Vern’s Stories: My Working Years - Part Four
It is now the fall of 1935. I have worked at quite a few jobs at the borax mine, ran different types of machinery in the bull gang, worked in the sack rooms and now I am oiler in the mill. Funny thing, when I was going to work at Pacific Coast Borax, I had said to myself,--1 will work there as long as I can work on top of the ground but if they ever require me to work underground in the mine, I’m quitting." After working there for awhile and seeing all these miners going down and coming out of the mine each day and not hearing of any getting buried alive, I got curious. I wondered, "How do they mine this borax? What is it like down there?" Later when the bull gang had some work to do in the mine, I jumped at the chance to go down. When I got down in the mine, I found it to be a very interesting place and I couldn't wait to go down again and explore some more.
Lately I have been down in the Los Angeles area looking at cars. I traded my 1930 Chevy in for a 1932 Rockney. It is made by Studebaker and named after the late famous coach by that name.
Now on Thanksgiving week, I have met a beautiful young lady named Thelma Bates. Her parents brought Bro. Griggs up to Muroc on Sunday. Genevieve and Thelma hit if off, and Genevieve begged her mother to let her stay with us until after Thanksgiving and we would bring her home on Saturday. Her mother consented, so she had been with us all week. She is so nice and I think I have fallen in love and I think she kind of likes me. I will be taking her home to Los Angeles on Saturday and will find out where she lives. Well, Saturday rolls around all too quick and I find out that she lives at 3435 Marmion Way, near Figueroa and Pasadena Avenue in Highland Park. I am hoping to see a lot more of her, but I find out she has a boy friend of sorts. This young man runs a Ferris wheel at a carnival, a couple of blocks away, near the Safeway store on Figueroa Street. He gives her free rides on his Ferris wheel. Boy, this is tough competition. If a suitor has a better car than you, why you can upstage him by buying a better car than his, but how do you compete with a Ferris wheel?
Well, she does invite me to come down again sometime. "Sometime" man! Time's awastin'! I’ll be back next week on my days off! Next week we take a little drive to a park nearby. I have to watch my driving because it's hard to keep my eyes off this lovely young lady. Boy, I must have it bad! We are sitting by the little lake in the park and I am thinking that she is more interested in the Ferris wheel than this guy, but I'm not sure? Maybe I can have a little fun kidding her and help my cause. I say something like this,"You know if you marry the carnival guy, you are going to be like a gypsy, traveling all over the country and never have a home. You will probably end up in the baseball throw, sitting on a bench over a tank of water. Every time the thrower makes a strike, the bench will collapse and you will fall into the tank of water, ha, ha." Well, she doesn't double over in fits of laughter, but she does smile a little. I don't think she wants me to be too sure of myself right off the bat, but she seems to want to see me again.
Whenever I am down at Thelma's, I always go to her church on Workman Street in Los Angeles on Sundays, where I met some fine Christian families. Bro. Griggs and family were members of that church.
After several months going places and doing things together, and enjoying each other’s company so much, I asked Thelma to be my wife. My heart was pounding wildly as she said, "Yes!" Seeing my Love didn't have a watch, instead of an engagement ring, I bought her a nice gold Elgin watch. The diamond ring would come several years later.
Back at home, I am already thinking about a place to live and raise a family. I discover a house in Hi Vista for sale for $300.00. It is a cute little place, inside all finished in knotty pine. Daddy and Mama give me 10 acres in the northeast comer of their 160-acre homestead, to put the house on. It is about 18 miles up to Hi Vista where the house is located. No problem, we will use Daddy's big house-moving trailer and truck. Glenn and Ralph and Art Crowley will help me jack it up and load it onto the trailer. No problem, that is, until we get to the property where there is no road on the homestead to the 10 acres. Daddy thinks it will be too big a strain on his little Chevy truck to pull it on in through the loose desert sand. I will have to hire one of Mojave Rotary Mud Company's big Moreland dump trucks to pull it on in to the ten-acre property. I don't remember what it cost me to hire the big Moreland dump truck, but it easily pulls the house through the desert sand and into place.
Interestingly, I had driven one of these big 5-ton Moreland dump trucks when I worked for the Mojave Rotary Mud Company four years earlier. We hauled white clay from a mine about 10 miles north of Muroc, across the desert to Muroc where we backed up on a wooden ramp and dumped the white clay into a railroad car below. Quite a thrill for a 17-year-old.
Now we have the house jacked up and ready to pour the concrete foundation. Like a couple of birds, building their nest a stick at a time, I am working hard to get our little love nest built.
Back at work at the borax mine, because of the war clouds hovering over Europe, the demand for borax has greatly increased. The mine is in a big expansion program. A new six- story roll mill complex is in the works. There will be six big roll mills which will reduce ore into a fine powder. One problem with this setup, the borax though not apparent has enough moisture in it that as it is squeezed by the rollers, it tends to make little pancakes that won't go through the screens.
Sometimes a real simple solution to a problem works better than a complicated one. In this case after trying different things, it was found that running the rollers at two different speeds did the trick as it gave a grinding action as well as a crushing action. I worked on this project, running a hoist that hoisted the cement buggys to the different floors as the concrete was poured on the different levels.
Daddy is back working at the mine and Oscar Swanson, the bull gang boss, is using Daddy because of his house-moving expertise, to move some cabins and garages, as they are re-doing the camp area, putting three cabins together in rows with a common roof.
Glenn, Bill Stickney and Art Crowley have graduated from High School and have joined the work force at the mine. Ralph and Genevieve are riding the bus 30 miles to Antelope Valley Joint Union High School in Lancaster. Nellie May and her best friend Grace Adair are adding to their brain power daily under the able leadership of Mrs. Jack Work at the Muroc School house. Mother is busy at Anderson's boarding house helping Hattie prepare meals for the crew from Indiana, testing Auburn cars. And so the world turns one more day on it axis.
John Debord knew Stanley Sausser back in Illinois. When Stan got a job at the mine during the great depression when jobs were very scarce, he wrote to John Debord and told him he could probably get a job out here. John came out first in 1935, then later Harry and Cecil Debord came out and got jobs at the mine. The latter later became Genevieve’s husband.
California made a law in 1935 that all cars, starting January l, I936, had to have safety glass in all windows. The plate glass in car windows could be very nasty in a car accident; people got cut up badly and died. Safety glass introduced in the Model A Ford in 1928, had proven a life-saver. California therefore decided all cars sold in the state after 1935 had to have safety glass in all windows. Some automobile companies hadn't converted over to safety glass yet so their 1936 models that came out in the fall of 1935, and were probably in the factory assembly stage in 1934, were caught flat-footed. These cars had to be sold before January 1st or they couldn't be sold at all in California. This made these cars sell very cheap.
Glenn saw this new 1936 Willys priced so cheap he couldn't resist. He bought it just before the first of January in 1935. This car had two interesting things about it. The gas tank gauge was off and it would run out of gas while the gauge still showed it had some gas in the tank. Glenn ran out of gas more times than we want to remember. The other thing was the back seat set right over the back axle. There was a hole in the body so the rear end could come up under the seat. If you were sitting in the middle of the back seat and the car hit a bad bump, you and the body were going down and the rear end was coming up, the resulting collision would just about jar your eye teeth loose. We had more fun with that Willys. If an unsuspecting person was visiting the ranch we would get them in the middle of the back seat and tear off down the roughest road we could find.
Well, we are in 1936 and it is moving along. The Army Air Corps from March Field near Riverside California has set up a small base on the east side of the lake about three miles north of our place in the mid-1930s and some weird things are happening now. These Army Pilots, some of them not much older than kids themselves, are having fun with their Boeing P-26s (called pea-shooters). Bombs are falling in some funny places. Sometimes a car traveling on the road and one of these little varmints will come roaring over the car from the rear very low and scare the driver so bad that he will run off in the ditch. It seems they liked to scare women especially.
The army had a strafing target on the edge of the lake right close to where we drove every day going to work. They would zip in low toward the target machine, guns blazing, then pull up at a sharp angle. One day on our way home from work here was a plane scattered all over the lake. He had come in too low and had hit the lake bed. In the area where we traveled the lake going to Muroc, they had fixed up an old car set to make a big circle with nobody driving it, pulling a target. The planes' bombs that broke open on impact, were filled with white flour that left a white spot where they hit. As the car made a wide arc around the lake, the plane would fly over and try to hit the moving target. We never got any flour down our neck. We were just happy to buy our flour at Anderson's store. I guess nobody is complaining too much about all these goings on. We never heard of any natives getting hurt and maybe it put a little extra excitement and zing in our lives.
On the homestead I am working in my spare time and on my days off to get the honeymoon cottage ready to carry my bride across the threshold when the time comes.
A scary thing happened today as I was getting ready to leave the house and go up and work on the cottage. I had gotten up and had breakfast. The rest of the family were all gone to work or to school and I was alone in the house. I was just about to open the door and step outside when a funny paper caught my eye, laying on the floor by the stove. I sat back down and began to read it. I had read for probably about 10 minutes when I smelled smoke. I looked up and it was smoking where the stove pipe goes through the ceiling. I grabbed a bucket of water and ran upstairs.
It was just starting to flame up in the 2 x 4s next to the stove pipe. I doused it good with water and put on more water until it was completely cold. It appeared it had been smoldering for some time and had just burst into flames as I had smelled the smoke. If I had walked out the door when I first intended and walked the 1⁄2 mile up to my place and went to work, by the time I saw the black smoke pouring out of the house, it would have been too late to save anything. What a tragedy that would have been for seven people out on the desert, everything gone with only the clothes on their backs. I believe Our Dear Lord looking down on this loving family of seven, living the simple life out on the great desert, had mercy on us and caused me to stay there long enough to put out the fire.
I have heard from Thelma and as soon as school is out in a couple of days, she is going up to her aunt's in Banning, California to work in a cannery, canning peaches during summer vacation. This will be a little longer trip than from Muroc to Los Angeles, but whatever the distance, it is O.K. I would climb mountains, ford rivers, wade through snow hip deep; nothing, no nothing is going to keep me from seeing this girl. I am in love, really in love, I think for the first time. The other times I think were just warm-up exercises.
Well, the trip to Banning proves to be a nice one. The scenery is very nice, the miles fly by easily as I have so much anticipation of the one that will greet me on the other end. Only thing is, I have to watch the speedometer, as my desire to get there may cause me to go too fast. When I arrive Thelma just seems to be growing more beautiful by the day. We have a nice time driving around seeing the sights and talking. The Lewises are very nice; they are a big family and the boys are Thelma's cousins. They like to kid us a lot, as you can imagine. Thelma is not too happy with the sanitary conditions at the cannery and is not sure if she will ever be able to eat canned peaches again. Well, the weekend ends all too soon and I must head back to my job at the borax mine. It's so hard to leave the one you love so dearly, praying God will keep her safe until I return next weekend.
Back at work, it is hard to keep my mind on my work, but I must as there are dangers lurking around every corner and the safety of the men I work with is a must also. I am still running the hoist, hoisting concrete to the different floors in the new rolls crusher building. I am working blind as I am on the ground floor in the old part of the building. The cable from the hoist runs through a series of sheves, up to the top of the building, then back down to the ground floor, near the mixer where the cement buggys are loaded. I operate by bell signals, dials and marks on the hoist drum. It is challenging but fun. Everything is going well and the floors are taking shape on each level.
I visit Thelma several more times in Banning and each time it gets a little harder to leave. The last time I am down, the peach cannery season is over and the cannery has closed down. Thelma and I begin some serious talking. We are both sort of shy and neither of us seems to want a big fancy wedding which would be next year in February or March when Thelma would be 18. It is now August 1936 and we decide to elope. First we think of Arizona, then no, we decide we need some new clothes for this event so we will go to Muroc and then to Las Vegas and get married there. When we get home to Muroc, the kids are all excited about this turn of events. Glenn offers his new Willys for the trip to Las Vegas. Everybody seems to think that it is a good idea. Mama is down visiting her folks in Huntington Beach and Thelma's mother and Dad are in Carlsbad at a camp meeting, so they know nothing about this.
I didn't think about it at the time, but my car is a brown color and would be hard to write on. Glenn's car is jet black and makes a perfect billboard to write on with a white liquid shoe polish dauber. Friday Thelma and I went into Lancaster and bought some new duds for the trip.
Genevieve set Thelma's naturally curly blond hair in a finger-wave for the event. Early the next morning about 4 a.m. August 10, 1936, we got up and got ready tor the trip to Las Vegas. When we went out to get in the car, you should have seen that car. It was decorated with signs from one end to the other, even had a "JUST MARRIED" on the roof for the airplanes to read. It was fun; people were honking and waving at us all the way to Las Vegas and of course we were waving back and smiling from ear to ear.
When we arrived in Las Vegas, we made a bee-line for the court house to get our marriage license. Thelma, of course, had to put down 18 on our application but then after all, she is in her 18th year on the planet. Across the street from the courthouse is a Methodist Church. How convenient!
We walk across the street to the parsonage which is just behind the church. As we approach, there is a young couple just leaving. As we enter the living room, there is a couple waiting. The pastor's wife didn't even ask what we were there for, maybe our smiles gave it away. Says she: "The pastor is busy right now, marrying a couple in the study. You are next after this couple here, indicating the young couple sitting on the sofa." We are thinking, I wonder how this manever has any time to preach. Well, he finally gets around to us. The ceremony is brief; "You may now kiss the bride." Boy, that's one thing I am good at. Wow! We are now man and wife! I have the prize of the century! After the ceremony the first thing we did was go to the telegraph office and send a telegram to Thelma's parents in Carlsbad and telegrams to others in the family. Then we went downtown to the best hotel in town and had a nice dinner. Las Vegas was just a little cow-town then, compared to today.
After dinner we drove out to Hoover Dam, sightseeing. Hoover Dam had just been completed recently and was one of 7 wonders of the modern world. It was begun in 1931. It was the largest dam in the world when built standing 727 ft. high, 660 ft. thick at the base, 1,282ft. across at the crest. It took over 5,000 men over 4 years to build it. The lake it forms behind it goes for many miles to the beginning of Grand Canyon, holding millions of gallons of water.
After taking each other's picture on the dam, (there was no one close by to take our picture together, so we took each other's singly.) we drove to Kingman, Arizona, then from there on Route 66 over the Oatman mountains, the crookedest road on the whole of Route 66 to Needles, CA, where we spent the night in Needle's best hotel.
From Needles we went across through Desert Center to Banning to the Lewises. I don't think Aunt Ruth was too happy with the whole affair as she had been entrusted with the care of her niece and here I had taken her off and married her.
Aunt Ruth had an only daughter, a beautiful teenager about Thelma's age that she had lost because of a congenital heart condition. I think Aunt Ruth was thinking of her daughter. Had she lived, she would have been at a marrying age and maybe she was wondering what kind of a man she would have gotten. Anyway, Aunt Ruth likes me and so she was happy for Thelma and wishes us well as we were leaving for Los Angeles and the Bateses. From Los Angeles we went down to Huntington Beach where my Mama was visiting with Grandma and Grandpa Murdy. After visiting with Mama, Grandpa and Grandma and others in the family, we headed to our little Honeymoon Cottage on the desert where we would spend three happy years before moving to Boron, CA. Note: We probably saved our two mothers from some concealed laughter by marrying when we did. Unknown to us, both mothers were pregnant and when the wedding should have been held, they were about ready to deliver. They would have been quite a sight, marching down the isle with their big pot-bellies.
In the late fall or early winter of 1936, I was promoted to rigger and was responsible for rigging up cables block and tackles and other gear the bull gang projects called for. The company has purchased and has had erected near the mill a big steel water tower. Glenn and Lee Golden have been assigned the job of painting this new tower. The top tank part was to be painted in big orange and white checker board squares, a big project for them, but one they can handle..
At home I have a dream: a nice ranch house and spread and maybe a nice herd of white-faced cattle running on the range, so in the evenings and on my days off I am working for the first part of this dream. I have bought a well rig because water is one of the first things needed. We had a kerosene cook stove. Now there were two kinds of kerosene cook stoves. They both had wicks but one controlled the flow of fuel to the burner by raising the burner up and down. This type was very easy to control the flame. The other type used a needle valve. This latter was the type we had. The burner flame was either going clear to the ceiling or was going out. It was almost impossible to control. I was planning to replace this stove with a nice propane gas range at a later date but I didn't tell Thelma because I wanted to surprise her. In fact I was planning a lot of surprises as I work around the place.
Well, another big surprise . Ralph has quit school in his sophomore year and has gone to work for the Pacific Coast Borax Company. It seems not very clear just why he quit school. Whatever the reason, now all of us boys, our cousin Art Crowley and Daddy are all working at the mine.
Art Crowley's brother-in-law, Cliff Howard who is married to Art's sister Loraine, live in Oxnard, CA and have a home there. Cliff worked in the sugar factory there for some years. It has shut down and he is out of work. Art wrote to him, telling him he can probably get on at the mine. They come up bringing a small camping trailer to live in. They have a son, nearly one rear old, named Eddie. Cliff gets on at the mine quite easily and goes to work in the sack room, loading bulk borax in box cars.
At about this time some people named Drain had a place one mile south of us. They were very nice people. He worked for the telephone company. He was getting near retirement age; they had built this place up, a very nice comfortable place, well furnished. They had a 160 acres and planned on living there and growing alfalfa when he retired. They had a care taker on the place, an old mule skinner that had run pack trains in his younger years. He was quite a rounder and in the bars a lot. He had left for parts unknown and so the Drains needed a care taker to live on their place for a time. Their house was very well built, modern, warm and cosy, nicer than most houses on the desert. Mr. and Mrs. Drain met us and offered the place to us to live in for an unspecified length of time. Didn't seem to be much work involved, just looking after the place and keeping it up. Looking at it, what did we have to lose, a nice home nicely furnish and winter coming on? Well, it proved to be a good decision; the winter of 1936 and 1937 turned out to be the most severe in many years.
One day while we were living at the Drain Place, as I came home from work I met Thelma on the road out by the pump house about a hundred yards from the house. "What are you doing out here, Honey?" I asked. "The Army is trying to bomb our house," she said trembling. “Some Army planes flew over the house and dropped some bombs right above the house. They landed right over there by those Joshua trees. They made a terrible loud explosion. I don't know if they are coming back to try again or not." I said, "Jump in the car, Sweetheart, we are going down to the East Base right now and see what is going on around here!"
At the base they could see we were really steamed up and promised to send some officer over to investigate. It was kinda funny what happened in a scary sort of way the next day. Thelma said the officers came to the door and asked her to show them where the bombs had hit. Thelma took them out and showed them where the bombs had hit the ground. As they were looking at the crater the bombs had made, this Army plane came over and started circling above their heads. The officers looked up, looking kind of worried, cussed at it and said, "'Hope that - - - fool doesn't drop any bombs."
We let Cliff and Loraine Howard live in our house while we were living at Drain's. We lived on Drain's place for about six months, then moved back to our house.
It is now March 1937 and two blessed events have occurred. The two mothers have delivered. If they had been planning replacements for the ones they had lost through marriage, things didn't seem to work out quite right. Leona Bates lost a daughter and she had a boy David Livingston, born on March 19, 1937. Edith Harris lost a son and she had a daughter Patricia Ann, born March 15, 1937. Oh well, they are both beautiful babies and the mothers couldn't be happier!
As I am working on our house in the evening after work with all my dreams intact, I am thinking how nice it would be to have electricity. As far as the power company goes, it probably wouldn't happen for many more years as the closest pole line is many miles away. The only solution is having your own generating plant. Sometime later I am talking to this man at work. He lived in the boondocks over toward Mojave and has a light plant and batteries. He is moving to Boron. He is building a house on Anderson Street in Boron and will have no more need for this light plant so would like to sell it. Whoop-tee-doo, what do you know, sounds like it is just what I am looking for. He invites me to come over and look it over.
I go over to see what he has. He has a gasoline-powered 32-volt Delco generator, 16 large glass-encased batteries, 32-volt iron, 32-volt console all wave radio, 32-volt toaster, 32- volt washing machine motor and 32-volt lamps. Everything looks first class. I say,"This is just what I am looking for but I am a little short of cash right now, what do you want for the whole lot?" He says, "Tell you what, do you have a Sears charge Account?" My reply, "I sure do." He says, "I am going to need a refrigerator and Sears has just the one I want in their catalog and it's around $150. You can buy it on your charge account and pay it off by the month and have it shipped to me in Boron and I will give you all this for the refrigerator." I say, “Looks like a deal to me," and so it was.
What a deal! I brought it all home, poured a concrete floor and a base for the generator. I built a building over it with shelves for the batteries and wired the house for electricity. Now we had electric iron, electric radio and washing machine. Man, we are swimming in luxury! The batteries would keep us in electricity all week without starting the generator. On Mondays we would start the generator and charge the batteries while Thelma did her washing. It all worked out very well.
Back at work now I have a new job working in the big machine shop and while there I have learned how to use a cutting torch. A cutting torch is a very handy tool around a place like this. Using acetylene gas mixed with oxygen makes a super hot flame that will burn through a one-inch steel plate. They put me with a new machinist they had hired, installing screw conveyors up in the new part of the mill. He was a good man but he didn't know how to use a cutting torch so I did all the cutting with the torch. I don't think anybody but us knew this: Fun! After we got all the screws installed, I was put with Charlie Roycroft to help him. Charlie was a wise old machinist that had worked around mills like this for many years and knew all the tricks of the trade. How do you put a six-inch shaft in a big steel roller for the long rotary kilns that take 50-ton press to push it in, when you don't have a 50-ton press? Easy for Charlie: you build a little round chamber out of fire bricks that the roller will set in with the hole facing up. Heat it red hot, suspend the shaft above it on a chain hoist, lower into the red hot roller, the hole in the roller has expanded in size as it is heated and the shaft drops easily into the roller. When it cools, it will shrink around the shaft, it will take a 50-ton press to push it out. There are many things that can be done with a few inexpensive tools if you know the tricks. Another thing I am happy to learn is how to sharpen twist steel bits of all sizes. I am really getting an education working with Charlie Roycroft.
I have the weekend off so we have decided to go to Los Angeles so Thelma can visit with her family; it has been awhile. Arriving we are told Willard has had a collision with another car on Marmion Way. No one is hurt badly; their Studebaker though is badly damaged. They have it towed to the Studebaker garage where they tell them it will cost over $400 to fix it. That is too much so they buy another car for less. It is sitting in the back yard and Leona wants to get it out of there, so she says to me, "You can have it if you get it out of there." I go out and survey the damage. The front axle is bent way down in the middle, making the front wheels closer together at the top and farther apart at the bottom. It has leaf springs and the master leaf is broken on the left side and the left wheel is pushed back under the car. Also the left fender is bent down on the tire. This appears to be all the damage. I see nothing there that I can't handle so I say I will take it. I go down to Studebaker, buy a new master leaf, pull the axle back in place after beating the fender back in shape. I install the new master leaf. Now comes a little trick I have learned. The badly bowed down axle needs to be brought up straight so the front wheels will be perpendicular. Now here comes the trick. I put a hydraulic jack under the middle of the axle, throw a log chain under the jack and fasten tight where the springs are clamped to the axle. Now with a couple hundred pumps on the jack, the axle comes nicely into place in a straight line. Job complete. Total cost $6.50. I jump in, turn the key, the motor roars to life and we are ready to head for the desert, leaving Leona wondering how I could fix it so cheap when they wanted $400.00 to fix it at the Studebaker garage.
We used this car for many years in Muroc and also in Boron, even used it to drill a well on the ten acres by our home. More about that later.
Monday morning back at work in the machine shop, Charlie informs me we have a special job to do today. Today we are going to put new cables on the big double drum hoist at the main shafts in the Baker Mine. This is the shafts where all the ore is hoisted out of the Baker mine and where most of the men are lowered into the mine and pulled out at the end of their shift. I am so glad to be working with Roycroft. He is so knowledgeable, he gets most of the real important jobs, especially where employee's life or limb is at risk.
After we get the cables over the big shevie wheels on top o f the galis frame, (This 3/4 cable is very heavy. We do this by fastening the new cable to the old cable and pulling the new cable over the shevies with the old cable.) We fasten the one end to the cage and ore bucket, the other end fastens to the hoist drums. There are two drums so one cable goes over the top on one drum and fastens, and under the other drum and fastens. Now with the new cable, all the dials and drum markings will be off. It will be my job to ride the skips down and bell them exactly to each level while Charlie on top will be re-marking each dial and drum. This will have to be done on each side. It will take a couple of hours.
The company is very particular about these cables. The men ride up and down hundreds of feet in and out of the mine. Strict records are kept when they were installed, how many trips they have made up and down. After so many trips they are changed end for end so the most wear will come in a different place. After so long a time and so many trips, new cables are installed.
Over at Muroc, the church is running into a little trouble. We have been meeting at the school house. Now Mrs. Work is giving us a hard time saying the church people are talcing the kids' pencils and leaving the room in disarray. It is obvious she doesn't like us using her class room for a church. We as a church don't want any hard feelings in the community, so what to do? Brother Griggs has had a burden for Charlie Anderson who is not a church goer. Brother Griggs has talked to Charlie and dealt with him many times about his soul's salvation. Charlie Anderson is a likeable, interesting person, fun to talk to but a hard nut to crack on spiritual matters. So far it appears Brother Griggs has made no progress. However, Mrs. Hattie Anderson attends our church and is very fond of Bro. Griggs as a preacher. I have been talking to her about the situation at the school. Sometime past they had built a store building over in North Muroc on Highway 466 (now Highway 58) and ran a store there for a time, but it proved unprofitable so they had shut it down; the building was now empty. Hattie suggested we could use this building for our church, rent free, if we wanted to move it over there. I talk it over with our people and they seemed to think it would be a good idea. It also might be a double whammy as it would be close to half way between Muroc and Boron and Boron had no church at this time. There could be a number attend from there. We have now gone over to North Muroc, unlocked the door, went in the building, swept the floor and cleaned it up, only one problem, there is nothing for the congregation to sit on.
There just seems to be three alternatives: do like they do on the mission field, either stand or sit on the floor or make some seating. I don't think the first two will work in the good old U.S.A. When people come to church in this country, they expect to have a place to sit down. Well, it looks like someone is going to have to do this little deed, who? Look in the mirror, Fella, there doesn't seem to be anyone else around. There is no money in the treasury and I am not over-endowed with it at this time, and I have plenty of work waiting at home that needs to be done, but this is a must. Lives are hanging in the balance. Ernie Fillinger has come to help. We go to Lancaster, buy enough lumber to build sixteen benches, each five feet long. They are built like a garden bench with slats, two for the back and six on the seat. We go over them with brown walnut stain after they are finished. After that we give them all a coat of spar varnish. We are kinda proud of our workmanship; they look real nice. Someone loans us the use of a piano and we are ready to begin services.
The move to North Muroc proves to be a good one and we now have a nice size congregation, part coming from Muroc and part coming from Boron and a fine group of young people.
We have a Friday night service just for the young people. The older folks can come but they cannot take part; this is a young people's service by young people and for young people. The service consists of singing hymns and choruses and testimonies with different ones leading, prayer, Bible drills, a contest of memorizing Scriptures with prizes given, and lots of fun things and a short sermon or devotional by one of the young people. Quite often some of the Harris young people get roped in on this one. Genevieve is the piano player for both the Sunday and Friday night service as she is the only one in the church that can play the piano. She is a junior in high school. Besides the regular Friday night services, the young people had lots of fun socials, sometimes at the Harris homestead, with New Years Eve parties and taffy pulls, picnics and outings. Genevieve remembers one time, we took the whole gang deep-sea fishing on the barge off Long Beach. We took Brother Griggs fishing several times on the barge, 12 miles out in the ocean from Long Beach, as he was very fond of ocean fishing and was very good at catching the big 10-pound yellow tail. Yes, I know it is hard to believe, but yes, in the long-distant past in ancient times, I was a young person.
I guess Ralph must be in need of a little excitement. He has gone and bought himself a Harley Davidson motorcycle; not to be outdone, Art Crowley has bought an Indian motorcycle. Thelma and I have some exciting news! Thelma had been feeling something was different in her body, so she has gone down to her mother's doctor in Eagle Rock for an examination. The good doctor says she is pregnant. We have both come from big families so we both want to have a big family. Looks like this is the start; it is due in November or December this year.
Back at the mine and machine shop, Charlie and I have a new project. Charlie has brought into the shop a large solid piece of steel, about fourteen inches by eighteen inches, probably weighing 500 pounds. It is going to be a high pressure hydraulic cylinder. He has bored out the center and he has turned it over to me to drill a lot of holes; they are all center punched and marked for size. I am thinking this is going to be duck soup. What I didn't know was this is no mild piece of steel; it is harder than mild steel. I start drilling and in no time my drill bit is dull and quits drilling. I go to the grinder and sharpen it, go back to my work, start drilling again, right away it is dull again. I don't know but Charlie is probably watching out of the corner of his eye and laughing up his sleeve. Finally after many more trips to the grinder, I go to Charlie and say, "Charlie, this dull bit is no good; it won't hold an edge." Charlie laughs and says, "Let me show you something, son, you sharpen a drill different for hard steel, than you do for other steel," and shows me how it is done. I put the drill back in the drill press and what a difference! It goes through the steel at a good rate. This little trick will stand me in good stead many times in later years.
Home now on my days off, I am doing a different kind of drilling. I am drilling a water well. The well rig I bought didn't have a motor. Remember the old Chrysler touring car I told about in an earlier story? I took it out of the car and put it in the well rig. Everything seems to be going good and I am making progress. I have also rigged up a light on the rig so I can work at night after work.
It is now November 1937 and Thelma is living with her folks in Los Angeles to be near her doctor for prenatal care and to be near the hospital when the time comes.
December blows in a very apt way to express it on the desert for this is the windy season. Surely it won't be long now and it wasn't. On December 3, Thelma gave birth to a beautiful little girl. I was so excited on the way to the hospital I bought a shirt three sizes too small when I put it on the cuffs on the sleeves came just below my elbow. When I got to the hospital and saw our beautiful new little daughter, I was overwhelmed. When the nurse brought her in and placed her in this new little mother's arms, what a beautiful sight to behold! When I looked down on this new mother with the baby cradled in her arms and with satisfaction, love and joy mirrored in her moist eyes, I thought how awesome that two human beings dedicated to each other and in the sanctity of marriage together have brought another human soul into existence. How wonderful and yet under God. What a responsibility to nurture these little ones in an environment of Christian love so they will be a blessing to each other and to mankind.
In due time we brought our precious little treasure home. Our little bundle ofJoy and that was her name, in fact we broke with tradition and gave her four names because she was named after her two grandmothers,
Joy Edith Leona Harris. I am sure Thelma got a lot of good advice from her mother on how to raise babies, a mother who had raised seven babies, but I don't think Thelma needed too much advice. She was just a natural little mother and did a great mothering job on all her kids.
I am now back at work in the machine shop. Things are starting to slow down a bit as the building programs are nearing completion. I am doing some mundane jobs around the mill like tightening loose bolts on machinery and cleaning things left laying around during the rush.
At home I am back drilling on the well again on my day off and after work at night. It has lain idle for sometime because of more important matters. I will be going down to the Los Angeles area to buy some steel casing for the well.
It is late spring now 1938. A young man named Byron Chase has been coming up to Boron lately. We hear he is planning on starting a Baptist church there.
Thelma is down visiting her family with the baby. This will be a good time to surprise her by installing the gas stove while she is away. I go over to Steussy gas supply in Boron, get two bottles of propane gas and the stove. The plumbing is quite simple and I am ready to test the stove. I light a match and light up the four top burners. (This is before the day of automatic lighting gas stoves.) Great, they burn with a beautiful blue flame. Good so far. Now to test the oven. Here is where I make a terrible mistake. I don't know if my brain slipped a cog or what, but I think it is more likely I am used to a kerosene stove. You see with them, you can turn them on and there is no hurry about lighting them. Anyhow whatever, I turn the oven on, casually light a match, reach down with the match in hand and open the oven door. Whoom! There is an explosion; flame shoots out of the oven right in my face. My eyebrows disappear, my five-day growth of beard is gone, my face is red as a beet like a bad sunburn, and the whites of my eyes have turned red. Along with all this my surprise for Thelma has evaporated because when I go down to get Thelma and the baby and they gaze on this funny-looking man, I am going to have some explaining to do. Maybe the fact that she has a new gas stove, she won't think about what a nut she has for a husband.
Besides visiting, another reason Thelma went to Los Angeles, was to go to her doctor for an examination. Wonderful news, Thelma is going to have another baby. When God created man, male and female, He said to them: "Be fruitful and multiply." We seem to have entered into this program wholeheartedly.
Mother during our time in Muroc worked off and on for Mrs. Anderson in their very large house back of their store in Muroc. The Andersons had this very large house with many rooms near the north end of the lake where much testing of cars, cycles and airplanes was going on. Being there were no hotel accommodations in town, the Andersons would board these men, 5, 6, 8 or so while they were in town testing their machines, providing meals as well as sleeping accommodations. Mama while helping Mrs. Anderson with meals and other work would come home from time to time with funny stories of things that happened there. Most of these stories were forgotten after a time, but this one story stuck with us and became a cliche around our dinner table for years.
In preparing dishes for the men's meals, Mrs. Anderson would taste each dish to make sure it was OK. If she tasted a dish that was exceptionally good, she would say, "Oh, this is delicious. We will save this for me and Arlene." (Arlene was her grown daughter.) We all about cracked up when Mama came home and told us this story, so this got to be a saying around our dinner table if anyone was eating and thought a certain dish was exceptionally good, they would exclaim, "Oh, this delicious. We will save this for me and Arlene." I'm sure if we had a visitor at the table when this happened, they would have thought we had lost some of our marbles.
Nell has graduated from Muroc School is now going to high school in Lancaster. Genevieve who has dated Harry Debord briefly before graduating from high school, is now going to junior college and dating Cecil Debord. Glenn is dating Roberta Steward who lives in Randsburg. Ralph is going with Betty Sickman who lives on the Cohen Ranch. Romance seems to be drifting across the desert like a cool evening breeze after a hot summer's day in August.
At home I am drilling on my well at night after work. Something strange is happening. There is this crash, then this strange banging noise. I grab a light and run around to the engine. It is still running but the poor thing is in its death throes. The number three piston has come right through the side of the block and broke off. The banging noise is the connecting rod banging against the starter on the side of the motor. I shut it off, thinking, "What do I do now?" I decide to go to bed and sleep on that question. I don't have another engine to replace the one that gave up the ghost. After work the next day, I hit on an idea. Remember the Studebaker that Mrs. Bates gave me? It is still around and running good I believe I could take the back fender off of it and put the belt that went on the engine over the back tire and use it for the power plant to finish the well. It works. I have to run it in reverse to get the right speed and direction. For fun I write down the mileage on the odometer. I go ahead and am able to finish the well down to 60 feet which I feel will give me plenty of water for our needs. I check the speedometer. I have gone over a hundred miles in reverse drilling the well.
I have taken Thelma down to her mother's as it is getting close to the time for our next "Blessed Event." And so it happens Thelma brings forth a beautiful perfect little baby boy named Paul Forrest on December 19, 1938. We are so thrilled and happy but I am an old veteran now so I don't run out and buy any clothes that are too small. I am sitting by my beloved in the hospital, looking at her as she presses little Paul close to her. I'm thinking what a wonderful little mother she is now with two babies.
When we are back home our dream is unfolding before our eyes. Joy is a year old now and cute as a button and little Paul cooing as he looks at his mama's face. We are so happy but there are dark clouds peeking over the horizon. Rumors are flying thick and fast that the Army Air Corps is going to take all the land for miles around the dry lake in all directions and kick us all off the land. We keep working on our place. We put the casing in our well; we have ordered a jack pump that should be here any day now. Things are so uncertain, we don't know what to believe. The local army brass are staying mum; they will tell us nothing.
We decide to wait it out for awhile and not do anymore work or spend anymore money. We are afraid anything spent now will be money down the drain. So we wait and we wait; 1938 has come and gone and we are well into 1939. Finally the post office is filled with big white envelopes of official notices from the government. Our land and property will be taken by Eminent Domain. The property will be apprised and an offer made and a time when the property will have to be vacated. Well, now we know; looks like our dream of a nice little spread on the desert is just that, a dream; a dream that will never happen. One bright spot, our dream about a family. That is already materializing and will continue on.
Over at Boron the Baptist church has been going for some time now. At North Muroc we now have lost our people from Boron. You can't blame them. Why drive ten miles to church when you have one in town?
Now with this change of events, all our people are coming from the Muroc area. We decide to move the church back to Muroc. The Andersons let us build a kind of an open air building on their property. At our Sunday night services, the bugs are driving everybody crazy. We had a roof overhead with three electric lights down the middle, but with the sides more or less open at night, these bugs would be attracted to the light and fly in one at a time. After a little while there would be hundreds circling each light. They would go down people's shirt collars, getting in their face and in their hair, driving people bonkers. We didn't know what to do about this problem until a man came along with a solution. He said to get a tin wash pan, suspend it below each light and fill it with water, add a little kerosene and that will take care of your problem. We tried it and sure enough it worked. The bugs come into the light, make about 2 circles around the light and fall into the water. There was never more than one or two bugs around the lights at any given time.
On Easter morning 1939, we had a beautiful sunrise service on the big rocks on the hill in Muroc over looking the dry lake. It signaled the beginning of the end for the little church in Muroc and the Harris family's sojourn in the Muroc environs. Bro. Griggs preaches an inspiring sermon, Genevieve plays the piano and as the congregation sing "Rock ofAges," it reflects off the rocks and drifts down into the valley. It is a beautiful, beautiful desert morning where God's children and His creation seem to harmonize in a symphony of love.
I was reminiscing about our years in Muroc. There was something about the old Muroc that we lived in that seemed different than any place else. It had a mystic and a charm that was hard to define. Maybe it was the vastness of the desert it was in. Maybe it was the way the population was scattered out over this vast area. How many places in California can you take a compass and draw a circle 10 miles in diameter from the post office and know everyone in that circle? Muroc was such a place. Everybody had lots of breathing room.
It was nice sometimes to get away for a spell and go to Los Angeles or surrounding cities, get in the sea of traffic with people honking and crowding you on every side, long lines to many events. You felt you were in an atmosphere of pushing and shoving. After a short stay, it was always good to get back to our desert retreat in Muroc where you can see a mile long freight train crossing the lake five miles away and at night the stars look so close and brilliant and the moon has a beautiful orange glow as it comes up in the east.
So as I leave Muroc on this beautiful Easter morning it is with some misgiving and a tad of sadness and yet realizing as the old are pushed out and the new push in that the brave men who defend our country in the air, putting their lives on the line daily for America will have one of the best places on earth to train in. They will have the largest emergency landing field in the world which will save many lives. So there is always some good that come from any sacrifice we make in our lives and to save lives is the greatest good.
We will close this story as the United States Air Force takes over Muroc and it disappears off the face of the earth. When and if we come back, in our next story, the Vem Harris family will be in Boron, California and the Forrest Harris family will be in Adelanto, California.
Love ya,
Grandpa Vern
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