Story #24 in the Harry Forbes Remembers Series
Young boys, and young people too, asked him what life was like when he grew up. “Guess I looked pretty ancient. We lived a totally different life than there is today. Then also a city boy’s life was not at all the same. I was born over 100 years ago on April 11, 1918, exactly 7 months before World War I ended. I think I told them they had been fighting for 4 years, and that was long enough.
We just seemed to drift happily along on very little. We made our own types of cheap entertainment. We worked to grow all our own vegetables, raised our own animals for meat had our own dairy products. We country people did not have long weekends or working hours. We worked until the work was done, sometimes all night and lived a happier life doing it. Us kids had many chores, helping grow the vegetables and feeding the animals for meat and milking the cows. Being a part of the homecanning of meat and vegetables was our era.
In our time (and our parents’ time) when a young couple got married, they ordinarily were not at all rich. If he had property and a house, that became their home.. If not, they looked for the best secondhand house available and a business of his own or a way to earn a dollar. We wore fur coats in winter to drive our horses and tractor, straw or felt hats in summer to shade the sun, a raincoat if it rained and hand levers to operate our machinery, Not like nowadays with heated cabs and push button controls for various jobs and self-propelled machines.
When children arrived, the wife cared for and disciplined the children while the husband made the living. The children in those days were allowed to be children until school age. We made many of our own toys that were duplicates of our parent’s work tools and meant more to us than store bought toys (because we made them ourselves). We also did imitations of our parents’ workday. We had auction sales with auctioneers, branding stick calves and stick wild bronco horses that bucked you off. But we forgot to have any Stampedes.
My father’s cow pony Don and I were pals. Many times I had a sleep on hay in the manger in front of him. Sometimes they found me sleeping on the barn floor in front of his front feet. He knew I was there.
When I was 5 years old, my father bought an international header. It was a lifesaver to see those heads and short stalks of dried-out grain, with an elevator to elevate them into a header box. The elevator had canvases that made a snapping noise as they turned, frightening the horses. Uncle Chris was having a runaway with a team on the header box and had lost one line but was running them in a circle by pulling on the other line. I saw this and ran outside the house waving ad hollering, “Let ’em go Chris, let ’em go!” I wanted to see a real runawy. An old fellow helping my father, pretending to be watching me, drug me back in the house, but as soon as he was not watching, I was outside agine holleering, “Let ’em go Chris, let ’em go!” Chris finally got them stopped; they were tired of running in a circle.
In our bygone years, age 6 was considered to be school age. But in those years people did a lot of things on their own judgement and common sense. We lived 2 miles from school so my parents held me back ’til I was 7 years old and sister Agnes was 6 years so there would be two of us to walk those 2 miles to school. We had heard older people talk about lower and higher grades in school. The only grades I knew of were road grades, one grade higher than another. So, I thought in Grade 1 you sat at the lower row of desks, when you got to a higher grade you moved up a grade to a higher grade or row of desks ’til you reached the top row of desks or grades of school. So, when we started school, with no previous visits, we saw a number of changes.
Sister Agnes and I started walking to school in April, 1925. Though she was a year younger than I, she was a wizard in school and made me work like the devel to keep up. We played games at recess and dinner times like, Anti-I-Over. You’d throw the ball over the barn. If the person on the other side would catch it, he/she would run around the barn to see how many he or she could catch on the other side as prisoners. They were running to the side the first team was on. We also played “Come Sheep Come” where a wolf would sneak in to catch some sheep. At first you wouldn’t know who the appointed wolf was. We play “Hide and Seek” where the ‘It’ person had to hide his or her eyes while the rest hid. After counting to 20 or 30 or whatever the number was, the ‘It’ person had to somehow catch someone else to be the ‘It’ person. Those brats had it rigged so the teacher was ‘It’ most of the time.
Agnes and I made 8 grades in 6 years so in the spring of 1931, we had to write Grade 8 exams. The school where we wrote our exams had 2 rooms and a principal. Pir scchool had only one room and no Principal. For this 2-room school we had to drive to Hatton, SK, 12 miles away. The first day Father took us, a trip in the morning to take us, a trip in the to come and get us. The second and rest of the days he loaned me the car to make 1 trip there in the morning and 1 trip back in the evening to save him one trip. I was 13 years old. Your parents were your driver’s license in those days.
Most roads in those days were just two ruts, one rut for each wheel. Ther gophers liked traveling down those ruts, no grass to interfere. My second morning driving I ran over a gopher. I made my sister Agnes promise she would not tell our parents that I had been driving so fast that I ran over a gopher.
