The Stories Of Our Life: July 2008

This is one of those, "Don't try this at home" stories!
In 1933, my father, Bob Barnes, was fifteen years old and living in Long Beach, California, with his mother and step-father, Jessie and William Michael. One evening, his Mother was cooking pork chops for dinner, when an earthquake hit. It was so strong a quake that the apartment building that they lived in shook down around them. After they had run outside, stepping over the rubble of bricks on the ground, they could see into the apartments upstairs, where the walls had fallen down. It scared him so badly that he a fifteen year old young man, slept in the bed with his parents that night.
After the quake, they had to move to North Long Beach and a different place to live. Father started going to school at Wilson High School and it was a status school. All the kids wore fancy clothes and saddle shoes and he just had blue jeans and tennis shoes. He didn’t fit in. He decided to quit school and go to Iowa, where his Dad was living. After he had saved up $10.75 and wearing his Boy Scout shirt, neckerchief and hat,

he started for Iowa, hitchhiking. He ended up hopping a freight train and had quite an adventure riding the rails from Long Beach, California, to Des Moines, Iowa. This photo was taken about 1929, it shows him in his Scout uniform. You grandkids, look the places up on a map and see how far he had to travel by jumping into freight cars. He said, in his story, that he went through Barstow, California, Alamogordo, New Mexico, and some place in Texas. What other places might he have gone through to get to Des Moines, Iowa?
When he got to Buckeye, Iowa, where his sister lived, he helped out around the place as much as he could but he finally decided to get a job, working on a farm. He was hired by a dairy farmer, who knew his parents, for $10.00 a month, room and board and laundry.

This picture shows Auntie Ruth, Father's sister, with their Dad, his Mother and her first child, my cousin Jack, who was killed in WWII. It was taken about 1926, in Iowa.
One of the first things the farmer asked Father to do, was go out and open the barn doors and bring the cows in. Well, he climbed over the fence and started out but there was a bull standing there in the yard and the bull started to paw the ground and snort and he suddenly took off chasing Father. Well, Father turned on a dime and high tailed it for the fence and jumped to the other side. He said he “cleared that fence by a country mile”.
The farmer came up and said, “I thought I told you to get those cows in!”
“Well”, said Father, “that bull run me off!”
The farmer said, “We’ll have to teach him a lesson!”
So they went out to the barn and the farmer got a pitch fork and gave it to Father. “Now”, said he, “you stand right here in the barn door and when that bull comes for you again and he will come again, you jab him up by the horns, with the pitch fork. Don’t you hit him in the eyes though! Then when he turns around, you jab him again in the butt!”(Would you have stood in the door while the bull was charging you?)
So Father stood in the doorway and when the bull charged him again, he took the pitchfork and jabbed him up by the horns. That bull turned and when he did, Father gave him a jab in the rear end. Well, the bull took off running and Father chased him. He gave him a jab with the pitchfork every time he took a jump. He said he never drew blood, just gave him a stick that scared him.
That bull never bothered Father again!
By the way, look at the bottom of the right side of the Boy Scout picture at the small bucket. When we were kids and when Grandpa Barnes was a kid, we put our garbage into those cans. By the end of the week or when the garbage man picked them up, they stunk to high heaven!

I always wondered when this picture was taken, it is in front of some barn doors, so I guess it COULD have been taken in Iowa when Father worked on the farm there.

I'm choosing to tell you a little bit about what my life was like, in the summer, as a kid instead of my favorite vacation. Hope you don't mind.

Mother and Father liked to fish and hunt. We would start school in Idaho and go to school there until the hunting season was over, then we would go to California. We lived in a series of rented houses in California, until we bought our home in Los Altos, CA. We would go to school in California until fishing season opened in Idaho, when we would again pack up and leave for Idaho. We finished school in Idaho (which us kids thought was great because school there closed before

school in CA closed) and then we camped out all summer.

We camped in various places and in various ways. Usually we had a tent for the kids and Mother and Father slept in a small travel trailer. Our family was big on camping and with the Carters, Mother’s family, it was a way of life. One time we went camping to the Big Smokey, in Idaho, with Grandma and Grandpa Carter, Aunt Jennie and Uncle Goldie, Jennie’s daughter, Beulah and her husband Percy Herrera, their son, Lyal, maybe our cousin Clayton Richardson, Mother and Father, Roberta, Kathy and I. We fished and played. (The picture above on the left, shows us with Grandpa Charlie on top and r to l - Mindy Boyce, Father, Kathy, Mother peeking through, Percy Herera, Aunt Jennie, gpa's sister, Uncle Goldie, her husband and ?) We dug a hole in Paradise Creek and dammed it up to make a swimming hole. That water was right off Big Smokey and cold enough to freeze anything. What it froze was us! How in the world we ever even stayed in the water long enough to dam it up, I don’t know. Pretty fun huh? We thought so. I was out fishing with Father that trip when I thought I had my line caught on a stump or something. I called Father to help me get it un-stuck and he came to my rescue for the hundredth time. Long story short, it turned out to be the biggest fish I ever caught. It was about a 2 pound trout with the most beautiful pink meat you ever saw. We called it a Dolly Varden. Don’t know if that was the true name but this is a TRUE fish story. It was also on this trip that I learned the saying, "When the trailer's a rockin', don't come a knockin"! You can figure that one out for yourself. It took me awhile.

We had a place in McCall, ID, a beautiful lot with a tent house on it. We had to be careful when it rained not to touch the sides of the tent or it would leak. We had to take our clothes away from the side of the tent so that the tent or tent house wouldn’t leak and get us or our clothes wet. We hated it when we had to sleep in a tent in the rain!
(Picture on right was taken in McCall at the camp ground. L side of table, Joel Boyce, Jackie Corbridge, cousin, Roberta, Charlie Bradshaw, cousin, Kathy. Grandma Mike and Grandma Corbridge at head of table. R side of table Barbara, Martha Boyce, German girl, Susie Boyce)
There was a little round mirror hanging on a tree where ever we went. The first thing that went up was the mirror. We had to wash in icy cold water most of the time but we had our priorities straight. We had our mirror.
One thing that is memorable in a scary way was camping out in West Yellowstone at the Madison River Campground. Mother and Father would be in the trailer and we would be in our TENT. The bear and moose would be wandering around at night and we would hear the bears raiding the trash cans . We were too afraid to call out for our parents because we didn’t want the bears to hear us. To this day, I have a mortal fear of sleeping in a tent where the bears roam!

When we were camping one year in the Madison River Camp ground, Grandma and Grandpa Corbridge, Aunt Billie and her daughters, Jeneane and Sue came and camped with us. Jeneane and Sue were so cool. They did their hair every night and they knew how to fix it in the morning. They dressed nice etc. Of course, they were older than us so everything they did was great. Being the sweet little girls that we were, we hatched a plan. We had been catching frogs on the river that day and we collected a bunch of them and that night we snuck into their tent and put frogs in Jeneane and Sue’s bed, then we waited with eager anticipation for the screams. We were not disappointed! Needless to say, we got in big trouble for that little trick. How could we be such stinkers when we were such nice girls?
That same summer, we went over to Preston, Idaho, to Grandpa Corbridges parent’s house. We called his mother, Little Grandma Corbridge. Well we walked into this small, frame, farm house and there was Grandpa laying on his stomach on a sofa. Roberta walked over to him and slapped him on the rear end and said, "Hi Grandpa!" Well, Grandpa must have come off the couch about six inches and almost started crying. He was recovering from hemorrhoid surgery, which was why he was laying on his stomach. There was a lot of scrambling around and Roberta was whisked away to the kitchen. Remember the little black wood stove that I have. Well, Little Grandma had one just like it in the kitchen only it was full size. She was still cooking on it when I was a young girl, about 11 or 12 years old. That would have been in the 1950s. This picture shows Grandpa Corbridge and his parents at their place in Preston, Idaho.

One more thing I want to tell you about Little Grandma and Grandpa Corbridge’s place. That’s where I got to help kill chickens. Someone, probably Grandpa Corbridge, would chop the heads off the chickens and then let their bodies run around headless before falling to the ground. Then someone else, I think it must have been Mother or Grandma Corbridge, would dip the dead chickens into boiling water. Then everyone else pulled feathers off. It’s a stinky job because wet feathers are pretty strong smelling. I do remember though that it was Little Grandma who showed us how to get all the little pin feathers. Another never to be forgotten lesson in the life of Barbara Barnes.
On our trips to Idaho, we would take turns riding in the car with Mother, or riding in the truck with Father. The car always had the back seat packed so that it was one big bed. Mother and Father would pack it up pretty evenly and then put blankets over the whole thing and make a bed. There were the three of us girls and we always got to buy candy and comic books for the trip and we had a pretty good time. We always stopped in the desert to shoot. Father would get his gun out and let us shoot the 22 or a BB gun. He would set up cans or sticks for us to shoot at. We got to be pretty good shots. We were as good as the boys he never had. We also set up cans in the side yard at Grandma and Grandpa Carter’s house and practiced with our BB gun. When we ran out of BBs we would go to the store about a half a block away and buy them (if we had the money) Our Carter cousins, would come over and shoot with us and we always held our own with them. (Lyal and Clayton…BOYS!)

I remember one trip to Idaho, when I was riding in the truck with Father, it was night time and we were looking at the stars. Father taught me the different planet names. He used a name to help me remember them…Vem J. Sun P.
V – Venus
E – Earth
M – Mars
J – Jupiter
S – Saturn
U – Uranus
N – Neptune
P – Pluto
Now, Pluto is not even recognized as a planet, so the name, Vem J. Sun works perfectly!
Grandpa Charlie taught Father the house painting business and he took to it like a duck to water! Father specialized in oiling log cabins and that took us to resort towns for the summer. We lived where the rich people lived but we camped out. We spent the summers in Pond’s Lodge, ID, West Yellowstone, MT, McCall, ID etc. Roberta and I helped Father with painting occasionally. We hauled paint hoses around and did the gofer work. There was a spray paint compressor on the back of the pick-up truck. Father would go up to the door and ask if they wanted their logs oiled and then if they wanted it, he would look the place over and quote a price. He got lots of jobs so he must have had a good spiel.
It was when I was helping Father with painting that I learned to drive. I was 12 years old when he first started teaching me to drive. He would wait until we were on a dirt road out in the country and then stop the car and let me drive. (There was a lot of coaxing and saying, "Please let me drive Father, please!) When I was 12 or 13 years old, he told me I could move Mother’s car and I backed over a stump. I was showing off for a cute boy, but it sure backfired on me. I tore the oil pan off the bottom of the car. I felt terrible but I don’t think I got in much trouble for that one. The escapade that had me grounded for the rest of the summer, was when we "borrowed" a car and took it into town. I better tell you about Martha and Susie Boyce before I go on.
We met the Boyce family camping at the State Camp Ground in McCall, ID. Lynn Boyce had been divorced and his children were put in foster homes. We met them the first summer that Lynn and his kids were back together. Lynn was a teacher and had the summer off. They were camping at the camp ground too, I think. They ended up buying a lot there in McCall and Lynn started a cabin. He built it himself. He was a big red headed guy, very funny and fun. He built an outhouse on the back of the lot with only three sides! It faced a mountain and was humiliating to use. We always heard noises in the woods when we were there doing our thing. Anyway, he had four kids, Martha, who was my age, Susie, who was Roberta’s age, Mindy who was Kathy’s age and Joel who I think came between Susie and Mindy. We went on hikes, looked for boys, swam in the lake, looked for boys, picked huckleberries, looked for boys, played golf,

looked for boys, anything girls do we did and we always were on the look-out for cute BOYS! We tried skinny dipping in the lake at night, (NO BOYS!) made picnics, went hiking and tried to get lost (never succeeded) and we stole Lynn’s car!
One day Lynn had to go somewhere and he left the girls at home. (And this is one reason why you kids were never allowed to go to other kid’s homes when their parents weren’t there!) We were all at the cabin and we wanted to go to town. Martha had the keys to the car but I guess she didn’t know how to drive it. I said I could drive but didn’t have a license. We decided to go ahead and take the car and go to town. It must have been temporary insanity. It was Martha and I and Roberta and Susie. Well, it was a stick shift and I couldn’t get it out of first gear so we drove in first gear all the way to town. When we got to town we either discovered that we needed gas or there were some cute boys at the gas station. I managed to get into the station and I think that’s when Father caught up with us. He must have been driving by and noticed us in the gas station, he walked up to the car and jerked me out of that driver’s seat before I knew what hit me. He parked Lynn’s car and drove Martha and Susie home and then it was my turn. I know I got put on restriction for the rest of the summer but I talked to Roberta and she said that she just remembered that I REALLY got in big trouble and she didn’t. That’s probably pretty fair, I was the one driving and she was a younger sister, with Susie in the back seat.
Another thing that happened to me in that camp ground in McCall, had to do with a snake. My cousin Charles "Charley" Bradshaw, was there one time and he came up to me and put his arm around me casually. I didn’t think anything of it at the time but a few seconds later, Mother came up and pointing at my light pink sweater, she asked, "what’s that?" I looked down and went into hysterics. Real, honest to goodness hysterics! Evidently Charlie found a dead snake and he had draped it around my neck when he put his arm around me. I was scared to death of snakes before that and that just added to my fear. Pretty funny huh? Charley was really sorry…afterwards.
Water always played a big part in our summer fun. At the lake in McCall, we fished and made rafts, dove into the water and had a ball. We got to go water skiing occasionally and here is a pic of a bunch of us at McCall. We dove into the river and were successful at spearing suckers and white fish in the Madison River, in West Yellowstone, Montana. The only thing was, we used wiener roasting forks and they didn’t have barbs on them. We could never land a fish. In the morning, there would be dead fish floating on the water. Pretty bad huh? There was a pond that we went to in Hailey.

I think it was when we stayed on some land owned by Owen Simpson. He had the Warm Springs Ranch and it was near there. You can see our camp in the picture to the right. Our trailer is the one to the right and the one on the left is Jack and Edith Van Ausdelen. He was one of Father's best friends. We called them Aunt Edith and Uncle Jack. There was a cold creek behind those trees and we washed many a time in that cold water! Brrr! Anyway, the pond where we played was sort of shallow and mossy, a place to wade and we made a raft there too. We did tubing on the river in Hailey too.
When we were in McCall, Idaho, on Saturdays we went to Kriegbaums Hot Springs for our weekly bath. It was a place where there was a hot springs and Mr. Kriegbaum had discovered these pools and hollowed out a drain and made these big wooden plugs for the water to be let out. You waited your turn and then when it was your turn, if the water hadn’t completely drained out from the former occupants, you sat and waited until it did. The pools were covered with flimsy shacks and you didn’t want to take all your clothes off until you had the plug back in and the water was pretty high. Teenage girls are very sensitive about things like that. Anyway, we got our once-a-week bath at Kriegbaums the girls in one and Father in the other, and then we went to church in McCall, on Sunday with Mother. Church was held in an upper room in some wooden frame building and I just remember that the floors were weathered gray wood and there were folding chairs. There were also smoke jumpers, (BOYS!) the number depended on how many fires there were going on at the time. The other thing that I remember about church there is that I developed a love of a certain song. I loved to sing, "Before Thee Lord, I Bow My Head." I could sing the alto part and I loved the harmony. To this day, that is one of my favorites.
Oh yes, between the camp ground where we stayed and a place where we could go to swim and shop at a small store, there was…a smoke jumper’s camp! We loved to walk through the camp but it was always empty when we did. Mother must have known the schedule and only let us walk through there when the smoke jumpers were out. (Here's a picture of me standing on the dock at that swimming place Father would meet guys in town and invite some of them to our campfire at night. We loved that but mostly they just talked to Father about hunting and fishing. He’s pretty good at telling stories and we were pretty young, 12 and 14y old, but a couple times a week we had cute guys at the campfire! This required hairdos and lipstick and all the other artifices that we could think of. Roberta fell in love with one of the smoke jumpers, Gordon Livingston, though and I fell for a forestry guy, named ...are you ready for this? Woody! We were both too young but it was pretty dramatic and exciting for us.
When we were camping in McCall, Father taught us how to make figure four traps or just plain boxes with a string. We baited them and waited until chipmunks came to get the goods. We captured a bunch of chipmunks and squirrels and Father made a cage for them. Then we set off to take them home to Long Beach with us. When we got to the corner of Pacific and Pacific Coast Highway in Long Beach, we had an accident. Some of the livestock got away and we wailed, seeing our summer’s work escaping. One summer, we brought home some Bantam chickens and were shocked to wake up one morning, along with the neighbors, to one of our chickens greeting the dawn with a hoarse cock a doodle doo. One of the little Banty chickens was a little Banty rooster! Woops!
As I said before, when we stayed in McCall, ID, we spent the summer playing in the lake, hiking, looking for boys, fishing etc, etc. One thing I didn’t tell about is picking huckleberries. Huckleberries are about the size of a small blueberry and you find them on bushes in the woods. You can imagine how long it takes to pick a small bucket of huckleberries! Well, Mother canned huckleberries in the summer and then we had huckleberry pancakes, huckleberry cobbler and huckleberry syrup, at home in California in the winter. We loved all these delicious things but we got tired of picking huckleberries pretty fast and there was a lot of whining and oh Mother, do we have to? Here is a picture of Mother and I in camp.
Now, there were times when we went on our own to pick huckleberries but those berries never saw the light of day. We ate as we picked. We could usually find little, wild strawberries, the size of the end of my little finger and those we just popped into our mouth as soon as we found them.

After we moved to a house in Los Altos, California, one of the daring things that we used to do is go skinny dipping in Grandma and Grandpa Corbridges swimming pool. We never went without getting permission from them and our parents but it was pretty racy stuff. We had to make sure that we weren’t seen by Von, the single male tenant who lived in the apartment next door to the pool. Hopefully Von never knew the scandalous way we behaved. Our parents and grandparents knew though. I think on those days when we said that we didn't have ANYTHING to do, they would egg us on just to get us out of their hair. We sure didn't think of skinny dipping on our own.
There were pool parties at Grandma and Grandpa’s pool too, with all the cousins. This is me diving and Larry Hoffman, cousin, and Roberta.
We dove for these huge marbles that Grandma and Grandpa had on the bottom of the pool.
There was a barbeque built into the cabana that was just in front of the pool and there were picnic tables in the cabana. Then in the pool area, there was a room with a sliding glass door, where people could sit and eat and talk and watch the swimmers. Above, you can see Aunt Hallie, with camera, Mother, sitting, Uncle Herb, sitting and Uncle Ross standing in the pool room. There was also a bathroom and shower on the left as you walked in the door to the pool. We had a lot of fun there with our family and cousins.
Mother and Father loved to fish and sometimes that meant that we either went with them for hours of fishing, miles from anywhere, or we stayed home (camp) and waited. I remember a time that Mother and Father went fishing on the Salmon river and left us in camp. As often happened, a storm blew up and we had thunder and lightening. We were so scared! We sat in the trailer and exchanged reasons that our parents were soooo mean and didn't love us, while the storm howled around us. How could they leave us like that? Well, they got back and didn't have any sympathy. THEY THOUGHT WE SHOULD HAVE GONE WITH THEM! They didn't have a storm where they went.

Our summers were a long vacation every year. We sat in tents and shivered with fright for fear of bears and moose, played in lakes, ponds and rivers, went on hikes, tubed on the river, sat around a campfire every night, washed in icy cold water, fished, picked huckleberries, had fun, got into trouble...and when we got home...it was like heaven! We appreciated our house with running water and the HUGE mirror in the bathroom and beds to sleep on, a closet to hang our clothes in that we didn't have to worry about leaking rain getting everything wet. We thought it was GREAT and we thought it was TERRIBLE!