Nov. 9, 1984
There are so many things I want to tell you that I will probably ramble around quite a bit. It has become important to me that I try to help you understand this heritage of yours. I believe that one is the product of their early environment as well as a continuation of the blood that flowed from the parents to the children. How do you separate the two? I guess that in modern times they do get separated in the early breakup of a family. Perish the thought; it is not good. Dad was honest to a fault, as the saying goes. But he made one grave mistake and it haunted him all his life. He sold some cattle and was bringing the money back from Kansas City. He loved to play cards, poker included. He was lured into a game and lost the money. I understand that big Tom Pratt was also in the game. It finally ended up that the man who owned the cattle obtained a judgment against him. He was never able to pay it off but any time he accumulated anything the court would take it and apply it on the judgment. There was a time when I tried my hand at cards but I was never too good. The last time I ever played was in the navy. I had been losing and finally I drew four tens which is a very good hand and no one stayed so the pot was a very small one. I never played again. Dad spent a lot of time herding cattle. That was the term that somewhere was changed from holding cattle. That was a rather endless job but not a very hard one. It was a good place to do a lot of reading and training a dog or horse. Dad read and studied. I was told that he studied Latin. He only had an eighth grade education plus normal school, which was a short course for would be teachers. He did have some knowledge of the classical literature. I too spent considerable time herding cattle. I can remember when there was a considerable amount of unfenced grass in this country. Electric fence was unheard of and permanent fences were to costly to build. So a lot of livestock grazed under the watchful eye of a herder and his dog. Dad and Bob and Vera Woods spent a lot of their early days herding in the same area. They became very good lifelong friends. Vera was Fred Conard's mother. There were lots of antelope and wild horses in the country then. Antelope were very curious creatures. One pastime, when antelope were near, was to lie down in the tall grass or a depression and wave a stick with a bright colored rag tied to the top of it. If one lay very still and the wind was right to blow the scent away, they would come very close. There were a lot of buzzards around. They fed on dead animals. They might soar for what seemed like hours, riding the updrafts on a summer day. One could lie on the back and watch them or the white clouds that floated overhead. It was a time to dream and I am sure that all of us did. My one great desire was to see South America. The pictures in our geography books always fascinated me. You see most of my life, except for Naval service has been spent working alone. I have always preferred it that way. Oh yes, we almost always carried a lunch and of course the horse could eat grass and you shared a bit of lunch with the dog. Life was good. We had no money but our wants were few. If we saw a toy that we liked we would try to make one like it. Maybe it didn't work like the 'boughten one, but who cared.