Grandpa's turn:

He calls it Tales of Woe and Happiness 4/25/31 to 9/3/37: I was born 4/25/31 in the late afternoon. The doctor was called but arrived too late to do anything. We were living in a 'tank house' at the time. One room square, three stories high. The tank at the top was a large 12' diam and about 8' deep. The water would be pumped up to it and then gravity would provide the water for domestic use. The lower two rooms was our home, about 3/4 mile south of Delano, CA, between it and the airport. It was always a bit of a joke in the family that I was a 'free' baby because the doctor died shortly after I was born and never billed us. When he registered by birth he failed to give my name, so my birth certificate just said 'baby' Topper. When I joined the Highway Patrol I had the rare opportunity to call myself by any name I wanted, but I stuck with Richard Kenneth.

This was during the worst of the Depression and financially we struggled, and would continue to do so for most of the next 10 years. My father Lee (shown above with Lowney about this period) was the youngest of a family of 10, and about half of them lived the same general area during this time. They were all primarily farm laborers. Lee & Lowney moved into this general area June 1927 (before the Grapes of Wrath days and the mass migration from Oklahoma to California) and good help was 45 to 50 cents an hour. But the Crash of 29 had driven the wages down to 20-25 cents by the time I was born.

My first memory of anything was the death of my little brother Joe. He died on his first birthday. As it was told to me, we were all living at the Moser Place (an 80 acre farm (vines and open land) about a mile east of Delano. The farm had a resevoir to hold the irrigation water. Our house (about 150 feet from the reservoir) had a fence, but somehow Joe Allen got out and was found in the resevoir. My parents jumped in the car and drove him to the doctors, but he was declared d.o.a. My only personal memory is standing in the driveway with Hazel and Bill and Uncle Albert who was visiting us at the time watching them drive away. The following year Uncle Albert himself was killed in an automobile accident. Another one of my father's brothers, Joe, died about this time also. He owned an orange orchard and had fallen from a ladder, piercing himself in the back with a branch. It never healed properly and he died, leaving his widow Edith who continued to be very close to our family and was a huge help to us physically and financially.

Late 1935, the whole family moved to Porterville into a rented house on D Street. Life and finances were a little better with Dad getting some oil field work as a roughnecker or driller. It paid a lot better than farm labor, but the work was inconsistent. So life was feast or famine most of the time. I

can remember during this time, my mother's sense of humor coming across. She would make biscuits for breakfast every morning and this particular morning we all dug into them as usual, only to find them inedible - we couldn't bite them. She laughed, and cried April Fools!! She had put rags in the middle of each. Another memory of living there at that time was the day Louise was born. We (Hazel, Bill and I) were taken to Lon and Irene Sheltons (Irene was Jo and Edith's daughter). Lon owned his own truck business, so they lived much better than we did, and when she brought out 'store-bought' cereal in the morning (Wheaties) and said 'dig in' we thought we had died and gone to heaven. UNTIL! The milk was poured on and we dug in - Oh No! Canned Milk. None of us could eat it.

We moved back to Delano and the Moser place again the winter of 36/37 and we got our first bicycle. We would take turns driving about 1/2 mile up and down the road - non stop from dawn to dusk. That poor bike never got a rest except when we were asleep or in church (the latter being quite often as my mother was very religious).

September 1937 I started school. Cecil Avenue Elementary School in Delano. I actually ended up my 8th grade at this school and attended the school for various periods of time during the 3rd, 4th year also - along with 18 other elementary school.

You can see the other picture at the beginning which would have been taken about the spring of 36. Being a kid at that time was so different from now. No TV, sometimes no radio, no pre-school, no kindergarten and noone tried to teach children before they went to school except bible stories which we got on a daily basis, along with our numerous prayers during the day (which certainly didn't hurt us). Children were simply expected to play - ball games, hide and seek, tag and anything our imaginations came up with. We climbed trees, roughhoused and generally behaved just as kids should!. It got rough at times. Both Bill and I were knocked unconscious by falling out of trees, and once Bill was knocked out by falling out of a moving car. My second time was playing baseball and running from third to base meeting up with the cat running home! My mother had called the cat to feed it. That ground was hard!

Schooling itself followed the path of "See Dick, Run Dick, See Dick run" in the 1st grade, leaning to write your name in the 2nd, tell time by the 3rd, math along the way up to multiplecation and some fractions by the 4th. I had a speech impediment at this time which made me difficult to understand. Bill very often had to interpret what I said to our elders, but from about 4 years on I was always asked to recite a poem or something at Church! I was called "Dickie Boy" by many of my elders - sure glad THAT stopped!

More about school years next time.......................Grandpa