eat it and couldn't take it back. That was the biggest spread of food I've ever seen in my life. Yeah, I had a good time in high school. I'd played baseball. I either pitched or was out in right field. In football, basketball, I'd never got a hold of basketball until I got in high school. I played center for the team and had some good games. When it came to football, we didn't get enough of winning games we went up to Arlington and played for state championship. That was before the river was, the highway was changed up the Columbia River. We went up the what was called the scenic route now.

Anyway, I rode with the coach and I think it was 22 hours from the time we left home to went up and played the game and came back again. That was the longest day I'd ever put in. We won the game 7 to 6. I carried the football through the hole the boys made for me on the right side of center. I made our touchdown, and they told to pass to Frank Ghast, and he caught for an extra point. When they got their heads down, why we fouled up their extra point play. So, that was the game: 7 to 6. Had a lot of fun in sports. That was in 1939, and I graduated in the spring of 1940. My cousin one time we went up there and the leaves had been 00:21:00flying and settled on a pavement. We're on a pretty good curve and the leaves was slick, and we took a little broadside slide there but didn't bump into anything and there wasn't any traffic coming, so we lucked out there. We put in a lot of trips up the Columbia there going to Elkton and Pendleton, La Grande, in that general location of Blue Mountains. I think gas was around, it might have been up to 34 cents a gallon. I don't remember for sure. I remember gas a lot of times was around 25 cents a gallon. It was a lot different than what it is now.

ED: Karen was our firstborn and, like I say, she was only 4 months old when her 00:22:00dad had to be away for a couple of years. Then when he got back, we had another daughter, Connie. She was born in 1947. Two years later, another daughter, Ruth Ann was born in '49. Then four years later we finally had us a boy: Donald Ray. We decided that was family enough, four children. We moved to Alsea when they were quite young. We lived over there for 7 years. Then we moved back to our farm we bought on the Alsea highway, lived out here for 42 years, raised our family, the rest of them up out there. It was a fun place to bring up a family. 00:23:00They're all living here in Benton County now. We're fortunate to have them all close to home.

DD: You want to tell them about Connie and her horses?

ED: Well, they all loved their horses, Connie and Ruth Ann especially. Our son liked to raise beef on the farm. He didn't care for the horses.

DD: Connie used to go out and take of this old boy's horse out on Lobster Road. He could tell that she just loved horses, so he decided to give us this old mare he had. He wanted to talk to us to see if we would accept it, let her have it. Oh, we decided, oh alright. Ended up the old mare was having a colt. He said, well, that was alright. That all went with the deal. There I was stuck with taking care of a horse and a colt both, so we had to get acreage to have place 00:24:00for them to roam around. We had, what did that horse come from we had out on Dad's place.

ED: I don't remember.

DD: Anyway, we had horses on Dad's place in Blodgett up on the highway. We got this 33 acre farm out on the Alsea highway and got the horses home then. The kids, they had a lot of fun on it. I just about had a heart attack one time when Karen was riding this old mare and she decided she wanted to go in the barn and the top wasn't very high. Karen was riding that horse and when in there she just had to lay right back on the backend of the horse to clear the upper part of the 00:25:00door. I didn't know whether there was going to be room for her or not, but she come through in good shape. The barn, it was pretty old and steep rift. They'd rifted with a bunch of low-grade shingles, some of them had blew off it. We had quite a windstorm out there and blew down buildings up and down the valley there and I was out there getting the cow and the milk and opened the gate and a gust of wind hit it in the corner of the barn. It come up skittering out towards me and then fell back in place. An old barn was put together with pegs and pretty well joined together, but anyway, I later pulled the old barn down with a tractor. When I pulled it over, why instead of it collapsing like I figured it 00:26:00would, the end of the rafter stuck in the dirt and the timber's upright and what not came in under the roof and flipped the whole roof from the peak out toward me and the tractor. I thought I was going to get clobbered with that roof, but it missed me about 8' to 10' feet, I guess. Eunice, she was taking out there taking a picture with the movie camera. I don't know what she thought, but it was about as close as a call that I'd had up to that time. Yeah, they fastened the joints of the timbers and stuff together with old pins and hammer them in there and get a good fit. The old barn could move around quite a little bit without collapsing. For Floyd Zeller, he had a little mill in there back of the 00:27:00Cardwell Hill. The truck driver was George Spesus. He was four or five years older than I was, and he was hauling lumber away from the mill and would bring logs back. We worked together until he got appendicitis and they ruptured and he got an infection and died.

So, I took over the truck and hauled the logs away, or the lumber to the mill-lumber away from the mill and the logs back to it. That went on for quite a while. I never did get any raise in pay from when I was just a helper to-I asked Zeller for a little more money, and he said he couldn't do it. He just decreased the pay [inaudible]. So, I looked around and found a better-paying job for work 00:28:00for Ted Harmston down in Nashville. Back up some at the head of the Marys River I hauled logs mostly then in the evening after the quit logging, why I'd haul side stock down along there. The road out of the mill, it would dry down there and then we'd haul it to the planer or ship it from Nashville or different places that had docks. From there, I went to work for Rex Clemens hauling logs. The old tractor, I think it had better than 300,000 miles on it. The valve broke when I was turning it around. I was here at the Mary's River run into the Willamette haul a load of cedar at a shingle mill. That was during the war and 00:29:00they couldn't get parts, so Rex told me, he said he'd like to keep me on the payroll and wanted to know if I tried cutting timber. I said, well, I'd work with Dad out there doing a little horse logging cutting some timber. So, I went out and started bucking and I did that then until my older brothers, they didn't need the HEMTT truck anymore, so they sent us up some fallen timber by hand. We'd work it out of Kings Valley. Allen Creek I think was the place. We felled timber then for quite a little while. We kind of had a little [inaudible] with the bull bucking. Thought we was kind of making rough on the buckers, and so we talked to the buckers and they said they'd made this much money bucking behind 00:30:00Cy and I as they did anybody else. They didn't have any kicks. We, cycle or two is when I went down, Rex, he was down there talking to somebody. We just sat down until he got done talking. Well, he says, what's up with the Davis boys? We told him we just had about all we could take from the bull bucking and we decided we'd just as well quit. Well, he said, he knew the old boy didn't always say things the way he meant them, and he didn't want to keep us busy. Said, how about just go ahead and finish this set and I'll put you off it and you'll go up to your own timber. He had some smaller plots of timber that he wanted cut. We decided to stay there and we went up Woods Creek and fell timber and then we'd 00:31:00buck them and this bull buck, he was a pretty good egg. He'd get over more timber scaling than any guy I'd ever seen. He'd ride up there in the morning to have a day scaling, catch up on our timber. I had a Plymouth sport coupe with a rumble seat in it, where the rear end would bounce up through there one time. It made a pretty rough pace. He got in there and he put his dinner bucket and cork shoes and scaling apparatus in the backseat, and we went up there and the road was pretty rough.

Anyway, his dinner bucket slid over and got over that hole in the bob and the frame and that hammered the dickens out of his dinner bucket and had coffee and a banana and some different stuff in there. It just, a heck of a mess. He got 00:32:00his dinner bucket out to get his shoes and one thing or another and seen what shape it was in, the coffee had drew all around it. It just reminded me of a baby's diaper, that awful mess [laughs]. My golly. Cy and I, we laughed. We [inaudible], he cut timber for a while. We shared our lunches and everything went by pretty good. Cy had, somewhere along the line he bought a red Ford V8 pickup from Rex Clemens. He had it for the White Brothers for crumbing for a while. It got pretty old and wore out. He told Cy he'd sell it to him, but he said he wanted him to promise not to break any speed limits with it. We was 00:33:00going to work one morning and got out in the road that comes across from the house, the highway to Greenberry. One of the spring shackles broke. The spring dropped down to the pavement and we went up a bank and down back onto the highway and then steered it back into the back again. We stopped there. He had a doghouse on the back of it. It upset, broke out the post that fed into the bed. A couple of timber fallers behind us, they got out and checked to see if we was alright. They just about, they was crying and laughing hard and said that's the funniest damn thing they'd ever seen. They went on to work and we turned around and went back home and got repairs so we could go to work some more in that old 00:34:00rig. But it was lucky we had the fella that rode in the back of the pickup to work. His name was Jack Moran. He crawled in there, usually. We had a crosscut saw we hauled in there back and forth sometimes. I was sure glad he wasn't in there to have that little saw wrapped around his ears. We told him the next day what had happened. Well, when the trucks got shot off and Cy and I went to falling timber by hand, we had the old cross cut saws and the springboards and the 12 pound ball we'd use to hammer the wedges with. That was up at this, I think, Allen Creek at Kings Valley. We worked at that quite a little while.

Then Rex got an electric generator to pull out around on the hills. The fella 00:35:00that had this Disston 11-horse chainsaw. It was for sale, so we bought it. Then we went to falling with the chainsaw. We got 2 other fellas to work with us, was Bob Snyder, was Cy's brother-in-law, and Lawrence Cook. He used to log later on for Starker's property. The four of us, we cut timber. Cy and Bob fell and Lawrence and I did the bucking. Then we got one of those little Canadian built one-man bucket saw. They called it a TM. The exhaust just come right straight up from the cylinder and it was a noisy little bugger. Lawrence, he wanted me to run it and he'd do the bucking I couldn't get with that with a crosscut saw. We 00:36:00did that for quite a while until Lawrence quit and went to work with his father-in-law. We'd get on, when we was falling by handsaw, get spring broads and have to cut a hole in the stump to stick the springboard in. One of us would usually get on it and maybe we'd be out in the air there anywhere from 3' to 4' to 10' or 12', maybe. But we never would fall off the spring boards. It was quite a trick to get out there, but I had one tree one time that had fallen straight up the hill. It was fairly steep. So, we decided we'd throw the saw and the springboards below the stump and we had a stump on each side. We'd run out and get behind it, get in the clear. When the tree went, it bucked up across, it laid across some other logs and hopped off the stump. It come sliding back down 00:37:00over the hill when it bucked first. It sounded like a bunch of firecrackers were going off it. We were safe enough we didn't get slapped with any of them. Sometimes we'd get in the pitch. The guys would chop into the seam and leave the tree stand for a day or two or three, whatever it'd take for that pitch to drain out so you could get in there and finish falling it. Some of those pit seams would be better than an inch across, maybe around a third or a quarter of the way around the stump. We had one of them and we'd have to drain over the weekend and then we went back on a Monday to get them down, we'd start to pour the oil on the saw to cut that pitch so we could keep it working. It'd bring the swat 00:38:00right out on your brow.

When we was falling by hand, I worked pretty good. Cy was right handed and I was naturally left handed. Whoever could stand by the side of the stump and swing the old sledge to fall the timber, why he's the one that usually got that job of swinging the 12 pound ball. We was working over by Alsea one time and was using the chainsaw at that time. We got in this big old tree, I suppose it was 5', 6' on the stump. It was probably close to 5'. It was afternoon. We used to carry a plumb bob. He'd try to figure out where we could fall a tree without too much wedging on it. We got to working on that darn thing and it come out to get close to quitting time and we was beating the wedges and sawing and sweating and 00:39:00finally we just decided we better get the heck out of there while we could see where we was going, had the wedges drove all the way in and we still couldn't get it to tumble. The next morning, we got back before anybody else showed up there and went in there and we had more wedges with us then, so we put them in and went to that tree and it just didn't seem like it was harder than any other tree to fall at that time. We got it down before the other guys got in there, but that was a definite no-no to leave a tree that near cut up and leave the thing we stand. We got back out there about daylight to make sure we was in there before anybody else to get it on the ground. I know we used to saw out the undercuts with the chainsaw and then we had this Pulaski. We'd slap it in there 00:40:00and try to break the wood loose, because the saws wouldn't, the curve wouldn't quite come together. Sometimes it'd be chips fly up and hit us in the leg or knee somewhere. We never did get hit in the face, but it was chunks that would fly sometimes.

ED: Is that when you were working for Rex when you went in the Navy?

DD: Yeah.

ED: When you came back did you come back did you go back to work for him or somebody else?

DD: I went to work for Cliff G. then. Yeah, we was working up the, they razed the back of the old Greening place when I had to go to the Navy. We was cutting a place up in there. They built a plank road. It used to be the old choker house down, I guess they call it Cedar Creek. Down them fields, anyway. I don't think 00:41:00it's Floyd Blossburg and can't remember who else was driving truck, but they'd come down that old plank road. They just about made the guy working all the time wanted to keep the planks nailed down. But they'd come down there plopping and banging. When I got back from the Navy, I talked to Rex to see if he had a job for me. He didn't. He said Cliff G., that is his brother-in-law, was getting set up to go into logging. He had us go talk to him. So, he put us to work and they worked for Cliff for quite a few years over in Alsea country up Salmonberry, then ended up he went up in the Cascades, logged I think a set for Simmons.

Anyway, that didn't turn out very good. That was the last logging job he had. He quit logging. He had his little rubber tire tractor he run up and down the road degrading the road, and the brakes didn't work on it worth a hoot. He went up one hill and eventually the log trucks come down and load it. So, he didn't stop to get out of the way and back up and he usually just shoved it into reverse and run back on the compression to keep from going too fast but he missed the gear and he run down the road backwards and the tractor I think tipped over and pretty well buggered him up. He ended up, he lost money and quit logging up there. I think it must have been after that we was starting working one place 00:43:00and then another. I forget who I was working for, but Cy he was cutting up Bummer Creek at that time, worked for Sim Christensen. He was a contract logging for Starker. They needed another cutter, and so I stepped into the hole there and I worked up Bummer Creek for quite a while and then on Tum Tum Tree Farm and over at Soap Creek. We cut up there by the Blodgett Schoolhouse, then across the highway up by, out through there to the old Ewing place. I think out there they wanted us to cut the wolf trees, the big old long-limbed trees that grow here and there. They take up a lot of room.

So, let's see, I think I don't remember where else we did cut. We was up one time towards Marys Peak up in the Shot Pouch area. I finished up an area and stepped in another place and to fall a tree out where they hadn't been dumping any. This was a pretty good sized tree that I fell out through some alders and stuff. When it hit the ground I stepped on it to mark it off. I could hear the limbs and stuff kind of cracking around down below and, what in the world is going on? So I kept my axe and I walked around there to see, and one of them sideways trees hit this deer in the head. It was laying there with blood running 00:45:00out of its mouth and its ears, so I finished it off with the axe and dressed it out and hollered to Cy, quitting time. Told him to come over and help me. He said, what do you need? I said, oh, just come on over. So, he came over there and we drug that deer out. He said, what are you going to do with it? I said, put it back in the rig and haul it home if I don't get stopped. He said, well, if you get stopped just tell them what happened and you're just taking the deer down to turn it in. Well, maybe we'd get away with it. Went down to his place, we skinned and halved it out. I left half for him and I took the other half home and we had fresh venison for a while.

ED: You might not want that on tape [laughs].

DD: [Laughs] Yeah, when I was working up Bummer Creek, they had a bunch of old cedar logs laying out there, and I needed a fence post so I made a deal and I 00:46:00cut quite a bunch of cedar post for my purpose. We cut wood, too, for heating the houses and one thing or another. The road up in there, they haul a bunch of big old, I don't know what you call them, cobblestones or what. They'd haul up and dump them out and then they'd walk them in to this soft, muddy road bit with a Cat to kind of crumble it up. That made pretty good road bed that held up the loaded logs as they'd come out.

ED: When I was a kid and we lived at Alpine we had a flock of guineas. They'd get up on the hill and when they'd come flying down to where the house was, 00:47:00they'd make an awful noise. They were just like watch dogs if they seen anybody. After we bought the farm, Don was having a lot of back trouble and the doctor thought he was going to have to have back surgery, so I decided that I better get a job, because we needed to have an income. We were buying our farm. First I went to work at the laundry for a couple of years, and then a friend of mine talked me into going up to Oregon State food service and applying for a job. She worked there. That was in 1965. The family was all, Karen was out of high school and working. The others kind of took care of little brother, so I thought, well, I needed a job. So, I started there in food service and worked for 25 years there, retired in 1991. That was a good experience in my life, working with all 00:48:00the students and met a lot of nice people. I always felt like I was doing something worthwhile, feeding the students there at Oregon State.

DD: I had an uncle, Fred Johnson, lived out in Coburg. He walked around and finally he had hell cutting trips. Well, he bought a pickup and put a little doghouse on the backend of it so he could get back there and lay down when they was on their hunting trips and somebody else would do the driving. He prepped with that hip for a long time and when my hip went to pot on me, why I'd go to bed at night and roll and toss and tumble for anywhere from 2:00 to 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning before I could go to sleep. They recommended I get me an 00:49:00artificial hip. So, I did. I was supposed to exercise a certain amount. Walk maybe a mile or so a day, so this one day I took my 22 and I went up the highway and walked up one of Starker's logging roads for quite a long ways. I got up in there and I did a little target shooting and come back down and my knee started hurting. Yeah, it just pained pretty darn mean. I picked up a limb to use for a cane and got down to the highway, why I threw it down and made it to the rest of the way to the house. Ended up, had that, that was my right knee was replaced and the left hip had already been done. As time passed, I got to having some 00:50:00pains in that darn hip. I had a broken prosthetic device that was a part that went down in the bone from the hip joint and they x-rayed it several times before it showed the cracking. They had to get into the bone and split the bone and dig all the old cement out to replace it with a new one, and when they got done with that, why, I got around pretty good. Then my other knee started giving me fits, so they put it in, too. I had both knees and the hip replaced. My right hip gives me some problems, but I'm just going to live with that as long as I 00:51:00can, maybe, I hope I never have to have it replaced.

ED: The first hip he had put in, it lasted for 15 years before it broke and they had to take it out and replace it. I fell on the job and damaged my knee and had to have some cartilage taken out of it. In 2004, I had to have a knee replaced. So, I have a total new knee and it's working out real good.

DD: In the process of cutting timber out on Starker's property, a lot of times we'd be working, TJ and Rex Clemens would come along and go and do whatever they were up to doing. TJ, he'd usually have some water jugs with him and stop at the 00:52:00spring and get him some unchlorinated water to drink. He liked that a lot better than drinking the city water. It used to be kind amusing, those two guys, running around together. They'd probably look at timber and one of them didn't want it and the other one didn't buy it, they checked over a lot of the old homesteads or one thing or another. After guys got out of high school, my cousin Pete, he was the only kid in their family and Willard and Homer was Uncle Raleigh's kids. Then there was Cy, Ben, and myself. We had a basketball team that had 1 sub. We'd play different teams around the country and several years we played we never did get beat. Finally we got spreading out and had to take in 00:53:00other players to make our team. Had Forest Porter playing for us and I don't know, Boy Eagleson. We usually played against the team he was on. We had a lot of fun in those days. Johnny Thompson built a new barn and had a floor for dancing and baskets at each end of the floor. We had a bunch of our games there, and then we'd go around playing in different high school gyms. We had some donkey basketball games and the people had a lot of fun watching. Teddy Harmson, from down in Nashville, he was on our donkey team, or we played against a team he was on. I don't remember. The donkey he got on, he'd get on him and that donkey would just pile him up. His face got pretty red before he got done with 00:54:00it. The crowd, they would just talk about it in the later years about how much fun they had watching us guys get out there try to get them darn donkeys to maneuver, have them put the basketball in the basket. It was sure aggravating to ride them crazy things.

ED: It'd fun, though. Well, we passed our 64th wedding anniversary in August this summer, and we hope to be around for quite a few more, but I'd like to say that we're really proud of our 4 kids and their families and 9 kids and 15 great grandkids. Anytime we need help, they're right here to help us out, so it's been a wonderful life. Don't regret anything. Your turn.

DD: Well, I agree with her pretty much 100%. That's about it.