In November on election day when the farmers came into town to vote, a big barbecue was set up on the court house lawn, where everyone could get a BBQ beef sandwich, voter or not. Children, too, and we took advantage of it. In winter there was a skating rink in the park, or out at the gravel pit where the boys swam in the summer. Later we had a pool in town. Saturday movies were a dime, ice cream cones a nickle. My mother said to me once when I was older that she felt bad when she didn't have a quarter to spare sometimes for something we wanted. I told her "Mama, we never even missed it." We never felt deprived.
Times were tough in those years, a lot of people were out of work, and came on the railroad looking for it. Many a time Mama would give them a bowl of soup or a sandwich on the back steps. it would not do to ask them in the house. She had a big garden with about any vegetable you can name; melons, and rhubarb; and we picked fruit and had berries offered to us from other orchards. We always had plenty to eat, and share.
My mother was a wonderful cook. She canned all the fruits and vegetables, made candies like a professional candy maker. She created a number of artful things, designed some of my dresses. I learned later that when I passed one house on the way to school, the girls would rush to the window to see what I was wearing. We always said that Mama had been born fifty years too soon, or she could have had a career of some kind, and had an easier life.
My mother not only helped people do housecleaning, but also wallpapering, cleaning the church and she also did the offices of two grain companies in the evening. Once she went to one office and saw a man there she didn't recognize, so she quietly left before he saw her, went to the house next door and called the sheriff, who caught the man red-handed, robbing the safe. Sometimes I would go to the offices with her and help dust while she would vacuum and mop. Most other work was dome at home and when we were in school.
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