Howard and Irene Young - Family Home Evening, Oct. 29, 1979

[Glenn Young] Family Home Evening, October 29, 1979, Sunday.  Grandma and Grandpa Young are going to tell us about when they were young, what life was like.

[Irene Young] What do you want to know boys?

[Amy Young] How old were you when you got your own car?  [Irene] I've never had a car.  But you mean a family car?  [Amy] Yes.  [Irene] I was somewhere about the same age you are.  I would guess around 10, 11, somewhere through there.  It was a Model T Ford and you wouldn't believe it, but it had sticks to pull back and forth.  [Linda Young] Oh, it didn't have a steering wheel?  [Irene] Yes, it had a steering wheel, but these were gears of some kind, for shifting weren't they?  Do you remember the old Model T's?  [Howard Young] Yes, it had one lever on the left hand side between your leg and the body.  There wasn't a door by the steering wheel.  You either had to come in from the other side and slide over the seat, or else you had to climb over the side and down under the steering wheel.  [Irene] I don't remember that.  But I know it was sure wonderful because we'd been walking to church and everywhere else and it was fun.  But you know one interesting thing about those old Model T Fords?  They wouldn't go up hills very good.  We'd get to the bottom of the hill and Dad learned to turn it around backwards and then he'd back it up the hill.  It would go up that way.  Lots of times, we had to get out and push it.  [Howard] Do you know why that was?  [Irene] No, I don't.  [Howard] Because it had a gravity feed fuel system that didn't have fuel pumps on it and the gas tank was under the front seat.  When you got the front end of the car higher than where the gas tank was, the gas wouldn't flow up into the carburetor.  So if you turned around and backed up the hill, the gas tank was higher than the carburetor and the gas would run in it.  I've seen that done dozens of times.  Who was the first guy that thought about that, I don't know, but that's why they backed them up the hill.  Because there was no pump on there.  [Linda] That's funny.  [Howard] Uncle Johnny Barfus had an old Model T Ford and Yego[?] hill from Downey went North and East.  It was an old dirt road and when you got out in those foothills, the roads went up and down over every ridge like that.  There was one steep hill and whenever he got to Yego Hill, there was a place you turned around and backed the old Ford up to the top then he turned around and drive forward again to get to his place.

[Irene] Another thing, I don't know if you know what a running board is, they have them on some of the new cars now.  You've noticed them on pickups, just short ones.  Well that would run from where the fender went over the back wheel up to where the fender would go over the front wheel.  We used to stand on the fender and hold onto the sides to ride on it sometimes because there wasn't enough room for all of us.

[Linda] Grandpa, how old were you when Grandma and Grandpa Young got a car?  [Howard] They never owned a car.  [Linda] Is that right?  [Howard] While I was going to high school, Brig worked for an old bachelor that had a big dry farm and he'd go and work for him all summer driving six or eight head of horses.  He saved his money and went to Logan and bought a Chevrolet touring car.  Now this was like the Model Ts, it didn't have windows in the sides.   It just had the lower--just like your car out here--the bottom part of the door.  From there to the roof was open, and then the roof was cloth.  Just like a convertible top only it was a solid cloth top.  Brig went to Logan and bought this Chevrolet.  It was a touring car, like Model A Fords.  That was the first car that we had.  This was about the year I was a senior in high school.  He got it in the fall.  It was the next spring, a time or two, that he let me drive it to high school.  I was really up in style.  [Linda] Well, so, did Grandma and Grandpa Young never ever in their entire life... [Howard] We tried to get Dad to drive a car and he said "No, if I'm going anywhere, I'll hook old Butch and Prince on the buggy and that's the way I'll go."  No, he was scared to death of a car.  [Glenn] Did he drive to Thatcher from Preston?  I remember he was with our family a time or two.  [Howard] He never drove a car.  We never got him under the steering wheel in his life.  [Linda] So you would take them places where they wanted to go if they couldn't walk or...  [Howard] Yes.  Either Brig or I would go and take them.  [Linda] I never thought about them there being...  [Howard] Well there was lots of cars then.  Everybody had a car but us, practically.  But Dad, he just was scared to death.

[Irene] You know, when I think back, I must have been a lot younger then that because Roland is approximately ten years older than I am.  In the neighborhood of that.  He was nowhere near twenty when we had the car.  I moved to Swan Lake when I was five and it must have been soon after that because it was in Swan Lake when we first got a car.

[Linda] Tell us about your house now.  [Irene] OK.  Well the house was a four room.  There were two bedrooms, a back porch, a little room we used for a front room, and a big kitchen.  It had a big round table in the kitchen where we'd all sit around.  We could sit twenty down at once on that, when the leaves were in that big table.  That's what we fed, most of the time.  Summer, winter, because--well not winter so much as summer because Dad always had cousins and stuff there.  Mother did, some of her sister's children were always with us.  Then they always had a hired man or two.  [Linda] So did you all sleep--that was when there was all eleven that you had there...  [Irene] No, we had two double beds in one bedroom, that the girls slept in, and there was a little--you had to go outside and up around and on top of the house, kind of, off from the hill, and that was where the boys slept and then the hired men slept and then we nearly always in the summer time had--Dad built some platforms and boarded up about three feet and put a tent over the top for outdoor sleeping.  That's where the hired men slept in the summer time.  In the winter, they slept in that room in the house.  Then we had a sheep herder and he usually stayed in the sheep camp.

[Irene] Mother used to bake eight loaves of bread a day.  A day.  [Linda] So is that what she mostly did?  She did the cooking while you guys cleaned and did the wash and stuff?  [Irene] Well, we worked together on it.  [Linda] It looks to me like you would have to cook all day to feed that many people.  [Irene] You had to--it was pretty much.  That, and we always had chickens to tend and gather eggs and so on.  That was my chores and I used to carry two big buckets of eggs, one on each side, back to the house.  Then we'd have to sit in the evening and wash them.  That's all the time I was growing up.  That's what put me to school and fed us--put shoes on our feet, when we wore them.

[Linda] What was your question, Matthew?  [Matthew Young] What kind of things did they have back there?  What were the prices?  [Irene] Oh gee.  You pay a dollar and a quarter for a pair of overalls.  Butter was ten cents a pound.  Eggs were about ten cents a dozen.  We sold a lot of eggs for ten cents a dozen.  Mother used to make butter and take it to town, for ten cents.  That was kind of before I remember, though.  Then we'd go to town once a week to buy our groceries and Mother would usually go.

[Linda] Bryon, what was your question?  [Bryon Young] What kind of horses were there?  [Irene] Horses?  We had a pony, a sorrel pony mare, and she was as gentle and as tame as anything you'd ever see.  Until she'd have a colt and then boy would she get mean.  She used to buffalo us.  One time we put the saddle on backwards and boy did we ever get spanked for that.  Dad said that's no way to treat a horse and boy we didn't ever do it again.  I remember one time I was on a bank and I tried to jump to get onto the horse and I missed and went scooting right underneath its stomach.  She just stood there.  She was a good old horse.  We used to take her to go get the cows and wade her through that swamp so we wouldn't have to wade through.

[Linda] How long did Grandpa Young keep horses then?  [Howard] Well, until the buggy we had.  He took that buggy to Thatcher.  There was dirt roads and when the roads were bad, he'd hook the team on the buggy and Mother would drive it to Primary down to the school house.  She drove, and that was after we moved to Thatcher, when the roads would be too muddy to go with the car.  I don't know.  That old buggy, I guess down in that junk yard, it just finally fell to pieces with the wheels rotted away.  [Irene] These kids fooled with it and...  [Glenn] That was one that was given to us by--was it Wright, who lived down there almost to Millens, right where that little...  [Howard] Yeah, Ken Wright.  [Irene] Oh, well anyway, Lou Land finally got that, didn't he?  [Glenn] There was an old one down there but it had rotted apart.  Then there was a horse drawn manure spreader.  We took the seat off of that and put it on this buggy because this buggy didn't have a seat.  [Irene] That's how you did it?  I was going to tell you, when I first went to Thatcher, the road from--between Manhart's and where...  [Howard] Bartlemay's [sp.?]  [Irene] Bartlemay's now live, used to get so icky.  It was clay, and I remember once, the wheel of the car, it just stuck on that till it just came out just like an ice cream cone.  Right on the edge of the wheel.  The wheel stopped turning.  It just couldn't handle it anymore and we'd have to get out and dig it off before we could even back up.  [Howard] Yes, a shovel and dig that clay off the wheels and back up a little bit and clean the ruts out and then you could go.  But that was the stickiest. It'd just stick there like it was glue.  [Irene] Finally they put cinders and gravel on the roads until they became good roads.  But I can remember how bad that used to be.  [Glenn] It seems like I remember a school bus going off the road.  It got off the edge and just sunk.  [Irene] I imagine so.

[Amy] Grandma, what kind of schools did you go to?  [Irene] Well I guess I was lucky.  I went to a two room school where there were three or four grades in a room.  I think there were eight of us in our class that I went to grade school with there in Swan Lake.  You used to have to take examinations by the State and the State would send out written questions and we'd have to write them down and answer them.  If we didn't, we didn't pass.  One year, we'd had a poor teacher and he didn't have the kids ready and they all failed.  So the next year we had a double class in one--had two classes in one.  We had a big group that way.  [Linda] So would you go like they do now?  From August to June or did you just go...  [Irene] About eight months.  [Howard] About from the middle of September and it would last till...  [Irene] Even when I started to teach they were only teaching eight months.  School was only running eight months because the first year that I taught, I made $75 dollars a month for eight months.  There was no insurance, no anything.  [Howard] Nothing.  [Linda] Isn't that $600 dollars a year?  [Irene] Oh and I was rich.  I bought me a cedar chest.  I bought me some tailor-made clothes.

[Linda] So how did you get to school?  When you were a kid, did you ride a horse, or did you...  [Irene] I was right in the middle of our family and the older brothers and sisters of mine went to Logan and went to school with...  [Howard] That was high school wasn't it?  [Irene] ...lived with Grandma and Grandpa in high school.  Well actually Dorothy left before.  She went out and was tending kids with Aunt Irene.  Opal went to Denver and stayed with Aunt Erma and helped tend her kids.  Those two were just enough older that the aunts wanted baby sitters.  I think Opal came for high school two years.  And I think Dorothy went for two or three years.  She went to high school in Opal [maybe Oxford?].  But, by the time I came along, they started bus routes and I went to Downey.  [Howard] You were the first one in the family.  [Irene] I was the first one in the family that went to Downey to school.  I'd have to get to Swan Lake, either walk or go by horseback.  Then I'd get on the bus in Swan Lake and go on the other twelve miles to school.  But sometimes when I'd ride the horse, it was so cold Mother would put a blanket over the horse.  Then I'd roll it around my legs.  I'd get up there and the tips of my fingers would freeze.  I had my hands frozen two or three times and old Mrs. Hadley [sp.?] would take me in when she'd see me coming and help me thaw my hands out and make the bus wait for me.  She said "I don't care.  The girl's not going to get on the bus till she's thawed out!"  Then they'd take of my horse for me.  I'd tie it up at the fence and they'd either have it in the barn or take care of it until I'd come home.  Then I'd go on back home.  That was two miles that I had to do that.  But I walked it lots and lots of times.

[Amy] What kind of bus did you ride?  [Irene] Well, that's another good question.  We had what we called the "Stink Bug."  It was before they made commercial school buses.  This was a big bus that they had used to transport men to work.  It was painted black.  I remember the wheels was way up under it because it had such a long end to the back of it, sticking out over the back wheels.  That's why we called it the "Stink Bug."  One time we were going down the road and a wheel came off.  We saw the wheel going down the road faster than we were.  Boy can you imagine how that driver must have strained to hold that busload of kids on the road, so we wouldn't tip over?  He did, and no one got hurt.  But we had to go chase the tire and bring it back and put the wheel back on again.  [Amy] What did it look like?  [Irene] It was pretty square looking, it wasn't streamlined and roundish on the corners like the buses today.  It was kind of funny looking.  [Glenn] Did it have windows?  [Irene] Yes, it had windows.  But the engine was out in front, it wasn't built...

[Howard] The first school bus that they had over to Thatcher--they just take a truck without any box on it.  Then they build a box out of wood and maybe put just a window in each side.  And put wooden benches in there--nail them to the floor.  Just a flat wooden bench like the bench you have to your table up to St. Anthony.  You'd just sit on that old hard board and went bouncing over the gravel roads.  No heater back there.  The driver was up in the cab of the truck and the kids rode back in the back.  Just like you'd haul your cows to market back there.  [Irene] You used to have sleigh, just a wagon box, and they'd put a tarp over it that looked a little bit like a sheep camp, and put it on runners, in the winter time when I was going to grade school.  We'd get in there and go down the road, with horses, you know, they took this in the winter time.  One time we tipped over.  One of the sleigh runners run up over a big high snow drift.  Whang!  That thing tipped over.  We drug a little ways before we stopped, but no one was hurt.  We didn't ever have a fire, a little stove, or anything in it with us.  Some of them used to do that, but we didn't.  So we didn't burn up or anything.  We got out of there OK.

[Linda] So did you go to school, Grandpa?  Did you go to school in Preston?  [Howard] The first two years.  I went right there in town.  That school house was a two-story.  And there was four classrooms on each floor.  So there was all eight grades were in there.  Then when we moved out to the Fifth Ward, it was a two room schoolhouse.  They had first, second, third, and fourth grades in one room and fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth in the other.  Normally each row would be a grade.  If there was any overflow, maybe the next grade or the one below, there'd be an empty seat.  That student in that grade would sit in the row of another grade.  The teacher I had in the lower room was my cousin, in the third and fourth grade.  In the big room, that's what we called it, I had the same teacher for all four years.  He drove an old Model T Ford from Cove, Utah up there every day to teach school.  I don't know how he got along in the winter, I can't remember.  But he taught, so they must of kept the roads open.  [Linda] Cove is quite a ways.  [Howard] Yeah.  But he'd--from Cove up there East of Preston.  But we lived a mile from the school house.  Sometimes Dad would take us and sometimes we'd ride on old Butch.  That was an old bay work horse.  Then, when the weather was good, usually we walked.  When I graduated from the eighth grade, there was four boys and one girl in the class.  That was our class.  Now how would you guys like to sit in a room with four rows of benches and over here would be the fifth grade and up here would be the eighth grade?  You'd sit there, when the teacher wasn't working with your class, you'd be listening to the eighth grade up here part of the day and the fifth grade down here the other part of the day.

[Linda] So then did you go to high school after you finished there?  [Howard] Yeah.  Then, to go to high school, it was three miles.  I rode a saddle horse three miles over and three miles back, unless we walked.  Once, when the weather was good in the spring and that, some of the kids would walk over and back.  [Irene] Well when I went, I had to go earlier than the bus in order to catch the main bus to go on to Downey.  So that's how come I had to ride a horse.  There was only two of us, another girl and myself.  Then she moved to town, so that left me.  It wasn't until there were more in the family, till there were four students, that the bus would come and get us.  [Howard] It wouldn't come for one student.  [Irene] It wouldn't come for one or two, they had to have four.  [Linda] So how far was it to Downey?  [Irene] To Swan Lake it was two miles.  [Linda] From Swan Lake to Downey.  [Irene] About ten miles, I guess.  [Linda] That's quite a ways.  [Irene] Yeah.

[Amy] What kind of things did you guys play with?  [Irene] Haven't you heard me talk about making my own marbles?  [Howard] Let me tell them one thing.  Now you guys eat school lunch or else you come home from school.  When I went, out there in that old two-room schoolhouse, Mother would wrap our lunches in paper and tie them with string and the only place we had to put them--there was a coat hall, a cloak room with hooks on both sides and a window in the end.  The only place we had to put our lunch was in that window in the end.  Wrapped up in that brown paper, it'd dry out till you couldn't hardly choke it down in the summer and in the winter it'd freeze.  That was our hot lunches.  Two slices of bread with eggs or meat or jelly or whatever we wanted.  That was our lunch.  So don't ever think you have it tough with your hot lunch program.  And some of that bread...  [Irene] I used to sometimes take the sandwiches out of mine and fill my bucket with--I had a little lard bucket that I took my lunch in a lot of times--and I'd fill it with apples.  Then I'd trade the apples for something else to eat when I got to school.  Well, the kids, they liked apples.  [Linda] Sounds like a good plan.

[Linda] You'll have to tell us about your marbles now.  [Irene] Well, we used to have a lot of marbles, but I wasn't a good marble player.  I thought I was.  I wanted to be.  So I'd lose my marbles, my good ones that Mom and Dad would buy for me, and then when I'd run out, I'd have to make my own.  I used to use clay.  We'd go out on the hill and it was good clay over there.  We'd roll them and roll them until they were just perfectly round and packed hard and then lay them out in the window.  In the sun, you know, outside on the ledge of the window and let them dry.  Then we would get them, and always as they'd dry, they'd have one little flat place on them, you know.  So you'd get out there and shoot your marbles and it'd bang into the side of the building and it'd break open.  That's all right, we'd go make us some more.

[Irene] Then we used to play Guinea [sp?].  This last year in school, I made a guinea and a paddle and I taught the kids and the kids kind of liked it.  We played in school.  [Linda] So what's that?  I don't know what it is.  [Irene] Well, you whittle out a stick that's pointed on both ends.  It's about four or five inches...  [Howard] A broom handle.  [Irene] ...four or five inches long.  And it's out of broom handle and pointed on each end so that when you hit the end of it...  [Howard] Whittle the end sharp.  [Irene] When you hit the end of it, it will flip.  As it flipped, you'd knock it with a bat.  The farther away from the circle, or where you were tossing it to, the more jumps it'd take to get to it.  You'd measure your score by the jumps it would take from the guinea back to the circle where you were pitching.  That's how you scored.  If you made it in as many jumps, then the other team got to score.  If they didn't, well you could add up.  Say, like I gave you three jumps, and they couldn't make it, I could add three points to my score.  But if they made it, they got the three points.  Then it was their turn.  [Linda] So you would knock this thing from the middle of the circle as far as it would go.  Then the other team would say "We'll give you five jumps to get it."  [Irene] No.  I would do that.  [Linda] Oh.  You would say "I think I can get it in..."  [Irene] I'll give you five jumps for that.  So they would try it and if they could make it, they got the score.  [Glenn] Then they would kick it in the air and bat it back?  [Irene] No.  You would put it up in the air and then bat it and you could double the score by hitting it up in the air.  Usually you had three hits to hit the end of that.  You know, flip the guinea three times.  If I knocked it away from the circle a ways.  Then, if I could, when I was good at it, on the third hit I'd knock it up and hit it like this.  I could double it if I hit it once, triple it if I hit it the second time, four times it if I hit it again.  You couldn't very often do it more than twice, though.  [Linda] What were you hitting it with, a paddle?  [Howard] A flat strip of wood.  [Irene] A paddle that I used to use from a side of a crate or a box.  You know, just a thin piece about a quarter of an inch.  We didn't use to have plywood.  [Linda] So you would lay this guinea just down on the ground?  [Howard] Yeah.  [Linda] And whack it with the end of the...  [Howard] You hit one of those pointed ends and that would make it jump up in the air.  Then when it was coming down, you swung at it with this paddle and knocked it just as far as you could knock it.  [Irene] In my history, I've written the rules down for these.  [Linda] Oh good.  [Glenn] How did they get it back?  The same way?  [Howard] No, you'd have to go pack it back and start over.  [Irene] Well, we'd have a circle we'd draw, about a fifteen inch circle we'd draw on the ground.  Then we'd walk four steps away and draw a line.  That was the tossing point, to toss the guinea to the circle.  If it went in the middle, you didn't get any hits.  You were out.  If it went on the line, you got one hit.  If it went on the outside of the circle, you got three hits to knock it away.  The farther you could knock it, boy we just really used to swing that and knock it fifty feet or so away, you know, in the three hits.  Then you had starts and stops.  You could jump one and then go back and jump again and then mark it and go back and jump again with starts and stops.  Or you could just leg it off, you know, by jumping as far as you could.  [Howard] You had different rules than we did.  I think every community made their own rules.  [Irene] But it was a fun game and it was...  [Linda] You played that too, but just different?  [Irene] Uh huh.  [Howard] Yeah.  [5 seconds or so of tape lost]  [Irene] ...they didn't have the money to buy them.

[Sandra] Was that all that you played?  [Linda] Let Grandpa tell how he played it.  [Irene] Marbles and guineas, and then we did a lot of high jumping and running and relay racing and Black Tom and Pop Pop [sp?]  Pull Away.  [Glenn] I saw a [sports] letter that Grandma had, I think basketball and track.  [Irene] Yeah.  [Glenn] That must have been in high school.  [Irene] Yeah, it was in high school.  That was during the time when they used to let girls play and I did that.  [Howard] I lived out in the country and I never saw a basketball game or a football game till I went to high school. The first basketball game I went to, I couldn't figure out how they were scoring.  Only I knew when the ball went through the basket, that it would score.  That was really something.

[Irene] Now, is there any other questions you want to ask?  Maybe we've carried on a little too long.  [Matthew] What kind of clothes did you wear?  [Irene] That was a good one.  I had one dress that I remember.  I don't know how long it lasted.  I must have grown out of it sooner or later.  But it was a blue serge.  It was made out of one of somebody's old dresses.  I'd wear that five days a week, Linda.  Then it'd get cleaned up and I'd do it again.  I don't remember, but I know there for a while we were pretty poor and then I usually had one or two cotton dresses besides that old blue serge.  Oh, how I hated that thing.  [Linda] But you never wore pants or anything, did you?  [Howard] No, no.  [Irene] Bloomers.  Bloomers come to your knees, but no...  [Howard] Slacks.  [Irene] No slacks.  I can remember one time, when Mother was making me a dress, it was a full circle.  Oh, I just knew that would be great but I bawled because she wouldn't make it above my knees.  She put it right to my knees.  That was a long dress.  That was while I was still in grade school.  [Howard] Well the boys don't, Matthew, they wore Levi's, just...  [Irene] Or overalls.  [Howard] Just like the Levi's are now.  Or else bib overalls like these girls wear.  Taken up where they--blue denim, or dress pants.  [Linda] So you didn't wear knickers or knee pants or anything like that.  [Howard] Well, not to go to school.  No just...  [Irene] Just little boys.  [Howard] Just the size of Andrew.

[Irene] Let me tell you just one more interesting thing.  We used to make the bloomers, the underpants for girls, come clear to your knees.  They were about like those knickers.  You know, there was a ruffle here and a ruffle here...  [Howard] They had elastic, didn't they?  [Irene] Elastic around the legs and elastic around the top.  But they'd make them out of flour sacks.  Sometimes, you couldn't get all of the flour sack... [tape ends on side 1]

[tape starts on side 2]  [Howard] ...in grade school, I think everyone was about in the same fix but we lived three miles out of town. Well when we went to high school, the town kids really looked down on the country kids but there was country kids from all the areas around for--well, Mink creek was about 15 miles away.  Riverdale was about six or eight and down to Fairview, that was south of Preston, that was four or five.  Those kids, to go to high school, their parents would come up to Preston and rent a room in somebody's house for them to live in and stay there and go to school.  They had to fix their own meals and get themselves to school.  Some of those Preston kids, I still can't feel good toward them because of the way they acted, those town kids.  [Irene] It isn't that way any more, though.  [Howard] Now, with busing the kids and with the electricity and everything on the farms, why the town kids, they're happy to get out in the country.  They think that's the only life there is.  [Irene] From the time I was in the third grade, I started milking cows, and by the time I was in the third grade I milked three cows night and morning.  Even when I was in high school I milked cows.

[tape interrupted] [Howard] He went down to southern Utah to help fight the Indians who were bothering the settlers in what they called the Blackhawk Indian War.  He was a young man but he told us about that, going to fight the Indians.  I don't know whether they had any battles or not. Anyway, then he told us about how the Indians would hunt buffalo with a bow and arrow.  He was a carpenter so he made Uncle Brig and I each a bow and arrow.  On the end of the arrow, instead of having points, he put thread spools, you know like your mother's thread comes, so we wouldn't hurt one another or hurt any of the animals or anything.  Well, Uncle Brig was all of two and a half years older than I was and after we'd had them a little while, he thought of a better way to do and he pulled the spools off of the arrows and then drove a shingle nail into the end of the arrow and took it to the old grind stone which is a stone like an emery stone only you treadled with feet kind of like pumping your bicycle to turn the stone.  He ground the heads off the nails and made them as sharp as a pin.  One day we decided to go out and we had a pasture by the side of the barn and by this barn was a big pile of manure where we threw out of a hole in the side of the barn to get it out of the barn.  Then the cows and the horses would get in the shade under the eaves of the barn and they'd come up over next to this pile so that the trail between this pile and the barn was up higher than the rest of the ground.  We decided to go hunt buffalo.  So we'd gone out into the pasture with our bow and arrow and my dad had an old cow, a milk cow.  She was so gentle, you could walk up to her out in the field any place with a milking stool and a bucket and sit down and milk her.  You didn't have to get her in the barn and tie her up to milk her.  We went out there shooting at this old cow with those sharpened arrows and after one or two shots, why, she wouldn't stand still.  Finally she run for the barn to get where there was shelter.  So we got ready to kill this buffalo and so I run up to hit her from coming between the barn and the manure pile.  When Uncle Brig shot her with the arrow, she just come on through there and run over me.  She had a stub horn on one side and it hit me on the forehead somewhere and knocked me down and she run over me.  I run to the house to my Mother, crying, and she wanted to know what was the matter.  I can't even remember this old cow's name.  I said, "Well, that old cow butted me."  "Oh," my dad said, "Oh she couldn't have butted you, she couldn't butt anything."  "Well she did."  I never did tell them what had happened.  Anyway, that incident died down and one time, I think it was probably after I graduated from high school even, something come up about hunting buffalo.  [Irene] It was after we were married.  [Howard] So we sat down and told my dad and mother about this buffalo hunt.  When we told them, they both laughed until the tears ran down their eyes.  Finally my dad said I thought it was funny that that old cow would butt you and I never could figure out why she did.  So that was our buffalo hunt.

[Linda Young] Would she ever let her milk you like that, out in the field?  [Howard] Oh yeah.  [Linda] As long as you didn't have your bow and arrow with you.  [Howard] As long as you didn't go out there with a bow and arrow chasing her.  Well, I wasn't old enough to milk.  I don't know whether Brig was or not, but I wasn't old enough to milk.  We couldn't have been very old.  I doubt if I was in school.

[Irene] One of the stories that Grandma Young used to double up and laugh was when they got talking about Treasure Island.  Wasn't it Treasure Island that had that pirate story?  Brig would deliberately open the book and scare him and he would bawl.  Grandma couldn't figure out why he bawled.  But finally she caught up with Brig and found out that Brig was scaring him.  [Howard] Well, one thing, she read to us an awful lot.  Reading was hard for Brig and she realized that she needed to create an interest in him about reading.  She read in the winter.  She used to sit and read to us for hours.  I know it was just to help him with his reading.  He hated school.  When he graduated in the eighth grade, he went one day to high school.  He come home and said I'm not going over there with all those kids.  So that was the end of his school.

1998:  Transcribed and edited for readability from original tape recording by Matt Young.
An audio CD copy of the original tape recording is available from Matt Young--Glenn Young has the original.
Some names may be spelled incorrectly.