Grandpa and His Roll Top Desk

 

Most often we found our Grandpa, on our frequent trips in and out of his house, seated at his roll top desk in front of the window where he could see the comings and goings of the farm equipment and horses, our Dad and the hired men. As he sat there, he was busy figuring on the back of used envelopes.

 

Frank recalls, “Grandpa was a great planner. He could figure out numerous ways to make a fortune for anyone that would listen.” He took into account the acreage, the type of crop, the yield and the selling price for the grain, hay, potatoes or whatever we might plant. In this way he would arrive at his estimate of the year’s profit.

 

In those years, many of which were Depression Years when prices were rock bottom and crops often could not be sold at any price, we rarely achieved Grandpa’s goal.

 

Frank remembers further, “The roll top desk as a great place to explore. The many drawers and small compartments held most of Grandpa’s trinkets. I loved to look through these things.” Darryl contradicts when he says, “I also recall the roll top desk somewhere on the first floor that was stuffed with odd bits of paper—forbidden territory.”

 

Grandpa and Banks

 

Grandpa was a great one to believe that banks were there to be used. In the spring, when it was time to plant the crops and money to buy the seed was scarce or non-existent, Grandpa would always say, “Go to the bank, that’s what they’re there for.” So we would go to the bank for the needed cash, which of course, always had to be repaid in the fall. This became an endless process.

 

Irrigating the Land

 

Remembrances of Grandpa fail to reveal his ever doing much manual labor on the farm. Our Dad did most of the work. Grandpa did help with the irrigating and there was considerable of that to be done.

 

Canvas dams were threaded onto pieces of lead pipe and carried over the shoulder. Wading boots were worn and the work was done when the “head” of water was available. Sometimes this meant working through the night or in the very early morning. The men went out and “set” the dams across the various small ditches that interlaced the land, weighting them down with rocks. After the backed-up water had caused the land to be sufficiently moistened, the rocks and dam would be removed and a “set” made further down the ditch. In Grandpa’s words, “Nothin’ to it.”

 

It was not terribly hard work but the hours were long. On hot days it had its advantages. Carrying wet dams was cooling and sometimes a nap could be taken in the field until the water reached the sleeper to awaken him for the next “set”.

 

Butchering

 

Grandpa also helped with the hog butchering. I remember this as being a very dramatic and exciting part of life on the ranch, done in the fall when the weather had turned nippy. A neighbor or two brought their animals to be slaughtered and dressed out, too, because we had good facilities and because the carcasses were so heavy it took the strength of several men to do the job.

 

Everyone in the family got into the act. There was a well house in the barnyard where there was an ample supply of water. Nearby was a large vat about 6 feet long, 3 feet wide and 2 feet deep underneath which a fire could be built. On butchering day the vat was filled and heated to boiling. The hog was slaughtered and the carcass dumped into the hot water. Much heaving then ensued to pry it back onto the platform where all the men fell to quickly scrape the hide and remove the hair.

 

Once this was done, it was raised on a framework of 2x4s where it was dressed out. Then came the part where the children got into the act. The tail was taken off, a big safety pin driven through it, and it was pinned by turns to the back of our coats and we chased each other around the barnyard. Also, Grandpa saw to it that the bladder was cleaned and filled with air for a balloon for us to kick around.

After the carcass had cooled overnight it was carried into Grandma’s big kitchen where the table was opened full length. And that’s where Grandpa shone! He had the know-how needed to properly cut the meat into chops, roasts, spareribs, bacon and hams and he really liked his job. He had his knives honed to perfection and the job was soon finished except for canning the sausage, making the head cheese and smoking the meat set aside for this purpose.

 

Grandma’s Kitchen—Cooking and Entertaining

 

Grandma’s kitchen was a wonderful place. It was always warm and friendly—often there were neighbors who dropped in to visit. Grandpa had a rocking chair alongside the kitchen range and Grandma would practically have to trip over him to get from the stove to the pantry and back. He liked to sit there, rock, smoke his corncob pipe and talk to her.

 

There was always a cat, purring and rubbing its back against her legs and usually grandchildren around his feet because we were there so much of the time.

 

Herb recalls that the pantry was a good place to hide in the game of Hide and Seek. He continues, “Also the wood box alongside the kitchen range. Next to the wood box was a ‘Kitchen Queen’ to store sugar, flour, salt and spices. Alongside that was the kitchen window where I spent many hours waiting for Auntie to come home at night from her job at J. C. Penney in Hamilton.”

 

“This window was on the northwest corner of the house and gave the best view of the road toward Aunt Fannie’s place, the cheese factory and Hamilton.  During the summer it would still be light when Auntie drove home in her tan Model A Coupe but in the winter all I could see through the icy window was the car lights. Most of the time I had to melt the ice on the window by breathing on it or taking turns putting my hands on the glass. Finally after what seemed an eternity, the lights of Auntie’s car would turn up the lane and she would be home.”

 

Darryl says, “I best remember Grandmother Vincent in the kitchen on the ranch. To a four-year old its airy, light décor and wonderful aroma were indeed impressive. Somehow I recall a canary or two always in song. I suspect as the ‘tail-end-Charlie’ of Frank’s children, I received more than my fair share of Grandmother’s attention. She seemed never too busy to make those delicious triangular-shaped donuts (Brown Bobbies) in some mysterious fashion.”

 

Frank remembers, “During the long hot summer we often had homemade ice cream. What a treat that was! Grandma would mix the ingredients while we helped Daddy dig out a block of ice from the ice house. He would wash off all the sawdust under the well pump. Then we would slip the block into a gunny sack and hit it with the side of an axe until it was broken into small pieces.”

 

“When the ice cream was finished, Daddy would call for Grandma to bring out a pan and some spoons. The mixing paddle was pulled slowly out of the ice cream. After a short argument about who would get to ‘lick the paddle’ and who would get to eat the ice cream that fell into the pan, we would all get a few mouthfuls of the delicious treat. Also, Grandma was an excellent cook who always had some of her cookies or burnt sugar cake for us kids.”

 

Auntie tells how Grandma made her deliciously browned roast beef, “She had a round-bottomed iron kettle that had legs on it. She would take the lid off the stove (firebox) and set the kettle right down on the flame. She put the beef into the kettle and, honestly, you’d swear that she was burnin’ it up but she never did. Then she would pour in the water and cook it. I’ve never, never tasted gravy like Mother’s.”

 

One of Grandma’s specialties was her Parker House rolls. Everyone wanted her to make them when they came to dinner. Auntie says, “She’d mix up those crazy Parker House rolls and I never saw the time that she didn’t have people set down to the table, take the rolls out of the oven, put ‘em on a plate and take ‘em to the table. If I’d try to do it either I’d have ‘em done an hour early or an hour late!”

 

Auntie laughs when she recalls, “I’ll never forget one day when Aunt Ruth and her family drove in unexpectedly and Herbie came over. He was so tickled and said, ‘We’ve got company and Grandma will have Parker House rolls.’ He just knew that Grandma never failed when company came to make them and he wouldn’t believe Aunt Ruth’s ‘No’. He opened the over door and there was no rolls and his face was about a mile long.” For the uninformed, raised dough Parker House rolls do take some planning ahead!

 

(Note:  Aunt Ruth—Ruth Cosens Stephens, widow of Jennie’s youngest brother, Hal, who lived at Ronan at that time.)

 

Aunt Geneva and Grandmother were a real team when it came to entertaining. Auntie often made the angel food cake and the salad and peeled the potatoes and vegetables. She set the table, all pretty, getting out the fine linen or hand-crocheted table cloth, the hand-painted china and the fine silver. This was all done in the dining room adjacent to the living room; I always stuck around learning how it was done, trying to help and especially waiting for an invitation. Later, Herb was to follow the same process. Often an invitation was extended no matter who the guests were to be.

 

During the week Grandma worked hard in our large garden which was located southwest of the barnyard about a quarter of a mile from the house. We grew large quantities of squash, pumpkins, and cantaloupe as well as corn, beans and root and salad vegetables. I can still see her coming in at noon, hot and tired, wearing her sun hat. She would wash up a bit and without ever remembering to remove her hat, prepare dinner (supper was the evening meal). In the afternoon she would rest before taking up her numerous other duties.

 

For all the warmth and love in the kitchen it was a terribly inefficient place in which to work. Grandmother spent a great deal of time walking from the corner sink, which had no related counters, to the big table in the middle of the room which served as a work surface, to the Kitchen Queen in the opposite corner, to the range and then to the pantry in another direction.

 

Dishwashing was always done by scrapping and staking the dirty dishes on one end of the table; washing and rinsing them in pans placed on the top of the range to keep the water hot during the process. Clean dishes were then placed on the other end of the table to be carried to the pantry. Fortunately, in those days all hands pitched in to help when big dinner parties were given.

 

The Milk House, The Cats, The Well

 

One of the most unique buildings on the ranch was the milk house. It was located right outside Grandma’s back door. It was a small, low building with thick, masonry fieldstone walls, and a concrete floor. The interior was frequently white-washed to keep it clean for the purpose that it served; milk, cream, butter, eggs and other foods were stored there.

 

Herb recalls the crocks with smelly dill pickles, dill and other aromatic herbs. He remembers, too, how he “helped” turn the handle of the cream separator which was also located in this cool building. The separator was a marvelous contraption into which milk was poured. Turning the handle drove the milk around and around until the cream came out one spout and the skimmed milk another. The skimmed milk had a great foam built up on it as it fell into the bucket.

 

The family always enjoyed telling the story about me when I was a little girl—how  I was busy talking and backed up and sat right down in the bucket of skimmed milk! The foam just shot up all around my head. I was one sticky mess.

 

Between the back door to the house and the door to the milk house was an areaway where the cats congregated. On a farm there are lots of cats—there are other cats and grandmother cats and great-grandmother cats and baby cats and, of course Tom cats!! Feeding them isn’t too great a problem because there are lots of mice to be caught plus pans of skimmed milk and table scraps. When we’d step outside the door sometimes there’d be just one big MEOW there were so many cats.

 

There was a hand pump located near by, over the well. Although there was water in the house, for some reason, Grandma or Grandpa thought that the water that came through the pipes was not to their liking so their drinking water was hand pumped and carried into the house in a pail. It was placed on a stand in the corner of the kitchen near the sink and a dipper was placed in it.

 

If you wanted a drink of water you lifted the dipper and drank from it. When I look back on it now and think how everyone in the family, the hired men and the people who came to visit—all drank out of the dipper! We didn’t catch anything-we survived. We wouldn’t think of doing that today, we’d be afraid of germs.

 

Our Grandparent’s Living Room

 

The living room extended along two-thirds of the south side of the house. In the east end (Herb calls this the “parlor”) were the piano, chairs and a plant stand upon which sat the large Christmas cactus which bloomed profusely each year. Later the radio was added to this half of the living room.

 

Several of the oil paintings Grandmother had completed in college were hung in the living room. Frank remembers, “Jennie Stephens was a talented artist in her younger years and the walls of her home displayed many of her paintings. My favorite was of some deer by a mountain lake. I called them ‘doggies’.”

 

The family gathered, for the most part, in the west end near the big roll top desk where the wondrous wood and coal burning heating stove sat. To children’s yes it looked huge—not so big around, but tall, and oh, it was fancy. Black and shiny, its fenders and trim nickel plated, it had an ornate swing-away top where a kettle could be placed to heat water. It had isinglass windows through which the fire could be seen.

 

There was no central heating and in the winters when it turned very cold, most of the house, except the kitchen and living room, was shut off. This warm place drew the family closer together.

 

Grandma’s rocking chair sat near the big stove and one of my earliest memories is of being rocked in that chair. She would sing, “Oh where, oh where is my little dog gone? Oh where, oh where can he be? With this tail cut short and his ears cut long; oh where, oh where can he be?” She would sing it over and over until I would finally go to sleep. I was rocked miles in that chair.

 

If I were particularly cross or fussy she would say, “Hark! Hark! Do you hear those coyotes up on the hill? Hark! Listen! I hear those coyotes.” Now, I never did hear those coyotes—as long as I lived on that ranch. I think it was just a trick to get me to be quiet and go to sleep. Maybe she could remember when she was a little girl and hear the coyotes, but I never heard them where we lived.

 

Our Grandmother was Irish and one of the things I remember, as I grew older, was wondering about what kind of Irish she was. I had heard there were two kinds:  Lace-

Curtain Irish and keep-the-pig-in the-parlor Irish!!

 

She did have lace curtains and this was one of the bug-a-boos of Aunt Geneva. Grandpa wouldn’t keep his hands off the lace curtains! He didn’t like those curtains screening his view of what was going on out there on the ranch! He was always fussing at them and pulling them back. Finally she had to concede to him so that at the window where he sat, the lace curtains didn’t extend all the way across. So…she was lace-curtain Irish.

 

She was also, sometimes, pig-in-the-parlor Irish. When we had an old sow that would have a BIG litter of little pigs and she didn’t have enough “faucets” to go around, the little runt, the one that got shunted away and looked as if it were going to starve to death, was put in a bushel basket on top of a gunny sack (burlap bag). It was brought into the house and set right behind that great big, ornate heating stove for several days until it could recuperate. It was fed with a bottle to get it going again. Oh, how we did love to come over to Grandma’s house when it was farrowing time for the sows and find a little pig in the parlor!

 

Sleeping at Grandmother’s

 

“We had wonderful grandparents,” remembers Frank. “Grandma’s house was only a few steps away and we were always welcome. If we had to be punished at home we could always find refuge there. Many times I would run away from home and spend the night at Grandma’s house.”

 

Herb looks backward in time and says, “I suppose my first recollection of them (his Grandparents) was about 1930 when, dressed in snowsuit and mittens, I had my picture taken in the snow at their home. I spent much of my life, between 2 and 6 years of age, at their house. Then we moved to the farm just outside Hamilton and my visits were restricted to the weekends during the school year.

 

“Summertime was different, however, and I was able to spend days at a time with them during those wonderful, warm summer days. Today I can far better remember their house and floor plan than I can either of our houses in Montana.”

 

“Grandma would let me have my friend, Bobby Greenup, over to spend the night. I well remember on a summer evening in 1938 or 1939 when we slept out all night on her front lawn. The newspaper had told of how there would be lots of ‘shooting stars’ that night. I can still see us lying out there on our bedrolls watching God’s display……”

 

“I suppose we had some of Grandma’s pancakes for breakfast the next morning. She almost always had them and would feed the left-overs to her pack of cats. Honestly, those cats would actually fight over her pancakes and, come to think of it, I’ve never seen a cat eat a pancake since!”

 

Herb continues, “I remember staying overnight at Grandma’s house and sleeping upstairs with Auntie. There was a heat register in the ceiling of the living room over the big stove and it was delightful in the cold winter time to stand over it while dressing for bed.”

 

“On Sunday morning Auntie would drive us to Hamilton where she was organist at the little Christian Science Church. I would sit with Grandma and I recall the singing and responsive reading and how proud I was of my Auntie up there playing away on the organ. After church it was back to the ranch for a big Sunday dinner. I had to be on my best behavior as often we had ‘company’ and we would eat in the dining room.”

 

Darryl does not mention staying overnight although he did many times. He spent at least two vacations on the ranch in the early 1940s at which time he and his friend, Dickie Summers, thoroughly explored the ranch buildings and played in them. He remembers, “The ranch house seemed immense in the eyes of one under four feet tall, particularly the stair banister that was forbidden territory.”

 

“Although I am told the ranch had some of the earliest indoor plumbing in Western Montana, I do recall a ‘two holer’ not far from the barn which held great interest for a city boy on a summer vacation.”

 

Chocolate Drops and Limburger Cheese

 

Grandpa loved his grandchildren and he was very good to us. When he went to town he would bring home treats. One of these was dome-shaped chocolate-covered mints that he brought in a small, brown paper bag. We got so we knew when he returned and weren’t long getting there to be given a piece of candy.

 

Frank remembers, “The limburger was my favorite. Grandpa followed a standard procedure with it. First he would get out his old pocket knife and carefully wipe the blade on his shirt sleeve to sterilize it!!”

 

Frank and I were real limburger cheese eaters. In those days limburger came in a very, very heavy foil. They didn’t have aluminum foil in those days. I suspect it was lead foil and it’s a wonder it didn’t kill us now that we know that lead can create problems.

 

I can remember Grandpa setting that chunk of cheese on the kitchen table and very carefully unwrapping it. Our mouths would just be drooling.

 

“This seemed to take forever to accomplish,” Frank adds. “Finally he would cut off a small slice and hold it out to be eaten. We had to be careful not to cut our lips. The first bite smelled bad but succeeding bites were delicious. He would laugh at our Grandmother’s scolding about feeding us kids that smelly stuff.”

 

Once we’d had our fill the cheese was then carefully rewrapped and the knife put away. We would go home and would hardly get into the house when Mother would scream, “Your Grandpa’s been giving you that rotten limburger cheese again!” She would get so angry because it did smell terrible. But we thought it was great—and still do, to this day. It makes us think of Grandpa whenever we eat it.

 

The Potato Bug Story and Grandma’s Pot of Gold

 

From Frank’s memories comes this account, “One summer evening Daddy came in from the potato patch to report that the potato bugs were damaging the vines. He offered to pay Marge and me to pick the bugs off the plants until he could find time to spray the crop with Paris Green. He agreed to pay us fifty cents a quart for our efforts.

 

“We were up early the next morning to start making our fortune. We soon found that it took a lot of work just to cover the bottom of the quart jar with bugs. Grandma saw us and asked what we were doing. When we told her about the job and Daddy’s offer she said that that was ridiculous and that she would fix him by helping us.”

 

“She came back from the house carrying a large stack of old newspapers and her broom. She had us place the paper sheets end to end between the rows of potatoes. Then she took her broom and swept over the vines, knocking off the bugs by the hundreds. It was a simple matter to pick up the newspapers and funnel the bugs into the jars.

 

“We soon had two quarts filled. When Daddy came in at noon he couldn’t believe his eyes! Grandma was near at hand to make him pay up. After we had pocketed our fifty cents we told him how we had done it.

 

Grandmother patiently endured the hard work and lack of money but her longing for better times is recorded in Herb’s memories as follows, “I recall during the depths of the Depression playing a game with Grandma called ‘what we’ll do when the Townsend Plan is adopted.’ The Townsend Plan was named after a man who had the idea, ahead of his time, to give every one over 65 a monthly pension check. He never was able to get the idea through Congress but that didn’t stop us from dreaming and planning what we would do with Grandma’s check when it arrived.”

 

Grandma answered a magazine ad and bought a Brown Bobbie machine. This contraption made triangular, greaseless doughnuts the sale of which was guaranteed to make one rich. Grandmother did sell some of them but for the most part they became another delicious treat for the family and particularly for grandchildren, Herb and Darryl.

 

Shaving, Barbering and Doctoring

 

Another thing I recall about my Grandfather was when he shaved. It was a very serious business. He shaved only every week or two, becoming quite grizzled between times, because it was practically an all-afternoon task.

 

He often did this when Grandmother was gone or busy elsewhere in the house because he took over the entire kitchen. He had to heat the water on the kitchen stove and bring out towels, his razor and his razor strop, his soap and brushes, and all the needed paraphernalia. This was all laid out just so on a towel on the kitchen table. Everything was very meticulous and clean—Grandpa had heard of “barber’s itch” and wanted to avoid it.

 

After stropping his razor he carefully began. The whole process took about two hours. My brothers and I had to stand way back and be on our best behavior if we wanted to watch Grandpa shave.

 

Herb says, “When I grew a little older, Grandpa made a deal with me to be his barber. He came up with a comb, a pair of hand clippers and a dishtowel which I pinned around his neck and proceeded to ‘scalp’ him. The first few times he looked as if he had just come out of ‘Boot Camp,’ but as time went on I gave him a fair—not good—haircut for which he paid me a quarter each time.”

 

“In those Depression Years of the mid-thirties it was a small fortune for a lad. You’d be surprised how much you could buy for 25 cents at Boren’s Dime Store in Hamilton!’

 

Grandpa had a deep and enduring suspicion of doctors and threatened them with dire things whenever the other members of the family suggested that one might be called to care for him. Instead, his faith was in patent medicines. He had two in particular that he used. The first was named simply, “Pain Killer” and the other, “Heart Medicine.” They had the most intriguing pictures on the labels—our first anatomy lessons.

 

They also had a high alcohol content and I suspect, looking back on all this, that during Prohibition time, when Grandpa couldn’t get a little snort of whiskey, he would take a little snort of “Pain Killer”! He would just put some in a glass with a little water, give it a quick stir and drink it down….

 

Grandpa had some very unusual home remedies although I suspect that at the time he was being raised in New York State, they were quite common.

 

One of these was the cure for sore throat. First of all, I think it would be well to recall that in those days of limited clothes washing facilities, our socks were not changed daily—if they were changed weekly might even be challenged! Grandpa’s cure:  Remove your sock and immediately, while it is still warm, place the foot part squarely over the sore spot, wrap the remainder around your neck and secure it snugly with a safety pin. In the morning your throat will be much better!

 

Another cure that almost blew Jim Coombs’ mind when I married him and told him of it was the one for croup. Grandpa’s cure:  Swallow a few drops of coal oil (kerosene) placed on a teaspoon of sugar!

 

For a cut or even a puncture wound from a rusty nail—Grandpa’s cure: Soak the wound in turpentine! When I consider the high tetanus risk that we ran on the farm—barefooted—I shudder. The turpentine must have worked!

 

Ditches and Discipline

 

Darryl remembers, “I was intrigued by Grandma’s garden and in particular the canals and streamlets designed to effect irrigation.”

 

When we wanted to water the gardens we would make rills and flow the water through them. When the lawn was to be watered we put a dam in the ditch and flooded it. That was fun on a hot day—to slide on the grass and flop down in the water. I often wonder how the grass ever grew with all that rough treatment but it was sure fun while we were doing it.

 

Another thing that was really great was to run little homemade boats down all those miniature canals and build little ports in the muddy banks to which we could tie up our fleet.

 

We would run upstream, sometimes as far as the chicken house, and put in our boats following them through the small elevated flume that ran through the back of our property, through the culvert into Grandmother’s yard, and continuing to our port, usually located on the north side of her house.

 

These small ditches also were the home of tadpoles, frogs, minnows and garter snakes. It was a tempting place in which to play and so shallow that our Mother need not worry about our drowning. It did create problems, however, when the season was chilly or when we were dressed for some special occasion.

 

Frank remembers, “One time while playing in the small irrigation ditch in Grandma’s front yard, Grandma approached with a small stick to punish me for getting my clothes wet. I began running in place saying, ‘Grandma, put dat switch down, I be a good boy.’ I can’t remember her ever hitting any of us kids with the switch. All she had to do was pick it up and we would behave.”

 

Frank continues, “I was kind of mean to my little brother, Herb. I guess I resented the attention he always got from the adults. One time I loaded my B.B. gun with a toothpick and shot him in the back. I caught heck for that.”

 

“Herbie and I were playing on Grandma’s front porch once when he was about two years old. I decided to play a trick on him. I asked him to go out to the corner of the yard where the bee hives were located and bring me a bee. He promptly followed my orders and returned with a bee in his little hand. I couldn’t understand why the bee hadn’t stung him. As I took it from his hand to examine it closely the critter stung me! After that I figured the good Lord was on Herbie’s side so I started treating him better.”

 

Herb recalls, “Grandma didn’t hesitate to keep me in line by threatening to use her ‘stick’ on me. The stick was a short twig off a tree or bush and only occasionally was it used. I recall once when I was older of putting a board under my overalls in the appropriate spot when I knew I was really going to ‘get it’. She swatted me with her hand that time and somehow managed to cut it on the wood. Boy, did I feel bad then! I dearly loved her and surely didn’t want to see her harmed in any way.”

 

 

Tea and Coffee

 

One of the curious things about Grandpa was the way he drank his tea. English Grandpa and Irish Grandma were big tea drinkers. They put plenty of cream and sugar in their tea and drank quantities of it.

 

Grandpa did something that was really fascinating to watch. He would mix his tea, cream and sugar in his cup and then pour it carefully into his saucer until it was level full—at least it looked to me to be. He would then get his hand under the saucer in some way, balancing it on the tips of his fingers, lift it up to his mouth and drink it. Well, it was really a juggler’s trick and it had my brothers and me bug-eyed! It is no wonder that we were always clamoring at our Mother to let us eat with Grandma and Grandpa.

 

As I grew older I thought, oh, Grandpa, your table manners are terrible. I was embarrassed by them. Then one day I read a book and learned that when Grandpa was growing up, that manner of drinking tea was considered to be very proper—to saucer and blow your tea! In fact, there were special saucers so that your cup could be set in a smaller saucer while you were using the regular, larger saucer from which to drink.

 

Grandpa’s Mother, Matilda Vincent, came for a visit and stayed a year. She, too, was a tea drinker and Auntie tells, “She never drank water. Along in the afternoon she would make a gravy bowl full of tea, go into the living room, sit in a rocking chair, rock and sip her tea. It took her about an hour and a half to drink it all.”

 

Coffee was made less frequently but Auntie tells, “Grandma Stephens (arriving home from a visit to Butte) brought the first percolator to the ranch. I think it was the first one brought into Ravalli County.

 

“Mother got it all ready; she followed all the directions and put it on the stove. At that time we had about three hired men besides the family and Grandma.”

 

“We all stood there watching. Those men kept saying, ‘It won’t do it, it won’t perc—there’s nothing down there to make it come up—it won’t do it, no, it won’t do it..’ This went on for between five and ten minutes and pretty soon ‘kerpoook, kerpook, kerpook’ and there it was….we had percolated coffee for supper that night.”

 

Grandmother Travels

 

In 1900, following the death of Frank Stephens and after his widow, Jane, came to make her home with the Vincents, she proposed that Jennie and she make the trip together to visit Jane’s son, Hal, in Palo Alto, California. The trip became a reality when Matilda and Seymour Vincent traveled west from Vermont to stay with Clinton and the children. This was undoubtedly one of the highlights of Grandmother’s life.

 

Many years later, in 1951, Auntie recalls taking Grandmother to visit Velma, Herb and infant daughter, Karen. Auntie says, “I got her all ready and said, ‘Now is there anything else that you want me to get for you to take to California?’ Her reply, ‘Well, if it wouldn’t be too expensive I’d like a new pair of gloves.’” Auntie concludes, “I still have the gloves…bless her heart…navy blue gloves.”

 

 

Cars and Other New-Fangled Inventions

 

Grandpa liked cars. My Dad and Aunt Geneva learned to drive some of the first cars in the area (1910-1920). The family owned a Chalmers, a Chevrolet and a Buick—all early models.