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Freddie’s Childhood Memories

A mix of memories I decided to record before I forget them. I may have some details wrong, so if you remember differently, please let me know!

Diamond Springs House I was quite young when we lived there. I remember a few steps going up into the front door, with the kitchen on the left and living room to the right. The back part had a bathroom in the center and a bedroom on each side. Mommy and Daddy slept in the right bedroom, and I stayed in the left one. I don’t remember where Eileen and Ellen stayed—maybe in the same room. I don’t remember how old I was when I was potty trained, but I do remember wearing a diaper to bed at age 3. One morning I woke up and my diaper was dry. So I told Mommy I didn’t need a diaper at night any more. But I wet the bed that night, so I went back to diapers at night— I don’t know for how long. I had a nice tricycle that I rode around in our gravel yard, but I had to stay away from the street next to the house. In front of the house there were several kinds of shrubs, and I really liked one with succulent leaves. I could easily snap them in half, and one time I got scissors and had fun cutting them into pieces. When Daddy arrived around midday after delivering a load of veneer blocks, I helped carry in food items that Daddy had picked up in SaveMart - canned corn, canned milk and other foods. I don’t remember much else about that place.

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Living in Town

As I remember, our main home base was at the Ranch, but we also lived for several years in a small house on Lime Kiln Road in Diamond Springs, and around 1960, we built a larger house with a basement below Grandma and Papa’s house on the outskirts of Placerville. The memories below happened at the Placerville homes. Rubber Band Fights When we kids got together with our cousins Diann and Denise, we made forts in Grandma & Papa’s living room, using sofa cushions, chairs, pillows and anything else we could find. We had a fort at each end of the room, teamed up, and shot heavy duty rubber bands across the room at each other. We also folded gum wrappers or bits of paper into V-shaped bullets, which we hooked to the rubber bands and used those for ammunition. I don’t recall getting hit very often, or hitting moving targets on the opposite side, but it was more likely when there were more of us shooting at each other. The adults didn’t seem to mind, as we were far enough apart to do any damage. It was fun to do when we couldn’t play outside. We did have to put everything away afterwards and pick up our ammunition, but years later we’d fund rubber bands and folded paper bullets when we moved furniture. I even found them in the rafter hollows. Eating Dog Food Grandma and Papa had a small dog they called Cubby, and kept his food in a bag in a cubbyhole in the stone wall portion of the kitchen. It looked really good, and I decided to try a few pieces. They weren’t too bad, but tasted very oily, and one taste was enough. Cubby Bites a Boy When Nicolacito and Bulmaro’s family were here, Bulmarito was playing with Cubby, and the dog bit him. Daddy grabbed Cubby by the nape of the neck, took him behind the house and gave him a good spanking. The dog yelped a long time, and was much more subdued after that. Cubby was never as nice a dog as Chubby. Buying the Volvo In 1960, I went with Daddy to shop for a smaller car. We looked over the vehicles at a used car lot, and Daddy liked a red Volvo squareback. He got permission from the salesman to test-drive it around the block, and after we drove out of the lot onto the street, another salesman yelled at us, waving his arms back 2

and forth. I told Daddy, who hadn’t seen the man, but he continued driving, liked the car and bought it. Apparently the other man thought we were stealing it! We drove it around town, down to the valley, over to Clearlake, up to Seattle and down to Linda Vista one time. Daddy had it painted blue after the door got repaired from a rock slide on our way to Clearlake. I think we sold it after 2 or 3 years, as we always had more things and people to take on trips than it had room for. Linda’s Smashed Fingers When we lived in the house in town, we got home after running errands in the Volvo. Somehow as we got out of the car, the passenger-side door was closed while Linda’s fingers were in the doorway, and she screamed in pain. Mommy had to hurry around and unlatch the door to free Linda’s fingers. I don’t think they bled, and her fingers were likely sore for a few days, but that’s all I can remember. Linda’s Potty Chair Linda had a little wooden potty chair, with a white porcelain potty under it and a roll of toilet paper on the floor next to it. I took the roll and put it in the potty partly filled with pee, and then called Linda to see that her roll of TP was soaked and useless. She ran crying to Mommy, and when Daddy came home, I got a good spanking. Then he held me in his arms and explained that when I did naughty things like that, Satan was inside of me, and the spanking would help me remember to not let Satan get in me and do bad things. After every spanking, he always held me on his lap and told me he loved me. Staying Up All Night Often at bedtime, I begged Daddy to let me stay up all night—I didn’t want to go to bed. Finally Daddy had enough of my begging, and one night when I asked, he said I could stay up all night. I couldn’t believe my ears, but happily played with my toys as Mommy and the girls went to bed and turned the lights out. Daddy and I were in the living room, and the rest of the house was dark and quiet. I imagined tall black men with spears in the darkness, and staying up late wasn’t fun as I expected it to be. Before long I became very sleepy, and informed Daddy that I’d changed my mind. But he insisted that I stay up. So I lay on the sofa and pretended to look at pictures in a book—with my eyes closed. Daddy was across the room, reading a magazine. He checked on me, and told me to keep my eyes open and stay awake. After what seemed like forever to me, and pleading over and over for him to let me go to bed, he finally agreed to my request, when I promised always go to bed when told to. I never asked to stay up late after that! 3

Teaching Chicks to Swim While living in our house in town, our mother hen hatched a nice family of chicks, and I liked to hold them. One time I saw a bucket of water and decided to teach the chicks how to swim. But they just flapped their wings and kept getting out. I put them back in, but they continued getting out. Finally I got one chick to stay in, but it wouldn’t swim. It just floated there motionless. I told Mommy, and she said chicks are not made to swim like ducks, and it had drowned. She got a Velveeta cheese box, wrapped the dead chick in a rag, and helped me bury it. I was learning about life—and death—the hard way. Washing Mouth with Soap When I was about 6 years old, Daddy wanted to be sure that we grew up bilingual. So he told us children that we could speak English to Mommy, but we had to speak Spanish to him and to our siblings. The consequence for disobeying would be getting our mouths washed out with soap. One day, and I don’t remember why, but I must have defiantly spoken English to the wrong person. Daddy took me straight to the bathroom, turned on the water, took a piece of soap and proceeded to wash my mouth, getting plenty of soap on my teeth as I cried in discomfort. It took a lot of rinsing to get the soapy taste out of my mouth, and to this day I can still remember the strange feeling of soap on my teeth when I smell certain soaps. After that, I never disobeyed that rule, and even now it feels awkward to speak in English to my sisters. And we’re all thankful that we are very fluent in Spanish. Runaway White Car Very early one morning, Daddy left with a truckload of veneer blocks headed to Stockton. The rest of us were to come later in the white car, bringing a load of 50 gallon drums to buy gasoline where it was cheaper. Mommy started the car to warm up the engine, turned on the headlights, and went into the house to get us kids. She heard a noise, and saw the vehicle going down the hill beside the house. It jumped down over two stone terrace walls, went through a tall deer fence, ran over two small pear trees, and came to a stop partway up a larger pear tree in the orchard. It stayed there with the motor still running, and the headlights shining into the early morning sky. Mommy got a flashlight and hurried down, but couldn’t get in through the driver door because it was up in the tree. She was barely able to open the back door enough to squeeze in, crawl over the barrels, and turn off the engine and headlights. Of course we didn’t make it to the city with the gas barrels, but we are so thankful we kids weren’t in the car. It wasn’t badly damaged, and we only had to pay the neighbors for the damaged fence and pear trees. 4

Clothesline and Other Bedroom Memories

My bedroom was on the back porch above the ground-level basement entrance. Mommy had a clothesline running from the bedroom window to a pine tree, with a thin cable running on pulleys between the window and a pine tree. After doing laundry, Mommy hung clothes on the line, rolling the cable out with clothes on it until the stopper reached the pulley on the pine tree. When they were dry, she reversed the process. When I went to bed at night, my shoes were often full of dirt, which I emptied out of sight under the bed. Eventually Mommy discovered my growing dirt piles, and had me empty them in the trash or out the window. While in bed, I was careful not to let my arm hang over the edge, as I didn’t want imaginary crocodiles under there to bite my hand off. I often slept in until the sun came up, and Mommy, who normally never sang, would sing the first line of “Good morning merry sunshine” to me. It felt nice to wake up that way. Goulash Grandma Adams was well known for her thick, whizzed-up green drink which we all called goulash. She made it every morning when she was at home, claiming that it would keep us healthy. She made it using pineapple juice, sunflower seeds, raisins, and stuffed it full of tender comfrey leaves from her abundant supply growing like weeds in the garden. Sometimes she added other ingredients when she read about the latest superfood. Most of us complained about how awful it was, but the flavor was usually tolerable, although the blender could not whizz the prickly comfrey leaves fine enough, so it was a bit rough going down. But we dutifully drank our small-glass portions, and it may have been a factor in Grandma and Papa’s living to their mid-90s. While in Mexico, Daddy had his own version of goulash, made with orange juice, bananas, pineapple and a generous portion of icky papaya, which thickened it into a Jell-O-like consistency if we didn’t drink it right away. The others liked it, and I tolerated it, but was glad when we were out of papaya—then it tasted good! 5

Papa’s Eating Fads Ever since I can remember, Papa would find something on sale or that he really liked, stock up on it, and eat it at nearly every meal. Maybe it started when ice cream went on sale for 10 cents each half gallon. He would eat it for months, along with other food, of course. Another time it was beans – 3 times a day, every day. Then it was grated carrots. He would come in from his outdoor work early and grate carrots, eating them 3 times a day. When his skin started orange, we convinced him he needed to taper off on them. Then he started in on chocolate pudding, mixing up a batch and eating that at every meal. There were other items he binged on, but the big one was popcorn. He got up early, practiced his organ for an hour, and popped 3 gallons of popcorn, storing them in wide-mouth plastic gallon jars. He ate a gallon for breakfast, another one for dinner and the last one for supper. When going to work for Sydney Holland, in with his lunch box items was a gallon of popcorn. Sydney joked with him about it, but Papa didn’t mind—he just enjoyed his popcorn. And when it went on sale, he made sure to keep a good supply ahead—at times he had more than 200 lbs. stored in the basement. Instant Protein and Other Fads Grandma read somewhere that we needed more protein, and started buying gallon containers of Instant Protein powder. Maybe some of it went into her goulash, but she would make sure we all got a serving each day somehow – sprinkled on our sliced peaches or mixed with water. I believe it was vanilla flavor, and tasted good, so we didn’t mind it. Daddy read that Swiss whey was good for us, so he bought it in bulk and gave us a spoonful of the fine dry powder every morning. We had to be careful how we breathed while taking it, as the dry powder easily went down the wrong passage sometimes, making us cough a cloud of white powder out over everything. After a few of those occurrences, Mommy or Daddy found a way to get it into our food in hydrated form. Brewer’s yeast was another fad, which again when taken dry by the spoonful, we had to be careful how we ingested it. We later found out that it tasted good on popcorn and with other foods, and still use it to this day, now known as nutritional yeast. 6

Walking the Flume Ben Holder and Daddy took me down to Slab Creek Dam, and we walked the flume all the way to Mosquito Road. Most of it was a wood structure supported by large wood supports. It was about 8’ wide and 6’ deep, and had a nice boardwalk used by the flume inspector to keep an eye on it for areas that leaked or needed reinforcement. It was a long walk, but fun as we watched the water run below us to the Rock Creek power station. We saw a rattlesnake in the rocks, so the men jumped off and dispatched it. As we neared the road, the flume became a canal where solid granite rock had been blasted out, and continued that way to Mosquito Road, where a short one-lane wooden bridge crossed it. A few years later, the flume was dismantled, and the rotting beams and gate valves can be seen to this day. In 1973 Javier and I walked from the top of the ridge down to the recently destroyed flume remains, and followed it to Mosquito Road—a much more difficult trek on the steep canyon wall compared to the flume boardwalk. During that walk, I lost a small pocketknife that Pat Rosaschi gave me – a trick knife that could not be opened unless it was held a certain way and pushed in the right place. When we got to the canal part, we found a cute little hobo house made in the granite channel, where someone had placed beams and sheet metal over the top, made a wall at each end with a door, and had a makeshift bed, table, bench and shelves. It appeared that the place had been abandoned a long time before, but we found old bedding, clothes, kitchen items and even some cans of food. We left everything intact. It was in a very remote place, and had a great view of the canyon. 7

Ranch Life Ranch Dirt Cookies When I was quite young, I enjoyed making “pretend” food. Deer droppings made nice “beans,” rotten wood that pulled apart in stringy pieces were “vegemeat,” and seeds or other plant parts made nuts, grains, etc. One day I mixed a batch of mud, rolled it into balls and mashed them into “cookies” on an upturned wooden box to bake in the sun. When I returned to check on them a few hours later, they were dry and crispy. They looked so delicious that I just couldn’t resist biting into one. But the mouthful of dirt I got was nothing at all like a cookie, and I quickly spat it out. I never tried that again! Nailing into the Floor Out toward the big barn, under a large white oak, Daddy had a wooden platform, about 8’ by 8’ in size. I don’t know if it used to be a shed, or was the beginning of one, but Daddy poured containers of screws, bolts, nuts, washers, nails and other used hardware all over it, making it easy to find whatever he needed for his jobs at a glance. When I got big enough to use a hammer, I took it out there and pounded a nail into the wooden floor. That was fun, and there were many kinds and sizes of nails, and I felt so grown up, pounding in all those nails. Years later, when the floor began rotting, Daddy collected his hardware and took the floor apart. He was quite surprised to find hundreds of nails of many lengths and sizes sticking out from the bottoms of the floor boards! Planting Pine Nuts at the Ranch We had many Digger pine trees on our place, with large heavy pinecones that could be lethal if they fell on us, and could puncture car tires. They had large nuts in them, so Daddy had us collect them so we could crack them open and enjoy the little nuts. They tasted good, had a slight pitchy taste, and took a lot of work to get a few nibbles for nutrition. One time we had some extra seeds, so Daddy sent Eileen, Ellen and me onto the mostly bare hillside between the spring and the upper gate to plant them. Now the hillside is a forest of tall Digger pines, which in my opinion are useless and ugly compared to the Ponderosa pines. But now 60 years later we can see the results of our work. 8

Gas on Fire One snowy day, I went to the woods with Daddy, where he built a fire to keep us warm, sloshing some gasoline on it to get the wet wood to burn. Then he left me by the fire while he went off to scout out more trees. He took a long time, the fire died down, and I got cold. So I removed the cap from the metal gallon gas can, held it up over the fire and poured some gas on it. To my surprise, the little bonfire came to life, and flames raced up the stream of gas and into the can. I quickly jumped back and was scared as I saw fire coming out of the nearly empty gas can. Not knowing what to do, I shook the can around, and to my relief, the fire in the can went out, so I put the cap back on. That gas can should have exploded, but I believe my guardian angel saved my life that day. Many years passed before I told Daddy about that incident. Broken Yardstick Another time I was at the same landing, under an oak tree, while Daddy went off somewhere. I got bored, and played with Daddy’s yardstick that he used for marking logs. I threw it in the air and watched it fall. Then I discovered that if I threw it up with a twirl, it would fall making a humming sound as it whirred down. That was more fun—until it fell and hit a rock, breaking it in half. When Daddy came back and found his broken yardstick, he was not happy because he needed to mark several logs for sawing, and neither half was long enough to use. So I got a good spanking with one of the halves, and then I ran into the woods and hid in a hollow oak tree, never wanting to see Daddy again. After a while, Daddy got worried and came looking for me, calling my name over and over, but I didn’t answer. I got tired of hiding, and the ants were biting me, so I went back, and Daddy hugged me and said he loved me. Several years went by before I showed him my hiding place—I wanted it to be a secret in case I needed to use it again! Riding the Cletrac Box, Lupines When I was very young, I rode in a wooden box bolted to the Cletrac tractor that Daddy ran up and down the hill, pulling logs to the landing. In the spring, lupines bloomed in carpets at the top of the ridge, and they were so fragrant and beautiful, I just flung myself into the mass of color and fragrance, immersing myself in what seemed to be what Heaven might be like. It was 9

near that very spot where we built our house in 1997, and lupines still bloom in that place, where we also added irises in the center of the circle we use as our driveway turnaround by our house.

Cutting My First Tree I watched Daddy cut down hundreds of trees, ever since I can remember. When Daddy got me a shiny silver bow saw, I enjoyed cutting tree branches into firewood, and pieces of old boards into short lengths to split into kindling. One day I decided to cut down a tree all by myself, so I took my axe and saw and headed down the hill where there were small trees, and found a white oak, with a trunk about 6” in diameter. I held up my axe to see which direction the tree was leaning, made a nice wedge-shaped undercut, and then made the back cut. To my delight, it landed exactly where I’d aimed it, and I felt quite proud and satisfied that I was a logger like Daddy. But I didn’t tell anybody, because I hadn’t asked permission, and I didn’t want to get into trouble. About a year later Daddy found it, and asked if I’d cut it, and I admitted I did. He didn’t punish me, but said I should have asked his permission, and done it under his supervision. Chasing Girls with Burning Stick Mommy and Daddy were cutting veneer blocks on property beyond Finnon Lake, and it was getting late. They wanted to finish up, so Daddy built a nice bonfire to keep us warm and give them some light. I pulled a burning stick out of the fire, and had fun chasing Linda and Lanita around with it, which made them cry. Daddy saw what was happening, stopped the chainsaw, threw the stick back into the fire, and gave me the spanking I deserved. I teased them so often, and should have remembered that there would be consequences, but for some reason I seemed to forget as more opportunities came up to tease and make them cry. I’m amazed that they still love me, in spite of all the mean things I did to them.

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Bedtime Routine Every night after Daddy sent us to bed, we would call out, “Daddy, duerme con mi.” (Daddy, sleep with me.) He would come into our dark sleeping areas to give us a goodnight hug and kiss, and then we’d say, “Buenas noches. Soñabas Dulces. Duerme bien!” (Good night. Sweet dreams. Sleep well!) That was our bedtime routine, and we’d happily fall asleep, knowing that Daddy loved us no matter how naughty we’d been during the day. Bathtub Poops When we 3 kids were little, Mommy would run a bath and put all of us in at the same time. Sometimes we’d find little pieces of poop floating around—Lanita was not fully potty trained yet. Mommy pulled us out and dried us off—I don’t remember her rinsing us off first. That happened more than once. Frozen Sink Since we traveled around so much, we kids always slept in sleeping bags. I don’t remember using sheets and blankets until I was in my late teens, unless we were visiting people who had beds made up for us. Nights at the Ranch during the winter would get very cold, and the only insulation we had was cardboard tacked to the board walls. One night I woke up to a loud thumping sound in the bathroom next to the area I slept. In the morning we found the bathroom sink on the floor. It had been mounted to the wall, with galvanized pipes coming through the floor connected to the faucets. That night the house was so cold that the pipes froze and broke, causing the sink to come off the wall mount and fall onto the wooden floor. Paper Squares Sometimes I woke up early, and for entertainment, I cut up junk mail and other papers into strips about half an inch wide. When I had a good amount of strips cut, I’d snip them into half inch squares—many hundreds of them. The colored papers were more fun to cut than plain printed letters, and I discovered that most catalog pages were thinner, so I could cut 3 or 4 strips at a time before cutting them into squares. I had a basket that I neatly snipped them into, and that kept me busy until the rest of the family got up. When the basket was full, Daddy would dump them into the stove, and I’d start all over again. I have no idea where I got the idea from, or why I did it, but I found it very enjoyable over the course of several months until I got tired of it.

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Bathroom Light The bathroom had no door—only a split curtain in the doorway. There was no light switch. An extension cord ran from the kitchen to the upper right corner just inside the door. A double-bulb fixture was connected to it, but there was a bulb on only one side. When it was dark, we had to carefully reach up, find the bulb, and turn it slightly until the light came on. If we weren’t careful and got our fingers on the empty bulb slot, we’d get a big jolt, which made using the bathroom at night very frightening. Turning off the hot bulb involved grabbing, turning and letting go quickly, or we’d burn our fingers. The toilet was very old, and when I pushed the flush lever, in my mind it sounded to me like “Floosh lottit, in through the yoi-let. Swoosh-slurp-glug-slurp-glug-slurp-glug.” Bathroom Strings There were knot holes in the boards between my room and the bathroom, so using string and fencing staples, I rigged string to different things in there. When one of my sisters walked into the bathroom, I pulled all the strings at the same time. That made the toilet flush, the tub water start running, the clothes hamper lid go up and down and a towel fly off the rack and across the room. When my parents saw it, they made me take it all down. When I got older, I built a door to replace the curtain, with a foot of open space above and below it, since there was no window in the bathroom. We never did put in a regular light switch though. Night Animals Later I moved to the back bedroom, which we had used as a chicken coop in earlier years. I cleaned it up, found rolls of bright yellow flowered wallpaper, tacked it to the walls, and put my sleeping bag on a sofa in there. It had a light with a pull string by the door. I rigged up strings to open and close the door and pull the light chain on and off, since my bed was across the room. I put a small wood burning heater stove in there to keep warm in the winter. At night I heard rustling noises outside during summer nights when my rustic slider window was open, so I used the Kodak Instamatic camera that Uncle Wes bought me and got photos of raccoons and deer. One night when the moon was bright, I saw a mother skunk with 3 babies scamper up the hill outside my bedroom. They had a nest in the leaves under my bedroom floor. I didn’t try taking pictures of them, but I was surprised to see how kitten-like they were, running and jumping around. I always thought they walked slowly. 12

Orphan Annie We had a room in the back of the house where we could lock up the chickens, but sometimes a hen would hide out where she was laying her eggs and hatch out some babies. One time there was a hen on her nest near the house. At night Mommy covered her with a wooden box so she would be safe from wild animals. But one night an animal knocked the box over and killed the mother and her babies—all but one little chick. We saw the little chick running around peeping loudly the next morning, and determined to save her, so we brought her into the house. Papa named her Orphan Annie, and she slept at the foot of Linda’s bed. Sometimes she even snuggled up by Linda’s chin at night. When she got bigger, she perched on the headboard to sleep. When we went for a ride in the 1930 Ford Model A pickup, we would take Annie for a ride, and she seemed to enjoy that. During the day, she followed us kids all around the yard as we ran and played. I used rubber bands to stun grasshoppers, and then called, “Here, chickie chickie chickie,” and Annie came running at full speed to happily gobble them up. She was a fun part of our family until some animal got her. One fall when we left for Mexico, we couldn’t catch the chickens, so we just let them run wild, expecting them to be gone when we returned. But the following year when we got back, we awoke to hear a rooster crowing! We checked where the sound was coming from, and found the rooster and a row of hens perched on an oak branch on the hill behind the Shanty. We were amazed to see them, but they were quite wild and didn’t want to be cooped up, so we let them roost in the tree. First Rifle Use Daddy had a .22 rifle, and he taught me how to use it when I was about 10 years old. We were in our tiny living room with the window open, and Daddy showed me how to put in a bullet, cock the hammer and aim at my target. It was getting dark, and Daddy told me to shoot at a pine tree about 30 feet away. But I was afraid the bullet would bounce back, so he had me shoot at the moon instead. We had few neighbors, and they lived miles away, so there was no danger. Later I made a cardboard target and practiced shooting at it. Shooting Birds We had a fruit orchard, but it didn’t get much care except for disking the soil in the spring. The big fig tree thrived though, we got plenty of figs every year, and it was a fun tree for climbing and playing in. The birds were a nuisance though, pecking big holes in our ripe figs, so I shot a few jays. We had a life-size artificial bird with wire feet, so I climbed up and tied it to an upper branch near a 13

fig. Then I called Lanita, and told her there was a bird in the fig tree, and I was going to shoot it. She saw that it was a pretty bird, and asked me not to shoot it, then waved her arms and tried to shoo it away, but I shot it anyway, and she was in tears. Then I told her it was just a pretend bird. I did countless other things to tease her and make her cry, but she still loves me anyway. Lanita’s Rattlesnake Lanita moved into my former bedroom, which was an open space on the left just inside the front door. One summer day, Linda came out of the kitchen, happily singing a little tune, when all of a sudden she let out a scream. Then she said there was a rattlesnake coming into the house. Mommy was so frightened that she jumped up on her bed, because she hates snakes. By then the snake had gone under Lanita’s bed, which was bad news, because she always had a lot of junk under there. When it came back out, I tried to shoot the snake with the rifle, but it moved too much, so I chopped off its head with an axe and took it outside to show Daddy when he came home. It was quite a big snake too, about three feet long. Wagon Down Hill Daddy made sure we learned to be diligent and work hard. If he saw us doing nothing, he’d find something for us to do. So when he was away, we would play, and as soon as we heard the car or truck coming up the hill, we immediately found something to look busy—cutting firewood and filling the wood boxes, hoeing weeds and other endless things that needed to be done around the house. I enjoyed splitting kindling, and when I had a huge pile of it, I would make towers of crisscrossed kindling sticks. Then we’d take the wagon up the hill where Mommy hung the cloths, climbed in and raced down, crashing into the kindling towers and scattering sticks everywhere. When we had lots of cardboard boxes, we’d pile them up and race down, crashing into them. 14

Collecting Flowers After Daddy broke his leg in 1964, Mommy had her hands full taking care of us 3 kids while attending to Daddy’s needs and managing the household. She got scrapbooks for us, and as we traveled to town and back, she stopped on Mosquito Road for us to collect wildflowers. She knew the names of most of them, and looked them up when she didn’t. We pressed the flowers between Sears catalog pages until they were dry, taped them in our scrapbooks, and labeled them. We collected dozens of flower varieties, and although the flowers in my book are coming un-taped and falling apart, I still have my collection. Gnus in the Zoo While in southern California for Daddy to treat his broken leg in the hot springs, we visited the Sandy Eggo Zoo. We really enjoyed the variety of animals, the seal show, the petting zoo,

and other nice animal activities. We rode a small train around the zoo, and saw some strange animals called Gnus. We saw old Gnus and young new Gnus, and had fun talking about Gnu news.

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Walt Jackson at the Hot Springs While camping at Desert Hot Springs, a kind elderly gentleman stopped by our campsite and offered us a book, Steps to Christ. We recognized it and told him that we were Seventh-day Adventists too. He introduced himself as Walt Jackson, and we visited every day. While playing in the hot spring pool, he offered to teach me to swim, and he was a good teacher. Since I was missing school, I’d brought my books and assignments to keep up, and he helped me by reading to me—it was about whalers—and he also helped with difficult math problems. One evening I went to visit his camper and he was fixing supper, so he offered me a plate of food. It included cottage cheese—a rare treat, and I was just starting to enjoy it when my parents called, so I didn’t get to finish it. They told me not to bother him, but I think he enjoyed my company. Daddy spent a lot of time soaking his leg in the healing hot springs, and we kids had fun in the pool, as well as climbing the nearby desert hills, putting together jigsaw puzzles, feeding peanuts to the chipmunks and damming up the small creek of warm water that flowed out of the pool up the hill. I had a really nice dam and was quite proud of it, but someone downstream noticed the water had stopped, and soon a man came and told me I was not allowed to do that, so I had to open the dam and let the water flow again.

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Walt Visits the Ranch A few months later back in Placerville, I got out of school one day, and there was Walt Jackson! I asked how he’d found me, and he told me he came to town and asked where the school was that had nice little boys, and that’s how he found me. He offered to take me home, but Mommy had told me that I was to take the Camino bus to the Union Ridge Mosquito Road junction, where she would meet me and take me to the Ranch. So I told him I had to do what my Mommy said, and he respected that, saying he would follow the school bus to my stop. And every time the bus stopped to drop off a student, he waited behind the bus, instead of passing it as cars used to do before it was not allowed. Mommy was waiting at my stop, and was quite surprised to see Walt Jackson there! He wanted to see where we lived, but Mommy was hesitant to have visitors see our run-down old Ranch house. But he came anyway, and we had a nice visit before he went on his way. Walt at Linda Vista One early morning in 1970 after Assembly at Linda Vista as I headed to my classroom, I saw kids crowded around a camper parked near the school office. It had California plates, so I stood outside the closed back door and called out, “Hello, my name is Freddie Adams.” From inside, I heard a voice respond, “Hello, my name is Walt Jackson.” I was quite surprised that he came all the way to south Mexico to visit me, but he liked to travel. We hadn’t seen each other since 1965. He entertained the kids by pretending to pull coins from under their arms and other tricks, which made him very popular. Also, visitors from the U.S. were rare, so his visit was quite a novelty. He came and visited our house, I showed him all around, and he stayed on campus for 6 days before continuing his trip. I don’t remember seeing him after that, but we did correspond for a few years afterwards. 17

Mexico Memories

Stealing Cookies We lived in the former Silva house, beyond the school buildings past the pitalla near the trail from Rincón Chamula. During the rainy summer, the trail to our house was swampy, but old boards were used as a walkway through the slushy places, which often had many frogs. My friends and I would play with the clear slimy strings of frog eggs, and later the pollywogs. When the weather was dry, Daddy could drive the white car to the house – a small cabin with a living room, fireplace, kitchen, bathroom and two bedrooms. I often rode my bike over to the level area by the classrooms and comedor, pushed it up the hill, and coasted down the rough semi-gravel road toward the mechanic shop and Córdova home. Sometimes I took the curves too fast, skidded on the gravel and skinned my knees and elbows. Then I headed for home across the big field, crying as I pushed my bike, and Mommy dressed my painful scrapes. As soon as the scabs came off, I did it again. At age 7, it took a few painful falls to learn that I needed to slow down before navigating the gravel curves. Daddy set up a shelf with large display jars filled with candy and cookies that he sold to students who wanted variety from cafeteria food. We kids were not allowed to eat the sweets without permission, and especially not in between meals. One day when Mommy was busy in the bedroom with the girls, I quietly removed the lid of a jar filled with marshmallow coated cookies and filled my pants pockets with them. Quietly replacing the lid, I snuck out the door and ran in my bare feet to hide around behind the fireplace where I could enjoy my treats. My bike was leaning against the wall, and in my hurry to get out of sight, I got too close to the bike, catching my little toe on a bicycle spoke. I fell to the ground, screaming in pain as my foot started bleeding. Daddy took me over to Horace Kelley’s dispensary, where he cleaned and disinfected my painful right foot. It didn’t need stitches, 18

but it hurt a lot. As I lay on the examining table, Daddy saw marshmallow cookies bulging from my pockets. “Ahaaaa, so that’s why you got hurt – stealing cookies!” He didn’t spank me that time—I suffered enough by my own misdeed. Box Trailer On some of our trips to Mexico, we towed a small black and white box trailer to have room for more things. At the border crossing, the inspector checked over the contents, smiled at Daddy, and commented, “I lookie, but I no see!” Daddy gave him a small tip, and he was happy. On another trip, Daddy had his Harley in the trailer with our other items. Apparently it got overlooked at the border, because it stayed at Linda Vista for many years, and Daddy often rode it on logging roads in the mountains, or to the city. I enjoyed riding it as well, and liked to show off doing donuts by the school office. It was converted from a sidecar bike, and it had parts from several other bikes. It was unique in that it had reverse, which most bikes don’t have. For a third trip pulling the box trailer, Daddy added a plywood lid painted black and hinged on one side to keep the contents covered. One evening near Poza Rica, a tire on the trailer went flat, and there wasn’t much of a shoulder to pull off the narrow two-lane highway. But Daddy managed to get far enough off, with the trailer at an angle, to remove the tire. He didn’t have a spare tire, so he left Mommy with us kids inside the trailer on some sleeping bags and the lid down while he went into town to fix the tire. After what seemed like a long time, he returned, put the tire on the trailer, and we went on into Poza Rica for the night. After we got to Linda Vista, I used the trailer lid as a very wide door to my bedroom, and it stayed there until I tore the old house down in 1986. On our way home the last time with that trailer, we pulled it with the yellow car, and as we traveled between Villahermosa and Coatzacoalcos on the narrow raised-bed two-lane highway through the swampy areas at night, Daddy suddenly slammed on the brakes as a large truck loomed up in the darkness, stopped in our lane. A line of headlights coming the opposite way made it impossible to pass, and there were men standing behind the truck, which is why we didn’t see the taillights. To avoid slamming into the men, Daddy swerved to the left partly into the opposite lane, leaving room for the vehicles to get by, but the right fender hit the rear left corner of the truck, slicing a two foot long hole in it as we came to a sudden stop and the oncoming vehicles whooshed by. The men yelled at us for not stopping, but Daddy just backed up from under the truck, went around it and we continued on our way. We knew that driving at night in Mexico is not safe, but we did it a lot, because we always seemed to be running late, in a hurry, or having deadlines to meet. 19

One last memory of the box trailer was on a wet narrow curvy road near Galeana. We were going around a wide curve, slightly downhill, when somehow the car began sliding sideways, with the trailer making it difficult to control. Daddy expertly tried to straighten the car, but it slid the opposite way. Thankfully there was no traffic, the car and trailer stayed on the road, and Daddy regained control. We kids were on the bed in back, and shouted, “That was fun—do it again!” Poor Mommy and Daddy were quite shook up, and screamed together, “No! That was dangerous. We could have run off the road!” We kids were quiet after that, totally unaware that we could easily have overturned had we gone off the edge of the road. Looking back, I can think of many times that our guardian angels protected us as we traveled without seat belts in old vehicles with hard metal seat rims and dashboards. Swatting Linda When Linda came home from school at noon every day, she always headed to the bathroom first thing to pee. We had a denim duffel bag that we used for dirty laundry hanging between the bathtub and the toilet. When I saw her coming, I quickly dashed into the bathroom and hid behind the laundry bag. As she prepared to do her business, I reached out and swatted her bare bottom. She screamed and raced out of the bathroom, and couldn’t stop crying long enough to tell our parents why she was so terrorized. Eventually I sheepishly came out of the bathroom, and I told them what I’d done. I got a good scolding, and never did that again. Selling Donuts Mommy taught us how to make donut dough, roll it out and punch donut shapes with a special mold. Then we dropped the dough into very hot oil and watched them puff out into nice round donuts. After cooling them on paper towels, we coated them with sugar, put them in a basket and took them to the campus around mealtime, where the students bought them all within a few minutes. No, they weren’t healthful, but we learned about making food to sell and earning spending money. 20

Pinecone Fights During free time, we often went to the Córdova house near the mechanic shop to play with them and other friends. One game we enjoyed was building forts under the pine trees, collecting lots of hard, round pinecones and having pretend battles. For shields we used square lids from 5-gallon cans that still had a handle in the middle. We threw with one arm and defended ourselves with the shields. The pinecones could inflict damage, but we rarely got hit—the fun part was deflecting incoming missiles and hearing them banging and bouncing off our metal shields. In fact, we spent most of our time reaching out way beyond our bodies to see if we could get the pinecones to hit our shields. Tin Can Phones We had fun playing with tin can phones with a long string between them, and could hear each other surprisingly well at a fairly good distance. So I got the bright idea that we could run a wire between our house and the Córdova house, about ¼ mile away. There were plenty of fluorescent light ballasts that were no good, so we broke them open with a hammer and screwdriver, and then unwound the long thin wire that was coiled around long thin metal plates. One ballast supplied enough wire, which we ran between our houses and draped them over tree branches, small trees and tall bushes to keep it high in the air. With high anticipation we fastened the wire to a tin can at each end and tested them, only to discover that they didn’t work at that distance. Much later we learned that the wire needed to be thicker, and also needed electric current running through it in order to work. At least we had fun trying! Stealing Money We had a small metal money box in the closet corner of the bathroom, which had a compartment for bills and small compartments for coins. The upper part could be removed and extra bills be placed in the bottom if it got too full. When Daddy brought bananas from Tapilula, or tomatoes, mangoes, pineapples and other produce from Tuxtla, we’d have many families and students stop by to make purchases. While in the U.S., Mommy picked up good used clothing at Rummage sales and Thrift stores, and people often gave us clothing, which we boxed up, took to the Monterey Bay Academy SAWS warehouse. They had a baling machine, into which they placed many boxes of folded clothes, pressed down with a hydraulic press to about ¼ their original height, wrapped with a waterproof tough material and fastened with steel straps. The bales weighed about 150 lbs. apiece. We loaded them into the car, along with many other items, and once at Linda Vista, 21

enjoyed watching Daddy cut the straps and the compressed clothes swell up somewhat. Then on certain days, Mommy would lay them out on the bed next to the front door, which we had cut in half, open the top part, and sell them to dozens of families from many villages throughout the mountains. So the money box would get quite full on those days, and at the end of the day, we would count up our sales. We really didn’t make money on the clothes, as we sold them cheap, and we did it to help the needy people. Now back to the stealing part. I had a treehouse in the back yard, and decided to invite a bunch of our friends over for a treehouse party. The school store had just stocked up on some large expensive chocolate bars, as well as other delicious goodies, but I was low on cash, and wanted to buy some nice things for our friends. So I took 50 pesos ($4.00 U.S.) from the money box and bought every flavor of chocolate bar they had, plus a few other treats. How fun it was to share those goodies with our friends, but I felt very guilty about stealing the money. Many, many years later, while we were in the U.S., I confessed to my parents what I had done, and gave them $20 to cover what I’d stolen—plus about 10 years’ worth of interest. I felt so much better after that load was off my conscience! Spanglish and Rubber Bands We children always spoke Spanish to each other, but if an English word was easier to say at the moment, we would throw that in. So, many of our conversations were in Spanglish. Eventually we decided we should break that habit, and I devised a plan to motivate us. Every day we each got 10 rubber bands that we kept around our wrist. If one of us caught the other talking mixed up, we would get one of their rubber bands. The one who had the most rubber bands by the end of the day was the winner. But it didn’t last very long— the habit was too hard to break. Conversations would go something like this. “Aha, dame una liga, hablaste mixed-up.” “Oops, tu hablaste mixed-up.” But at least we tried. And we still do it to this day when we talk among ourselves. 22

U.S. Memories

Visiting Clearlake Several times every summer after returning from Mexico, we drove 3 or more hours to Clearlake to visit Grandma and Grandpa Landstrom. We often took the Garden Highway along the Sacramento River levee and crossed on the Elkhorn ferry to get to Woodland, and then along endless winding roads through farmland, canyons, dry rocky hills, and eventually reached Clearlake. When Grandma & Grandpa lived in their old house and had their health food store, as soon as we arrived, Grandma gave us kids Vitamin C tablets – the sweet, chewable kind that we could dissolve slowly in our mouths. That was a special, healthful treat we looked forward to. When they moved to their new house nearby in “The Village,” we often arrived late at night. But sometimes we arrived in the evening after a hot summer day, and the first thing we smelled upon arriving was the star jasmine growing up a trellis by the front door. After getting our hugs, we headed for the guest bedroom, where Grandma put things for us kids in the bottom dresser drawer. Each time we found something new to play with or to take home. Usually it was simple things—rubber bands, colorful balloons, bubbles for blowing, and always the Cento Tea and yellow Wheat Pufties ads from their health food store that we used for scratch paper, drawing, coloring and making paper airplanes. The supply never ran out, and we still have some in our house to this day. Going into the bedroom, it always smelled of moth balls. After checking out the toy drawer, we had supper if we arrived in time— usually cottage cheese and canned fruit. And we had to finish one jar of fruit before Grandma would open a different kind of fruit. At home we often had 2 or 3 kinds of fruit open at the same time, as we liked variety, and cottage cheese was a special treat, so we wanted several kinds of fruit with it. But Grandma was very particular about finishing the entire jar first! 23

The bathroom had two switches—a light switch and one for the ventilator fan, which would only work if the light switch was turned on. Often after using the bathroom, I flipped off the light switch and left the ventilator switch on, so when the next person went in and flipped on the light, the loud fan went on as well, and often frightened my poor little sisters. Usually we spent several days during each visit cutting firewood for their winter supply, mostly after Grandpa died. Several church member friends had dead trees on their property that they allowed us to cut for Grandma. We loaded the car, backed into the garage, unloaded the wood, and went back for more. Using a small wheelbarrow, I wheeled it into the backyard, where I split the wood by hand using a splitting maul, and then wheeled it around to the woodshed. It took several trips to Clearlake to get enough wood to fill her shed, but we kept at it, and all pitched in loading, unloading, wheeling and stacking until the shed was full. Most of the wood was from dead trees, but other times we cut Digger pine trees, which had a lot of pitch, and it seeped out of the ends of each piece, making it nearly impossible to move without getting sticky pitch all over our hands, and at times our clothes too. Being very stringy, the wood was hard to split as well. After work, Grandma had Energine to clean our hands and clothes. We also used gasoline. I don’t remember ever using gloves when we worked, so our hands were well calloused, and often had scratches from the sharp bark. When I was 11, Daddy bought a small McCulloch BP-1 chainsaw, and he taught me how to use it while cutting pine limb wood at Kesikers Ranch. We called it the Beep-Beep, because compared to Daddy’s huge McCulloch 77 and 99 chainsaws that ran with loud roars, this tiny guy sounded like a small beep. On one visit to Clearlake, Daddy and Mommy used the two-man McCulloch 99 saw to cut a large dead oak that had fallen at the property of Grandma’s friends. It was very thick at the main trunk, and they cut it into narrow rounds. I rolled them out of the way to split into pieces small enough to load into the car. While trying to move one very large round, it rolled back against the main trunk, rolling and crushing my little finger. That was very painful, but I was able to continue working. 24

When the work was done, Grandma often had craft projects for us to work on – tile trivets, ceramic items that we painted and then she fired in a special oven, and always new projects for every visit. We also put together jigsaw puzzles, rode bikes and walked to the lake every evening. It was usually smelly and dirty with algae and dead fish. One time we crossed the bridge and dug for Apache Tears, small smooth black volcanic rocks. Toy Out the Window While living at the Ranch, Mommy was very good about getting us to Sabbath School and Church every Sabbath, unless the roads were too muddy or snowy. Daddy, being an introvert, usually stayed home, with excuses about not feeling well or something else. He also worked so hard during the week that he was exhausted and need the rest—as well as some peace and quiet from us noisy kids. One Sabbath on our way to church in the blue car, Linda and Lanita were fighting over a toy, screaming loudly. Mommy finally had enough of it, grabbed the toy and threw it out the window as we headed down Mosquito Road, just before we got to the one-lane bridge over the flume. Instantly the fighting came to a stop, as they no longer had anything to fight about, and were not expecting Mommy to do something that drastic! We always stopped at the Post Office to get the mail, and we had a key for P.O. Box 215. When Lanita was older, she was eager to get the mail all by herself. One Sabbath morning, as Mommy pulled up to the curb, Lanita opened the door while the car was still moving, hopped out, fell out onto the sidewalk. Thankfully, the car was nearly stopped, and she didn’t get hurt very badly. Sabbath School & Church We kids loved Sabbath School, and our rooms were downstairs in the brick church on Bee St. In fact, the furthest back I can remember is sitting in a tiny chair in Cradle Roll, listening to the stories and singing as we clacked sticks together, among other activities. In Kindergarten, there was a large smiling angel in the door window—if we arrived on time. But if we arrived late, the angel was 25

turned around, looking sad with tears on its cheeks. That seemed to motivate us to do our part in being ready to we would arrive on time. I remember a lot about Kindergarten. We started by telling our names. “My name is Mrs. Rathbun.” “My name is Freddie,” and so on. We sang songs, listened to Bible stories and put our offering in a basket as we sang “Dropping, dropping, hear the pennies fall.” There were sand tables, with boards around the top to keep the sand in. We could make hills and valleys, and there was a nice selection of stiff cardboard figures of people, trees, houses, etc. that we poked into the sand to illustrate Bible stories. In Primary, we used “Happy Songs for Boys and Girls.” We sang loudly, and among our favorites were “Dare to Be a Daniel,” “Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam,” “Beautiful Flowers,” “Missionary Band,” “Always Cheerful,” “Smile, Smile, Smile” and many others. The Church service was mostly boring for us, and the seats were hard with no padding. When the sermon started, Mommy gave us a Life Saver candy to suck on, which was special, even though they often gave me a headache, and later we found out that I can’t tolerate refined sugar, so I often had swollen tonsils and many cavities as well. Mommy also had tiny metal train cars that connected together, and other quiet toys for us to play with, as well as Fuzzy Felt Bible felt sets with compartments for all the little pieces that we stuck to a rectangular felt board to recreate Bible stories. Another one

was for Mission Hospital stories. We sat in the far corner, one row from the back. 26

When Ghina Saylor sang for special music in her operatic voice, I stood up on the pew and innocently yelled out in Spanish, “What’s wrong with that lady, is she sick?” I was innocently repeating what I’d heard my parents quietly say, not realizing that I shouldn’t broadcast it. I’m sure my parents were quite embarrassed, but thankful that few people there could understand Spanish. Polishing Shoes When we got home, I raced to my room to get out of my Sabbath clothes and into something comfortable. The top button on my white shirt and bow tie felt uncomfortably tight on my neck, the black pants showed dust, and my black shoes were too slippery. Every Friday afternoon I collected the dusty scuffed Sabbath shoes, wiped off the dust with a rag, and polished the scuff marks with a bottle of shoe polish. It had a sponge at the top, and when the jar was held upside down and pressed against the shoes, black polish came out to coat the scuff marks. Secret Place Sabbath was a rest day for my exhausted parents, but we 3 kids had plenty of energy to work off after church. We didn’t play with our Tonka toys or anything else considered secular. But I found ways to keep my sisters entertained, going for nature walks and collecting flowers, seeds, quartz rocks and other interesting things. I had the girls stay in the house while I made treasure hunts for them, or using sticks, rock arrows and other signs for them to follow to the next sign until they eventually got to wherever I was leading them. When we got older, Linda and I became bookworms, and often when we tried to read, Lanita, who couldn’t read yet, would get bored because we wouldn’t play with her. So she would cover our books, or cover our eyes, or hide our books—anything to get our attention.

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So Linda and I snuck way out to the back end of the old wooden barn where the cow used to stay, but later was used for storage. We cleaned out a nice “Secret Place” in the far end, set up a metal cot with steel springs, put old blankets & pillows on it, used wooden crates for shelves and spread hay on the floor. Linda and I spent many peaceful hours reading there, and Lanita didn’t find it because it was so far away from the house. At least it seemed that way, even though it was only about 200 feet away. Later we got ticks from the hay— maybe deer had been using our Secret Place as well. Eventually Lanita learned to read—out loud—and that annoyed us. We asked her to read silently, but she said she couldn’t understand if she didn’t say the words. So one day I pointed to an easy line in her book and told her to look at it. Then I covered it with my hand and asked her what the line said, and she told me. I told her that she had read silently, which surprised her. After that, she read quietly, and we all enjoyed the peace. Eager to Saw Wood On Sabbath evening as the sun was going down, I was eager to cut old boards using my bow saw and split them into kindling. So I got a board, set it on the wide Shanty step, and got my saw in position. Then I called out, “Mommy, is it sundown yet?” “No Freddie, 5 more minutes.” I called out several times, and when the sun was down and the Sabbath officially over, I immediately began sawing before it got too dark. Yes, I now know I didn’t have the proper attitude, but I was still learning. Sabbath School at Home On Sabbaths when the road was too muddy or icy, we stayed home and put together our own Sabbath School program in the kitchen where the wood burning stove kept us warm. Mommy and Daddy relaxed and read in the adjoining tiny “living room.” We sang songs, told Bible stories, repeated our memory verses, read the lesson, took up an offering and gave it to Mommy, sang some more and prayed. So we really never missed Sabbath School, even while at home. 28

Cutting Veneer Blocks In the early days, Daddy and Mommy used a huge McCulloch 99 two-man chainsaw with a long bar to cut veneer blocks, from 20” to 24” long. He used a 3’ wooden yardstick to mark out the blocks to cut, and the blocks had to be clear of knots. Using an axe, he marked the bark with 2 or 3 visible whacks where each cut would be. A section with knots would be eliminated, making thin slabs 4” to 6” thick which we called “pancakes.” I often used my little axe to cut them into pie-shaped pieces, and then cut smaller ones from those where the grain was straight, and from those make pencil-thin sticks to use for tiny fences or to crisscross into towers and other structures. We kids also collected buckeyes, acorns, manzanita berries, and other interesting things to play with. Daddy told us how the Indian squaws collected firewood, and had us go around and collect stove-size “squaw wood.” It was fun to hunt through the forest, finding pieces of rough wood that would fit in the stove. Forest Toilet One time, they cut a block that had a hollow center, so I stood it up behind some bushes by a tree, got a “pancake” with a short limb that served as a handle to place on top, and surprised my family with a toilet that we could use in the woods! It was rough and uncomfortable, but more fun to use than squatting behind the bushes. I even had a roll of TP we could use with it. Rolling & Delivering Veneer Blocks Daddy rolled most of the “pancakes” and longer knotty blocks down the steep hill below our landing, and I enjoyed helping roll them down. But ones with short knots were hard to roll, and didn’t crash through the bushes below like the ones without short limbs sticking out. Daddy claims that he later went down the hill and found perfectly good veneer blocks with no knots rotting where they came to a stop, but I don’t remember rolling any of those down. Ellen or Eileen could have done it, but he suspected it was me. He backed the big red 1952 International truck against a bank below where the blocks were cut. The truck bed had tall wooden sideboards to keep the blocks in place, and he used a wide plank to roll the blocks onto the truck. The blocks for the first layer were rolled down the plank onto the wooden truck floor, and stood 29

on end. The second layer was about even with the bank, so the plank was level. The third layer was higher, so the blocks had to be pushed uphill. After setting each layer, Daddy used the yardstick to average the diameter, and used a thick logger’s crayon to mark the top of each block. When he was done, I checked each block carefully to be sure he hadn’t missed any. I suspect he left some blocks unmarked so I could “discover” them for him to mark. Once loaded, the blocks were tied to the sideboards with ropes across the back of each layer, with several wraps across the top as well to hold the sideboards together. It was a lot of work, and when we got to the veneer mill in Sacramento, and after it burned, the one in Stockton, the blocks were unloaded, and Daddy received his pay according to the figures listed in the tally sheet he had filled out while loading. Other trucks came with full-length logs, which were loaded onto a conveyer that moved them forward as a long, high-speed chainsaw blade quickly cut them into blocks. I don’t remember other trucks bringing precut blocks like Daddy did. Cutting & loading blocks was a lot of work! In the veneer production plant, each block was clamped in the center and began spinning, slowly pressing against a sharp lathe knife the width of the block, first peeling off the bark and uneven part, and then creating a long strip of thin veneer that followed a long production line, with a cutter quickly dividing the veneer into sections 4 to 6 inches in width that moved along a conveyer belt, where women pulled out the defective pieces and the good ones disappeared inside the building for drying and being made into boxes. I watched the process while the truck was being unloaded. The lathe was most fascinating to see, as the blocks spun around getting narrower by the second, and in no time the big block was down to a thin peeler core, dropped aside, and another block started. 30

Chili Bar Grade Going to Stockton with Daddy was special, and we kids often took turns riding with him. Getting up so early, the stars were bright and the air was cold, but the engine heat soon warmed the cab. Mommy gave me a paper bag with Cheerios, apple slices, a banana and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. It was light by the time we got to Chili Bar grade, and I would count all the different kinds of soda pop cans by the edge of the road – up to 18 different ones. As I ate my banana, I dropped the peeling through the gearshift hole in the floor, where I could see the pavement under the truck. About halfway up the grade there was a water trough fed by a galvanized pipe coming from a nearby spring. (There was a similar one on Mosquito Road, and a water pipe on Rock Creek Road). These were probably used long ago to water horses pulling wagons, and later the old cars when their radiators overheated. We often stopped there to fill a flax fiber water bag that hung on the wood frame behind the truck cab. Moisture slowly seeped through the bag fibers, naturally cooling it on hot days by evaporation. The water tasted different, but sure felt good on a hot day. When it rained, the windshield wiper only worked on Daddy’s side. I discovered that by reaching under the dashboard, I could move the inner lever extending from the passenger side wiper, and moved it back and forth. But then I was too low to see out the windshield, and it got tiring after a while. So I only did it briefly, poked my head up and looked out, and did it again if I wanted to see better. Dual trumpet-like horns fastened to the roof honked loudly when a piece of wire with a loop on it was pulled from the cab ceiling. A large necktie-shaped turn signal arm swung out when Daddy pulled a wire to flip it out. He added blinkers to make it safer though. Often Daddy got tired of being in the same position, so he leaned forward toward the steering wheel. I stuck my head between his back and the seat, and he leaned back, clamping my head in place. I thought it was fun, but as he pushed harder, and I couldn’t take any more, I called out, “Ya, no mas!” and he let me free. But soon I was back for more. That long grade is full of memories. 31

Sometimes Daddy went to Stockton alone with his load of blocks, often leaving at 3:00 a.m., even though he had worked hard the day before cutting and loading. If we were awake when he left, we could hear the truck for 20 minutes or more as it faded off into the distance, following the narrow, winding dirt road about two miles to roughly paved Mosquito Road, cutting over to gravel-surfaced Rock Creek Road, and eventually fading away as he followed 9 miles of the rough road along the north side of the canyon to 193, where pavement resumed. I was fascinated that the truck had 15 forward gears and 3 in reverse! One shift lever had 5 gears, and another had 3. So he’d start with a heavy load in first gear with both shifters. Then he would shift one into 2nd, and then 3rd. As he gained speed, he shifted the first lever into 2nd and the 2nd lever back to first, working up to 3rd, and so on. When driving empty on level roads, he skipped the 2nd lever and only used the 5 gears on the first lever. (When we played with my Tonka trucks, I’d make truck engine groaning noises with a heavy load, shifting over and over a dozen times or more). When we finally arrived at the mill in Stockton, it felt good to get out and stretch my legs as I watched the veneer operations. Daddy Running Alongside the Truck Going the 3 miles up the Chili Bar grade was agonizingly slow. When I rode with Daddy, sometimes I would stand on his lap and steer the truck as it struggled up the steep curvy road. Near the top the road was mostly straight, and one time I clearly remember him setting the steering column throttle, then he opened the door and stood on the wide truck step as I stood on the seat and steered. Then he jumped off the step and ran alongside the truck while I was at the wheel. That’s how slow we were going—it took nearly half an hour to go three miles to the top. I hate to think what would have happened if Daddy had tripped and fallen under the rear truck tires. He only did that once, and I was probably 5 or 6 years old. Logging Truck Going Home Routines After the blocks were unloaded at the mill, we started back, and Daddy usually made 4 stops along the way. First was Snow White Bakery, where Daddy bought me a donut. The plain ones cost 2 cents, and the ones with chocolate, powdered sugar or colored candy bits cost 3 cents. Then there were big ones that were flaky with icing, but they cost 5 cents. Daddy 32

got us the cheapest ones, unless he felt extra generous, and then we had ones with chocolate or powdered sugar. Save Mart was our next stop about once a week, to pick up evaporated milk if it was on sale for 10 cents a can. He also picked up canned corn, buttermilk and anything else we needed that was on sale. Continuing north on 99, we cut over to highway 50 via Grant Line Road to avoid the Sacramento traffic, and stopped at a small market run by a jolly Asian man. That’s where I got my box of animal crackers to munch on as we continued home. The last stop was at a little store at the top of Chili Bar Road, where Daddy got me a little tub of vanilla ice cream to cool me off in that hot truck. At the checkout counter, there was a container of small paddle-like wooden spoons, which we would get to eat the ice cream with. It was gone by the time we got to the bottom, and then climbed up to Rock Creek Road, which seemed to go on forever. And the only smooth part was crossing the curved concrete Rock Creek Bridge. Even now that it’s paved, I dislike that road. Pedal Tractor One time on our way back from delivering a load of blocks, Daddy stopped at a tractor store to get some parts. I was about 6 years old, and saw a little red pedal farm tractor, just my size. I sat on it and put my feet on the pedals. A nice lady said I could ride it around the store floor, which I enjoyed very much. Daddy asked me if I liked it, but I knew we couldn’t afford to spend money on a new toy like this. But to my surprise, he bought it for me, and I spent many pleasant hours riding it. When I shifted the gear 33

lever, it made a loud clattering noise. Eventually Daddy got fed up with the noise and “fixed” it by removing the part that made the noise, but I didn’t mind it. One day I went up a steep bank and did a wheelie. I jumped off, the tractor flipped over backwards, and the cast iron steering wheel broke off. I was disappointed, but two wide steering support spokes remained, and I steered with those from then on. I spun the right rear drive so much that it wore the tread down flat. Home Racetracks We also had a red wagon, a small tricycle and a larger one. I made a sort of racetrack near the garage, going along the driveway, up a small bank into an old irrigation ditch that was often muddy where I could spin the tire, out of the ditch and down again. Round and round we’d go—two tricycles and a tractor, making ruts as we went. Sometimes Linda and Lanita got in the wagon and I pushed them around the loop – except when the upper ditch part was too muddy. Another time I collected old tires, sticks and other barriers to make a curvy race course. Then I had Linda or Lanita sit in the wagon and steer while I pushed as fast as I could as they tried to steer around the sharp corners, often sliding into the barriers or nearly tipping them over as they tried to steer with me pushing at full speed. The Splashity Watery Place Coming home from town, the last few miles from Mosquito Road to the Ranch were a dirt road, which mostly disappeared after the Swansboro development changed the roads. The dirt began on what is now La Paz Road, and wound around, up and down, with smaller roads that branched off to the house of Kenny Robinson, our Ranch, Grandma and Papa’s old ranch, the Darr place, Morton ranch 34

and a few other places. In winter it was muddy; and very dusty during the summer. Someone who owned a road grader graded it near the end of spring, smoothing out the mud ruts and clearing the road drains. Daddy would pay him $20, and others would pitch in as well for fuel and maintenance. In one place, the road went through a small shallow creek that had water in it during the wet season. It was about the length of a car, a wide dip that spread the water over a large area so it wouldn’t be too deep. We called it the Splashity Watery. Most of the time, the water was shallow enough that we could get through fine, but after heavy rains, it was too deep to get through. Eventually someone placed two large logs across a narrow part a few feet downstream. They added planks across the logs, and other planks on top of those for the wheels to drive on, and we crossed on that most of the time. The short driveway to our house was steep; and impassable when it snowed. A little further was the White Gate road, that long before used to have a white gate, but that was before my time. That was not so steep, but easier to walk up if the car couldn’t make it. The third option was to go up and around to the road that went to Grandma and Papa’s old place, but that was usually impassable as well. So we left the car at the White Gate, slogged up the hill, carrying groceries or other items, and soon were inside the Ranch house. Daddy built a roaring fire in the wood burning cookstove, and soon we got warmed up. I remember the snow at times getting up to 2’ deep, which hasn’t happened here in many decades. We kids made snow angels and built snowmen a few times. Most of the winters we were in Mexico, so in spite of the cold, it was fun to get some snow. 35

Indian Burial Ground Near the Splashity Watery place, just up the bank through the trees, we sometimes went to look for Indian beads. We crossed a large granite rock with many holes used by squaws to grind acorns. A large meadow spread out from there, with the small creek flowing nearby. About 50’ from the grinding rock was an area of fine, black dirt, which had supposedly been a burial ground. Other people had been there as well, bringing large sifting frames with fine mesh to look for Indian treasures. Daddy found a small rusty metal ore cart, about 5” long, which may have been used for trading by the early gold hunters. Daddy found obsidian arrowheads and spear heads there, but we only found beads, mostly glass or ceramic, but some made from bones. We also found burned bones and coals. The best time to find beads was after it rained, washing the dust away and exposing them. I still have a string of beads that we collected long ago. Priming the Pump About 300’ from the house, in a small ravine, we had a spring that produced the water we needed year round. Daddy had built a wooden springhouse to keep the water clean, and later he made one of concrete. Over time, slimy water moss, water grass and other things grew in the water, attracting frogs and a variety of insects, including water striders that skimmed across the surface without sinking. Eventually things got so bad that Daddy had to dig everything out to keep our spring clean. A pump sat on top of the springhouse, with galvanized pipe running underground to the top of the hill above the Ranch. Daddy had built a sturdy wood platform and set a 1,000 gallon galvanized water tank on top. He built a frame with a shake roof to keep leaves out, but it deteriorated over time, so he put fine wire mesh over the top to keep leaves and critters out of the tank. Adding water to the tank was a tricky process. Daddy ran a heavy duty underground electric wire from the pump to the house. When the tank ran dry, one of us had to plug the end into a fuse box near the front door. That started the pump running, but since the pipe going into the spring leaked, the pump couldn’t move water until it had been primed, 36

and it could burn out if it ran dry for very long. So it was a matter of racing down to the spring, unplugging the pump at that end, filling a gallon can with water from the spring, taking it up about 10’ above the pump line to a T in the pipe with a plug, using a crescent wrench we kept there to remove the plug, pouring the water into the pipe from a pinched side of the can that created a narrow part to pour from, getting another full can and repeating the process. The plug was then screwed back in, and another smaller plug was removed from the pump to let the air out. Upon replacing that plug, the wire was plugged back in, and if everything was done fast enough, the pump would have a certain sound, and we’d listen about a minute until we heard water falling into the tank up at the top of the hill. If the priming didn’t get done fast enough, or if insufficient water had been used to fill the pipe, the process at the spring had to be repeated. Back at the house, we had to keep our ears open, because as soon as the water stopped falling, one of us had to quickly unplug the pump wire at the house. The spring could only fill the tank about ¼ to 1/3 full, so we had to repeat the process often, and go easy on the water. If the water started tasting bad, Daddy went up and fished out a dead rat or two, plus rotting leaves that had slipped past the loose wire mesh on top of the tank. Barn Roof Monkeys One day I discovered a ladder leaning against the side of the big wooden barn, and found that I could easily climb onto the corrugated iron roof and to the top of the roof. What a great view of the Ranch I had. While Mommy went to prime the pump, I helped Linda and Lanita climb the ladder, and as Mommy came back from priming the pump, the three of us perched on the roof peak edge to surprise her, and called out “Hi Mommy!” She was surprised alright, but not very happy, and told us to get down right away! We felt disappointed that she didn’t appreciate our accomplishment, but now can understand that she feared for our lives. Tree Climbing Often we would hear crop duster planes spraying the pear orchards across the canyon, but I couldn’t see them very well from the ground. I found some large nails nearly a foot long in the garage, so I went out to a leaning Digger pine near the barn and nailed them into the trunk to make steps up to the first solid branches, and from there I could easily get near the top. That gave me a great view across the canyon, and many mornings I got up early to watch the planes, which gave me great satisfaction. Later I discovered that I could reach the lower branches of a taller Ponderosa pine near the house using our tallest ladder, and 37

climbed about 100’ to the top of that. From there, I could see much further, even over the hill to the old log house, toward Finnon Lake, and of course, the crop dusters. In late winter, when we had hard freezes, we heard wind machines—huge propellers mounted on tall poles throughout the pear orchards, which sounded like many planes off in the distance. They stirred the air to keep frost from damaging the blossoms and developing fruit. Other times they used smudge pots throughout the orchards, creating a layer of black smoke, again to ward off frost damage. Another memory well imprinted in my mind is the Michigan-Cal Lumber Company siren that went off at 7:00 sharp every weekday morning to start the workday, then at noon for lunch break, and around 5:00 at closing time. It was the longest, loudest siren I’d ever heard, starting at a low rumble, gaining volume and intensity to its highest pitch for a few seconds, but never a shrill noise. Then it gradually decreased until we could no longer hear it. The sound was like something spinning faster and faster, and then slowing down again. From start to finish it lasted 30 seconds or more. I didn’t hear it from the 1980s onward, but then it sounded one last time at midnight to begin the year 2000, and that brought back many fond memories of my childhood. The mill at Camino started in 1901, and shut down in 2009. Before that, the mill floodlights shone dimly on our bedroom wall, and when the wind was right, we could hear machinery at the mill, and loud bangs of logs being dropped onto metal surfaces. Changing Tires Sometimes Daddy had to do maintenance or repairs on the equipment, and we kids got to play, unless I was needed to help him. Often it was changing tires, which he used till they were bald, and then had them recapped with new rubber. I hated fixing flat tires, which involved loosening the lug nuts, jacking up the car, removing the nuts and tire, using a steel tool to break the bead (seal) between the tire and rim, prying one side of the tire off the rim without damaging the inner tube, pushing the valve stem through, removing the tube, filling it with air using a hand pump or removing a spark plug and screwing in an adapter that used the piston to pump air into the tire with the car idling, wetting the tube with soapy water to 38

find the leak, feeling inside the tire for the cause of the leak, removing the valve to let the air out of the tube, drying and scraping the tube around the hole using the rough lid of the patch can, painting on strong-smelling adhesive, blowing on it until dry, and carefully peeling the backing off the patch, applying it directly over the hole, using the edge of the can of patches to roll over the entire patch, especially the edges, to be sure it was thoroughly sealed. Then I filled it again with air, checked for leaks with soapy water, and put everything back together. Daddy always got used tires and wore them out, so we had flats quite often, and I dreaded having to change and repair them. But I didn’t dare say no to Daddy, and much later I realized that he had a whole lot more to worry about than changing tires – health issues, finances, vehicle repairs and so much more. Mean Ole’ Daddy Daddy made sure all 3 of us kids worked hard, and we often got mad at him for making us work so much when we’d rather play. So we called him mean ole’ Daddy. But he did let us play—if we had energy left after working so hard! We often got to play when Daddy was away running errands, and of course while traveling, we had too much free time, but not much to do stuck in the car day after day. We did get to see many places that were interesting along the way, but too many times we were in such a hurry that Daddy said we’d stop there another time, but we rarely had time the next trip either. Digging Walnut Tree Holes Daddy got the notion that we should plant walnut trees, and he made me go out and dig holes 3’ across and 3’ deep. As I got further down, the dirt was very hard, and Daddy shortened the crooked handle of a pick for me to use. I spent days digging; it was hot, hard, dirty work, and why did we need so many walnut trees anyway? I must have dug about a dozen holes along the road and big field at the Ranch before Daddy was satisfied. Then we put tin cans, mulch, kitchen garbage and nice soil in each hole, planting trees that cost the outrageous price of $6.00 each, even though they were only 4 or 5 feet high. Over time they grew, two survived, and for many years they have produced English walnuts—most of 39

which the squirrels eat. A few other trees survived, but only the black walnut rootstalk, and they provide nice shade. I still remember how resentful I felt about digging those holes so many years ago! Smoking Leaves & Matches One winter evening Daddy sent us down the road to rake up oak leaves and pine needles into piles and burn them. I had seen people smoking, and wondered what it was like. So I took a long slim valley oak leaf, rolled it up like a cigarette and lit one end, putting the other end to my mouth and blowing on it. But the fire on my “cigarette” just went out. I tried several times with no success, and finally gave up. I didn’t realize that I was supposed to suck on it to get it to burn, so I could blow smoke out like other people did. It’s just as well I didn’t know, and I never smoked a leaf or cigarette in my entire life. Later in Mexico, my friends taught me how to stick a lighted match in my mouth, which made people ooh and aah as they saw the flame go inside. I quickly closed my mouth, which extinguished the flame and filled my mouth with smoke, which I then blew out my nose, and that got the attention of other kids. That was the closest I got to smoking. Coal Juggling & Fire Jumping When we burned brush piles and old logs, Daddy taught me how to flick a live coal from the fire, about the size of a walnut or larger. He quickly picked it up and tossed it back and forth between his calloused hands until it stopped glowing and died out. The trick is to have thick callouses, which we both had, and to keep the hot coal moving, and we never got burned. Later during pack trips, I did that during evening campfires, and that had the other campers oohing and aahing at me. I also threw a few logs in the middle of the campfire and jumped up and down on them as sparks flew up all around me—yes, I was a show-off, but I didn’t stay in long enough to get burned, and with a light breeze blowing, my head was above the smoke and I could breathe. One morning at Soquel camp meeting, Jerry Dennis, one of our Pack Trip leaders preached at an early morning meeting. A bunch of us kids who had been on his Sierra trips attended. He preached about an angel touching the lips of Zechariah with a live coal, and told about a guy by the name of Freddie Adams who 40

juggled coals on Pack Trips. Partway through his sermon, he spotted me in the congregation, and asked me to stand up. I was shy and slid down in my seat, but he insisted that I stand up, and said he’d used that illustration other times when he’d preached in different churches. I still have a recording of that sermon. Radio Memories When not working out in the woods, Mommy kept busy in the kitchen. She made carrot juice and prepared breakfast, often baking a main dish for dinner as well. And every morning she listened to KTRB Radio from Modesto. It had news, commercials from Save Mart so she could tell Daddy when canned milk on sale for 10 cents a can, and a lot of talk radio. They also announced burn days and no-burn days. I thought a burn day meant the smog was so bad that it burned your eyes. And every weekday they talked about selling cows and chairs. I couldn’t figure out why it was so important that the stock market went up or down, and especially the number of “chairs” that different companies sold, but it seemed to be important to grown-ups. While working on vehicles or doing other maintenance, Daddy enjoyed listening to KRAK Radio in Sacramento, which also had news, and lots of country music. Most of the songs were sad ones about lost lovers, hard times, etc., but once in a while they’d throw in some fun trucker songs, such as Little Joe, Teddy Bear, Wolf Creek Pass, Phantom 309, Giddy-up Go, Truck Driver’s Prayer, and other fun ones like The Credit Card Song, and even If Jesus Should Come to Your House, interspersed with cigarette and alcohol commercials. Daddy liked Johnny Cash, Red Sovine and other singers whose names I don’t remember. Daddy had a small transistor radio powered by a solar panel across the top. When the sun shone, it had plenty of volume. He had fun putting his finger across the top and the volume would go down. Something larger would lower the volume even more. A passing cloud did the same, and on overcast days, he’d switch it to battery power. That was quite modern technology for back in the 1960s. 41

The Ranch House I believe it was built in 3 sections – the center section first with the kitchen and living room, with back bedroom and a wood room added later and a front porch, bathroom and big bedroom even later. The front door had hinges and a doorknob, but it didn’t latch—it just dragged across the floor and stayed in whatever position it was left at. The front porch was a catch-all area with things piled on the floor and against the kitchen wall. To the left was more storage area, which we eventually used as an open bedroom for us kids. It had two large windows, which had ropes that went through rollers at the top to heavy metal weights inside the walls, making it easy to raise the windows. We tacked big pieces of cardboard over the uninsulated walls to keep the cold winter wind out. Next was the bathroom, with a split curtain to cover the doorway. Mommy and Daddy had the big bedroom—it had a double bed, Lanita’s crib, Linda’s bed, Mommy’s dresser with a mirror and a tiny closet. As we kids grew older, we took turns sleeping in different rooms in different parts of the house. To the right of the front door was the kitchen door, and that part of the house was the nicest. It had linoleum flooring, a very nice metal sink cabinet with a double sink and dish drain space on both sides, with storage cabinets below. Between the sink cabinet and the stove there was a nice long counter top, with cabinets and drawers below and more cabinets above.

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A metal bread box sat in the corner, but I don’t remember storing bread in it. A row of metal canisters of different sizes with lids held flour and sugar. We had a blender and a wire rack toaster, with sides that had to be flipped open to turn the bread to toast the other side. Next was the wood burning stove, where all the cooking and baking was done. A box to the right held newspapers and junk mail, & a wooden box under the stove held kindling. There was always a blue teakettle on the stove for hot water. To the left of the stove was the door to the wood room and two bedrooms, which at different times were used for storage, a chicken coop, and later, my bedroom. I slept in a sleeping bag on an old sofa. Back in the kitchen, there was an open doorway to the tiny living room, a refrigerator in the corner, and the kitchen table with 5 chairs. The living room always had a bed, which Daddy used a lot after he broke his leg. That’s what we called the “Hospital para hombres con broken legges,” and using Ben Gay, I massaged Daddy’s leg like Dr. Cromer taught me, which brought him some relief. He also soaked his leg in a barrel of hot paraffin wax. At one time we had a piano; another time a Conn organ before we took it to Mexico, a record player, bookshelves, and boxes of extra stuff. We also put a Christmas tree in a corner if we were there in December. The phone was in there as well, and for a time, a black and white TV. The kitchen and living room were the nicest rooms, and where we spent a lot of our indoor time. They were warm and cozy during cold weather, and had nice lights. Those rooms hold many years of warm family memories. 43

My Last Spanking One day when I was 11, Linda, Lanita and I were playing ball, throwing it to each other in a triangle formation while Daddy and Mommy were napping. As I threw it to Linda, she reached out to catch it but missed, and the ball hit right in the middle of her face. She screamed and ran into the house. Soon Daddy came charging out, grabbed me by the arm and gave me a good spanking. Linda stopped crying and came out to see why I was crying, and we found out that when asked what happened, Linda had told our parents that I hit her in the face. She quickly explained that it was an accident, and that I didn’t deserve to be spanked, which of course made Daddy feel bad. Several times after that I did things that deserved spankings, but I got out of them by reminding him that I had credit from the spanking I didn’t deserve, and that was my last spanking. Hot Water Tank Plug In the wood room behind the kitchen stove was a 30 gallon galvanized hot water tank, with coils that ran into the firebox of our wood burning stove. That was our only source of hot water, except for the teakettle that always sat on the stovetop. The tank was quite old, and starting to rust through in some places. Daddy put in wooden plugs to seal the holes. One day I wondered what would happen if I pulled a pencil-sized plug, so I pulled, and suddenly a stream of hot water shot out of the tank clear across the wood room onto the wood piled against the opposite wall. I quickly called Daddy, who plugged the hole. Then he took me out for my spanking, but I begged and pleaded—I didn’t mean to be bad, I just wanted to see what the hole looked like. Besides, I had credit from the previous spanking I didn’t deserve. So I got out of that one. Wood Room & Woodpile The wood room was between the corner bedroom that I later moved into, and the back bedroom that had a door to the back yard, the Shanty, clothesline and the wood splitting area. One rick of wood went between the water tank and the wall, two more ricks lined the walls between the bedroom doors and the back wall, and a large wooden box held the odd-shaped pieces that would not stack easily. We also kept boxes of kindling on the wood piles, and it was my job to split wood and carry it in, armload by armload. There was a lean-to woodshed on one side of the Shanty, and it held wood as well. Often while working in the woods, we brought home a partial load of wood, so there was a constant supply for me to split and stack, and rarely did I finish splitting the entire pile before more was added to it. 44

The Barker Family & Leather Straps One day we went over to visit the Barker family, who lived in the log house on the 40 acres that belonged to Grandma and Papa before they moved to town. They had a boy about my age, and he told me that his daddy used a leather belt to spank him with. I remembered there were several old leather belts hanging by the hot water tank in our wood room, so one day I mentioned to Daddy that since nobody was using those straps, I could take them to Mr. Barker to spank his boy when he was naughty. Daddy said that would not be necessary, but I felt it a shame that those belts hanging there couldn’t be put to use. The Shanty It was a small Shanty, garage, house and barn in distance shack to the side of the house, built up off the ground with storage area for lumber, pipes, etc. underneath. It had a large wide step up to the door, with a window in front and one in back. To the right was a wringer washing machine and a large double deep cement sink for rinsing clothes. A bathtub with no plumbing sat against the right wall, with an old sleeping bag and pillow to lie down and read or take a nap. A medium-size heater stove was next, and I don’t remember using it. A bed sat across the back wall, another place to get away for reading or naps. The entire left wall had shelves from floor to ceiling, and we stored canned fruit, canned foods we got on sale, and other items. Back outside, an opening above the window led to attic storage, and that’s where I threw Lanita’s dollies to tease her. I don’t recall ever using it for storage. The entire roof was covered with homemade wood shakes, which held out the rain quite well. 45

The Garage Located under a large oak tree in our front yard, it was also on wood supports and had a sturdy wood floor, with a wood ramp going up to the open front door. I don’t ever remember a car being parked in there—I think it was too small. A long workbench across the back wall was lit by a window. The workbench had a good sturdy vice clamp and plenty of tools of all kinds hanging or leaning against three walls. Daddy’s arc welder and oxy-acetylene welding tanks were in the also, and plenty of mechanic tools, cans and jars of screws, nuts, bolts, nails, and lots of other hardware items. You could see daylight through the wood roof shakes, but it rarely leaked. Daddy always seemed to have car, truck and tractor parts, engines, transmissions and other metal items around and under the garage, and a whole lot more under and around the big oak tree down the hill where our treehouse was located. One time for Mother’s Day, the girls and I went behind the garage where Mommy couldn’t see us. We hated cracking and picking out walnut meats, so we did a whole big jarful as a surprise for her, and she was very happy for our present, knowing how much we disliked doing it. The Barn It was located near the end of our ridge, and seemed a long distance from the house. It still had hay and a feeding stall where we had a cow before I can remember. We rarely went there, but I do remember the old Merc and Grandma’s 1946 Chevy 46

Fleetmaster parked in there. In the corner was a very old refrigerator, with a big motor and coils on top. Mommy had boxes of old school papers stored inside. And the back side is where Linda and I had our secret place. It didn’t have lean-to’s on 3 sides like it does now. Dismantling the Old Chicken House Out near the barn we had a large chicken house, but it was falling apart and no longer in use, so Daddy asked me to tear it down. I got a hammer and crowbar and proceeded to remove the boards, loosening them at the bottom first, and then climbing up and prying them from the 2x4s at the top. Daddy’s construction methods were unconventional—he didn’t waste time or lumber building a frame and nailing boards to it. First he nailed 2 corner boards together and stood them up, doing the same at the other corner. Then he nailed a 2x4 at the top and bottom, filling in the rest of the wall with boards, and doing the same for the other walls, leaving a hole for the door on one side. Then he added rafters, slats and wood shingles. After I dismantled the roof and had most of the boards loose, the entire structure slowly twisted and creaked and fell to the ground, with me riding it all the way down. It all happened so unexpectedly yet slow enough that I was safe—in fact, it was kind of fun! The Pigpen Down below the barn there was a fenced-in area with a small building that we called the pigpen. Apparently pigs lived there when Marie was married to Daddy. I remember it being used for storing boxes of extra canning jars. The Orchard and Big Field Many years ago, Daddy planted a variety of fruit trees on a sloped hillside between the Ranch house and the water tank on the hill. I remember apples and plums, a large fig tree and a small wild apricot tree. Daddy brought large pieces of slate and placed them around the trees to keep the weeds from growing and hold in moisture. We also had a row of grapevines, plus one on an arbor in front of the house. He’d made an 8’ x 8’ arbor on the bank by the back corner bedroom with a scrawny grapevine—there may have been others that died for lack of water. It had a wooden floor, so we kids used it for a level play area. We also had a garden below the orchard in front of the house, with a wooden fence around it to keep the deer out. Our spring didn’t produce much water, so Daddy had a small ditch running to our orchard and garden from the Summerfield ditch that fed Finnon Lake. He had 47

permission to divert water from it to water our trees and plants, but it was too time-consuming, so our trees and garden didn’t thrive. The only tree that produced abundant fruit was the fig tree, and we enjoyed eating those. Besides, Grandma and Papa had a large orchard and garden. We helped them take care of it, and in exchange, enjoyed an abundance of fruits, grapes, berries and vegetables from their place in town. The Big Field was across the road from our orchard-garden area, and fenced in all around. Daddy disked it and the orchard every year, but I don’t ever remember anything but weeds growing in there. That’s where my parents did all their gardening in their later years. Mommy’s Ranch Activities When not helping Daddy out in the woods, she kept busy washing clothes in the Shanty, summer and winter. She used a wringer washing machine, and hung the clothes on a twisted wire line that went from a pine by the Shanty up the hill to another pine. In the winter cold, sometimes the clothes froze stiff before drying, and had to be warmed up by the kitchen stove to thaw out and finish drying. She always ironed most of the laundry—shirts, dress pants, pillowcases, blouses, skirts, dresses, and even Daddy’s hankies. She also mended clothes and made shirts for Daddy and me, plus dresses for the girls. Daddy’s jeans always needed patches at the knees and his back pocket, where he carried his pliers and crescent wrench wherever he went. She swept the floors, mopped the linoleum kitchen floor and took care of 3 lively kids. She found time to make desserts at Daddy’s requests— cobblers, pies, prune whip, tapioca or rice pudding, and cakes for our birthdays. She often baked chocolate chip cookies, which always made the house smell good. Lanita watched her closely, and shortly after learning how to talk, she would tell Mommy each ingredient in order—she had the recipe well memorized. She baked and cooked everything in and on the wood cookstove, which was difficult to control the exact temperature, but her food always came out great. At dinnertime, the meals were balanced—salad, a main dish, a vegetable, plus bread, and often dessert. Breakfast was mostly hot cereal during cooler mornings—oatmeal, Wheat Hearts, cornmeal mush, fried mush from leftover cereal, rice, and boiled wheat kernels, which were tough and chewy, but Daddy insisted we eat it. In warm weather we had cold cereal, and always fresh or canned fruit every morning. Sabbaths were special—we had berry toast, made from fresh berries during the summer and canned berries the rest of the year. I sliced bread into strips and dried them on a cookie sheet in the oven. Mommy added cornstarch and honey to the berries on the stove, made whipped cream, and we enjoyed a special breakfast. 48

Party Line Telephone For many years we had no phone at the Ranch. Then one day we saw a large truck from the phone company slowly coming up the road. It pulled a plow that made a deep furrow down the center of our dirt road, with a steel tube directly behind the plow feeding a thick phone cable from a large spool on the truck along the bottom of the furrow, and a scraper behind smoothing off the road, all in one pass. I don’t know how it proceeded in areas where there were large rocks just below the surface, but it followed the road to the last house. Lines branched out to the road edge up onto poles and onto trees to each house. I enjoyed watching the men work, and collected bits of colored wires that were clipped off and left on the ground. Once the small line reached our house, the lineman ran it into the kitchen and fastened it to a black rotary phone, and Daddy made a small shelf for it in the kitchen corner to the right of the sink and dish drain area. After Daddy broke his leg in 1964, we called the phone man to extend the line to the living room, where Daddy could have a bed close to the warmth of the kitchen stove, and also have access to the phone. Our phone number was 916-6221490, and we were on a party line with a few other phones on the same line. Each residence along the line had a different ring, so we had to listen carefully and only answer if it was our ring—one long ring and one short ring. Before making calls, we had to check for a dial tone. If other people were talking, we had to keep checking until they were done before we could call. And we had to keep calls short, so the line would be open for other neighbors to make or receive calls. Anybody could listen in on the calls of others on the party line, so we had to be careful what we said. And we could hear a click every time someone else picked up their phone, and another click when they hung up. If we heard only click, we know the other party was listening to us, so we would ask them to please hang up. Most of the time we had no problem, and I don’t recall the phone being used very often. When there was lightening close by, sometimes it would make our phone ding briefly, which made it scary one night when Daddy was in the hospital, the lights were out, lightening flashed, the phone went ding as the thunder roared. The warm kitchen stove was a comfort to us, and we had a kerosene lamp for light. Poor Mommy was frightened, but had to be brave to keep us kids from being too terrified.

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Our First TV Daddy didn’t want to have a TV in the house, exposing us to the evils of the world. But after he broke his leg and was in a cast to his thigh, he had to spend a lot of time in bed recuperating. He read a lot, and we kids had more time to spend with him, and that was good. But he was in a lot of pain, and a friend felt sorry for Daddy, so he gave him an extra black and white TV he had. At first Daddy would only watch it while we were away, or busy outside. I remember quietly putting a block of wood outside the living room window and peeking in to watch, since we rarely got to see TV except when we visited others who had one. Little by little, when Daddy saw an extra good program, he’d call us it to watch, which we eagerly did. Over time, Daddy was able to get out and be more active, running errands, going on trips and even working in the woods. When he was away, Mommy watched Jack LaLane, and did exercises along with him. She even ordered his stretchy band to exercise her arms and legs. I really don’t know why—with all her work outdoors and in the woods, she was plenty fit. Maybe it felt good to do something different. (And she wore a girdle when she went to church or other dress-up occasions— she was so trim and fit, she certainly didn’t need that!) We kids enjoyed watching Romper Room, where children participated in a bunch of fun educational activities, and Mommy even ordered one of their big punch balls for us to play along with them. Eventually we were watching Captain Kangaroo, Lassie, Leave it to Beaver, and then it was cartoons—Yogi Bear, Popeye, the Road Runner Show, Huckleberry Hound, and maybe a few others. As soon as we heard Daddy arriving, we quickly turned the TV off and hurried to look busy so we wouldn’t get in trouble. Mommy didn’t tell on us, because even she came to watch cartoons with us when she needed a break from her housework.

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Ranch Activities During free time, we kids found plenty of ways to entertain ourselves. Sometimes we played store. One of us would collect canned goods and food packages from the cupboards, spread them out on a board between two upturned wooden boxes and “sell” them to our customers. I can’t remember what we used for money, but it was fun. Sometimes we’d play restaurant at suppertime when we normally got our own food anyway. I made up a menu, took orders from Linda & Lanita, prepared their food and served it to them. Sometimes it took work, such as seeding pomegranates, and other times it was a matter of putting together our usual fruit and toast in a different or fancy way, making them feel special. We rarely ate out, unless visiting relatives who took us to a restaurant. When not playing restaurant, we often fought at suppertime. All of our dishes, bowls, glasses and silverware were discolored, battered, chipped and mismatched. We had flowered porcelain-coated Mexican dishes that we used at dinnertime, and colored battered aluminum bowls for breakfast and supper. For some reason, the blue one was our favorite, and we all wanted to use it, but there was only one, so a lot of fighting went on before meals. I’m surprised Mommy didn’t hide it and eliminate the “blue plate” problem. We had to take turns washing dishes, and had to do it in a certain order, from cleanest such as glasses and jars, then silverware, dishes, and last of all, pots and casserole dishes. When we cleared off the table at dinnertime, if a casserole dish was still half full or more, we covered it with aluminum foil and put it in the fridge. Sometimes we fudged and covered casserole dishes when they were nearly empty—they had food baked on that was really hard to scrub off. Another way we cheated was to wash all the dishes and leave the empty casserole dish in the sink to soak, so then the next person had to wash it. Sometimes we “forgot” whose turn it was to do the dishes, and began arguing about who had to do them. One time Mommy got fed up with our arguing and just went to the sink and started washing the dishes herself. That stopped our bickering, and we felt really bad that Mommy was doing our job, but none of us felt sorry enough to go help her—we just slunk away and felt ashamed of ourselves. Beetle in Ear I awoke very late one night with a very painful earache. Every few minutes, it felt like my ear was boiling. I woke up my parents; they looked inside and found nothing. Mommy called Dr. Jean Babcock, who suggested pouring warm oil in my ear. Daddy made a fire in the stove, put a jar lid with oil on it, and when it was warm, poured a little oil in my ear. The boiling sensation stopped, but something 51

seemed to be moving around in there. Soon the black body of a long slim beetle appeared, which was pulled out with tweezers. It was only about ¼ inch long, but it sure inflicted a lot of pain! Apparently the boiling sensation came from the beetle trying to burrow into my ear, and those tiny legs sure sounded loud! School in the U.S. and Mexico Linda and I studied at El Dorado Junior Academy while in the U.S., and at Linda Vista while in Mexico. I did first grade in Placerville, Mommy taught me second grade during the summer, and I did parts of third, fourth and fifth grades there as well. After that, we lived in Mexico during much of the school year, so I finished through Prepa (pre-college) there in 1975. At EJA, we students sat two to a desk, and my seatmate in th 4 grade was Penny Kimball. She was a quiet girl, and very nice. During recess, some of my classmates dared me to kiss Penny. That was at the age when boys felt repulsed by girls, saying they had “cooties.” I always tried to be nice to the girls, and I figured that Penny would appreciate a kiss, so I gave her one on the cheek when the teacher wasn’t watching. Apparently, she did not appreciate my nice gesture, because she got up and whispered to the teacher. At recess time, Mrs. Bissett had a little talk with me about proper behavior toward girls. A guest came to our classroom, and he wrote a long word across the top of the side wall chalkboard: Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg. He told us it was the name of a lake in Massachusetts, named by the Nipmuc Indians with villages across the lake from each other. Villagers from both sides fought for years over who had fishing rights, and they finally came to an agreement. “You fish on your side, I’ll fish on my side, and no one shall fish in the middle.” And that’s what the long name means in the Nipmuc language. I was one of the few who memorized it, and can still spell out all 45 letters. Sometimes when two students began fighting over something, Mrs. Bissett had me stand up and say that word to them, and it usually got them to stop squabbling. Another man visited our classroom and taught us how to draw very quickly and easily. He made a big number 2 on the chalkboard, added a few details, drew small waves under it, and to our astonishment, we saw a beautiful swan. He added a few reeds and cattails, distant hills, a few trees, puffy 52

clouds, a sun, and within minutes we were admiring a peaceful country scene. I drew variations of that artwork later in Mexico while listening to boring teachers, adding other details of my own imagination. Ellen’s Last Spanking I remember Ellen’s last spanking. I believe she was 13, and we were working in the woods beyond where Dyer Lake is located now. Mommy and Daddy were up on the bank, cutting veneer blocks with the big two-man saw, and Eileen was trying to study in the back seat of our 1942 green Chevy car. Ellen kept pestering and teasing her, opening the door, grabbing her things; just being a nuisance and clowning around, making it impossible for Eileen to concentrate. I was playing quietly on the front seat. Daddy saw what was happening, stopped the chainsaw and let Ellen have it. Eileen suggested I get out of the car too so Daddy wouldn’t get after me as well. Praying About Lost Axe Daddy was out in the woods and I needed to split firewood and kindling, but I couldn’t find my axe anywhere. I looked everywhere I could think of, but without success. Remembering stories about answered prayers from Uncle Arthur’s Bedtime Stories, I went to my room, knelt down, and prayed for God to please show me where to find my lost axe. When I got up, I felt impressed to go to the trash barrels we had by the rock wall at the corner of the garden. My axe was right there, in plain sight! I had searched all around there earlier, and never saw it. I figured that my guardian angel found it and put it there. Or maybe I was unable to see it so I could practice faith and pray, trusting God to help me find it. Fixing Roof Leaks The Ranch house roof was covered with heavy duty tarpaper, nailed to the board roof surface with roofing tacks. Then he sealed it with hot tar, which he bought in large black foot-square chunks. When the roof began to leak in too many places, he made a big fire under a barrel, melted the tar until it was soft, dipped it out with a metal bucket and carried it onto the roof walking a plank from the bank behind the house. Using a long stick wrapped with rags on one end, he mopped the cracked areas with hot tar and added pieces of tarpaper, which kept the leaky areas sealed until the next season. I still remember the strong smell of the hot steaming tar, especially when driving by a place where a road is being repaved. 53

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Frogs in My Sleeping Bag When I got my first canvas pup tent, I set it up in the front yard and slept in it during hot summer nights. Denise and Janet came to spend the night, and after I went to bed, Daddy took the girls to the spring, where they collected some frogs and quietly slipped them into my tent and sleeping bag. I wasn’t asleep and heard them giggling, so I knew what they were up to. When they deposited the frogs, I spoiled their fun by thanking them for bringing some critters to spend the night with me. Of course, I threw the frogs out after the girls left so I wouldn’t squish them in my sleep! The Berry Patch During the late summer we piled into the car and drove the very dusty road out past Slate Mountain to The Berry Patch, a large sloping meadow near Deer View. Armed with flats of berry baskets and other containers, we filled our tummies and dozens of baskets with huge, sweet, fragrant and very tasty wild blackberries, growing in huge clumps. Cows grazed there as well, so we had to watch where we stepped, and we heard their bells tinkle as we worked. Wild wintergreen grew there as well, making the air fragrant as we walked. After getting home with our treasure, Mommy made cobbler, jam and canned many pints of berries for berry toast throughout the rest of the year. Picking Pears at Deer View Our family went to Deer View nearly every late summer to pick pears from very old, abandoned trees at the overgrown resort ruins. The pears were always sweet and very flavorful, planted back in the 1920’s. I climbed high up into the tall, unpruned trees to pick pears and toss them to Daddy. Others we got with a fruit picker, as there were very few at ground level. We saw huge old apple trees, and some of those apples are the most flavorful I’ve ever tasted. There are many blackberries there as well. And we always spent some 55

time exploring the stone walls, chimneys and concrete stairways of Bret Harte Hotel and the nearby Lodge, which Daddy remembered from his late teens. It had huge wall murals, but now it’s all thickly overgrown with tall trees and bushes. We couldn’t drive all the way in, so we followed old roads and hiked the last ¼ mile, hauling pears out in gunny sacks and morrales. Later we used the Honda, carrying a pack on my back and morrales on the handlebars. Coming

in from the Slate Mountain side was a longer hike, but with less steep uphill. Each time we got several hundred pounds of pears, which we canned, dried, and sold to Mrs. Purser for 30 cents a pound, and made some good money while having fun! We were always fascinated as we explored the ruins and compared them with old photos of many years before.

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Camping Trips Other fun family activities included camping trips in our 1930 Model A Ford pickup. Sometimes we drove through Pino Grande, where we saw the remains of old

logger’s cabins and the large sawmill area. We followed old narrow gauge railroad grades past Old Pino out to North Cable Point, stopping to walk across still standing trestles on the way. At the point we saw concrete foundations, giant gear mechanisms, thick cables and anchors deep into solid rock. Daddy told us how he and Grandma crossed the cable car, how it dropped steeply down, leveled off and groaned as it climbed to the opposite side. We camped near a wide bank, and a tall beech sapling grew at the top. I climbed the little tree, which was quite flexible, and the further I climbed, the lower it bent down the bank, until I was within a few feet of the ground. I let go, the tree flew back up, and up I went for another fun ride. By the time we left, that poor tree stayed in a near horizontal position over the bank. I saved some leaves from that tree & others nearby. We liked to camp at Lake Edson, now known as Stumpy Meadows. Pilot Creek runs into it from the south side, and we had fun playing in the sand, watching the creek erode it as we diverted portions into other areas. The eroded sand made perfectly level flat mesas as it flowed into the shallow upper end of the lake, which was fascinating to watch as the underwater mesas got wider and longer. 57

Another time we camped by a creek near Pino Grande, and to stay warm and dry, I got the bright idea of sticking my sleeping bag inside a huge plastic bag I’d found, and I stayed warm and dry most of the night. Toward the cool of morning, I began to feel cold and damp. I got up at daybreak to make a fire, and discovered the entire outside of my sleeping bag was quite wet! That’s when I learned firsthand that our body pores constantly release moisture, and that my idea wasn’t so bright after all! Sometimes we drove the dirt road all the way to Loon Lake and Wentworth Springs, which had a large two-story hotel and several smaller wood buildings, which have collapsed over time. The spring had a wooden cover and a tin cup for tasting the highly sulfured mineral water, which we tasted and spat out. I saw large trout in the fast-moving creek, and decided to try fishing. I tied a bent piece of baling wire to a piece of twine fastened to a stick, put Cheerios on the hook and gave it a try. The Cheerios dissolved right away. Daddy suggested a grasshopper, but the fish didn’t bite. I don’t know what I would have done even if I had caught a fish, but I’m glad I didn’t. We enjoyed hiking the Rubicon Trail, and even driving up part of it in the high ground-clearance Model A. Some folks saw us as we came back out and asked, “How long have you been out in this remote mountain area?!” One time we camped in a nice peaceful place in the forest near Deer View. My parents slept in the pickup bed, and I slept on boards across the sideboards. Linda and Lanita got to sleep in my brand new nylon pup tent, which was lighter and smaller than my canvas tent, which I sold to someone in Mexico. I made a treasure hunt for my sisters, which they enjoyed until they got to the prize at the end—a dead rattlesnake 58

under a large piece of bark! On our way back to the Ranch, we stopped to visit the spotter at the fire lookout tower on top of Slate Mountain. He said he had been watching us through his binoculars as we neared the mountain, and didn’t see old cars like that very often! He had a great 360° view, and I enjoyed looking at distant landmarks through his powerful 20 power binoculars. Today’s smartphones have tiny cameras with even greater zoom power, which is hard to fathom. Camping in the old car was fun, giving us a chance to relax and enjoy nature as a family, and providing a much-needed break from our busy lives at home. Tunneltown One day while walking by where Tumeli Lane is now located, I noticed a large hole where an oak stump had rotted and later burned, leaving holes where the large tree roots had been. I stepped down into the stump hole, and observed that one root hole was large enough to crawl into. I made sure there were no snakes or other critters as I made my way in, and upon rounding a bend, I was surprised to see a small steel door. I turned the handle and it opened easily, into a large passageway. There were no lights, but it was lit up, and I could stand inside, so I followed the tunnel to a full-size doorway. I opened that door, and found myself in a world of its own, with grassy meadows, trees, blue sky above and many forest animals. I saw high mountain peaks off in the distance, and a peaceful river meandering beyond the meadow. As I explored the area, I was surprised to discover that the animals were tame, and they could talk too! I climbed a small grassy knoll and lay on my back, watching the fluffy clouds floating by. As I closed my eyes, I heard what sounded like an angelic choir singing the most harmonious, beautiful music I’d ever heard. I later discovered that I was on AngelSong Hill. It all seemed like a dream, but it was very real. After some time, I returned to the tunnel and small doorway back out through the stump hole. I returned there many times, had many adventures, met a wide variety of characters, and during trips to Mexico and other places, I told many dozens of Tunneltown stories to my sisters. The amazing part about that place was that no matter how long I spent in there, when I came back out, it was if I had just gone in, and time stopped while I was there. Linda and Lanita really wanted me to take them there, but I never did. However, they seemed happy with all the exciting adventure stories I told them, 59

and I even printed weekly Tunneltown newspapers for them to read—23 issues in total. Over time, the stump hole filled with dirt as the sides caved in, and totally disappeared when new roads were made for the Swansboro development. And it’s just as well—Tunneltown is still a serene, quiet place where all the creatures live in harmony. And whenever I want to know how things are going there, I just ask Mr. Anything, who is invisible and lives in my ear. Then I can share the information with my sisters, who have memories of many stories that kept them entertained for hours by a big brother with a very vivid imagination.

Earl’s Place Earl Proctor bought 20 acres of our 120 acre plot, had Daddy level an area up the hill between the two creeks, and parked a large travel trailer on it. He made a nice slate walkway in front, built a sturdy roof over the trailer and walkway, dug out a root cellar below the front, and built a nice deck over the cellar. The railing was made of rusticlooking cedar branches, and he was quite pleased with his place. He ran a black pipe from our spring to fill a small pond above his trailer to store water for his garden, and to supply water for his living quarters. He had no electricity. Daddy made a road down to the creek, where Earl built a sturdy screened-in house over the creek bed to keep cool in the summer heat. On the bank a few feet from the creek house, he dug out a small hole and lined it with cement, and it stayed full of fresh water fed 60

by a small spring. Earl had a door on the back side of the creek house, and he built a nice walking trail up the stream. In places where it was too rocky, he made board walkways and places to sit and enjoy the peaceful, natural beauty. I enjoyed visiting him and walking along the creek trail. Daddy built a larger pond just above the road culvert on Redbird Creek, and Earl collected a stack of old ore cart rails. His dream was to make a track go down into the pond and up the other side so he could splash through the water, but he never did it. Over time, the pond filled with cattails, and eventually filled with silt, so there is no trace of it now. Wasp Nest Misery Earl decided he wanted a place leveled off near the ridge of the southeast corner of his property, just in case he decided to build a bigger house, perhaps for one of his children. I watched Daddy as he cleared brush and then moved dirt to level the area under a large Valley oak. The tractor disturbed a wasp or yellow jacket nest, and they all came chasing me, stinging all over my body. I ran down the hill to the white car by the lupine patch and curled up in back, crying for a long time from dozens of painful stings—even through my red sweater. Daddy got a few stings, but continued working until dark. Back home, by body was covered with painful welts, but I survived. Both Mommy and Linda are very allergic to stings, and one sting would make them swell up so bad they could hardly breathe. They both got stung at least once while at the Ranch, and Daddy barely got them to town in time to get the shot needed to counteract the poison. Black Walnuts Daddy loved black walnuts, and there were plenty available at an abandoned ranch on the hill east of our property, so we picked up many gunny sacks full. But the hulls don’t come off easily. They are like hard charcoal, and just as dirty. Daddy set up a grinding wheel on a block of wood and had us grind them down to the hard shell, coating us with fine powdery dust, and we disliked the task. At least he didn’t make us crack the really hard shells and dig out the nut meats—he did that as he got hungry for them. 61

Oak Tree Pulley Daddy had a pulley hanging from a branch of the large black oak tree that shaded the garage and much of the yard. He used it to pull motors out of cars sometimes. One day I got the bright idea of running a rope through it, making a loop at the bottom, sitting in it, and pulling on the other end, which raised me high into the tree, where I could look all around. Another time I put my feet in the loop and pulled the rope, which took me upside down clear up to the pulley. I know now that was quite foolish—if I’d lost hold of the rope, I would have dropped headfirst right to the ground and killed myself. Tree House I really wanted a tree house, and below the garage, another large oak had a nice low horizontal branch. So Daddy leaned a plank on the branch that was about 10’ up; we walked up and he made a nice treehouse floor near a fork in the main trunk. He built a nice porch with a rail, but then got too busy, and never put walls or a roof on our treehouse. But the girls and I had fun playing there anyway. I hung the pulley on a branch above the tree fork, and lowered my sisters to the ground, which they loved. We had several old box springs and mattresses which were mostly springy wire frames—the fabric and filling had rotted away long before. I stacked them up and then we jumped onto them from the tree fork, and really bounced high without getting hurt. Wagon Picnics Sometimes we loaded the red wagon with a blanket, some food and a few things to play with, then took off up to the top of the hill behind the Ranch to do pretend camping and picnic trips. A large Valley oak stood at the top, with droopy branches making it a fun place for playing. I’d spread out the blanket and put our lunch on it and we’d eat, relax, play, and just have fun playing out in nature together. On one side of the tree there were rocks piled around two large graves and a small one. We’d been told that two horse thieves had been hung and were buried there. Nobody knew anything about the baby.

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Playing Cars One of our favorite things to do was playing with Tonka toys that Mommy picked up for 25 cents at Thrift stores. We had pickups, trucks, road graders and a tractor with rubber tracks and a blade that went up and down. Every spring, Daddy ran the small tractor pulling the disc to turn over the soil and kill the weeds all through the orchard, the big field, and all around the yard and buildings for fire safety during the summer. During our free time, I took a hoe and created a series of roads all through the orchard. Some were narrow and winding, some wide like freeways with an overpass. Then I’d make wide level areas to park our vehicles, which we called our houses, even though we had no structures on them. We put all the toys together and had “choosing parties,” during which we each took turns picking out a vehicle until they were all gone, and took them to our “houses.” Then we drove around, making car or truck sounds. A loaded truck would change gears often and make sounds like engines struggling to make it up the steep hills. Other highpowered pickups revved their engines and went racing along as we pushed them along my roads at high speeds, sliding around the corners and sometimes having an “accident” in which they turned over. So the tow truck had to come to the rescue. We could play out there for hours, and I often made new roads to drive on. Linda and Lanita enjoyed doing that a lot more than playing with their dollies. When spring came around, Daddy plowed up all my roads, and we began all over with a new set of roads, “houses” and fun Tonka toy activities. When we grew up, we had a final “choosing party” and divided up the toys between us, which we still have. Learning to Drive One day when Daddy and I were on our way to the woods in the 1930 Ford Model A pickup, he suddenly stopped near the bottom of the hill from the Ranch and asked me if I wanted to learn to drive, and at age 13, I had been eager to do so 63

for some time. He set the parking brake, got out, I slid over behind the wheel and he got in the passenger seat. He explained how to push the brake and clutch, shift into first gear, let off the parking brake, slowly let out the clutch and brake, and down the hill we went. At the foot of the hill where the road was level, I didn’t accelerate in time and killed the engine. He had me push in the clutch and the foot starter, press the gas pedal (it was really a round knob on the floor), slowly let out the clutch and off we went. The steering was hard, so I had to be careful on the sharp corners. As we curved around the narrow place with a steep drop-off near Redbird Creek, Daddy grabbed the steering wheel to keep us from going over the edge. I was focused on the clutch and brake, and hadn’t turned the steering wheel enough. Also, there was a small round knob to the right of the accelerator, and I was being careful not to step on it. Daddy later told me that the foot knob was to brace my shoe on as I accelerated so I could do smoothly. Later he showed me the steering column accelerator, which came in handy on steep switchbacks where I needed 3 feet—one each for the clutch, brake and gas at the same time. Using the steering column lever, I could manage the clutch and brakes with my feet without stalling the engine. Redbird Creek Waterfall Daddy took us kids past the second creek on our way to the woods and showed us a place we could go down along some large boulders and steep banks to a nice hidden waterfall he knew about. So down we went, and sure enough, a lovely waterfall about 12’ high dropped into a clear pool, surrounded by mossy rocks and shaded by giant oaks. Then we heard rustling in the leaves on the bank opposite from where we had come down. We looked around, seeing nothing. Then we heard more rustling, this time in a different place. Was it a bear with cubs? We’d seen tracks recently on the road above. We heard noises a third time, closer than before. I noticed a small rock rolling through the leaves. Then Daddy popped out 64

from behind some bushes. He had come down quietly from the opposite side, and was throwing small rocks into the leaves near us. We were thankful it wasn’t a bear, but he gave us a good scare! Asking About the Facts of Life One time while riding with Daddy to the woods, I asked Daddy how babies are made, and he beat around the bush, so I kept asking for more details. Finally he got red-faced and in a stern voice said with finality, “Por eso tienes pipi-cosa.” (That’s why you have a pee thingy.) That sounded totally ridiculous to me, and I wanted to tell him so, but he was not in a mood to discuss the topic any further. When we asked Mommy where babies came from, she said from a hole below the belly button area (she didn’t have a belly button). We asked her to show us the place, but she evaded the question and never showed us. Sometime when I was 15, I got enough hints from various sources, and saw a medical book in Yerba Buena, and I guessed how babies are made. Shortly after that, my guess was confirmed when I came across a book for children that told how the Daddy planted a seed in the Mommy, and the baby grew, and eventually came out a hole I knew about, but nobody would tell me. Driving the Tractor I was 13 when Daddy taught me how to drive the small Cletrac, and I found that easy and fun. It had a crank on the front to start it, and I had done that many times for Daddy already. The process involved reaching under the gas tank to open the fuel line—it leaked if left on while not being used. Next, make sure the brakes were set, the shift lever in neutral, flip the switch on, and move the accelerator lever back about halfway. Then it was time to go to the front, loosen the crank handle from the wire that held it in place, push it in, turn until it gripped the engine crankshaft, gave it two or three good turns, and the engine roared to life. Then move the throttle back to lower power, hop in the seat, release the brakes, push the clutch, put it in gear, move the throttle back, let out the clutch, and away we went. Steering was easy—pull the left brake lever to turn left, the right one to turn right, and both of them to stop, pushing in the clutch to keep the engine from 65

stalling. It sounds like a lot, but the entire process took less than a minute. Maintenance was a lot of work—make sure the radiator was full, oil and gas tank also, and use the heavy black dirty grease pump to grease the track roller fittings. It took five or six pumps for each fitting— more if needed, until grease came out the other side. I enjoyed pulling logs and disking the orchard—it was always fun and easy to drive. Mommy drove it too, mostly going backward and forward using a pulley system to load logs onto the truck. Loading Logs For many years Daddy took veneer blocks to the mill, but as demand decreased, he switched over to 16’ logs. He removed the sideboards and placed two heavy “bunks” on the truck bed to hold the logs. He placed a cable with a pulley about 30’ up a pine tree, parked the truck with the bed centered at the base of the tree, pulled a bunch of logs alongside the truck, attached two heavy duty slider pipes for the logs to slide up the side of the truck, and then Linda and I attached bell hooks to each end of the log. Cables from the hooks went to the main cable, which ran through the tree pulley and down to a hook on the front of the tractor driven by Mommy, slightly off to the side. Daddy stood on the board frame behind the truck cab, where he could guide the logs. The bell hooks had ropes attached to them so Linda and I could pull them into position. We attached the pointed ends to the log, and as Mommy backed up the tractor, the hooks lightened into the log, gripping it firmly as it slid up the pipes, over the sides of the bunks and slammed into the tree on the opposite side. Then Daddy grabbed the rope or the log on his end, and I guided the log on the back end using the rope. Once we had the log lined up where we wanted it, Daddy would signal 66

for Mommy to drive forward and lower it into place. It was definitely a family operation, and usually took up to an hour to load the truck. Then Daddy threw four binder cables over the load and tightened them with ratchet rollers and a long bar. Daddy and I usually went out into the woods very early in the morning to cut down trees, remove limbs, measure the lengths, and drag them to the landing. We both had a lot to carry as we went from tree to tree, carrying the chainsaw, gas & oil, axe, splitting maul, 2 heavy steel wedges and the 8’ measuring stick. During hot summer days, the chainsaw got so hot that the gasoline boiled in the saw, so Daddy removed the cap to cool it off. We drank a lot of water, sweat a lot and were filthy dirty by lunchtime. After washing up at home, we’d eat and take a nap, and then head back to the woods to bring in more logs, load them up, and have the truck ready to go to the mill early in the morning. Often we got home after dark, and our bathwater was very muddy by the time we finished our baths. Our hands were calloused because we never wore gloves. Sometimes Daddy would inflate some inner tubes and we’d go over to Finnon Lake to cool off and get cleaned up. Even though I knew how to swim, playing with the inner tubes was more fun. We just had to be careful not to get scratched by the valve stem. I liked to do the “washing machine,” as I kicked my legs and made my inner tube swish back and forth, round and round, splashing all the while. Logging Below John’s Place Every summer we logged in different places, depending where there were trees ready for harvesting. Much of it was on our 100 acres at the Ranch, and from property we owned beyond Finnon Lake. Often we harvested trees from other properties around Mosquito, and in the early 1970s when the Swansboro development went in, we got the trees that were cleared from new roads being built. Ray Hamilton, with his huge D-8 bulldozer pushed over large trees very easily and shoved them down toward our landing, saving us a lot of work. In 1971, we logged the area below John Fuqua’s place on the steep mountainside going down a zig-zag 67

road nearly to the river. A young couple and their four-year-old daughter Pigh (pronounced “pie”) lived in John’s house, and they enjoyed the remote location where they could “be one with nature,” wearing no clothes, growing their own food and being at peace with the world. Then we came along and they either stayed out of sight as we drove by their house, or threw on some shorts and overalls. Pigh never wore anything, and one time she asked me why we were killing the trees. I simply explained that we were making room for more trees to grow. After going by John’s house, we got to the first switchback, which had enough room to turn around with the truck and car. But the rest of the switchbacks were more of a challenge. Daddy drove the truck down forward until he got to a sharp switchback, backed down the next one, then forward, and backward until he got to the bottom. We had one landing on the second switchback partway down, and another one clear at the bottom. There wasn’t much room to collect logs to be loaded, so after the truck was positioned, I set a ladder on the truck and fastened the cable and pulley on the pine tree. Daddy dragged in the logs he had lined up along the road, and while loading, Mommy drove the tractor back and forward along a narrow ledge on the canyon wall as we loaded the truck. We couldn’t take full loads because of the steep, narrow road, but the Finnon sawmill was buying our logs at this time, so we didn’t have far to go. While putting on our second load there late one evening, a log went over one bunk and swung around unexpectedly. I held the rope tightly so the log would miss Daddy, but the force of the moving log yanked the rope out of my hand, tearing and shredding a layer of skin from two of my fingers. I stumbled in pain over to the bank and moaned in agony as Daddy and Mommy finished loading so we could go home. We finished that area after taking out 22 loads in 4 weeks, and moved our operation down to the lower landing, which had more room to turn around and collect logs, but steeper roads, so we put fewer logs on the truck. As Daddy headed up, if the load was too heavy, the front of the truck went off the ground, and Daddy had to carefully back down, loosen the binders, bump the logs against the tree to push them forward, tighten the binders and try again. He made it 68

every time, and never had to remove a log, but there were times when his front wheels were in the air and he kept going straight until the road was not so steep and he could steer again. Then he backed up to the next switchback, went forward on the next one and so on until he was out of the canyon. I drove the white car on those roads, but was able to navigate the switchbacks doing 3-point turns. That was tricky because of the steepness, but I managed OK. While working in the lower area, we had more equipment problems—flat tires, a broken winch cable, a hydraulic line on the big tractor splattering Daddy with black oil, and other such problems. The truck transmission failed as we neared the top, and the emergency brake wouldn’t hold, so Daddy backed the truck into the bank, got the big tractor from below and pushed the truck to a level area on the last switchback while I steered. Another time Daddy strained his back and had to take it easy, but continued working—we needed the money. In between all our logging operations, I went on my first Pack Trip with Reuben Hubbard into the Desolation Wilderness, Linda and Lanita went to Pinecrest, we went to camp meeting, I worked for Sidney Holland scraping and painting a shed, we visited Auntie Ferne and several friends; and we delivered firewood to Doc Miller in Sacramento in exchange for massage treatments for Daddy. In Calistoga, Daddy and I rode in a glider for 30 minutes, and that was fun, circling like an eagle, catching updrafts and enjoying the scenery. At Daddy’s request, the pilot took us over an area south of PUC that had recently burned, and we saw the charred black area, a large section ahead of the fire that had scorched the leaves dead from the heat as planes dropped retardant, and beyond that, green forest that escaped the fierce blaze. The flight cost $16 for both of us, but it was definitely worth it. We cut firewood for Grandma Landstrom, filling her woodshed and part of her garage, and cut wood for Mildred Conlin as well. Mommy gave a mission presentation and we kids sang at Clearlake, and people gave us clothes, soap, combs 69

and other things to take to Mexico. Back at the Ranch we cut wood for Papa, Eileen and Bud Darrington in exchange for fixing the yellow car and truck transmission. I got to use the little Homelite saw and the big McCulloch 77 saw. Daddy hurt his back so bad he could hardly move, so I loaded the yellow car with wood and Mommy drove him to Doc Miller, who adjusted Daddy’s back so he could walk again. Mommy got me 26 Matchbox cars on sale for 37 cents each. Sawmill on Fire A lot happened on September 13, 1971. Daddy took a load of logs over to the sawmill real early. I ate breakfast and came over later to help him. Mommy came, and we put on another load of logs. Daddy took it over to the sawmill and then we went to cut down more trees. After dinner we were going to put another load on the truck, but saw smoke over towards mill, so went to see Finnon sawmill burning up. There were many explosions, downed power lines, etc. The fire totally destroyed the entire mill, leaving only the mangled metal parts, and didn’t spread too much. Orville Beckett was badly burned after running in to grab important papers, and stood there watching his mill burn while smoking a cigarette. Then Daddy took him to the hospital. Nobody knows how the fire started. We had no electricity for 8½ hours. We took another load to the millsite. Thankfully, we got the last small loads from below John’s house out before the mill burned, and we took the few remaining full loads from the upper area to Bob Nielsen’s sawmill in El Dorado. We hauled 55 loads of logs that summer. Daddy’s Surgery Daddy’s back problems got so bad that he needed surgery, so on October 5, 1971 we pulled the Love Bug trailer to River Bend Trailer Park near Verdi to stay while Daddy was in the VA Hospital in Reno for studies, surgery and recovery. We kids studied our schoolbooks, played in the sand, and visited Daddy nearly every day, as well as Janet and Ellen. We also went to the library, park and planetarium. 70

Ten days later Daddy was out of the hospital and we returned home to put all the tractors, truck and cars away, ditch the roads for winter, board up the Ranch, block the 3 roads going to the Ranch, and then load the car and trailer. By the end of October we were on our way to Mexico. The summer of 1971 is quite typical of what many of our summers were like, except that I just shared the major highlights. We were always a very busy family, and always on the go! Packing for Mexico Mommy was always on the lookout for good used clothing at Thrift stores, and sorted through dozens of boxes and bags of clothes given to her for the poor people in Mexico. She also had a list of items that Linda Vista staff members and other people had ordered, such as Sabbath School felt materials, filmstrip sets and battery-operated projectors for laymen, colored sheet sets, Christian music records, decorated writing pads, and dozens of other items that were difficult to find or very expensive in Mexico. Daddy also had a list of equipment parts, beekeeping supplies, knife blades for the school bread slicer, and a lot more. In between all their other tasks, they made many trips to specialty stores and remote locations to find the needed items. On top of that, they collected all the items our own family need for the trip and not available in Mexico. Storage areas were piled high with items to go, and it seemed impossible to get everything into the car and trailer. During earlier trips with the white bakery wagon, we took a wood burning stove, a small Conn organ for the school church, and many other things, filling the entire back, and making a bed on top for us kids to ride and sleep on. When we got the Love Bug trailer, we filled the spaces under the bed and seats, and Mommy filled a mattress cover with clothing and felt materials to sleep on instead of the trailer mattress. Later we purchased a 22’ Prowler trailer, which had even more places to store items. And so the packing fun began, and we had it down to a science. Daddy removed the inside panel covers of the yellow car side walls and I filled them up with many boxes of canned goods—corn, peas, mixed vegetables, spaghetti-o’s, cranberry sauce, tomato and mushroom soup, and also many boxes of shoes. We tied wire coat hangers into bundles of 25 and fastened them under the car frame with baling wire, along with some garden tools and other long items. Under the 71

hood, he stuck an extra tire in the hood cross braces and wired it in place. With plenty of room in the engine compartment, Daddy fastened extra car parts and other items that wouldn’t get damaged by engine heat. (In later years, I took Daniel’s red wagon, a double kitchen sink, electrical wiring and other items for the house I built at Linda Vista.) A rack on the front held the yellow Honda 90. The roof rack held more spare tires, bicycles and other bulky items. Then we had the entire space behind the front seat to fill. I got large pieces of cardboard for the front corners, which could be seen when opening the doors, and folded them to look like boxes, making a sturdy area to hold loose items that we stuffed around 4 large bales of clothes. Every nook and cranny was filled with items according to the space available, including hundreds of packets of vegetable, herb and flower seeds given to us. Even a mouse would be challenged to get through our load. The bales were covered with a thin sheet or bedspread so they were not visible to prodding border inspectors. At the very back, we had suitcases, food boxes and regular tourist items. On top of everything was a mattress cover stuffed full with more clothing, zipped shut, and covered with sheets, blankets, a bedspread and pillows. That’s where we kids rode most of the time, and we were very comfortable back there. Nobody wore seat belts. The trailer was packed equally tight. After the compartments under beds and seats were filled, and the rear storage compartment full, we filled the closet with our clothes and stuffed full of other clothing as well, hiding larger items behind and under the hanging clothes. The bathroom shower held additional large, odd-shaped items. One time we took a huge tuba, laying it on the upper bunk and covering it with dark fabric. Removing the trailer table held by a 4” diameter tube, I filled the tube with small items clear to the top. I removed the stove vent filter, put light items in it, and shoved the filter back into place. All the kitchen cupboards were stuffed full with food for the trip as well as extra goodies like Dream Whip, Gravy Quick, Chicken style seasoning, Bac-O bits, pectin for jam, Junket for making ice cream, many seasonings, canned fruits and a lot more. Daddy removed the propane furnace, and there was a huge storage space behind the grill to pack even more things. Two Jeep cans of extra gasoline were mounted on the trailer hitch frame. 72

And upon looking at the car and trailer, it was obvious that we were well loaded—the car was down to the rubber axle bumpers and the trailer tires nearly scraped the wheel wells. It’s no wonder we had so many flat tires, broken wheels, broken axles, transmission issues and other problems on every single trip. Travel Education Every time we traveled to and from Chiapas, we took new routes and detours, always discovering new and different scenery along the 3,600 mile, 10-day trip. Heading south, we usually took the fastest, most direct routes, trying to avoid bad roads. Coming home, we did more sightseeing and stopped more often. We traveled nearly every state in the U.S. and most of the ones in Mexico. We visited Eletha’s family in Missouri, relatives in Ohio and New Jersey, saw the sights in Florida, and visited most of the National Parks in the U.S. In 1976 while returning from Mexico, we spent a week at camp meeting in Hobble Creek Canyon, Utah, visited the Sipes in Bozeman, Montana, spent a weekend with Mommy’s childhood friend Bea Coupland & husband Earl in Calgary, drove 1,000 miles of the Alaska Highway before it was paved, enjoyed amazing flowers and huge vegetables in gardens around Palmer, ate watermelon on the Matinuska glacier in Alaska, rode the train from Whitehorse, Yukon to Skagway, Alaska, and took the Malaspina ferry past Juneau and through The Narrows, sailing two nights and one day to Prince Rupert, BC. From there we enjoyed the beauty of Banff, Jasper and Lake Louise, picked up our trailer in Montana, visited Grandma Landstrom in Clearlake, and spent 2 days in Placerville. Then we went to Soquel camp meeting! The Alaska trip was mostly funded by aluminum cans we had collected, smashed and sold for 10 cents a pound. During every trip we learned many things, and even though we missed school a lot, our trips and many books we read gave us a well-rounded education. 73

Trip Activities Much of our trip to Mexico took us through boring deserts and dry rocky hills, so we found ways to entertain ourselves. Mommy taught us to knit, and we knitted potholders, using several different kinds of stitches. We read books on the smoother roads. I created paper dolls for the girls from white card stock and we colored sheets of paper with crayons, which I cut and folded to make dresses and other clothes, with tabs to keep them on. We had doll parties with more “dresses” we made with a variety of designs to give as gifts. When we needed to get rid of excess energy, Linda and I played “kickfight.” I would kneel by her feet, and she started kicking. Then I’d try to get past her kicking feet all the way to her tummy and tickle her. Linda kicked hard, so my arms, shoulders and back got bruised up, and I rarely made it past those wildly moving legs, but it was fun anyway. Daddy would drive long hours, sometimes leaving before dawn while we were still asleep in back. When he became drowsy during the day, he’d pull over for a 10-minute cat nap, and then he was fine. If Daddy got too drowsy, Mommy would climb onto the bed behind him, he would slide over keeping a hand on the wheel and his foot on the gas, and she would slide down into his seat and continue driving. We all dreaded the border crossing—would the inspectors give us a bad time? First we stocked up on last-minute items, washed the car and trailer, got insurance and travelogs at Sanborn’s, changed dollars to pesos, and then to the border crossing. Sometimes we crossed late at night, hoping the inspectors wouldn’t want to bother the “sleeping” children on the bed. Most of the time we crossed during the day; and Daddy was liberal with tips for the inspectors, which helped them be more lenient. Only once did we have to leave the bales in storage for Daddy to try to get them across on one of his many other trips to the border to get things the school needed. During one trip as we traveled through Mexico, we stopped at a wide spot with a nice view south of Poza Rica to eat breakfast in the Prowler trailer. Suddenly Lanita reached over and squeezed Linda on her chest. “Hey, why did you do that?” Linda exclaimed. Lanita innocently replied, “It looked like you weren’t wearing your bra, so I was just checking!” Lanita was—and still is—quite a character! 74

Coming back to California, the car and trailer were nearly empty, and with no bed in back, we had more room. Sometimes there were suitcases, food boxes and other things that took up part of the space. One night we stopped by the road to sleep—our parents in the Love Bug and the 3 of crammed in a tiny space between the luggage and the wheel well, on a sleeping bag. It was so tight we had to lie on our sides to fit, and we could hardly breathe. Then Lanita piped up, “Vamos a cantar ahora!” (Let’s sing now!) That gave Linda and me a good laugh, and somehow we made it through the night in that position. When traveling, we kids sat in aluminum lawn chairs. If Daddy had to slam on the brakes for a burro, bad pothole or unmarked topes, our lawn chairs would fold up with us in them, but it broke the trip monotony. After a few trips, the poor chairs began cracking and breaking, and so did the webbing. With no seat belts, hard steel tubing lining the front seat, and a hard sharp steel dashboard, any accident could have caused major injuries, but thankfully, during hundreds of thousands of miles we traveled, we only had a few minor non-injury incidents. Arriving at Linda Vista When Lanita was younger and we crossed the border, she wanted to know where our house was. To her young mind, our house was in Mexico, and we were in Mexico, so our house should be right there! Over time she realized that Mexico is a big country, and after crossing the border, we still had 1,000 miles to drive, taking 3 or 4 days, depending on road conditions and how many flat tires and other delays we had along the way. During the early years, the road down to campus was very steep and bumpy, and we kids were eager to hurry down and see our friends. So Daddy let us out at the top, and we ran all the way to the campus, excited to be there again. The house was boarded up, so we had to remove those to get in. The bats, mice and other critters left quite a mess, so we usually spent the first night in the car and trailer. Then we had a lot of cleaning to do. The garden was a jungle, so I went at it with a machete, spaded the soil and got seeds started. We kids got registered for school, and were often a few weeks or even months late, but we somehow managed to catch up with our classmates. Mommy taught English, and Daddy kept busy helping with honeybees, cutting trees, firewood and lumber; and getting bananas from Tapilula an hour away or supplies for us and the school from Tuxtla, 3 hours away. 75

School was OK when I had good teachers, and Manuel Ramos, my 6th grade teacher, was very good with the students. We tried our best to please him, and he taught us to do fancy calligraphy, the Linda Vista logo and the Chiapas logo. I was never good at sports— while playing soccer I seemed to kick my friends’ ankles more often than the ball, so they didn’t want me to play with them. I preferred to split firewood or do something useful anyway, and our house was close enough that I did so a few times during recess. I did enjoy playing marbles, and my friends were usually better than me, so they liked having me play since they won most of the time. Janet’s Visit In June of 1969, Daddy went to the U.S. and brought my half-sister Janet to spend four weeks with us before we returned to the U.S. She had just turned 18, was very attractive, and the guys suddenly changed their attitude toward me, inviting me play volleyball with them, hoping I would help her be interested in them. Abel Navarro was really smitten by her, and he invited me and Janie as we called her (pronounced Jannny), to hike to the Cave of 7 Entrances. It was a high rock mound about 30’ high, with a walk-in entrance at the base, a slanted hollow center that opened at the top, and side passages along the way. Abel was happy to hold Janie’s hand and help her up the cave slope. At the top, there were rock and grass ledges where we could sit and enjoy the view of the valley and mountains behind the school. Abel saw a ring on her finger and asked if she had a boyfriend, and she told him about Jim. Abel asked to see it, so she took it off and he studied it carefully. Then he said he wanted to be her boyfriend, and shocked her by flinging it down the cliff into the dense brush. Janie really got mad at him until he showed her that he had it in his other hand – he had thrown a small rock. She didn’t want to see him after that hike, so Daniel Campos took her to pick orchids and ride horses, and she liked 76

him better. Guys often came to our house to play guitars and sing for Janie, and she enjoyed their attention. She often slept in till 10:00, and we were always up at 6:00, because school started at 7:00. She slept on the bunk in the back room, and sometimes wandered into the main part of the house in her bra and underpants as if that was normal, but it certainly was a surprise for us! Another time she told us that she read the entire book of Genesis in my KJV Bible, and found it to be very fascinating. Daddy told me to say nice things about her in my diary, because she would probably read it. So nearly every day after that, I wrote things such as: “Janie helps us a lot. She cleaned my room and threw away a lot of my junk. I am very happy to have her as my sister.” “She fixed Linda’s hair and is helping us a lot. We are happy to have her here. We will miss her when she goes. I hope she will be an Adventist someday.” “Janie is making a three sleeve dress for herself. I love her a lot, just like Ellen. I wish she could live with us.” We had fun talking and playing in the evenings. We spun around to see who could turn the most times before getting too dizzy. I spun 210 times and Janie did 240. Sometimes Daddy recorded us talking with his reel-to-reel tape recorder. Janie talked about how much she missed fresh cow’s milk, and looked forward to getting back to the U.S. so she could have a tall glass of cold milk. And if it wasn’t fresh and cold, she would demand that the store take it back. She got sillier as she talked, eventually saying that if the milk wasn’t fresh, she would demand that it be put back in the cow! She had us all laughing, as she talked about many other things as well. We may have the recording on a reel tape somewhere, but we have no way of playing those tapes even if we do find them. I graduated from Primaria on July 13, 1969. The ceremony lasted till 3:00 p.m. We finished loading the car, closed up the house, and left for Tuxtla, getting stuck in four mudholes on the way and arriving at 11:00 p.m. We crossed the Isthmus, and Janie rode with us kids on the roof, getting sunburned. We stopped at the beach near Veracruz, played in the sand and the waves, and caught tiny crabs. At Puente Nacional Hotel, we swam in the pool. Daddy & Janie sat and watched me dive, with Janie giggling every time I bent over and dove in. Later I discovered the back of my swimsuit was ripped open! Janie was very happy when we got back to the U.S., where she felt more at home. We stopped to eat watermelon at a rest area in Arizona, where Janie and Daddy threw watermelon peels at me, and I threw them back, getting them good. 77

We got to Las Vegas on July 21, and Janie was so eager to get home that she stayed up and kept Daddy awake so he could drive all night while the rest of us slept. We visited Ellen in Yerington the next morning, dropped her off in Reno, and went on to Placerville & the Ranch the following day. The Norton Family We first met them after we arrived at Linda Vista in early December, 1968. They lived in a faculty residence near one end of the cafeteria building, and drove a VW bus. Elwin ran errands for the school, and Nytta taught piano lessons. They had four children: Barbara age 11, Buddy age 9, Bobby age 7 and Billy age 5. At that time I had just turned 13, Linda was 9 and Lanita just turned 7. They had many books and games, and were fun to play with. They had a set of “The Laura books” by Laura Ingalls Wilder, which were fascinating to read, and we devoured them. I liked to suck on Baco Bits as I read about drying jerky and all the prairie pioneer adventures. We kids had play day every Wednesday afternoon for 3 hours, alternating weeks when they would play at our house or we played at their house. We played kick the can and other outdoor running games. Sometimes we went off campus to have a picnic in a grassy meadow, or explored and played in the woods. We played with our Mexican friends other days of the week as well. One time we went on a school picnic, and Elwin Norton 78

opened up a huge tin of Linkettes that they had brought from the U.S., and that was really a special treat. Usually we kept our goodies from up north for our family, but they were willing to share, and that really impressed me. In this photo Bobby, Eneida, Lanita, 2 Mexican friends, Linda and Buddy are together, perhaps after a school event or just playing together. Piano Practice Nytta gave us piano lessons once a week; and we had to practice every day on the old out-of-tune church piano. We disliked wasting 30 minutes every day that could be spent playing with friends, but if we didn’t learn our pieces and get a star, we had to repeat them the following week. Toward the end of the school year, Nytta gave us a hard piece to practice for weeks, which we could then play for Papa and Grandma when we returned to the U.S. My piece was The Geisha, and it was fun to play. She also gave Linda and me a duet piece, Onward Christian Soldiers. After much practice, we got it down pretty well, and it sounded nice when we played it for others. When someone was cleaning the church, we could get into the Sabbath School room to practice. Usually everything was locked, but missing glass panes in the windows made it easy to climb in and practice. The piano had a tiny padlock, and we had to borrow the key to open it, which involved finding the staff member who had the key and returning it afterwards. I got tired of doing that, so I took the key home, cut a piece of scrap metal using the bench vice and hacksaw, filed it to the exact shape of the piano key, and it worked! When I got bored of piano practice, I played with the ever-present wasps buzzing against the windows. I carefully made a loose knot on a two-foot-long piece of thread, slipped it over the wasp’s tail and tightened it around the skinny middle. Grabbing the other end of the string, I swung it round and round above my head, always keeping it away from me. When I let go of the thread, the tired wasp tried to fly, but was weighed down and flew around about a foot above the floor, dragging the thread behind it this way and that way until it got tired and landed on the floor to rest. I also plucked wings off the pesky flies, watching them run around, unable to get very far. Removing only one wing was even 79

more fun as the fly buzzed the remaining wing and tumbled about. Yes, I was mean, but piano practice was so very boring. Notes from Barbara A few months after we met the Nortons, I began receiving notes from Barbara. In her first one, she told me about friends she had while their family lived in Yerba Buena the year before. There were several American boys whose friendship she’d enjoyed, but they moved away, and she wanted someone closer to her age to be her special friend. I didn’t know what she had in mind at her age, but I agreed, and we wrote notes to each other several times a week, mostly sharing about younger sibling problems, school, life in the U.S. and other general things that friends share about. We would leave notes on our school office mailboxes for each other, and other times handed them to each other during play day. Sometimes she would tantalize me with a secret she would tell me about in her next note, and in that note she said the secret was about why she wanted to keep her hair long, and after several more notes, and after getting me to try to get the secret out of her, she finally said she wanted to braid flowers in her hair when she got to Heaven. Over time, Barbara began sharing more personal information—her life goals, getting married, how many children she wanted to have, and other such things. At the end of the school year our family returned to California, and Barbara & I continued corresponding. When we returned in January, 1970, the Nortons were living in Yerba Buena, so we walked up there for piano lessons, and had our play day while we 3 kids took turns having our lessons. We played on long rope swings, slid down long hills on cardboard on pine needles, and did many other fun things together. Sometimes we played doctor, and one time Buddy came to the “hospital” claiming he had a cracked leg. Barbara was the nurse, and she treated the “injuries.” I had a “bad sore” on my head, so Barbara treated it. Sometimes we had a long play day, and went off into the woods with blankets and fruit drinks to play a variety of games. One game that Barbara suggested – and this surprised me coming from a 12-year-old girl – was to spread out a blanket on the ground, lay down, put another blanket on top, and take off our clothes, one item at a time, and prove it by pushing them out so we could see them. I didn’t want to do that, but she did, and didn’t seem to be bashful about it. Then she grabbed her clothes and put everything back on. She was still young, undeveloped and innocent. The other games we played were not that daring.

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Barbara and I continued writing notes to each other, and over time they got longer and more detailed as we discussed things like getting married, where we would like to live, what kind of house we would like, etc. We didn’t write about romantic things, it was more like dreaming about all the aspects of “playing house” together in the future. And all of this was by notes and letters only—when we were together playing, we never said a word to each other about the content of our letters. We just played like ordinary kids. Our siblings and friends teased us about being boyfriend and girlfriend, but when Daddy heard it, he simply stated that girlfriends and marriage were for after we finished school. We did enjoy writing and reading our letters to each other, and I remember as I read her messages, my heart would pound faster, and I suddenly had the urge to go to the bathroom. Then I got concerned—if Barbara had the same reaction, would it make her get pregnant? I don’t think either of us knew about how babies were made at that time. I hid a can with a plastic lid to keep water out at the base of a pine tree halfway up the trail to Yerba Buena so we could leave notes in it for each other. One day she sent me a note, asking me to meet me on a certain date and time out in the forest below Nela’s house where we had played on other occasions. I had no idea why she wanted to meet secretly, so I made a list of things we could talk about—my newest Matchbox cars, the silver dollars that Papa gave me, and a few other things. I wondered if she would want to hold hands as we walked and talked in the woods. I went to the meeting place and waited a long time, but she never showed up. As I headed back to campus, I met my parents walking toward our planned meeting spot. Apparently they got wind of our intentions, and went to check things out. They never mentioned Barbara, but they did interrogate me about why I was there, and I assured them I was just out enjoying nature. I wrote to Barbara, asking why she didn’t come as planned, and she said her parents made her do extra housework, so she couldn’t leave. Many years later, while visiting her family in Alabama in 1994, I asked her about why she wanted to meet me in the woods. She didn’t remember the details, but thought I was the one who asked her to meet me in the forest! By early 1972, Barbara and I had stopped writing, and she was very shy when we saw each other a time or two. Her parents, along with the Darald Edwards family, were establishing the Bella Vista mission near the Guatemala border, and I never saw her again until 1994 in Alabama to visit her family. She was married to Irdine Kay, and they had 3 children. I kept Barbara’s letters until Diana and I were married and lived at Linda Vista, and then I burned them up. We still keep in touch by email.

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Mommy’s Lockjaw One Sabbath during the closing prayer at church, Mommy yawned—and her jaw locked open. She stood outside the church with her hand over her mouth while Daddy ran to the house to get the yellow car. I hurriedly opened the gate that kept the cows out—5 or 6 long poles run through slotted posts on both sides of the road, which I slid through to one side or the other, and we rushed her up to the Yerba Buena clinic. The doctor there knew exactly what to do, putting his thumbs in her mouth on both sides, pushing down and back on her jawbone near the joint, and it popped into place, allowing Mommy to finally close her mouth. We were all relieved that he took care of it so quickly, and her jaws were quite sore for some time afterwards. I memorized the technique in case it ever happened again. The Garbage Hole Having no garbage service at the school, we composted kitchen waste, burned papers in the woodstove, and buried cans, jars and plastic. I dug a hole about 4’ wide and the same depth about 25’ behind the house. We had fun standing in the back doorway, giving empty cans a toss, often getting them in the hole or somewhere nearby, to kick into the hole later. One day we heard a loud clatter on our galvanized metal roof. When we came out of our rooms to see what it was, Mommy was standing in the doorway, looking a bit sheepish. She had thrown a can, but didn’t let go of it soon enough, and somehow got it up past the eave overhang and it clattered on the roof. I don’t think we could have done that from the doorway if we’d tried! After that, she let someone else do the can-throwing. More Mexico School Activities During free periods while studying Secundaria and Prepa, I often went to the school library, which had an old set of World Book Encyclopedias. I thoroughly enjoyed going through them, learning about National Parks and many other fascinating things, as the books were fully illustrated. And in class, I enjoyed doodling, making tree-branch cars, bicycles, people, cabins and other things. I drew a tall tower above the ocean floor, with weight-balanced platforms holding an airstrip, helicopter pad, garden, playground, park, house, cable elevator car, swimming dock, and a giant tank to catch rainwater. The doodles will appear of the following pages, along with a few photos with captions of other memories of fun and interesting things that I decided not to write about, because this project has already taken a long time, and I have other projects I want to complete as well. If other important things come to mind, I may just add them at the end. 82

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Final Thoughts While gathering information for a 1961 to 1970 diary from old letters and diaries from others, I decided to add my own memories to it. But the more I wrote, the longer it got as more things came to my mind. So I decided to leave this as a memory compilation apart from the other diary, so that I can have these things written down for other family members to enjoy reading and remembering, and possibly to add to as additional thoughts come to mind. ~Freddie Adams, July, 2022~

Add End Ummm . . . Just as I expected, a few other things did come to mind, and it’s too complicated adding them where they belong, so I’m sticking them here at the end, where there’s plenty of space! Buttermilk Trick When I was young, before I learned to read, I did not like buttermilk. But I loved chocolate milk. While living at the house in town, I saw a milk carton that had a wide dark area around it, and to me, being color blind, it looked like the chocolate milk cartons. So I exclaimed in delight when I saw it, as we rarely got chocolate milk. Daddy asked me if I wanted a drink, and of course I did. So he opened it just enough to get a straw inside, and said I could have all I wanted. I was happy that Daddy was being so generous, and wondered why he, Mommy and Ellen were standing around with amused smiles on their faces. I took a big gulp—and yuck—it wasn’t chocolate milk, it was buttermilk! They got me good that time, but after that, I always had them pour my chocolate milk in a glass where I could see it!

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Flavored Straws When I was 5 or 6 years old, I remember using flavored straws. The inside of each straw was coated with chocolate, strawberry or other flavors. So when drinking plain milk with these straws, it would be instantly flavored. Apparently they didn’t sell well, because I don’t remember seeing them around since the early 1960’s.

Records We had a record player on which we listened to some of our favorite stories so often that we had them memorized word for word – Packey, Pokey and Sally, the runaway animals from Flyshacker Zoo in San Francisco.

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We also had records of Ellen & Eileen as little girls, singing in Spanish. Those were made at a recording studio, and the needle was placed in the center, playing outward instead of from the outer edge to the center like all other records.

We had a few records with stories by Uncle Arthur Maxwell, such as Jimmy and the Jam Jars, Vera’s Victory, a story about HMS Richards as a boy playing with a muzzle loading gun and injuring his eyesight, and a scary story about a naughty boy named Peter who had hit his sister, and he walked through the woods, only to hear an owl seem to say, “Oh what did-he-doooo,” and a crow screeched back, “Peter, Peter, he beat her!” There were some Bible stories, and the Temple Trio of ladies singing Oh, Be Careful, The Boat on Galilee, Happy, Happy Home and others. Mommy subscribed to the Sabbath School lesson records for children that had a segment to listen to each evening, going through the lesson for that day. Many of the records became very scratched and dirty with time and use, but we listened to them anyway. Uncle Arthur with his English accent told how Jimmy 92

pulled a chair over to the counter and climbed up to reach the coveted “jaws” of strawb’ry jam. The upper cabinet was divided in two “pawts,” and the jam “jaws” were stored in the upper “pawt” . . . . One day Mommy found Lanita standing on the counter, opening cupboard doors. When asked what she was doing, Lanita responded that she was looking for the two “pots” in the strawb’ry jam story! And then there was a record that had colorful images of water creatures and a multisided mirror in the center, which reflected the images as the record spun around, making it look like a swimming duck, hopping frog, and so on as we listened to the song about “A little white duck, swimming on the water, a green frog on the lily pad, each one doin’ what he ought’ter.” and then there

Broom Closet Grandma and Papa’s house had a Placerite sandstone wall between the kitchen/dining room and the living room, with storage cabinets that nobody could reach or use up high on both sides. That’s where Papa hid his jar of silver dollars. Originally, there was an open space at the far end to get between the back of the kitchen and the back of the living room. In April, 1967, Papa turned the kitchen side into a broom closet, adding a bookcase on the living room side. Behind the bookcase, above the broom closet, there was a nice place to hide, accessible by climbing the bookcase shelves. It was dusty, but when playing Hide and Seek, nobody ever found me there! 93

Scary Drop-Off & Basement Just to the right was the back door, before the back apartment was built, it was very scary, because it opened to a 10’ drop-off. At the bottom they had barrels, where empty cans were thrown. To the right there was a large pit about 5’ deep. It had dirt steps going down from the back garden, and directly below the kitchen and bathroom. It had a sink, cabinets, a bed, a wood stove in the corner, and even a second phone! Two concrete indentations at the back had shelves for canned fruit and other food items. It was the coolest room in the house during the summer, but whoever stayed there got to listen to all the kitchen and bathroom noises above. In September, 1962, Papa encased the pit in front of the basement in concrete, added two more basement rooms toward the living room corner, put up wood walls, and built the upper apartment, where Aunt Minnie stayed later. Papa built concrete steps from the apartment to the ground level concrete pad, and more steps into the outer basement room. The two additional basement rooms had low ceilings, and they were used for storing empty boxes, tools, winter squash, and other things. Papa had a single bed in there where he’d take naps after working hard in the garden. He kept a small piece of rope under it, and if Alfred or Sydney called and asked if he could work for them, he’d fling the rope over himself and respond, “Sorry, I’m tied up right now!” That was Papa, always joking. More of Papa’s Antics One Sabbath as Grandma was getting dinner ready for arriving guests, she asked Papa to get a leaf for the table. He disappeared out the front door, and a minute later came in with a grin on his face and a nice big tree leaf, which he placed in the center of the table. After a good-natured chiding from Grandma, he did put an extension leaf in the table. Grandma always seemed to have a list of things for Papa to do, but it often took a long time for him to get around to it. So he drew a circle on a cereal box cardboard and wrote TUIT in large letters, hanging it from the light above the kitchen counter. He claimed that now he had gotten “a round TUIT,” so his jobs were done! Hot Drinks Papa and others in the family enjoyed hot drinks, and we tried a variety of brands. Postum of course was the original one, but eventually others came out such as Pero, Roma, Cafix, Fini and others. The 94

canister of Fini just didn’t look right to Papa, so he added the letters “sh” to the label, and then it looked complete—Finish. And we always had a non-dairy coffee creamer in them – Coffee Rich, Mocha Mix, Richining and others. Those were always used to enhance bowls of sliced peaches, creamed vegetables and a variety of other foods as well. A

After Grandma got new carpet in the living room in 1968, she made a rule that no food was allowed in there. Papa often liked to sit by the fireplace and enjoy his ice cream and other goodies. One day he got a twinkle in his eye, filled a bowl with ice cream, and headed for the living room. Grandma protested, but he continued with a grin on his face. At the living room doorway, he set his bowl of ice cream on the dining room floor, lay on the living room carpet, and proceeded to enjoy his ice cream, his head over the bowl just past the carpet. He won that round with Grandma! Licking Spoons While eating at the Ranch, we weren’t too picky about table manners. When we wanted peanut butter, honey, mayonnaise or something else in a container on the table, we’d just lick our spoons clean and dip in to get what we wanted. Grandma did not like that at all, and she tried to teach us proper eating etiquette. One time while eating at Grandma’s, Lanita picked up her clean, unused spoon and aimed for the mayonnaise jar. Right away Grandma exclaimed, “Girlie, did you lick your spoon?” Lanita, caught off guard, gave it a quick lick and then stuck it in the mayonnaise jar! At her young age, I guess she figured she was supposed to lick it first! 95

Where’s Toby? Grandma was in the house babysitting Toby while Diann was at work. Late in the afternoon, someone asked Grandma where she could find the Chicken Style seasoning. At that exact moment, Diann got back, popped in the front door, and asked, “Where’s Toby?” She was shocked to hear Grandma’s response, “In a little jar in the cupboard”! Toby’s Accomplishment “G’amma, I did a poopy all by myself!” Toby exclaimed, as Grandma came back from the garden. She found him squatting next to the little pile he’d made on the lawn, waving his hands to keep the flies off and grinning proudly at his accomplishment. More Toby Tales from 1970

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Your Story Hour We all enjoyed reading stories from the Junior Guide, and if there were extras at the church, Grandma or Papa would bring them home to read. Another favorite was Your Story Hour with Uncle Dan and Aunt Sue. On Sabbath after dinner, we all gathered around the radio and listened to KANG FM radio from Angwin (PUC) at 2:00 sharp. Papa turned it on a minute early to be sure we didn’t miss a thing, and since his hearing was bad, he sat in a chair with his ear to the radio speaker. Mommy and Daddy rested on the sofa, and we kids made ourselves comfortable anywhere we could. Each dramatized story was from the Bible or real life characterbuilding experiences that were fun to listen to, and very well done with sound effects and music to fit each scene, to the point that we could picture each detail in our minds. It was definitely one of the highlights during each Sabbath we were at home. Work List for Linda & Lanita

Washing Dishes During the week, the ladies washed dishes most of the time. But the men got to do the Sabbath dishes, giving the women a break. After dinner we’d give them a quick rinse under the faucet to get the food chunks off, then after sundown we washed, rinsed and dried them with a dish towel, putting them away. If there were more of us, one would wash, and another rinse and dry. If there were few dishes, just one of us would wash, rinse and let them dry in the dish drainer.

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Gopher Tunnel Roads When Denise was 6 and I was 4, we dug out the tops of gopher or mole tunnels, and the bottoms made perfect roads for our small toy cars. Grandma also found them to be perfect watering troughs for the young corn patch, and we just moved on and made new roads in other rows of the corn patch. Witnessing to the Neighbor The elderly neighbor across the fence was nice Madge Cox, who spent a lot of time in her flower garden. Grandma often took garden produce to her and they visited. One day when I was quite young, Grandma asked me to take a basket of raspberries over to Madge, and told me to invite her to come to church. When I did so, Madge became a bit gruff, and told me never to speak to her about church again. I got away quickly and don’t remember interacting with her much after that. Cuff Links When I was quite small, my long sleeve white shirt for church didn’t have buttons on the sleeves. So Mommy fastened them together with cuff links. I don’t remember using them when I got older, but it must have been the style back then. I had to look them up online to get an idea what they looked like and how they worked. Ellen’s Horse Ellen wanted her own horse so badly that Daddy got one for her. First he had to build a corral, so I went with him to Georgetown in the big red truck and got a load of cheap pecky cedar boards and posts, which he used to build a corral. Then we went down Green Valley Road a ways to a horse ranch and looked at their horses. Ellen rode one, and then she and Daddy persuaded me to get up and ride behind Ellen. It was my first time on a horse, and I was scared, being up so high. Suddenly the horse began bucking, and I went flying through the air, landing in the dirt mixed with dried horse manure. I don’t remember getting hurt—maybe a few bruises—but I never wanted to ride a horse again! Daddy bought the horse for Ellen, and she rode it all the way back to the house. I have ridden horses and mules a few times since then, but I never really enjoyed it. Grandma & Papa hade a pony that was so tame, we kids could walk between her hind legs and she wouldn’t kick. She got old and died in the orchard above the big golden delicious apple tree, where Papa dug a deep wide hole and buried her. 98

Papa Playing Piano in Pickup When we lived in the house below, the grownups decided to move the piano from the upper place to the lower place. The men loaded it into Papa’s old 1938 pickup, and Daddy slowly drove it down to the Y and over to the lower house. Meanwhile, Papa sat on the piano bench, and with a jolly smile on his face, played Bright Angel Trail, his fingers nimbly dancing up and down the keyboard and making the prettiest music as the pickup slowly moved to its destination. Big Scary Dog There was a time we lived in the basement of the lower house while renters stayed upstairs. Other times we kids stayed with Grandma and Papa and went to the Ranch on weekends so we could attend school. Walking to the bus stop past the Clint house on the driveway was scary for a little boy, because they had a huge German shepherd dog, which most of the time stayed in a boarded-in porch right next to the road. Every time I walked by there, no matter how quietly, if that dog was out, it barked ferociously at me, jumping on the board wall. Most of the time it was elsewhere, but the first few times it really scared me. The Diaz family was renting our house, and Sr. Diaz worked at a bakery on Green Valley Road. On my way home from school one day, I got near the Clint house and that huge dog barked fiercely at me. I backed away, waited for him to quiet down, and tried again, but he was watching through the wide cracks in the boards. I ran back to the bakery and asked Sr. Diaz to walk with me past the big dog, and he kindly did so. With a grownup along I was no longer afraid. I learned that the big dog couldn’t get out, and got used to walking by him, even though he was still scary. Bread for a Dollar A bakery in town often had huge heavy duty paper flour bags full of old but perfectly good bread of many different kinds. We could get a full bag for only a dollar, and that was enough to feed us, our pets, Papa & Grandma and anybody else we wanted to share it with. Most of it was probably white bread, but we could pick out the good stuff and enjoy all we wanted at that price!

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Treadle Sewing Machine Grandma had an ancient Singer treadle sewing machine that was fun to use – we moved the foot pedal back and forth and it spun a large flywheel to the right, which had a groove in which a belt ran up through the table to the smaller wheel at the top right of the machine. That made the needle go up and down, and when the presser foot was flipped down over the fabric, it moved the cloth forward with every stitch. We practiced on scrap pieces at first until we learned to sew straight and evenly. Then we practiced mending pillowcases and other easy things. Grandma showed us how to change the spool of thread and to thread the needle. Later we learned how to fill and replace the empty bobbin below. Sewing was fun! Quilt Blocks We spent a lot of time cutting out quilt blocks from fabric and clothes that Grandma brought home from Dorcas. We used 4” and 6” cardboard templates to mark out the squares, using thin pieces of soap to draw the lines. Then we cut out the blocks with scissors. Our cuts had to be perfectly straight so the quilt pieces would line up when sewn together. When we had many stacks of colorful blocks, we were ready to sew. During the sewing process, we had to be even more precise. We laid two blocks together, one on top of the other, and made a straight stitch from one end to the other, exactly 1/8” from the edges. We folded back one flap, added another block, and sewed it to the second block, continuing until we had a long strip of blocks sewn together. 100

Sometimes we alternated plain and patterned pieces to make the quilt look more attractive. Of course, all of our quilts were simple—we never did any of the fancy designs and patterns that expert quilters often do. After that, we had to line each strip together, always sewing on the back, exactly 1/8” from the edges, and with a lot of time and patience, we eventually ended up with a full quilt top. Grandma and Mommy took those to Dorcas, placed a plain piece of fabric for the base, added a layer of quilt batting in between and “tied the quilt,” using large needles to run yarn through each block intersection, tying them in knots to hold the batting in place. They used large quilt frames to keep the quilt stretched out so the batting would stay in place until everything was tied. Once the edges were sewn together, the quilt was ready to send off to the mission field. Quilting was a lot of work, but we—and the ladies enjoyed it. Legos

Among our all-time favorite toys as children are Legos. Mommy saw a flyer in a Sears mailing and ordered a set for us, and those kept us entertained during playtime for many, many years. They came in a medium-sized box with a huge variety of sizes and shapes to assemble just about anything we could imagine. Most of the blocks were red and white. There was a gray base as a platform to build on, long flat pieces, angled roof pieces, wheels with rubber tires, gears of different sizes and colors, and enough pieces to keep our creativity growing for many years. Over time, Lego came out with hundreds of other specialized sets, for building small airplanes to huge castles, but they are nothing compared to the original, classic Lego set that Mommy got for us so many years ago. Thank you Mommy for that super special gift! 101

Erector Set A few years later, Mommy got me an Erector set, consisting of thin metal plates with holes and many tiny bolts and nuts, a battery-powered motor, and many other parts to assemble a wide variety of structures, cranes with pulleys and other things. Compared to Legos, it was slow to assemble each project, and even though I followed the instructions precisely, I kept getting to a certain point and could not complete the project. I later discovered that many essential pieces were missing, so Mommy took it back to Sears and got a replacement. I eventually completed a few projects, but I just didn’t have the time or patience to spend hours putting all those tiny nuts and bolts together, and eventually set it aside to play with Legos. Childhood Impressions I was a bookworm much of my life, and in many stories I read the expression “And her chest swelled with pride.” As I got older and began noticing girls’ and women’s chests, some were more “well endowed” than others, so I just figured they were proud! Did they have a way to inflate themselves? I knew nothing about the subject. I did see ads for special bras to give the impression of having a larger bust—were those for proud women? Then I met large-chested girls and women who were thoughtful, kind, helpful, and definitely not proud at all. Some smallchested women acted very proud, thoughtless and unkind. So I eventually figured out that pride had nothing to do with that expression at all! Color Blindness When I was young, my parents noticed that I colored my skies purple and trees brown in my colorbooks. Since Grandpa Landstrom was colorblind, Mommy figured that was my problem as well. When I got older and could read the Crayola color labels, I did better in my coloring. My family had fun pointing things out and asking what color they were, and I had to guess, because I had no idea. I see colors, but similar ones look the same to me, such as red, brown & green; or blue, pink & purple; or yellow & light green. Red flowers among greenery blend in so well 102

that I cannot see them at all. I can enjoy red flowers up close, and contrasted with yellow & blue ones. Or are they purple? In the image below, I see 12 in the top left circle. In the other circles, I just see a mass of colored dots.

In these images, I see no numbers or letters at all.

I’m just thankful I don’t see in black and white, and when I get to Heaven, I’ll be able to see the full spectrum of colors! Bag Balm Ever since I can remember, whenever we skinned our knees, got burned, cut ourselves, or had any other injury, we always used Bag Balm. And it always seemed to work! It smells good too. When I got older, I discovered it was for cow udders. When backpacking, it healed blisters quickly. I’ve used it for waterproofing hiking boots, greasing hinges, and many other uses. We always keep Bag Balm handy, and our family has used it for generations! 103

Caca de Oso While in the U.S. during the summers, our family usually dehydrated fruit to take to Mexico, to use for backpacking, traveling and to share with others. We mostly dehydrated pears and apples on large door and window screens. Daddy really liked candied figs, so Mommy boiled them in honey/sugar syrup and we put them out to dry. Daddy got the bright idea of running dried fruits and nuts through a meat grinder to have an all-inone meal while we traveled. He included dried figs, pears, apples, prunes, raisins, dates, walnuts, sunflower seeds and anything else we had on hand. If it was too hard and dry, he added orange juice to soften it up. Then it was rolled in wax paper in what looked to us like bear poop, hence the name Caca de Oso. We tolerated it on trips, but it was very filling, and one roll would last an entire ten-day trip to Mexico, with plenty left over to share with our friends, which was a treat for them! May Baskets In 1969 while we lived in Linda Vista, we heard a rustling sound and children’s giggles outside our front door early one morning. Then we heard something about May Baskets, so we opened the door, and found a basket of flowers hanging on our doorknob, but nobody in sight. Since the Norton children were the only other Americans living there at the time, we knew it was from them. We had never heard about May Baskets, and that happened only once. But they had a lot of fun surprising us very early on May 1, 1969. Many years later, Barbara Norton Kay and her husband started a business of growing plants and flowers to sell wholesale to florists and nurseries. In recent years, Barbara and I have communicated by email, and every few years she sends me a picture of flowers on May 1, in memory of the fun times we enjoyed during our childhood as missionary kids in Mexico. Here’s what she sent this year: “It is the memories we make in childhood that remain the strongest. Thinking of you today and praying for you and Diana. Your friend, Barbara” 104

Puzzles, Guns and Propellers We enjoyed putting together jigsaw puzzles, and I decided to make one for Linda and Lanita. Using a thin scrap of plywood about ¼” thick, I glued a pretty picture to it and using a coping saw with a very thin blade that could cut tight corners, I made it into about 20 large interlocking puzzle pieces. They had fun putting it together, and I had fun making it. Early puzzles were made of wood using jigsaws—hence the name jigsaw puzzles! One day I came up with the idea of making a rubber band gun. I took a long, thin scrap of wood and cut it into a rough gun shape about 6”long. I made a notch at the end to hold one end of the rubber band, and stretched it the full length of the “barrel,” hooking it to the top nearest me. Then I bent a stiff piece of wire in the shape of a trigger, curled it around a screw in the side of the handle, and bent it inward so that when I squeezed the trigger, it slid the taught rubber band off my end and away it went to wherever I aimed it – flies, my sisters, etc. I even made a high-powered gun with an extra-long barrel to shoot rubber bands even further. I couldn’t find anything online resembling what I made, but the above illustration is the closest I found. Another fun wood projects was making propellers. I first carved a popsicle stick into a propeller shape, bored a hole in the center, nailed it to the tip of a pointed stick. When we traveled, I stuck it out the car window. Even at a slow speed, it spun nicely, but at higher speeds, it went so fast that the center got hot and started smoking. I later got larger pieces of wood and carved them with more pitch or twist, and mounted them on my bicycle. It was great racing back and forth in front of the comedor, watching and hearing them spin rapidly.

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Fire over the Hill While working in the garden at Grandma and Papa’s place, I saw smoke billowing up on the other side of the hill beyond the thick oak grove. I hurried through dry grass between the pear orchard and the oak trees around the hill and followed the smoke through the trees till I came to a clearing where there was a house, garage, several parked cars and a small motorhome. Grass and shrubs were burning around the buildings and vehicles, but no structures appeared to be on fire yet. Nobody was in sight, even though there were other houses in the vicinity. I rang the doorbell, and an elderly woman came to the door. I told her to call the fire department, and looked for a hose, but found none. Grass was burning at the front of the motorhome, and the front left tire, which was flat, began to catch fire. I asked the lady if she had the key to the motorhome, and she got it, but the battery was dead and I couldn’t start it to move it out of the dry grass. (I circled the place where the motorhome was parked in the Google satellite image above.) The fire engines soon arrived, and within minutes, they had the fire extinguished. Linda’s Gymnastics One time we were shopping in Sacramento, and stopped at a Parking Lot Sale in front of K-mart. The merchandise was surrounded by a low barricade of cinder block pillars stacked 3 or 4 high, with a rope along the top, fastened to the lower part of short poles with colorful banners and sale signs coming out of the holes in the cinder blocks. Linda had just come home from school at Keene, Texas, and instead of going into the sale area through the designated openings, she proudly said, “This is how we do gymnastics!” as she ran and did a flying leap over the cord. But things didn’t go as she planned—her foot caught on the cord, cinder blocks and banner poles clattered to the pavement, and people turned to see a very red-faced gymnast who quickly picked everything up and disappeared behind some clothing racks.

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U-Haul Dilemma During one of our many trips to and from Mexico, we sometimes spent the night at or near a gas station, and the one in this story also rented U-Haul trailers. They were parked in a row, with a low concrete wall behind them, about 18” high. While Mommy fixed breakfast in our trailer house the next morning, I walked along the wall, and decided to open the double door of a long U-Haul to take a look. I stepped inside, and the back of the trailer tilted down until the bottom of the back door hit the low concrete wall. This was fun—like a huge, boxy teeter totter. I walked forward, the trailer tipped down and the back door closed. When I walked to the back, the trailer tilted even further down without the concrete wall to hold it up. Back and forth I went, up and down in this new place I’d found to play. Maybe my sisters would like to do it too, so I walked to the back and pushed the door, but it was too close to the wall, and I couldn’t open it. I returned to the front, tilting it down, and then ran to the back, hoping to open the door before it tilted back, but the trailer was long, and by the time I got there, the back tilted down and I still couldn’t open the door. Now I was in a dilemma, and maybe even in trouble! I tried several more times without success. After a few more attempts, a gas station attendant appeared and opened the door, letting me out. He told me to stay away from the trailers, and I assured him I would—I’d learned my lesson well that time! Dividing Lines During our many days of traveling back and forth to Mexico, we kids rode on the bed in back. We had enough room for the 3 of us, but at times we took more than our share of space, and that meant trouble. Invariably whatever body part crossed the invisible line got chopped with the edge of a palm of a hand, tickled, pinched, poked, or whatever punishment the person in the invaded space felt like inflicting. It didn’t always work—it often involved the invader taking even more space, resulting in squabbles and altercations that increased in volume and intensity until Daddy told us to be quiet and behave ourselves. We did—for a time, and then it started all over again. I don’t remember Linda or Lanita doing much of the “punishing”—I think it was me who took delight in castigating my poor sisters. 107

Enticing My Sisters to Get Teased I can’t remember all the times I did it, but it happened a lot. I’d annoy Linda or Lanita just enough to get them to retaliate; only it would backfire on them, and they usually got the worst of it. One example stands out clearly in my memory. I think it was at the Ranch, while we were eating supper of applesauce and peanut butter—a family favorite. I got a dab of peanut butter with a spoonful of applesauce ready to eat, reached to my left hand to the right and poked Linda. She immediately slapped my elbow just as I was lifting the spoon to my mouth. And of course, with a little extra force and careful aim, her slap caused the spoonful of applesauce to splat all over her face and bangs. She immediately complained to Mommy that I had flung applesauce on her face, but I “innocently” explained that she hit my arm while I was eating, and the food flew onto her face, so it was really her own fault. That kind of thing happened quite frequently, and Mommy sometimes caught me. Then when Daddy walked in and Linda or Lanita complained about what I’d done, Mommy intervened and told him that I’d been the instigator. Since I was his only son and his favorite, I usually got away with it, but sometimes I got his very stern look and a few words of chastisement.

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Pest Control Even though I teased my sisters mercilessly, they got me back by pestering me, often trying to get my attention when I was reading or doing something that I didn’t want to be disturbed. So as we traveled, whenever I saw Pest Control billboards, I told them that I need to get pest control so they would no longer bother me. But that never happened, and the teasing & pestering continued for many years. I’m amazed that they are so nice to me in spite of all I did to them! Moldy Underwear Mommy told me to change my underwear every day to keep bacteria from growing in me, or something like that. I understood bacteria to be like mold, and I didn’t want that part of my body to get moldy. I was concerned for my sisters, so I told them that it was important to change their underwear every day, or their private parts would get moldy. I think that scared them into doing it. That was back in the days when we took baths once a week, every Friday evening, whether we needed them or not. School Papers I found some school papers that I wrote—maybe when Mommy was teaching me second grade during the summer, but I don’t remember that at all, even though I clearly remember first grade. I notice the papers are graded, and not in Mommy’s writing, so it could have been 3rd grade. The one about Daddy hitting me with a stick is a mystery, as I well knew that saying no to Daddy would inevitably lead to a spanking. And he nearly always used his hand—the only time I remember a stick is when I broke his yardstick and he spanked me with the broken half. And these days, a paper like that would very likely have CPS after my parents! 109

Poem for Mommy I found this poem I wrote for Mommy. I don’t remember writing it, and maybe I copied it from another source, but I wanted her to know how special she was, and how I missed her, so maybe I sent it to her when she was recovering from her illness while staying with the Rebollosos in Montemorelos while the rest of us were in California during much of April and May, 1968. Linda’s Magazine After I began telling Tunneltown stories and publishing Tunneltown newspapers, Linda decided to publish her own magazine, and she really put a lot of work into it! Not only the variety of content, but also the use of colored pens, illustrations from magazines and seed catalogs, and even the careful stitching to hold it together! On top of that, she made two identical handmade copies, with the same content, using the same colors, and finding flower and tomato illustrations nearly identical to the first one—a copy for me and one for Lanita. Quite impressive, and a lot of work! See the entire Beutitown Magazine on the next page, minus pages 9 & 10, which were blank. At the bottom right is another unrelated goofy “Bisnesmen” letter which Linda wrote when she was in an apparently humorous mood, with a scattering of topics and plenty of misspelled words to give Lanita and me a bit of entertainment. And yes, she loved to “skweez” my pimples, blackheads and anything else that looked promising of producing juicy results, or hard round little dark balls from old ones, or the really fun ones that shot out long thin squiggly results, and a 2nd or 3rd “skweez” produced even more from the same tiny hole. So much fun under my skin! 110

Linda’s Beutitown Magazine

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Lanita’s Storybook Of course Lanita couldn’t be left out. So while we were traveling to Mexico in 1973 and stopped for the night in Alpine, Texas, she composed a story, creating a small booklet titled “Cylvia!” In the forward, Lanita makes it clear that this booklet was not to be read. That was probably to entice us to read it! By the story content, you can tell she’d been reading Uncle Arthur’s Bedtime Stories!

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A Few More Things from Linda These two application pages were created by Linda for me to fill out. I have no idea what I was applying for, nor do I remember why I put my name as Old Faithful Bicycle, as we didn’t even go to Yellowstone in 1974, although we did go in 1973, and had a great time seeing all the fascinating sights there! This was probably just another thing we did while traveling to keep ourselves entertained.

While Linda was finishing nursing school in Keene and I was at PUC, for some reason I was very low on funds, and Linda heard about it. Even though she didn’t have money to spare, I was really touched when I received this cute Freddie Frog check from her. I carried it in my wallet for a long time, remembering her kind thoughtfulness every time I saw it. I never cashed it. 113

Kissing Factory When I was quite young at Linda Vista, the ladies and girls liked to gently pinch my cheeks and chin, exclaiming delightedly, “Ay Fredito, que chulito, dame un besito!” (Oh little Freddie, so cute, give me a kiss). I did not like them doing that, and turned my face away. One day while we were at the comedor, the long building housing the cafeteria, offices, bakery, laundry, staff housing and girls’ dorm on the second level, Daddy held me in his arms and stood by the door where the girls went in and out. He convinced me to kiss the girls, which I did reluctantly, but it wasn’t so bad as long as they didn’t try to pinch my face. In fact, it was kinda fun to see them laugh and giggle when I kissed them, and that’s where I got the nickname “Fábrica de Besitos” (Kissing Factory). I gave many kisses to the cuter girls, and only one or two to the ones I considered not very attractive, which made them feel very bad; I could tell. They begged me for more, but I just turned my face away, which I now regret, as it very likely reduced their selfesteem. After that, I saved my kisses for family, but many years later, after I met and fell in love with Diana, she got my first kiss on January 7, 1980 at the airport in San Francisco. She was going to board the plane for Wisconsin, to finish her year as an assistant girls’ dean. I stood in line with those who were boarding, and just before it was her turn, we stepped out of the line and I gave her a good-bye hug and quick peck on the lips – our very first kiss. We also hugged, but wearing bulky jackets, and having never hugged before, we lost our balance and nearly toppled over! Then she was gone, and five very long months passed. When she returned, I gave her a welcome home hug, but no kiss. We saved those for future good-byes or birthdays and special occasions. Piano Bench Jump When I was quite young, I enjoyed jumping from high places, such as the bench at Papa’s piano in the living room. After doing a few practice jumps, I decided to show Papa my newly acquired skill. So, when he came in from the garden, I proudly climbed onto the bench, jumping a little higher and further than I’d done before. I landed safely on the carpet, but the piano bench tipped over backward, hitting the floor pedals. One pedal broke off, rendering it useless. I think it was the soft pedal, which was rarely used. Papa didn’t scold me, and Daddy welded it back on later. But I didn’t jump off that bench anymore. 114

Sleepwalking Daddy would stay up in the kitchen by the stove and read after we 3 kids went to bed. He said that one night I wandered into the kitchen, and he asked what I wanted. I told him I was looking for monkeys, and then went back to bed. I didn’t remember doing that at all, so either I was sleepwalking, or perhaps he made up the story. Another time after Daddy broke his leg, he slept in a bed in the tiny living room where it was warm since the wood stove was nearby, and Mommy slept in their cold bedroom. One night his leg must have been hurting badly, because he called out, and Mommy heard him through the thin board wall, got up and went to see what he needed. Daddy had called out in his sleep, and when Mommy came in, she had to wake him up to find out why he was calling. Mommy doesn’t remember the details now, but that’s how I remember the incident. KTRB Modesto Radio While living at the Ranch, when Mommy wasn’t working in the woods, she listened to KTRB as I mentioned previously. One part I forgot to mention was the sign-off music that they played. It was “Now is the Hour,” a going-away song composed by the Maori people of New Zealand. It was played Hawaiian style, with the old kinds of electric guitars. I searched YouTube and found the exact version they played, located at this link: https://youtu.be/TRdO7PsZDaI. Hearing it brings back many memories of my childhood. There’s a good story that goes with this song. At the age of 24, James Edwin Orr, a Baptist evangelist, (1912-1987) held an Easter campaign in New Zealand. During that campaign in 1936, revival fell on the people of New Zealand. Many people were converted. Revival fire spread across the island nation. The key to this revival was the public confession and reconciliation of believers. A theme verse for that revival was Psalm 139:1 which says, “O Lord, thou hast searched me, and known me.” As hearts were cleansed, the Holy Spirit moved with power. As James was set to leave New Zealand, 4 Maori girls came to him and sang him this native song of farewell: Now is the hour when we must say goodbye Soon you'll be sailing far across the sea While you're away, oh, then remember me When you return, you'll find me waiting here. 115

Impressed by the song—especially the tune, and still stirred by the revival he had witnessed there, James quickly scribbled some verses on the back of an envelope while he was waiting in the post office of Ngaruawahia, New Zealand. It was set to the music of that farewell tune sung by those Maori girls. “Search Me, O God” Search me, O God, and know my heart today, try me, O Savior, know my thoughts, I pray; see if there be some wicked way in me; cleanse me from every sin, and set me free. I praise Thee, Lord, for cleansing me from sin; fulfill Thy word and make me pure within; fill me with fire, where once I burned with shame; grant my desire to magnify Thy name. Lord, take my life, and make it wholly Thine; fill my poor heart with Thy great love divine; take all my will, my passion, self and pride; I now surrender, Lord, in me abide. O Holy Ghost, revival comes from Thee; send a revival, start the work in me; Thy Word declares Thou wilt supply our need; for blessings now, O Lord, I humbly plead. Activities in the Woods While Mommy and Daddy were cutting veneer blocks across Mosquito Road, Ellen and I got bored, so we crossed the road to look around the school, which was still in use. Nobody was there, but we found some pieces of chalk, so Ellen and I wrote our names on the block wall of the newer building. I had just learned how to write my name, and I was quite proud of myself.

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Further down the road just below the old Alexander house, I saw a tiny squirrel in a pine tree that was away from other trees, about 30’ high. It was easy to climb, with many branches, so I figured I’d go up and catch the squirrel—there was no way it could get away from me. As I climbed, it went higher, and soon we were near the top. I was getting close, certain that I could catch it. Suddenly, to my surprise, it ran to the end of a short branch and jumped. But it didn’t fall to the ground. Instead, it spread its legs, and flaps of loose skin stretched out, so that it glided across the road into a tree further down the hill. That was the only time I’ve ever seen a flying squirrel. While working along Mosquito CutOff Road, we kids found several nice easy-to-climb pine trees, so we each went up near the top of a tree and began swaying back and forth, singing Sabbath School songs in Spanish, such as “Los Arboles se Mecen” (The Trees are Swaying) and “Los Angeles Me Cuidan” (The Angels Watch Over Us). The trees were flexible, and we felt quite safe. The Doxology When I was very young, the Doxology was part of every church service. It started out with “Praise God from whom all blessings flow, Praise Him all creatures here below . . .” I sang it also, but didn’t realize how it went, and sang “Praise Him all preachers here below.” It wasn’t until I got older and could read the hymnbook that I realized I’d been singing it wrong. School Activities While attending school at El Dorado Junior Academy, I clearly remember starting each day with worship. The teacher prayed, and we sang from our songbooks with plenty of enthusiasm. Some of our favorites, which I remember to this day, were “He Lives,” “I Walk Through the Garden Alone,” “Stand Up for Jesus,” “Onward Christian Soldiers” and “Volunteers.” After a Bible verse and a short story devotional, we ended with The Pledge of Allegiance, standing and 117

saluting the flag. After lunch and recess, the teacher read us a short, continued story from a book, which we all looked forward to. And when the school day ended, we all stood, had closing prayer, and all recited the Mizpah together, “May the Lord watch between me and thee, when we are absent from another.” To me, the word “absent” meant missing school, so I figured it referred to the students who would be missing school within the next few days. We all sang in the choir, which I did not enjoy—especially the preliminary tongue exercises. We had to wiggle our tongues back and forth, up and down, in and out and curl them inward—over and over! Our tongues got sore after 5 minutes, and by then we were ready to sing. We sang a variety of Christmas songs for a program in the gym, including Gloria, In Excelsis Deo. And on the word Gloria, we bounced around an entire octave of notes! Another song we learned, which just came to my mind a few weeks ago at bedtime, and every time I woke up to turn over, was “Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.” I don’t remember hearing that song since the early 1960’s when we sang it in choir. One day the teacher gave us Achievement Tests. When I got home and told Mommy, she asked me, “And did you achieve?” I didn’t know what she meant—I just thought that was the name of the tests! We always did all our studying at school. Carl, a student who was a slow learner, told me that his mother made him do homework every day, and he hated it. He asked me if I had to do homework. I didn’t know he was talking about schoolwork. I just knew I had to do a lot of work at home, so I told him that I did lots of homework, and I disliked it as well. Pinecrest Camp The major highlight of each summer was spending an entire week at Pinecrest Camp. It was cool, we got to eat cafeteria food, we enjoyed many fun activities, campfires were fun, and we didn’t have to work! We hiked to Wagon and Indian Camp to spend the night, swam in the pool, went canoeing, did archery, obstacle course, crafts and many other fun things. I never did like horseback riding though. Grandma and Grandpa Landstrom volunteered at Pinecrest, so I saw them fairly often. The cafeteria had the best food—pan pizza with no crust and filling an inch or more thick! Breakfast cereal came in tiny boxes lined with wax paper called “bowl in a box.” We split open on the side on the dashed lines, opened the flaps, poured in the milk and ate it right of the box. They even had sweet colorful Fruit Loops—something we never got at home, 118

because they were about 65% sugar. Wheat Honeys was another favorite—puffed wheat coated with mostly sugar and barely any honey. And we could eat as much as we wanted of whatever we wanted, so my toast was thickly coated with peanut butter and jam, and I didn’t get in trouble for taking too much! There was a rule about it though—we could take all we wanted, but we had to eat everything we took. At the end of each meal, tables were dismissed as soon as our trays were empty. And if someone took too much food, we all had to wait until he had finished his food. Sometimes we’d all pitch in and help him finish so we could go. The girls sat on one side and the boys sat on the other side of the huge dining room. If things got too noisy, the Camp Director, using a microphone, called Strike One, and we all quieted down. Sometimes we forgot and got noisy again, and we’d hear, Strike Two! We all knew that at Strike Three we couldn’t talk at all, so we stayed hushed after that. When our tables were dismissed, we took trays, cups and silverware outside. After dumping the trash, we washed everything in huge galvanized laundry tubs, using dish mops—stout wooden sticks with a fluffy string mop on the end. After washing in the first soapy tub, we repeated the procedure in a second sudsy tub. Then we rinsed everything in a third tub, and again in a fourth tub. The final tub had Wescodyne disinfectant, and we had to submerge everything in it and count slowly to 10. The final step was inspection by a staff member, and if our items were not perfectly clean, we had to go back and repeat the entire procedure. Then we set everything on drying racks to drip dry. Times have changed, and now we see a lot of good food thrown away, and nobody except the kitchen staff has to wash the dishes. I like the old ways better. Candy, Cavities and Tonsilitis Daddy enjoyed sweets, as did the rest of us. We had dessert at nearly every noon meal, which we called dinner. Mommy made delicious cobblers, pies, cakes, chocolate chip cookies, fruit turnovers, puddings and many other irresistible desserts. There was one exception—I didn’t like rice pudding. We also enjoyed 119

candy if there was no dessert. Sometimes Daddy bought huge 5-lb. bars of milk chocolate—about 2” thick and maybe 6” wide and 12” long. Using his pocketknife, he broke off chunks for us to bite and suck on. We also got bags of candy after holidays when it was on sale—sometimes 50% or even 75% off the regular price. I took them to Linda Vista and sold them out very fast—the students were delighted to buy American candy, and I made a good profit. I also ate a lot of the candy, and often got sick with swollen tonsils, a miserable head cold, and often a fever. Every year I seemed to have 6 or more cavities to be filled when we returned to California, and I dreaded the dentist’s needle and drill. But I continued eating sweets until my mid-teens, when I read Counsels on Diet and Foods by Ellen White. I knew sweets were the cause of my health problems, but when I read the counsels on health reform inspired by God, I decided to make a change, eliminating all refined sugar from my diet. I still used honey, dates, raisins and other natural sweets, but I noticed a big difference. I had fewer cavities, didn’t get sick so often, and felt so much better. Once in a while I’d indulge in a dessert with refined sugar, and nearly every time I got a sore throat, the sniffles and general misery. At age 21 I had my tonsils removed, thinking that would solve my problems. But eating foods with refined sugar still made me sick. So, I have abstained from sugar since 1978, and have enjoyed much better health since then. With so many other healthful alternatives, I don’t miss it either. Papa and Ellen White When Papa was age 8 and 9, he lived with his parents and siblings in a tenthouse. To make them edible, he soaked hard biscuits in the creek he crossed to get to Elmshaven, where Ellen White lived during her final years. He and his dad Tom worked in the 120

Elmshaven orchard, and cut firewood for her. During the evenings, Papa and other neighborhood children gathered in Ellen White’s living room for worship, and sometimes she showed slides about healthful living, using a projector called a stereopticon, which showed images with a 3D effect. She also described some of her visions, talked about the angel that visited her in the night, and answered questions. One question that often came up from poor families was about the moral implications of picking hops for making beer and grapes for making wine. The Napa valley had vast farms planted in wine grapes, and often no other work was available. According to Papa, Ellen responded that it was not the responsibility of the men who were working to make an honest living. The owners of the vineyards would be accountable to God for producing alcoholic drinks that cause so much suffering around the world. Orville Baldwin, who lived at Camino, went to visit her, and he asked Ellen how she knew what she said was true. She was sitting at her writing desk, and she responded, “You see the spot where your son is standing? That’s where the angel comes and stands, and tells me these things.” That’s why in her writings, she often begins with “Said the angel . . .” Papa also helped his father Tom build the huge barn on a farm at the corner of Silverado Trail and Deer Park Road. It still stands, solid as ever, more than 120 years later. Grandma Adams also clearly remembers attending meetings where Ellen White spoke. Afterwards, she and other children gathered around her, asking Ellen to bless and pray for them. Ellen White loved children, and they knew it. She placed her hands on the heads of the children, asking God to bless them in a special way. Grandma was 18 and Papa 22 when Ellen White died, and they attended meetings where she spoke several times during their teen 121

years. They were always impressed with the way she emphasized getting their authority from the Bible, and always pointing them to Jesus. Her writings were a lesser light, pointing to the greater Light. Papa’s Humor Papa liked to charm the ladies, and when relatives or close friends would visit him after being away for a period of time, he would greet them with a smile, a glint in his eye, and gently put his hand on their shoulder, give a gentle squeeze, and comment, “You’re feeling good; how do you look?” That gave everybody a good laugh. Sabbath Games Among other activities on Friday nights and Sabbath afternoons, we did a lot of reading and playing special card games. One was called Bible Characters, and the cards had names of people in the Bible, in sets of four. The names were grouped by family or time

period, such as Adam, Eve, Cain and Abel, or prophets, or kings. After each person received a set of cards, we took turns asking a player for a specific card. If I had Adam and Abel, I might ask Linda for Eve. If she didn’t have it, I drew a card from the main pile, and if the next person had a name from that group, they knew I did too, and asked me 122

for Cain. When I said no, they knew I must have Adam or Abel. It gave us good mental exercise, and helped us learn Bible names well—especially when we got to kings like Jehoshaphat or Hezekiah. The rules specified answering a question about the character we wanted before receiving the card, but we never did that— it would have been too slow. But we would have learned a lot more about the Bible if we’d followed the rules! We also had similar games with flowers, tress, and mammals, and that helped us learn a lot about nature—especially wildflower names. I still remember Painted Trillium, Evening Primrose, Midnight Ladies, and other flowers that don’t grow where we lived. Collecting Aluminum Cans Recycling became a big thing in the 1970’s, and we could get 10 cents a pound for aluminum cans. We collected them from roadsides, public trash cans and anywhere else we could find them. Most were beer cans, and they smelled terrible. When there were public events with grandstands, afterwards we’d scramble underneath and fill black trash bags with our bounty, as well as what had been left in trash receptacles. At the Reno Air Races, we collected enough bags of cans to fill the yellow car, but the ride home was very smelly! Papa got in on it as well, bringing home a bag from behind the tavern on Placerville Drive nearly every day. Then we had to smash them, and that was a lot of work. We mostly used the side of the axe head on an upturned solid oak round. We also used the bottom of a round car jack, and that worked well. We tried driving over them, but they just partially flattened, or flew out from under the tires. Daddy even fired up his huge antique single-cylinder motor used long ago for pumping or running a sawmill and pressing a tire against the wide flat flywheel, but the cans did not flatten well, and many flew out. So, most of them were smashed with an axe on a stump. Sometimes we were naughty and dropped little rocks in the cans before smashing them to make them heavier. Over time our hard work paid off, and we made enough money to travel to Alaska and cover other family expenses.

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Air Races and Air Shows Whenever possible, we’d head over the Sierras to watch the Reno Air Races. Most of the time we watched from outside the fence to avoid having to pay, but one time we splurged and paid to get up close and watch from the grandstands. Old fighter planes raced around tall pylons in a large oval pattern at low altitudes, so we had a good view. Other categories of planes raced, Blue Angels did their spectacular aerobatics, and a small helicopter did a lot of fancy flying as well. The pilot showed how safe it was as he shut off the engine about 50’ up and floated to the ground with a soft bump. We did see one tragedy though, as the racers went around the back straightaway, something went wrong and a plane did a nose dive, crashed and exploded in flames and black smoke. After the races, we collected a carload of aluminum cans from under the grandstands. Daddy also took us to other air shows a few times, where we got to watch a variety of stunt plane aerobatics, which was fascinating. The Blue Angels were very impressive, flying in formation with wingtips only 18” apart, doing corkscrews, flying straight up out of sight, and a minute later racing at high speed right past us, and much more. After the show, we got to see the planes up close. The Blue Angel pilots in their smart blue uniforms sat on the wings of their jets and autographed their photos on the show program brochures. With huge crowds surrounding each pilot, it would take forever to get the autographs. But I noticed that nobody was under the wings. So, I went under the wing where the pilot sat, reached out and held up my brochure, and he grabbed and signed it! I did the same with the other pilots, and was done in a matter of minutes. Yes, I know that was not a very ethical thing to do, but we needed to get home and back to work out in the woods. KCBS San Francisco KCBS was a high-power AM-FM news radio station we often listened to at the Ranch or while driving. Very early one morning on our way to Mexico, Daddy was able to pick up KCBS as we neared Flagstaff, hundreds of miles from San Francisco, and it came in very clear. Ken Ackerman was one of the radio hosts, and he talked about the modern women’s liberation movement, and how they were pushing for gender-inclusive 124

language. A mailman should be a mail person, and other terms should be delivery person, salesperson, chairperson, and so on. He discussed the ramifications of changing the language, and a few other details. Completing his report, he ended with, “For KCBS News Radio, this is Ken Ackerperson reporting.” That really gave us a good laugh as the station faded away to local daytime stations. Nighttime radio waves traveled thousands of miles compared to just a few hundred miles for daytime radio reception. Mexican Beach Sunburn While traveling up the west coast of Mexico, we stopped at several beaches to play in the sand and cool off in the waves. In one place, we found many long, colorful spiral sea shells, and got a nice collection. Others were short and conical. The time flew as we jumped and splashed in the fairly shallow waves, and after an hour or so, we continued traveling. Our skin was quite red and we were badly sunburned. We began to feel hot, our skin felt painful to the touch, and Mommy put lotion on us. By bedtime we hurt all over, and putting on our pajamas was quite painful. Sleep was difficult because of the burning pain. The next morning, we had blisters all over our faces, shoulders, backs and legs. Over time, the burn became less painful, and then we began peeling. Pulling off big sheets of loose skin from each other was fun, but as we neared non-burned areas, we had to stop, as it hurt there. We were quite a sight during the next few days, because of light and dark patches with rough edges on our bodies. We learned from that experience not to stay out in the sun too long, because even though the water felt cool, it was in reality intensifying the burning rays of the sun. Texas Talk During one of our many trips to McAllen at the Texas border, we always had our eyes open for good deals and free things. At the grand opening of a bank, all but me went to get free punch and candy being offered. A lady with a very strong Texas accent poured drinks for Linda and Lanita, and then asked, “Want sm’awss?” 125

They looked confused, trying it figure out if she was talking Spanglish and asking if they wanted “mas” (“more” in Spanish). Then she pointed to the bowl with tiny ice cubes, and they discovered that had been offering them some ice! After enjoying the cool drinks, as Linda and Lanita headed down the bank steps, the friendly lady called out, “Y’all come back now!” So, the girls turned around and went back up the steps to see what she wanted. They didn’t realize that was the Texan way of saying good-bye! Another lady had a little girl with her, all dressed up pretty. She was talking about the lovely “Easter drayess” that she’d just purchased for her daughter. Most of the time we could understand Texan, but those two times stand out in our memories. Deep South Travels While traveling through Louisiana, it was so hot and humid that we had a hard time sleeping in the car at night. I slept on the front seat, and the others in back of our yellow 1957 Chevy Carryall. Mosquitoes were especially annoying, with no netting to keep them out. We had to leave the windows open to get what little night breeze there was. One big fat mosquito was particularly bad, and none of us could sleep as we slapped at the miserable little insects. Finally, when it landed on me, I gave it a quick slap, and as I held up my bloody arm in the dim night, Daddy asked, “Machucaste?” (Did you smash it?). I assured everyone that it was indeed very flat. We were all very awake and couldn’t sleep, so Daddy got up and we continued east, with the breeze helping us feel cooler and warding off the mosquitoes. Daddy found a radio talk show host who kept him and Mommy entertained with his southern accent and very unique ways of talking. He used dozens of terms that had our parents laughing time after time, but the only one I can remember is “powerful cars with forked-eight engines.” Desert Heat None of our cars had air conditioning, so traveling through the desert during summer months was hard on all of us. One particular day as we headed west out of Blythe, California on I-10, the water in our gallon drinking jugs was too hot to drink, and we were getting very thirsty. So, we poured water into cups and held them out the windows, and the hot moving air evaporated enough of the heat so we could drink the still quite hot water. 126

Hick Hacking Because of frequent colds and congestion, we kids often had lots of flehm build up in our throats. So, we sucked air in through our noses and upper throats to clear the runniness, used our lungs to push out air through our throats to clear out the flehm, and spit if we were outside, or swallowed everything if we weren’t. It all sounded terrible, with a slimy bubbly sound, then scraping of all the goo from our throats. We called it “Hick-Hacking,” and tried to stop each other from doing it. But it seemed to be the easiest, most effective way to get rid of the stuff. One day I saw a newspaper article about a man who was arrested after hick-hacking in a plane. At least, that’s how I shared it with my sisters, to get them to realize the seriousness of what they (we, really) were doing. I’d never heard about hijacking before, and at first glance, it did look like hick-hacking. Eventually as we grew older, we mostly discontinued that practice. Roughhousing Dangers After Daddy added 3 extra rooms to the side of our cabin, Linda and Lanita had a bunk in the back bedroom, and Mommy had large shelves along one wall to sort and store the clothes we brought in bales from the States. The center section was my bedroom, with a piece of plywood for the hall wall, the plywood box trailer lid for my door, and an old thin bedspread which served as a curtain wall. The rest was storage and workbench tool area. One day the 3 of us were roughhousing on the top bunk, when I suddenly lost my balance and tumbled headfirst to the concrete floor. Somehow—I believe it was an angel that did it—a pillow that had been on the top bunk flew past me and cushioned my head as I landed. I was not hurt at all, and we sobered down after that, realizing I could have been seriously injured.

Gobble Song I have no idea why, but while eating supper, we kids sang a silly little song, which went like this: “Gobble, gobble, gobble tu comida. Gobble, gobble, gobble con tu boca.” (Brief translation: Gobble your food; gobble with your mouth.) I think it was to the tune of a children’s Sabbath School song, but I can’t remember which one. 127

Mean Boys One time when I was very young, I went to the boys’ dorm clear at the opposite end of the campus, with a friendly student. I got to see how the students were packed, 6 to a room, sleeping on 2 triple bunk beds, with a small closet for each student, and a table in the center for doing homework. Someone called my friend out briefly, and he left me in the care of the other students in the room. Some of the boys began suggesting nasty things for me to do when I was in bed with Mommy or my sisters. Being young and innocent, I didn’t know that the suggestions they made were wrong, but I never did them. Another student began messing with me, saying that he had a knife in his room, and he was going to stab me with it. He was a bully type, and the other boys were afraid of him, so they didn’t intervene. When the bully went to get his knife, the other boys quickly hid me behind a bunk under a blanket. The bully returned, and demanded the boys reveal where I was. Then he discovered my hiding place, yanked off the blanket, and proceeded to threaten me with his knife. I was very frightened, but thankfully, my friend returned. He was a dorm monitor, and took the forbidden knife from the bully. I never wanted to return to the dorm after that, nor ever stay in one, and thankfully, I never had to. Staff-Student Relations Early on, all students were required to work a minimum of two hours a day, even if their parents could afford to pay their full school expenses. It was just part of the work-study program, as well as to help keep the students out of trouble – for the most part. Many students came from very poor families, but were excellent students and workers, so they worked 5 hours a day. Most students worked 3 hours a day to earn part of their tuition. Industrial students worked 5 hours a day, and stayed during vacations and summers to cover their full expenses. 128

School administrators including the Director, Secretary and Treasurer worked two hours daily along with the students, swinging machetes, hauling trash, weeding the flower gardens, and showing by example the value of manual labor. They also played sports with the students on Friday afternoons and Sabbath evenings. These activities helped strengthen positive relations between staff and students. Road Paving Since our first trip to Linda Vista in January, 1958, the highway was paved between Tuxtla Gutiérrez and San Cristóbal. The first 15 miles or so, we drove on that road to the Escopetazo Junction, and from there on to the school, another 65 miles of very rough road through mountains and valleys, with many sharp curves and steep grades. A few miles out of Tuxtla, we drove over a bridge crossing the Río Grijalva, which followed a wide sloping valley for 100 miles into a narrow gorge half a mile wide, with vertical cliffs 3,300’ high. After 8 miles, it opens up to a wide valley again. Back in the early 1520’s when the Spaniards tried to conquer the Chiapa natives, they put up a fierce resistance. Eventually the Spaniards got the upper hand, so the natives jumped to their death from the canyon rim rather than become slaves to the Spaniards. After driving through the ancient town of Chiapa de Corzo, the road follows a long straight stretch to the base of a mountain, where we can see the road zigzag to the top, where it curves out of sight. Our family tradition was to guess how many minutes it would take to get to the top. Going uphill fully loaded and pulling a trailer, it took 16 to 18 minutes, but less without a trailer—unless we got behind a slow noisy truck belching black diesel smoke. Coming down usually took 11 to 13 minutes. Daddy had the advantage being the driver, as he would guess his time and then drive slower or faster to match his guess. From the top to the junction, the road followed a narrow steep cliff, which back in the times of oxcarts or wagons, drivers would fire a shotgun to warn oncoming carts that they were on the narrow one-lane trail; hence the name 129

Escopetazo, or shotgun blast. In the late 1960’s on a trip to Linda Vista, we were delighted to discover the first few miles of the road were paved beyond the junction, with heavy equipment straightening out some of the sharp curves. Every year after that as we progressed toward the school, the road was paved and smooth—first to Soyaló in 1968, to Bochil in 1969, to Jitotol in 1970 and to the Linda Vista turn-off the following year. Every trip, we watched each curve of the road to see how much progress it had made from the previous year. The road coming from Villahermosa was also being paved, and by 1972, the entire highway between Tuxtla and Villahermosa was fully paved, and could be driven in less than 6 hours instead of all day, or longer during the rainy season, when mudholes were deep or impassible. Eventually the road down to the school was paved as well, and that was a real blessing! Eclipse and Comets On Sabbath morning, March 7, 1970, our family went to the school lab to see the solar eclipse using a telescope we brought for Domingo Pérez from the U.S. He aimed it at the sun, and we saw the moon slowly move over the sun as it became a crescent, reflected on a white part at the base of the lens, until the sun became just a tiny sliver. It got fairly dark, and it felt colder too. We could see a few stars, and roosters crowed. We also noticed rippling shadowy waves going from north to south, coming down the hill and across the campus, plainly visible on the ground and roofs. It was a full eclipse over south Veracruz and Oaxaca, but still very fascinating where we were. It reached its peak at about 11:30, and ended by 1:00. We missed church, but this was a once-ina-lifetime experience. Everybody else stayed in church. 130

We got up before daylight on April 5, 1970 to see Comet Bennett through the pine trees, traveling at 100,000 mph, but to us it appeared to be motionless. Comet Kohoutek appeared on December 12, 1973, but it was very dim, and we couldn’t see it well. Fighting Fires Nearly every spring during the warmer months, vegetation got dry, and farmers burned their slash-and burn hillsides for planting corn crops. Often the fires got away and onto the school property, so students took shovels, hoes, and machetes to fight the fires. We used the tools to make firebreaks, and leafy branches to whack out the flames that jumped our fire lines. Sometimes students started fires on purpose so they could get a break from school and go fight fires. When I was 13, we were sent to fight a fire behind the girls’ dorm, mostly in leaves and low brush. Some of the girls were there too, using rakes to make a firebreak. When the fire was mostly out, just a handful of boys and Angelica, a quiet, nice girl from a very poor family, continued widening the firebreak. The boys struck up a conversation with the bashful, shy girl who was not used to having boys pay attention to her, except for my friend Marcelino, who really liked her. Everybody stopped working except Angelica, who was too shy to stop and talk with the boys, which back then was not allowed unless supervised by adults. As Angelica innocently bent over and continued raking in the late afternoon sun, the loose neck of her dress hung down, and we could all clearly see her soft fluffy brown feminine charms in full view. That was the first time I had seen such a heart-melting sight, and I didn’t know what to think of it. I looked around, and saw why the other boys were not working, but instead, distracting her with their flattering conversations. A few minutes later, a staff member sent us back to our dorms or homes, and after that year, we never saw Angelica again. Her family probably couldn’t afford to send her back to our school.

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Pogo Stick Our parents got us a pogo stick, on which we enjoyed bouncing up and down repeatedly once we got the hang of it. We could also lean forward and bounce along down the trail like kangaroos, which was fun at first, but eventually we got bored of it, and eventually sold it to a friend. Daddy on the Ground One day when I came home from school at noon, I found Daddy sitting on the ground in front of the house, leaning back against a big oak round at the edge of a wood pile we’d cut a few days earlier. His Harley was nearby, and when I asked why he was sitting there, he said he was waiting for Mommy. That was very unusual, but a few minutes later when Mommy arrived from teaching English, he had her help him into the house, as his foot was very sore. Apparently while driving up to the house on his Harley, he crushed his foot between a large wood round and the bike pedal, but never said anything until Mommy arrived. He must have been in severe pain, or was embarrassed about what happened. Mommy took care of him, and soon he was back to normal. Bicycle Motor While we were in California, Daddy found and bought a chainsaw-sized bicycle motor. It clamped to the frame just below the handlebars, and had a ribbed friction cylinder that spun when the motor was running. A handlebar accelerator made it possible to increase or decrease the engine speed, and a locking lever made it possible to raise or lower the ribbed cylinder onto the front tire, firmly holding it in place so it sunk partway into the rubber to get a good grip. It worked well on level areas, and fairly well on minor slopes. But on the steep climb from the school to the main road, we still had to do a lot of pedaling. Otherwise, the ribbed part simply dug a groove in the tire rubber. After the novelty of using that a few times, we decided it wasn’t such a bright idea after all.

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Electricity During the first 12 years of operation, the school had electricity produced by a huge noisy power generating plant down by the maintenance building. It could be heard all over the campus, and it usually ran from 5:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. When the plant broke down, days would go by until someone went to Tuxtla to find parts and repair it. When Daddy bought the bulldozer in California and shipped it to Linda Vista in 1963, the plan was to build a road to the Bajada and install a hydroelectric plant for full-time power. Daddy built the road, but the river generator project never happened. And so, we had to put up with electric power as it was, using the washing machine and other powerconsuming items before the lights went out. Night times were especially bad, when everybody was at home or in their dorms, and when families tried to iron their clothes, the lights would alternate between dim and very dim. Sometimes the light bulbs were so dim that we couldn’t see to read unless we had a bulb right next to where we were trying to read or study. And the buildings using fluorescent tubes had dim flickering lights or none at all, so they used candles or kerosene lamps. Then something wonderful happened. We arrived from our summer in California on the evening of November 9, 1970. The lights were bright, and there was no drone of the power plant off in the distance. Neighbors who came to welcome us informed us that we now had Federal power 24 hours a day. What a wonderful blessing that was! Sure, there were times when the lights went out, but we had the power plant for backup power. And the price was very low—even in 1984 when Diana and I returned to work there full time, I offered to pay the school treasurer for our portion of the electric bill, as there was only one electric meter for the entire school. But he told me the amount was insignificant; the monthly bill for the whole campus was just over $100, and that included everything – the homes, dorms, classrooms, woodshops, maintenance shop—everything! 133

Dr. Rabbit When we kids were little, we enjoyed listening to records with mission stories by Dr. Rabbit—Eric B. Hare. He had a unique way of telling stories with his strong English accent, and his books were fun to read as well. The Junior Guide carried a series of stories from his son-to-be-published book Dr. Rabbit, so when I was 14, I translated them as a continued story each Sabbath for the Junior-age kids, and they really enjoyed listening to them. Mommy had heard him tell his mission stories from Burma when she was a child at Camp Wawona, so I wrote to him and told him how much we all enjoyed his stories—my mom as a child, my sisters and me, and now dozens of children in south Mexico. To my surprise, he wrote back—and not just once, but four times at least. And he sent me two autographed books—Dr. Rabbit and Clever Queen! So, I spent portions of two years translating and relating Eric B. Hare’s fascinating mission stories in the old Capilla, where the younger students met each week for Sabbath School. Rincon San José When we arrived at Linda Vista in late 1970, some students stopped by early on Sabbath morning, asking for a lunch for the children in San José. We hadn’t heard about it, and had nothing ready, but we found out that our neighbor Domingo Pérez hiked with a small group of students up the mountain about 4 miles to a small Chamula village where a church had been recently built, to feed the children’s hungry tummies, and then have a Sabbath School program for them. We liked the idea, and after getting further information, went along to help every Sabbath from then on. Early on Sabbath mornings we and other young students picked up lunches prepared by each family on campus, usually consisting of 134

a jar of hot milk, a sandwich, and a piece of fruit. We collected felt materials from our supply to illustrate the Sabbath School lesson, loaded the yellow car with our family, a few students and other volunteers, and drove up as close as we could before hiking the rest of the way to the little wood church. Native children scurried around, collecting logs and boards to use for benches under a tree. Lunches were placed on a table, each one with the name of a child from the family at Linda Vista who had sent the lunch, and designated to a specific child in the village. That provided a tie between children at our school with those at San José. As we handed a lunch to each child, we asked, “¿Quién te lo manda? (Who sends this to you?), and they responded with the name of the child assigned to provide their lunch, such as Eloy or Yisseth or Linette. Very rarely did the sponsoring child meet the one their family was providing food for. The children ate every bit of food, even down to scraping the inner lining of the banana peels! Once their stomachs were full and we’d collected the trash and empty milk jars, we had a Sabbath School program with prayer, songs, the lesson illustrated with felts, and also had them recite their memory verse. Several times I took my portable tape recorder to record them singing and saying their memory verses. Older students from Linda Vista helped with the adult Sabbath School and Church services. 135

We often hiked the mountain trails back to the school, as the road was very rough, and hiking downhill didn’t take much longer than riding in the car. One day I decided to climb the mountain trail near the mountain ridge, and then followed a shelf near the top, going through cornfields, many thick jungle areas with tall trees and long vines, and several sinkholes as well. Eventually I came out by the upper Yerba Buena gardens, with rich, black soil, and acres of raspberry plants that multiplied from 6 starts that the Comstocks brought from the U.S. a few years earlier. The berries were abundant and huge, but not as sweet as the ones in the States. The wild blackberries there are very sour as well. When we were away, Domingo Pérez and older students continued the program. When we returned, we brought special things for the children—clothes, shoes, toys and garden seeds. Each child who received seeds was required to plant and care for their little vegetable gardens, which provided food for their families, besides the usual corn and beans. Eventually we trained the older church youth to lead the children’s programs, and moved on to other villages—Palmarcito, Maravillas, El Ambar, and one-time visits to other places. My First Sermon When I was about 17 years old, our family hiked several hours over the mountain and down the other side with several students to Arrollo Grande. The male students led out in the adult Sabbath School program, while Linda, Lanita and I had Sabbath School for the children on a grassy bank in front of the church. As a student from Linda Vista read through the lesson for the adults in a monotone voice, the children enjoyed lively songs and exciting Bible stories with felt materials outside. I noticed that more and more adults appeared as our program continued, and by the end of Sabbath School, very few adults were in the church—they were outside with us! I don’t blame them—the student inside had not been trained how to teach the lesson, and many of the women didn’t understand Spanish. 136

After the children’s program was done, the church elders asked me to preach the sermon—and to use the felt illustrations! I had worked with children for years, but I’d never preached an official sermon. But I quickly made some notes, selected a Bible verse and some hymns, and went onto the primitive church platform. After going through all the usual preliminaries—announcements, doxology, pastoral prayer, opening hymn, offering, second hymn, Scripture reading, general prayer and special music, I stood up and shared the Plan of Salvation, using the same felts I’d used for the children. Everybody was very quiet, and the illustrated message opened up the Gospel in a way they could understand—simply and clearly as I was used to teaching it to the children. Afterwards, many of the folks there thanked me profusely for making the Bible so clear and simple. And ever since then, I’ve tried to make all my sermons easy enough for a child to understand, as I know that many people in our churches are baby Christians. I personally get a lot more out of clear simple sermons that are short and to the point instead of long, deep theological messages that are way over my head. Camping Adventures—The Boulder My good friends Abner, Javier and I left one Friday afternoon in December, 1970 to camp out in the forest. We had my backpack with tent, sleeping bags, blankets, food, cookware, machetes and my Pathfinder Field Guide. We took the trail from Linda Vista toward Rincón for about a mile through lovely pine forests, and then cut over the ridge and down the other side, where we found a nice grassy meadow—a perfect place 137

to set up camp. I pitched my pup tent, we collected rocks and wood for a firepit, and then cut a bunch of bushy oak branches, which we used to make a wall around our campsite to alert us if animals came near. We enjoyed a hearty supper of creamed green beans that Javier got from girls who worked in the cafeteria, along with crackers and other foods. We sat by the fire talking until after 10:00 before turning in. Early Sabbath morning I got the fire going and we enjoyed instant oatmeal, dried fruit and nuts for breakfast. We had our own Sabbath School and Church services, and then took a hike along the hillside to enjoy the beauties of nature and the amazing scenery of canyons below and forest-covered mountains above. Back at camp, we discovered we were camped on a walking trail— we had cut over the ridge and by-passed the fork just up the trail! However, it wasn’t used often, and we saw only one Chamula family walk by. We ate, had our siesta, and practiced some of the Field Guide activities, such as putting up a flagpole with a Pathfinder flag made with charcoal art on a flour sack. We also made treasure hunts, played nature games, and climbed on a large volcanic boulder on the ridge above our camp. It was a very special day, and we enjoyed every minute of it. We had to be back to the campus before dark, so I took down the tent and Abner packed our things. Javier was up on the hill, and then we heard a strange noise. Javier had taken a stout pole and pried the giant boulder we’d been standing on earlier, and it began rolling down the hill—straight toward the center of our camp! I quickly yanked out the tent stakes and pulled it away just as the boulder rolled to a stop, right where our tent had been! Part of my jacket was under the giant rock, and we had to dig out the dirt underneath to free it. We had no idea that rock could have been a threat if there had been an earthquake, or had it rolled for any other reason. And it stopped right where our heads had been inside the tent the night before. We were sobered to think how close death could have come to us had the circumstances been a bit different. 138

Camping Adventures—Poison Drinks Exactly a year later, Javier, Herberto Zúñiga and I went camping again—this time up the mountain near the cloud forest by the upper Yerba Buena garden. We found a nice level area near the edge of the jungle and set up camp, enjoying a nice campfire. Wild chayotes grew in the jungle, so we ate our fill of them. Sabbath morning after morning devotions, we explored the jungle and found huge matted nets of large plump fava beans, which we picked and shelled for lunch, enjoying the colorful variety, and relishing their mealy rich buttery flavor after they were cooked. After a siesta, we hiked up toward the dams, which supplied the clinic below with abundant water. Since we didn’t follow the trail, we used machetes to hack our way through the dense jungle growth. We didn’t have much water along, so we slashed thick wild grape vines at an angle, drinking the clear tasty liquid that came out from the tips. However, after a few drops from a different vine, our mouths began to tingle, and we realized we might have slashed into a poison vine. We raced back to camp, gargled with salt water, and to our relief, the tingly sensation went away, and we felt no ill effects. We headed back up to the dams, but it started raining, so we hurried back to camp, collected our things, and slipped down the muddy mountainside, wet and dirty, but thankful to have survived another great camping adventure. School Clubs When we arrived at Linda Vista in the fall of 1973, our new school director was Edmundo Alva, a Peruvian who was very nice. He enjoyed outdoor activities and especially agriculture, so I got along with him very well. He usually 139

wore a long dark coat, and walked along leaning forward with his coattails sticking out, so the students nicknamed him Pingϋino (Penguin), using that name behind his back. But Daddy didn’t know any better, and called him Pingϋino to his face! When I told Alva about my passion for agriculture, he took me out to the nearly abandoned school garden and gave me a nice plot with black soil to plant whatever I wanted. We brought a used rototiller from Texas, and I dug up a large plot of soil, which I planted in soybeans, chard, broccoli, cabbage, lettuce, radishes, cauliflower, summer squash, and a bunch of other things. Soon I was selling produce to families and the school kitchen, and it kept me very busy. Mr. Alva had trash cans placed around the campus, and insisted that all trash be placed in the receptacles instead of tossing it on the ground as was the custom. He had a large hole dug for sanitary waste, and insisted it be used. We started up a variety of clubs, and I became president of the Agricultural Club, as well as the Club de Externos, or non-dorm students. We went on Sunday picnics and hikes, weekend campouts and did other fun activities together. The Club Agricola decided to make a two-day trip to look for plants. Director Alva, Pastor Castro, and a group of students piled into our yellow carryall and headed higher into the mountains. As we traveled along, I was amazed to see Director Alva eat a piece of candy and toss the wrapper out the window! On campus he was very particular about not littering, but on public roads he was a different person. In San Cristóbal, Mrs. Gertrude Blum gave us a nice assortment of cuttings from her lush gardens. We camped by the Rancho Nuevo cave and explored it. 140

With no tents, we slept under the stars on the hard grassy ground. We noticed Pastor Castro sleeping with his glasses on, and asked him about it. “To see my dreams clearly” he responded with a mischievous smile. We continued to Comitán, collecting plants at ranches by the road as they caught our eye. We got back to the school with a full carload of plants and cuttings for our gardens and many adventures to share. Movie Camera Around 1974, with so many adventures happening in our lives, I decided to invest in a movie camera. Cameras and film with audio were too expensive, so I bought a cheaper Bell & Howell Super-8 movie camera and projector for $200. It included zoom, a plug-in headlightlike spotlight for filming at night or indoors, a small 3’ screen, a 3-minute roll of film and a short film excerpt from Swiss Family Robinson. The camera had auto-focus, was battery operated so I didn’t have to crank while filming, and was very low resolution. But we thought it was great, and I stocked up on 3-minute rolls of film when they were on sale for $6.00 each. Developing cost nearly $2.00, and with tax, editing tape and a film splicer, my silent home movies cost about $3.00 a minute—very expensive compared to today’s technology. Using a battery-operated portable tape recorder, I recorded and edited audio on cassettes to match as closely as possible some the movies I filmed, playing the audio while I showed the home movies. In recent years, I digitized all my home movies, using audio from the cassettes, subtitles, music and sound effects I found online to bring my home movies back to life. Maravillas Waterfalls My good friend Miguel Hidalgo told me about a series of waterfalls downriver between Tata Santos and Maravillas, so of course we had to go check them out. We were accompanied by Javier’s youngest brother Fernán and my good friend Elías Luis (we called him Mata, short for Mata Culebra, because he worked in the maintenance shop and wore thick heavy steel-toe boots that could kill a snake). We hiked along the ridge across from Tata Santos, and clambered down the steep bank to the riverbed, which was dry in January. We followed it to the edge of a very high drop-off. We saw a deep hole below in solid rock, carved out by the fall during summer rainy season. 141

We clambered up the canyon wall on the Maravillas side and followed the cliff edge until it tapered enough to clamber down through dense brush and trees into a cornfield below. We followed that back to the lower riverbed at the base of the fall, which was a good 100’ wide of solid rock, with large cracks and pools of clear water. We found a pole about 20’ long and poked it into the large muddy pool at the base of the fall, but never hit the bottom. We heard water running nearby, so hiked through a thin line of trees and brush to a wide creek tumbling down a steep bed of large boulders. Water flowed from a cave at the very base of the cliff, and joined the main riverbed further down. That’s where we saw another wide waterfall, with a few streams dropping into another pool below that. We carefully worked our way along the left side, hanging onto bushes and small trees, until we reached the base of that fall. We heard more water rushing through the jungle to the left, so followed it up a steep bank to another cave, too narrow to get into, but producing abundant clear, cold water. Back down to the main riverbed, we clambered over boulders, smooth stone slabs, small waterfalls and boulders consisting of masses of fossilized seashells. We continued down till we reached a large, circular pool of shallow water, which dropped as a long, curved drapery waterfall, very beautiful, as if it had been man-made. We found a narrow ledge sloping to the left at the base of another vertical cliff, and carefully followed it to a dry cave, which had the nickname “El Buho” (The Owl) inscribed inside, and Miguel said there had been a student at the school that 142

went by that nickname. Down at the base of the curved drapery fall, a smaller creek came down a narrower canyon, and we followed the right side of the canyon back up to the top where the car was parked near the road. It was a real adventure, and I have no idea why I didn’t take my camera, but the sights are clearly etched in my brain. We did return to the upper falls many times for day trips and campouts, and I took many photos and videos on those hikes. In fact, my friends and I took machetes, shovels and a mattock, which we used to clear the existing trail through an overgrown cornfield to the upper fall, and carved a trail and made steps so that school staff and students could safely get down to the more beautiful areas. Only once did I see the huge waterfall flowing, in September, 1976 just before I left to serve as a Student Missionary in Bolivia. The Cave by San Cristóbal In the early 1970’s, we noticed a sign a few miles beyond San Cristóbal pointing to a cave, so we went to check it out. A wooden walkway went a hundred or so feet into it, and there were even electric lights to see the formations. The area is in a nice pine forest with grassy areas—perfect for camping and picnics. In January, 1976, our family took Student Missionaries Craig Bradley and Dave Wyman along with us to camp and explore the cave. By then, the wooden walkways were rotting, but concrete walks took their place, so we all went in to the end of the solid walkway. However, we knew from photos by expert spelunkers and photographers that the prettier parts were further in, and inaccessible to the general public because of very uneven floors, giant boulders and many miles of side passages. 143

The next morning, Craig, Dave and I took water, a camera, some rope, and got permission to explore further in—at our own risk. The going was slow after the concrete walk ended, and we didn’t even try the rotting wooden walkway. We clambered over, under and around large boulders, and as we progressed, the formations were more beautiful. We saw huge drapes, cauliflower-like formations, many stalactites, stalagmites, columns, pools, and fine, colorful, twisted ceiling formations. Off on one side passage, we saw a unique large white pigeon-shaped formation. By then we decided to turn back, as it was late, and the cave continued for many miles. We were in there at least four hours, and it was a fascinating, unforgettable experience! 144

Orchid Collecting The trees and cliffs in the mountains around Linda Vista grow air plants in abundance, and many of them produce a huge variety of colorful orchids. Some are only ¼ inch across; others produce dozens of large colorful blooms on stalks 8’ long! Most are very fragrant, and my favorites are small white ones that smell like honey vanilla, while others have a delicate orchid fragrance. The following pages have a sampling of what we collected and planted in trees and hanging baskets in our backyard.

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Lost in the Fog Very early one Sabbath morning, two students and I decided to hike to Manzanillo, a small village at the end of a long ridge visible at a distance from the main road near Rincón. We had never been there before, but there are walking trails all through the mountains, and I figured we would just follow trails going in that direction, and should be able to find our way there. We packed our Bibles, felt materials and hymnals. Churches in Mexico don’t provide hymnals—all who can afford them buy their own. And most hymnals only have the words—the few who can read music or play the piano have rare expensive hymnals with musical notes. We also took drinking water, as most water is contaminated, even in the high mountains. We followed the trail toward where we had camped a few years before, and then took a fork to the left through cornfields along the side of the canyon to a large creek. Then we began climbing the last long steep through a dense pine forest. As the trail became steeper, we saw colorful orchids growing on the rocky cliffs. Several times the trail split, going off to other villages or ranch communities, and a dense fog enveloped us. We had no idea which trail to take, and we knew that if we got on the wrong trail, we could end up miles away, with steep cliffs between us and our destination. We prayed, and claimed the promise of Isaiah 30:21: “And thine ears shall hear a word behind thee, saying, This is the way, walk ye in it, when ye turn to the right hand, and when ye turn to the left.” At each fork, we took the trail that seemed to go up, although in places it zig-zagged, and we did not know if it would continue going up, or veer off to a different location. But the route continued up the steep mountain, having no idea where we were in the dense fog and thick pine forest. Then the trail leveled off a bit. 147

We heard roosters crowing and dogs barking, saw colorful flowers, and then primitive huts appeared through the fog. We stopped at the first hut and asked if we were in Manzanillo, and the folks said yes—what a relief! We told them that we had come from Colegio Linda Vista, and were looking for the Adventist group. “We’re Adventists” the family responded. “Come inside, this is where we meet!” The family was very happy to see us, as they rarely had visitors. They already had a small wooden table covered with a white cloth and colorful embroidered edges, and a large bouquet of flowers in the center. A variety of wooden chairs, stools and benches were lined up, and soon other families arrived, until the house was filled with about two dozen adults and children. Everybody was clean, hair neatly combed, and appeared to be wearing the nicest clothing they had. The ones who could read had Bibles and hymnals. They led out in the services, but invited us to lead song service, teach the lesson and preach the sermon. I used my felt materials during the sermon and spoke about the Origin of Sin and the Plan of Salvation. They invited us to eat with them—homemade tortillas, black beans, and atole, a hot drink made of finely ground corn, panela (sugar cane sweetener) and cinnamon. We visited briefly, and enjoyed the view of the vast mountain ranges in all directions after the fog burned off. The folks there lived simply, were happy and healthy, and appeared strong in their faith. They pleaded with us to return again as we left, but I never got back there again. However, other mission-minded students visited many villages scattered throughout the mountains nearly every Sabbath weather permitting, and we hope they went to Manzanillo as well. 148

Archeology Hike While teaching at Linda Vista, I took my students and workers on expeditions to caves, waterfalls and other interesting places. I heard about a remote location where a carved stone jaguar had been found, similar to the one at left, but not as detailed. So I took my boys to check it out. The jaguar must have weighed 200 pounds, and had been carried many miles over steep, rough terrain—at night so the men wouldn’t get caught with archeological treasures that belong to the Mexican government. Two men living near Rincón Chamula showed it to us, hidden under coffee bags in their hut, hoping I would buy it. They offered to take us to the place where they found it, and it took hours to get there. We climbed several ridges, and dropped into a valley with a large, outspread ranch. From there, we climbed a steep cliff and followed a canyon wall to a narrow ridge. The trail continued toward a tall narrow waterfall, caves where gold artifacts had been found, and an ancient unexplored archeological village made of carved stonework, but the plan was to go there another day (located out of view in the photo at left). We left the trail and followed a long thin high sawtooth ridge with steep cliffs on both sides in places. Eventually, we reached a near perfectly round conical hill with terraces all around it, as if they had been used for dwellings. Below this peak were steep vertical cliffs—see photo of what I described above. 149

The very top of the hill was perfectly flat, with a foundation made of hewn rectangular stones. It must have been a main structure. We saw hewn stones further down by the cliff edge above the ranch, so there was probably a large structure there at one time, and the stones got thrown down the cliff to build the ranch below. The entire hill is covered with pine and oak trees, orchids and long Spanish moss hanging from the trees, and the views are amazing! After exploring the stonework on top, we slid down a very steep slope to the base of a cliff, which we followed to the mouth of a cave. A rock wall held soil in place to make a fairly level floor, and this is where the carved stone jaguar was found. We dug around in the dirt and found pieces of pottery, but very little of it had any kind of ornamentation. This trip was fascinating, and to my knowledge, I was the first “outsider” to visit this place. I definitely want to visit the archeological village site in the near future—who knows what can be discovered there! 150

Gardening Ever since I can remember, I enjoyed gardening. At the Ranch, in Mexico, at Placerville, and at Hollister. Much of my garden work was in for Grandma & Papa, where I disliked weeding long rows of corn, digging up Bermuda grass and chopping tall Johnson grass. Watering was fun, because we could cool off on hot summer days, squirt each other, and poke a hose into gopher holes, watching to see where the water—and at times, a very soggy gopher, coming out the other end. Harvesting was the fun part—big, sweet, juicy peaches, cherries, Elephant heart plums, a variety of berries and grapes, melons, sweet corn, summer squash, tomatoes, and so much more. We did not like the tiny pointed itchy scales on fig, bean and corn leaves. They made us sneeze too. But when the outdoor table on the lawn under the Modesto Ash or Tulip tree was loaded with summer garden produce for dinner, nothing could compare to those meals. We also had the incentive of earning 25 cents for every fruit tree we dug the weeds from and made a big dirt saucer for watering. And collecting giant colorful tomato hornworms got us 5 cents each—we collected every single one we could find! I clearly remember sitting in the nectarine tree, eating the delectable fruit with juice running down my arm, feeling like I was in Heaven. Eating white and purple figs in the trees was great too—after picking off the clear amber ball of sweetness on the bottom and sucking it like candy. And breakfasts of sliced peaches or berries with a little Rich’ning or Cremora non-dairy powdered creamer sprinkled on top (we didn’t know about the mortal dangers of corn syrup solids back then), along with toasted homemade bread and peanut butter, just could not be beat. Frozen sliced sweetened peaches and berries made the best sherbets for dessert, blended in a liquefier with some Mocha Mix. In the fall we harvested many buckets and boxes of apples, canning hundreds of quarts of applesauce sweetened with a little honey. A fresh hot bowl of applesauce, eaten with a liberal spoonful of peanut butter is something I relish 151

to this day. And those pears! We gleaned pears from the huge orchard across the fence down the hill, and later in the season, drove as close as we could get and hiked in to Deer View, hauling out many gunny sacks and backpacks of the besttasting pears in the world, from trees planted in 1928. We canned and dehydrated pears for weeks, and enjoyed them all year long. Mrs. Purser paid us 30 cents a pound for the extras, so we made good money on them as well. Grandma Adams always enjoyed perusing seed catalogs, discovering new varieties of vegetables, berries, grapes or dwarf fruit trees to try out. She always planted way more than our families could eat, so she sold the surplus and sent donations to Africa. And being sick much of the time, our family, Diann, Denise and Papa ended up doing most of the work. She even convinced church families such as the Polks to send their kids Sherry, Denise and Randy to dig, weed and water the garden “to train them to be good workers.” Of course, they took home extra produce to eat as well. Johnson grass at times grew five feet tall, with thick, woody stems. I chopped them down with the machete, and when we returned to Mexico, received a letter from Grandma that she stepped next to a dried stalk and got a very nasty gash in the lower part of her leg, which took many weeks to heal. I felt bad about it, but she often worked in the garden wearing only her dress and flip-flops, so her legs were not protected. While living in Mexico, I had my garden every year from age 10 and onward. Daddy had a rock wall terrace built below our house, which we filled with good soil. My friends and I hiked up the hill where the dense virgin forest jungle produced rich, black soil, and we carried it on our backs to enrich the garden. We also collected cow pies and horse manure, and dug holes in different parts of the garden for kitchen waste. The temperate weather was ideal for gardening, and I planted a huge variety of vegetables. Lima beans did very well, since it didn’t get cold enough for them to die out in the winter. Every year the stalks grew thicker and thicker, like small trees, and we enjoyed the harvest year after year. Cauliflower and broccoli did well, and attracted hundreds of small white cabbage butterflies, which laid 152

many patches of tiny eggs under the leaves out of sight. If we didn’t destroy them before they hatched, we’d soon find the plants being devoured by dozens of voracious caterpillars, which we picked off one by one so we could have a harvest. They were very good at hiding in the broccoli, and after cooking it for dinner, we carefully picked out the cooked worms that we’d missed before eating the broccoli. Chayotes are a squash-like vine that produce abundant fruits year round. They require no care, and grow nearly anywhere, taking over the garden, climbing fences, and even high into the trees. The fruit is about the size of a pear. Some are smooth-skinned, and others are very prickly. When cooked and cut in half lengthwise, the tough chayote skin is easily removed, and the meat can be cubed, sliced, or shredded to use in soups, stews, scrambled with eggs, or eaten plain like squash. Since they do not have much flavor, mayonnaise and Spike or other seasoned salt makes them more palatable. The slices can be used to make mock apple pie when sweetened and seasoned with apple pie spice, and the flavor & texture is close to that of real apples. Nearly every part of the chayote plant is edible. The fast-growing (6 inches per day) tendrils and young leaves are collected and fried with a little salt, and taste very good! The starchy root tuber, or cuesa de chayote, can also be prepared in a variety of ways, but the fruit itself and the puntas de chayote are most commonly eaten. The heart of the chayote has a fibrous texture, and is discarded, but not before removing the tasty nutty-flavored flat seed that is in the center, and that is usually eaten first after cutting them. 153

When an old chayote falls to the ground, roots and shoots emerge from the bottom end, and soon a new plant begins to grow. Even picked ones sitting in the house too long will grow out stems and leaves a foot long if forgotten in a dark corner. When we brought cuttings or bulbs of plants from the U.S., most of them didn’t take hold. We tried asparagus, grapes, berries and even a peach tree. Everything died, except the peach. After many years, it bore tiny hard fruit that never ripened. Later I planted an orchard with a dozen different kinds of fruit trees, but they barely grew; most produced nothing, and the rest died. One lemon tree yielded a few lemons each year. The bananas produced a few stalks. The only trees that provided plenty of fruit every year were a guava that grew wild by our front door and an avocado tree in back that grew from the compost pit. Ironically, we never watered or fertilized them at all. And the guava is still producing fruit, 50 years later! That often happens though. Plants that we work so hard to care for amount to very little, and “volunteer” ones become the most productive! Tulips, daffodils, amaryllis and gladiolus did well the first year, but didn’t come back the next year—except for the salmon-pink gladiolus. They continued growing and blooming every year. I got several artichoke plants from San Cristobal, but they died out. I collected a huge variety of succulent plants, and had a big patch outside my bedroom window, along with fragrant white and pink sweet alyssum, colorful 154

nasturtiums, pansies, four-o’clocks, snapdragons, zinnias, pungent geraniums, impatiens (popping the explosive seedpods was so much fun!) and many, many others. Then I had my huge orchid collection growing in oak trees and hanging planters all around the house and yard. I had a prize rosebush that bloomed most of the year. While we made a trip to the border to renew our papers, I asked my boys to clear the weeds out of my garden. Upon returning, I was devastated when I saw that my special rosebush had been hacked off to near ground level, and I let my boys know how unhappy I was about it. But a few months later, it grew new shoots, got bigger, and produced even more abundantly than before! Tomatoes did very well, and I had some growing in planter boxes on the wall outside the kitchen window of our old cabin in 1985. That way, Diana could pick fresh tomatoes for dinner right through the window! When we tore the cabin down to build a nicer house in 1986, we carefully took down the planters and let the tomatoes continue growing. The stems got thicker and the tomatoes continued producing. After finishing the exterior and deck of our new house in 1987, we replaced the planter boxes, and the very same tomato plants continued growing and producing— this time from the edge of our deck. The weather didn’t get too cold during our 155

winters, to the plants produced tomatoes for many years, growing clear up to the roof!

During our younger years, we often spent the summer in the States, and upon returning for school in the fall, my garden was usually a total disaster—a thick jungle. But I took my machete to it, cleared out the dense growth, dug up the soil, and soon had a vigorous garden growing again. One plant I really like is known as the Leaf of Life, among other names. It’s a semi-succulent, and grows as low ground cover or up to 3 or 4 feet tall. It has bright green leaves with dark indentations around the edges.

The very first one I saw was a plain leaf, about 5” long, pinned to a wall. When I asked about it, I was told to return in a few days.

To my surprise, the leaf had wilted slightly, but roots, shoots and tiny leaves grew out of the indentations, and when they got larger, the original leaf dried up, and the plants were set outside as garden ornamentals. 156

During certain times of the year, the plants put out a whole bunch of long bell-shaped pink flowers that make the plant look attractive as well.

I found gardening very rewarding, and while at Soquel camp meeting during the summer of 1975, Grandma Adams and I attended a seminar by Jacob Mittleider that really got me excited. He described the Garden of Eden, how it grew so well because the soil had the perfect combination of nutrients. But after 6,000 years of soil deficiency from nutrient depletion, the result is poor crops, lack of flavor, diseases and all the other problems, because many essential nutrients are lacking. He did mention one exception—the Nile River in Egypt flooded its banks nearly every year, covering the floodplains with fresh, nutrient-dense silt that produced abundant, flavorful, healthy crops. After traveling the world and studying plants extensively, he came up with a formula that would produce excellent crops, even in a plain mix of sawdust and sand. He tried his method in Africa, Papua-New Guinea, Honduras and other parts of the world, with outstanding results. After attending his seminar, we drove an hour away 157

to Hollister, where he had a project in progress, with 120 greenhouses and 80 grow boxes. There I met Eddie Henken and Mr. Larsen, to ask about attending their handson training program. Sadly, there were none scheduled, but they offered to let me work there for a small stipend, as they were shorthanded. So, Daddy towed our Love Bug trailer from Placerville, parked it on the property, and I lived there, learning all about growing greenhouse tomatoes, as well as zucchini squash, carrots and a few other vegetables. I learned how to mix the proper amounts of nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus, along with lime and a tiny bit each of a dozen micronutrients to come up with a balanced weekly feeding program for optimum plant growth and health. There was a pre-plant mix, a seedling mix, and a growth mix, each a bit different in components. They preferred to call the fertilizer mineral nutrients instead of chemicals, which sounded nicer. I was fascinated as we planted thousands of tomato seeds, transplanted 24,000 seedlings into planters, and prepared to set them in the greenhouse grow boxes. Then we took off for the weekend to camp at Yosemite. Upon our return, we found every single seedling dead—hit by a fungus disease while we were gone. But we sterilized everything and started over, this time applying fungicide, and we produced an excellent crop. I decided to pursue a career in agriculture, and planted a small experimental garden at Linda Vista in our backyard, using the Mittleider method. I excitedly planted a nice variety of seeds and watched the garden grow. But the plants grew slowly, were stunted, and my “model garden” was a total failure. After consulting further with Eddie Henken, he admitted that the Mittleider method works great—as long as he is around to diagnose deficiencies, diseases, etc. But it isn’t a foolproof method for the home gardener. 158

Ran

Meanwhile, Grandma Adams encouraged me to study Theology, saying I would make an excellent pastor. I had my doubts, but decided to go to Bolivia as a Student Missionary during portions of 1976 and 1977. I went there to assist a district pastor doing visitation, giving Bible studies and leading out in church programs and activities. After arriving, I spent two weeks training with the pastor, and then he flew with me 250 miles into a very remote part of the Amazon jungle, where Bolivia borders Brazil near Peru. I lived in a small adobe room next to a dying church of two faithful members and a handful of lukewarm attendees. The pastor returned to his district and left me to carry on and build up the church. I was very miserable there. I’m fine with preaching once in a while and working with children, but I am not a social person. I dreaded visiting homes, giving Bible studies, and being in charge of all the church activities. I trained other members and delegated responsibilities, but I definitely did not feel called to pastoral ministry. I felt guilty for not enjoying “doing God’s work,” yet I also knew that God can use people in many other careers. I gave hundreds of Bible studies, and not a single person I studied with chose to surrender their lives fully to God. Five people were baptized before I left, but they were ones already attending church or committed to God. Even my garden produced only a handful of tiny radishes and pencil-sized carrots. I felt like I was a total failure. Back in the U.S., I spent a year and a summer doing construction from foundation to roofing at Leoni Meadows, and I totally loved carpentry, as I had while working with Sydney Holland and Papa during previous years. So, I decided to study Industrial Arts Education at PUC, and enjoyed it thoroughly. I even taught shop classes to the PUC Prep School students, and that went very well. 159

We are both convinced that God led Diana and me together, and our lives since then have been very fulfilling, and full of huge challenges as well.

I especially enjoyed teaching practical manual arts to the students in Mexico.

I’ve seen firsthand that God can use anybody who is willing, no matter what career they choose. And yes, we still have a garden where we now live in California, and enjoy plenty of food from it nearly every day. 160

Swings and Marbles When we played with friends up the hill at Yerba Buena, we enjoyed a swing hanging from a large oak limb. It was a long rope with a sturdy stick fastened to it. We grabbed it with both hands, ran sideways along a slight incline, and then flew out over a steep drop-off, sailing through the air in a thrilling wide arc, landing on the gentle slope on the opposite side. In the jungle area further down the hill, giant vines called bejucos hung on firmly in the treetops. They were also very long, and about 2” in diameter. When a vine got chopped off near the base and the jungle underbrush was cleared away, we enjoyed swinging from those as well. In front of our house, a leaning pine tree offered a perfect opportunity for a rope swing. So, I purchased a stout rope, shimmied up the tree and tied it firmly above a branch to keep it from sliding down. With a stout wood handle fastened at the bottom, I enjoyed swinging in a big arc over the area that sloped below. If I got enough speed and gauged it properly, I could swing out and around all the way to an 8’ tall pine tree, kicking the top as I went by. I let my friends use it too, but soon other students came clear over from the campus to enjoy it. I decided to cash in on it, and insisted they pay 5 centavos (just over half a penny U.S.) to use it. That soon kept them from returning, so my friends and I could swing whenever we wanted. Playing marbles was another fun activity we enjoyed, especially during recess at school. We played on hard-packed smooth level dirt areas which had three holes about 2 feet apart, 3 inches across and an inch deep. We took turns flicking our marbles to the furthest hole. Whomever got nearest, or even into the hole got to go next. The goal was to flick our marbles back into the middle hole, and then to the first one, making 3 such rounds. The trick was not only to get to the holes, but at the same time bounce our marbles off those of our opponents, knocking theirs further away while getting ours closer to the next hole. I rarely had the skill to win, but Marcos Diaz, a Chamula Indian classmate, was by far the best. He could stand many feet away, flick his marble with a spin and perfect aim, landing his marble exactly in front of another marble, making it fly off into the distance, while his spun a few turns where the other marble had been sitting. Or he could bounce off a marble and right into the hole he was aiming for. Sometimes he did all 3 rounds before we even got our turns, winning the game. The rest of us had a better chance of getting to play when he wasn’t around, but we all enjoyed it. I spent days leveling a flat marble court near the swing tree so I could play with my friends when they came over to our house. I found a way to make spending money at that also. While in the U.S. I bought bulk bags of colorful marbles not available in Mexico, which I could sell for 161

double the price of the ones locally available. They always sold out quickly, as did many other things I bought in bulk and sold to the students, who wanted anything made in the U.S. such as candy, Matchbox cars, felt-tipped pens, etc. Hill Slides and Jumps When the road below our house was dug out and widened, the area below it was a steep bank of loose dirt—perfect for sliding to a trail near the bottom, which we could use to circle around back up to the top. We sat on pieces of cardboard and got good speed—and well covered with dirt! My friends brought a short wood ladder made of sticks with slats nailed across them, and we could ride 3 at a time down that, sitting on rungs and bracing our feet against other rungs. Sometimes we went tumbling, but most of the time we made it to the bottom intact. A steep bank behind the church was another fun place to play. It was shorter and too steep to slide, but we could jump about 10 feet down and land in soft dirt that slanted steeply, so we never got hurt. Pathfinder Activities

While living at Linda Vista, I really enjoyed participating in outdoor youth activities. Mommy got me the Pathfinder Field Guide, as well as the MV Honor Book, which had the requirements for Pathfinder levels from Adventurers to Master Guides. I completed all the requirements for the levels up to Guide, minus one item—to memorize Psalm 91 or 1 Corinthians 13. No matter how hard I tried, even into my 30’s, I never mastered either chapter, so I gave up, and didn’t get to Master Guide. Diana, on the other hand, memorized Psalm 119— the longest chapter in the Bible, with 176 verses! She also memorized the books of John, Daniel and Revelation, as well as dozens of chapters and hundreds of verses from other books. Back to Pathfinders, the book also listed all the honors available at the time, and the requirements for each honor, so we kids worked hard at earning as many honors as possible to fill our sashes.

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I devoured the details of each section of the Field Guide, and when the Pathfinders got together to learn and demonstrate the skills we had learned, I shared many details from that book. We also went on campouts to nearby meadows, hillsides or jungle areas, and I was the only one who had a canvas pup tent. The others made shelters using sticks and blankets, hoping it wouldn’t rain. Sitting around the campfire, eating roasted veggie dogs and other good things, telling stories and just being out in nature made it special. Pathfinder Honors While attending Pinecrest Camp, some of the activities included working toward earning Pathfinder Honors, in which we would fulfill specific requirements in each area to earn colorful, embroidered oval badges to add to the sash that went over a shoulder, across the chest, and back and down to our waist. We had a book which described many dozens of areas toward which we could earn badges, with the requirements for each honor. That motivated us to learn a specialty in a wide variety of skills and topics, so we worked to earn as many as possible to fill our sashes. Some of my honors included Campcraft, Wilderness Survival, Rocks, Cacti, Insects, Beekeeping, Orienteering, Baking, Cooking, and many others. Cycling was one that I worked hard at, and one requirement was to disassemble a bicycle completely and put it all back together again. Linda’s bike was the smallest, so I chose to take that one apart. But it was a well-made and old, with the hardware very difficult to disassemble. It was hard work, but eventually I completed the task. However, the bike was never the same after that, and I wished I’d chosen a different one. One final requirement was to ride 50 miles in one day. I couldn’t do that around Linda Vista, because of the steep mountain roads, and the bikes had no gears. We did coast down long grades between San Cristobal and Tuxtla, or the pass to Solosuchiapa, but that involved very little pedaling. So that had to wait until we were at the border, camped out at Benton-Rio Grande State Park. The area was fairly level, with long farm roads and little traffic. I rode around the park a few miles for several days to warm up after 163

sitting in the car while traveling for many days. Then the day arrived when I decided to ride 50 miles. Daddy’s tall blue bike had a speedometer-odometer mounted on it, so I could tell how far I’d gone. After breakfast, away I went, taking it slow to conserve my energy. Hour after hour went by, and my progress seemed so slow. I’d go up a long, easy grade, cross over to the next road, and get rest by coasting down that grade before cutting over to the next up grade. By lunchtime, I had cycled 37 miles. I felt tired and hungry, and headed back to camp. After dinner, I rested on my bunk in the Love Bug trailer, and my legs were sore. But I was determined to complete my 50 miles, and away I went. This time it was much more difficult, and I went slower. But I kept plodding along, mile after mile. As I neared 50 miles, I headed back to camp, riding back and forth within the park until the odometer reached 50 miles. I limped into the trailer, collapsed onto my bunk and rested. My legs were burning, I couldn’t sleep at first, and felt totally exhausted like I’d never felt in my life. I slept well that night, and felt a little sore the next day, but soon was back to normal. I discovered that I should have ridden the bike for a longer period of time before doing 50 miles, but the way we traveled and the places we lived didn’t provide that option, so I made the best of the opportunity I did have. While camped there, we enjoyed playing in the dense, jungle-like growth. Vines grew in the trees and spread out between them like huge, strong nets. I climbed the trees, jumped into the vine mesh and walked down the intertwined vine mesh slope to the ground, over and over again. Other Bicycle Anecdotes For many years, I was the only person to have a bicycle at Linda Vista, which made many of the students there very jealous. So, they would often hide my bike when I went into the office to get our mail, or at other times when I was briefly out of sight. One time when I rode it to town about a mile up the steep hill and another mile on the gradual slope of the gravel main road, I met a group of students on my way back. They grabbed the handlebars and threatened to take it away from me. After much pleading, and threatening to tell my father, they let me go. I told Daddy as soon as I got home, and he walked me over to the boys’ dorm, where he told the dean about the incident. The dean sent for the ringleader, and told me to describe exactly what had happened. Knowing the boy might retaliate later, I got scared, and didn’t say anything. I think Dean Marino Vázquez understood my dilemma, so he let the boy go, warning him to behave himself and to leave me alone. 164

Most of the school campus was hilly, but the area in front of the comedor had a long covered smooth concrete corridor, which the girls swept and mopped every day. It was very smooth and slippery, and a great place to ride the bike— especially where it was still wet from being mopped. I would ride onto the wet area, pedal rapidly, and make the rear tire spin as I peeled out to the dry part. Or I would speed up on the dry part, hit the wet section, slam on the pedal brake, and slide a very long distance. I even figured out how to do fishtail accelerations and braking without falling. The walkway was so smooth, that even when dry, I could start at one end of the corridor, race along at full speed about 2/3 of the length, slam on the brake when I got to the fireplace, and slide all the way to the end of the corridor where it met the vehicle turnaround near the offices. The concrete basketball court was another favorite place to ride. Daddy had a bigger bike, and he taught me how to sit on the handlebars and ride it sitting backwards. Linda had a small $5 Flea Market bike, and I had a medium-size bike—one that Daddy bought me brand new. It was the latest style with wide handlebars, a banana seat and 3 speeds! However, Linda’s was easier to ride and do tricks with, so I rode it more than she did. I loved doing wheelies, and got to where I could ride from one end of the corridor to the other on one wheel. I also raced across the grassy area and up a steep bank, flying high into the air and landing a dozen or more feet away, still pedaling till I got to a place with gravel, where I skidded and did a turning stop. Many years later when I taught students in the woodshop down the hill, I rode my yellow Honda 90 up that same hill, and with higher speed I got more air and landed 20 or more feet away. I had to slam on my brakes hard to stop by time I reached the office. Then I calmly parked the Honda, pulled a comb from my back pocket, tamed my unruly hair and took care of business in the office. 165

I rarely fell, but I remember one particular time when my sisters timed me racing Linda’s bike from the campus to our house and back over the walking trail. Leaving from the rotunda flagpole car turn-around, I raced at full speed along the road past the store, up the trail over a small ridge, down into a dip, over another ridge and dip behind the church, up a long hill, dodged rocks on a level area, up one final grade and down a slight incline to the grassy area in front of our cabin. Skidding to a stop while turning, I raced back to the campus, again skidding to a stop at the finish line. I don’t remember how many minutes it took—possibly 3 minutes for the round trip, but it was sure fun! However, the last time I tried my speed racing happened when I had reached the house and was headed back to campus. As I flew along, the pedal must have hit the side of a large rock, causing me to lose control. I flew over the handlebars, hit myself in a very sensitive place, and lay on the ground, rolling on the pine needles and moaning in agony. Aside from a few other bruises, the bike and I were OK, but I didn’t feel like racing after that, and my sisters were surprised to see me quite subdued as I slowly rode back and told them why I didn’t feel like racing anymore. There was a fence between our house and the church to keep the cows out of the main campus. It had a 6-foot-wide wooden gate where the walking path passed through it. I liked to race the bike up the hill, slam into the gate with the front tire to fling it open, and speed toward the house, seeing how far I could get before the gate slammed shut with a loud bang. I usually got about 40 or 50 feet away over the uneven trail, about halfway to the house, before it slammed. Daddy bought a unicycle, and we took turns trying to learn how to ride it. I strung a rope from one place to another and held onto it above my head as I tried to balance. I held onto a corridor post to climb on, and wobbling all over the place, after much practice, made it from one end of the corridor to the other. But I never learned to mount or ride it properly, and it wasn’t as fun as the bicycle, so we eventually sold it. I also sold my 3-speed wide-handlebar bike, which I never really liked, as it was hard to ride on our uneven terrain, and I couldn’t do all the tricks and wheelies I could on Linda’s bike. Eventually I outgrew Linda’s bike and we sold it to our friends the Cordova family. The next time we returned to Mexico, I didn’t see the bike, and asked about it. They were hesitant to tell me, but I insisted, so they showed me. It was in the junk pile, in pieces and totally destroyed. I was not happy about that. 166

Motorcycle Riding I learned to ride Paul Allred’s Honda 50 when I was 11 years old, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Then when I was 14, Daddy bought a red Honda Trail 90 for Clifford Tonsberg. I rode that around a lot, but when we took it to Mexico, after riding around there a few weeks, Elwin Norton took it to Sabanilla in his plane. When I was 16, Daddy and I bought a yellow Honda 90 for $275, and I rode that for the rest of my able-bodied years, and loved it. At first, I fell a few times, especially when I tried going up steep trails with loose rocks, or tracks through desert sand. But eventually I learned, and went through many seemingly impassible areas, like most cyclists like to do. Several times I rode it all the way to the Yerba Buena dams—after the trail was no longer maintained. Another time I followed the steep walking trail down the cliff from Pueblo Nuevo to Linda Vista. In one place the trail was so deep and narrow with a thinner deep path in the middle. I had to lift the Honda to drag it down past that point, but I made it! Another time, while riding down a grassy hillside after visiting San José, I used the front brake too hard and it locked, tumbling sideways in the grass, and ending up with grass stains on my jeans. That was embarrassing for me as folks laughed nearby. Daddy had a big red Harley he rode around in the U.S. and sometimes made long day trips on it. One time we needed to get from the Ranch to Bud Darrington’s garage, to pick up the yellow car, which was being repaired. So, we all piled onto the Harley – Lanita on the gas tank, Daddy, Linda and Mommy sandwiched on the seat and me on the hard steel rack in back. It was a bit scary riding Mosquito Road that way, but we made it without mishap. Daddy also had a smaller black and white Harley mix that came from a police sidecar with the car removed, and parts from other motorcycles. It even had reverse, making it easy to back up in tight places. Daddy took it to Mexico in a box trailer, and it stayed there for many years. Sometimes he rode it to the nearest town or city with a phone to call home, 167

but mostly he rode it to Yerba Buena or Pueblo Nuevo. He taught me how to ride it and do donuts in loose gravel. When he saw a logging road being made from Rincon Chamula to an area with many pine trees, he took me with it to visit a sawmill in operation over a ridge, down to a small river and up the next hillside. On the way, a deep mudhole blocked our way, but a narrow dry footpath followed the edge, so I got off and he tried to maneuver that. However, he lost his balance and toppled over—onto the downhill side of the bank. It was too heavy for Daddy and me to lift up, but some Chamula men came along, and we got it back onto the road past the mudhole. The men at the sawmill were happy for our visit, and Daddy shared some of his logging wisdom after he learned how they got the logs down to the mill without a tractor. We had no problems coming back. Another time we heard a tractor near Estoraque, working on the ridge that slopes down from Pueblo Nuevo to the river far below. After a few weeks, Daddy and I rode the Harley down the new logging road to the river, where it ended. Daddy noticed that some of the road had damage from recent rains, and suggested to the dozer driver about making rolling water bars. He thought it was a good idea, and a few months later, we returned and found that he had taken Daddy’s advice. I was on the Honda this time. We saw the ruins of a huge adobe cathedral with no roof near the river. We crossed at a wide shallow part of the river. Being low, the Harley got wet, with the exhaust blowing bubbles as it got in deeper water. I got across easily on the Honda, keeping my feet above the footrests to stay dry. We climbed along a sawtooth ridge that we could see from our house at the school, went through a pass at the end of the tall cliffs, and descended to another smaller river. The road was steep, with loose dirt and rocks, and I took a tumble. I was OK, but the left brake lever broke off at the end. It was still functional, so we continued to the bottom, crossed the next river, and then climbed the mountainside for quite a long distance, passing through a village we could barely see from our house, perched on the mountainside. It was called El Limar, but I cannot find it on Google maps. We continued climbing, eventually getting into virgin pine forests carpeted with lovely park-like grass. The lumbermen were harvesting larger trees, and a sawmill cut them into lumber. It was a very long drive over a steep rough road to get the lumber out, but there were plenty of trees there. This is the furthest mountain 168

we can see from the school in the above photo. We stopped several times on our way back to gather air plants for my collection. Back in the U.S., Eileen & Ronny had the big red Harley 74, which they fixed up and painted. Daddy and I took it out on a desert road near Fallon, and rode it at full speed. The speedometer registered close to 100 mph, but Eileen said it was not accurate. I had a tape recorder along to record Harley sounds as we rode along. I recorded Daddy doing donuts, and also speeding by at full throttle— recordings which I still have. I rode it all the way from Fallon to Placerville—the longest I ever rode it at one time. Daddy drove the rest of the family in the car behind me. It was a thrilling ride! The one time I dumped it was in 1976, while I rode it to work with Papa and Sydney on a job past El Dorado on Highway 49. On Forni Road, a car pulled out in front of me from a side road on a straight stretch, so I passed it. A little further ahead I came to a 90-degree curve a bit too fast, got too close to the centerline, hit a wet spot with small gravel, and skidded down the middle of the road about 70 feet, spinning round and round sideways on the crash bars, my chin bumping the handlebar and my knee lightly scraping the road, enough to rip a hole in my jeans and barely scraping my knee. Before the Harley stopped spinning, I found myself thrown into the air onto the pavement in a running position. I stopped and ran back to the Harley, on its’ side in the middle of the road, still in gear and engine running, spinning around in circles on the crash bars. I turned off the motor, picked it up and pushed it to the side of the road. This all happened within 15 or 20 seconds. Daddy was in Grandma’s Impala ahead of me, and watched everything happen in his rear-view mirror. I checked the Harley and it had a few scratches, but otherwise it was OK, so we went on to work. I felt bad I’d scratched the fender and crash bars just after so much work had been put into it, but am thankful I was OK, especially since we didn’t wear helmets in those days. Hillclimbs and Motorcycle Races A few times when we were in the U.S. around Easter, we’d go to the motorcycle hillclimbs in the grassy rolling hills near Livermore. A steep slope was marked off 169

with white lines, and men with ropes fastened to the top stood at the edges, ready to circle around and catch men and their cycles when needed, which was most of the time. There were a few Harleys, but most were tinnysounding Yamaha and Suzuki trail bikes. They started at the bottom about 30’ from the steep part, getting as much momentum as possible. It got harder near the top, where it was rough and so steep the front end flew up and over backward, sending bike and rider tumbling down the steep slope. Most of the time, men at the ropes caught them, but sometimes a bike went flipping and flying down so fast that it couldn’t be stopped. The better riders with powerful bikes were able to follow the right lines, avoid the rough places and go flying over the top. The climbs were timed, so the ones who made it in the least amount of time won trophies. There were different categories of bikes and riders, and plenty of excitement the entire time. Once I went up the side ridge to watch from the top, but most of the action happened further down. Some bikes had chains, others had very knobby tires. Since it was Easter, event sponsors hid colored eggs in the grass for us kids to find. During recent years I’ve watched videos of hillclimbs, and now they use bikes with the rear wheel sticking back about 8 feet, with spikes or paddles on the rear tires. This gives them the advantage of greater traction with the rider weight at the very front, but when they take their tumbles, they risk greater injuries. Whenever possible, Daddy took off on a “business trip,” which I found out just recently that those trips included major motorcycle races. Daddy took me to a few of them, and I was amazed at how fast those racing bikes sped around the dirt tracks, doing power slides around the curves, leaning so steeply it seemed impossible to keep control. And they often did lose control, sliding into straw bales 170

along the track edges. They often raced only inches apart, and sometimes had pileups, and some riders ended up with broken legs and other bones. One time we went to a race in Tulare. Daddy bought a ticket, climbed to the top of the grandstand, and dropped it to me so I could get in. Yes, we were naughty, but tickets cost $5.50 each, which was a lot of money in 1970. As the bikes did warm-up laps, a rain shower came through. The racers walked the track, decided it was too dangerous, and the race was cancelled. Many people were angry, even though the announcer said the spectators could get a refund. Lines were long, and many impatient people just dropped their tickets on the ground and left, even though they could have gotten refunds by mail. I grabbed a handful of tickets, but knew I could only get one refund, so I threw them away. Then Daddy said we could go through lines over and over, so I started picking up tickets, but by then others were doing the same thing, and I found very few. I wished I hadn’t discarded the first handful! We each went through the line about 3 times, each time at a different booth. Later, Mommy mailed in a few more and we got a check for them. So, we made some money on that non-race! Mail

Getting mail was always special, and we really looked forward to reading letters from family and friends in the States. Grandma Landstrom wrote every week, Grandma and Papa wrote often, and others wrote from time to time. And we kept busy writing back to them. With letters taking two weeks or more to reach their destinations, it took a full month to get a reply from each letter. Mommy subscribed to the Junior Guide, and we all devoured that each week, although at times several weeks would pass with no issues, and then two or three arrived at a time. Later when I turned 13, Mommy subscribed to The Youth’s Instructor. About that time, it transitioned into a new modern magazine for the changing youth trends. At first it had no name, but after a name contest, it became Insight Magazine. It was OK, but I still preferred the Junior Guide, and I submitted my name and address in the Pen Pal section, sharing my hobbies and favorite things to do. Jennifer Wong from Hong Kong was my first Pen Pal. I had 171

pen pals from other countries, from which I got stamps for my collection. Wayne Nielsen in Florida was a Pen Pal we later met in person with his parents when we traveled to that state in 1970. Joni Swain was another Pen Pal I met 8 years later when we were both at PUC. She invited me to what I thought would be a youth gettogether at the home of the Chuck Reeve family, but in reality, it was an Amway presentation in which supposedly the best products of the “American Way” had been developed, but it was a pyramid money-making scheme, and I wasn’t interested in it. Joni wasn’t my type anyway, so we never communicated again. And the very next day after I met Joni, I went on my first date with Diana, and the rest has been “together happily ever after!” Back to the topic of mail at Linda Vista, Mommy also subscribed to the Review and Herald, and we read the Children’s Story in that. We also got the weekly Mountain Democrat to keep up on news in Placerville, and for a time, my parents subscribed to the daily newspaper from Harlingen, Texas to keep up on national news. Mail bags were sent from Tuxtla by bus or cargo trucks, and delivered to a house in Pueblo Nuevo. If we were in town, we’d stop to see if there was any mail for Linda Vista—and us! The lady dumped the mail bag onto the dirt floor, and about half of it was for the school. And often a lot of that mail was for us! One time the mail was sent on a truck loaded with tequila, which overturned and saturated the mail sack and contents. When we got our mail, we had to let it dry out and evaporate before we could tolerate the stench. Ink had run on the letters, and they were barely readable. Mommy wrote home about nearly getting drunk while reading the church magazines! Some of the mail never got though, which we could tell by missing magazine or newspaper issues, and things we heard later from relatives who wondered why we hadn’t responded. Daddy had a high-quality reel-to-reel tape recorder with a powerful radio built in it. He connected a wire to it, running it up into the rafters to serve as an antenna, and when he couldn’t sleep late at night, he listened to AM stations from the U.S., getting news updates much faster than we got from two-week-old newspapers. 172

Linda Vista Phone Service I don’t know when Pueblo Nuevo first had phone service, but Linda Vista had a phone in their office in the late 1960’s. The number was 17. Often the phone didn’t work, so we had to go to town, where a lady managed small phone switchboard adjoining the Tienda Prats—the only indoor store there during the early years. She answered Operator calls, and then plugged in stretchy cables into a board full of numbered holes, connecting calls to the desired number. Making a call from Linda Vista was nearly impossible. It involved picking up the receiver to connect to the operator in town, and sweet-talking her into calling the main switchboard in Tuxtla, the Chiapas capital. From there, the call went to Mexico City, and then on to the U.S. Calling from the U.S. was a challenge as well—dial 0 for Operator and connecting to an International Operator, who then called Mexico City. Once in Mexico, the phone didn’t make a ringing sound, it was more like the distant hooting sound of an ocean buoy. From there it went to Tuxtla, then to Pueblo Nuevo, and finally, Linda Vista, and we could hear the operators and hooting at each step along the way. Once the secretary at Linda Vista answered, she was told who the call was for. In the early years, she sent a student running to the classroom, house, or dorm to let the person know they had a phone call, and that person ran to the office, hoping to arrive before the call got disconnected. Later, the school administrators asked my parents to bring a loudspeaker system from the U.S. That cut in half the time the call recipient arrived at the phone. And there was no privacy. Everybody on campus knew who got phone calls, and the phone was in the main school office hall near the mailboxes where anybody nearby could hear the conversation. 173

When Daniel was born at Yerba Buena Hospital on June 4, 1985, as soon as everything was stable, I drove up to the phone switchboard cubicle in town, gave the lady the number in California to call, and when she got through, I got the information to one relative, and they shared it with the rest of the family. In one quick call I took care of the gender reveal, birth date, time, weight, hair and eye color, full name and the full hospital cost for the birth—$85 U.S. dollars. And the phone call cost about $5.00. In the mid 1990’s, an inter-campus phone system connected all the homes, offices, dorms and work departments. That saved a lot of time sending messenger students running to give messages. Soon after that, a direct-dial phone line was installed at the school, and in early 1996, we got our own phone, from which we could make and receive calls to and from the U.S.! The line and phone cost about $365 U.S., plus a monthly fee, but it was so nice to communicate with family so quickly! Then our phone service quit for several months, and later we discovered the brand-new phone lines had been cut and used for fencing around the houses and gardens of invading families living on school property! Eventually the line was replaced, but a few months later we left for the U.S., and did not get our money’s worth from that wonderful modern phone service. But we enjoyed it while we had it! In 2010 we returned to Linda Vista for an alumni reunion, and by then the school had Internet service and a strong cell phone signal as well, so our land line was already outdated. My parents and sisters went to visit friends in the Chamula village of San José, and the indigenous folks were using cell phones too! What a drastic change in just a few years! 174

Stamp Collecting

Getting mail from Pen Pals around the world, and seeing such a wide variety of stamps, I started collecting them. I picked up a cheap stamp album that had the most common stamps from each country, but soon it was filled, and became outdated as newer stamps came out. So, I bought a larger, binder-style album, into which I could add more pages as needed. I got both grandmas and other relatives to send interesting stamps for my collection, and sometimes I bought bags of 200 or more stamps from stores or mail-order catalogs. In those days, stamps were not self-adhesive. After tearing the stamps off with the envelope corners, I soaked them in containers of warm water until the adhesive let them slide easily off the paper. Then I dried them upside down so they wouldn’t stick to anything. Once dry, if the stamps were too wrinkled, I pressed them in large books until they stayed flat. Then came the fun part – sticking them into my album. I used stamp hinges, which were thin folded pieces of cellophane coated with adhesive. I licked the short part, stuck it on the back of the stamp near the top, licked the longer part, and stuck it over the photo in my album matching that stamp. The adhesive was not very strong, so if I found the same stamp in better condition, I could remove one and replace it with a better one. I learned a lot about countries around the world by studying the stamps, and could even tell which were from China and Japan by their characters. Saudi Arabia had the biggest and most colorful stamps, but other countries did as well. While at Linda Vista, I ran out of stamp hinges, so when Daddy made one of his many trips to the U.S., I asked him to bring me a pack of stamp hinges. A few months later when he returned, I eagerly asked about the stamp hinges. He smiled and handed me a different-looking packet—of black triangular photo album corners! I felt very disappointed, but felt sorry for him, taking the time to look for what I requested, and not knowing the difference, bringing what he thought I wanted. I had to wait until we got back to the states to stick my stamps into 175

the album. Linda and maybe Lanita collected stamps too, and I gave them my extras, but I had the largest collection. By the time I was in my late teens, I got busy with other projects, and stored them away, along with a few old coins that I had collected as well. In my early 20’s, I donated my collections to The Voice of Prophecy, for them to sell and use the funds for their ministry. Musical Instruments The first time I remember having music lessons is when Daddy had Nicolasito try to teach me to play the guitar. I was quite young—maybe 7 or 8. The guitar was big and bulky, and pressing the strings against the frets hurt my fingers, so I only lasted through 2 or 3 lessons. Later, Daddy decided we’d learn to play the marimba as a family. We purchased a set of rubber marimba sticks and Domingo Pérez tried to teach us to play. Linda and I had the high notes, where you have to roll your wrists and make a smooth trill, but we never mastered the skill. After a few lessons, we quit before learning our first song. I took piano lessons from Geneva Clint in Placerville, but her house smelled like burned cheese, and I struggled to learn. Nytta Norton at Yerba Buena gave piano lessons to all 3 of us for two years, and we made better progress with her. Linda and I even played a duet, Onward Christian Soldiers. We each also learned a recital piece to play for Grandma and Papa, and mine was The Geisha. Many years later, Papa taught me to play his masterpiece composition The Bright Angel Trail, through which the music follows a mule trail to the bottom of the Grand Canyon and back to the top. It includes majestic sweeping views along the way, Indian dancers partway down, the song of the river, and the slow, arduous climb back to the rim. My landlady Helen Lund at PUC wrote out the music, so we have it printed and I got a copywrite for it. That was the only piece I could play well. Marlene Silva gave me accordion lessons, but I didn’t care for that. Linda got a melodica, which is like a piano that you blow through to play it. After the novelty wore off, that was set aside. Someone gave us a ukulele which we strummed once 176

in a while, but we never really mastered that. I don’t particularly care about violin music, but when I was getting to know Diana, she was learning it, and had to teach someone else what she was learning. I was happy to be her student so we could spend more time together, and I learned the basics. For the final recital I had to play a piece through that I’d never played before. I did it, but not very well. I never touched a violin after that, but touching Diana—that’s a different story! Baptism When I turned 12, I wanted to be baptized, so I joined the baptismal class with a few other young people. We met on a large boulder in the grassy area below the comedor, where Pastor Xavier Soto Valle went through the basic Bible teachings while the others were having Sabbath School. I was baptized on Friday night, March 8, 1968, along with three other boys and two girls. We wore dark blue baptismal robes with heavy ball bearings sewn into the seams at the bottom to keep them from floating up as we stepped into the water. It felt icy cold, as the small propane water heater wasn’t much help with that amount of water in the large concrete tank in the church baptistry. When I invited Daddy to get baptized with me, he said he wasn’t ready yet— he said his life was too black from all the bad things he had done in his younger years. I told him that God loves him anyway, and will forgive him if he asks. But he said maybe another time. I was disappointed. He did say that he wanted to be baptized at age 12, but his parents said he wasn’t ready—he needed to stay out of trouble and be a better person. But no matter how much he tried, he just couldn’t seem to please his parents. He finally gave up, feeling that his case was hopeless. A few years later, Linda and Lanita decided to be baptized. Again, we invited Daddy to join them. Again, he said he wasn’t ready yet. He felt that he should attend a series of evangelistic meetings first. The following summer, the Placerville Church had such a series. The rest of us attended, but in spite of our invitations for Daddy to join us, he was always “too busy” or “not feeling up to it.” And so, the years went by. We prayed for him every day.

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Many decades went by. As Daddy got older, he realized that his time was running out. His good friend Pastor Paul Emerson came out to the Ranch to visit him, and they had some serious spiritual conversations. One day, he told Mommy that he didn’t want to miss out on eternal life with the rest of his family. As a child, he’d wanted to be baptized in the Eel River, and that’s where we attended Redwood camp meeting every year. So, in 2014, at age 94, Pastor Paul baptized him in the frigid waters of the Eel River. Mommy was re-baptized with him in support of his commitment. And nearly all of the living relatives were there to provide support as well. That was indeed an answer to prayer, and a very special day for the entire family. My Born Again Experience Even though I was baptized at age 12, read my Bible, and prayed regularly, my walk with God was more like a routine. But things changed a few years later at age 17. My best friend Javier was in California with us for a year in 1972-73. For some reason we took a break from Mexico—perhaps our family was low on finances and we needed to work and save up money. During that time, Javier felt a deep conviction that he needed to be re-baptized. So, Pastor Bill Hilliard came over and went through a series of Bible studies from the booklet In His Steps. I helped translate when Javier had a hard time understanding. When we got to the lesson on The Plan of Salvation, I suddenly realized as never before the price that Jesus paid for my sins, so that I could live with Him and my saved loved ones for eternity! Yes, I’d heard the story many times before, but this time it impacted me in a new and different way. I felt like a new person, and had a deep desire to spend time getting to know Jesus better as my close, personal friend. My devotional life grew as I saw Bible stories and principles from a totally new perspective. Over time, the thrilling newness of that experience wore off, but just like marriage, Diana and I are still deeply in love, even though we don’t feel the initial excitement of our first years together. My walk with God has its ups and downs, but I am grateful that He is by my side, filling me with His love, peace, joy and hope of a future beyond my wildest dreams.

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Being Paralyzed This is not a childhood memory, but it is a memory from more than half my life ago that I want to record. Having spent much of my childhood at Linda Vista, my dream was to get training and return to serve there the rest of my life, unless God had other places where He needed me to work. When I heard the news that our official call came through from the General Conference to serve there, I literally jumped for joy! Our first years working at Linda Vista were so fulfilling, as we trained young people in practical manual arts—hands-on skills that would be useful to them no matter which career they followed. We developed a program where all the students rotated to a variety of practical skills, taught by the staff in charge of different work departments. For the boys, that training included agriculture, auto mechanics, electricity, plumbing, printing, photography, and my specialty, carpentry and construction. The girls learned gardening, healthful food preparation and preservation, child rearing, sewing, and other home skills. Diana taught some of the gardening and kitchen skills. The students loved it, and it gave them a break from classroom book learning. I also started up a burl clock industry as a way for students to earn tuition money, as well as bring in a good profit for the school. That expanded to cutting out plywood shapes of Mexico, a variety of states, praying children, trees, owls and many other figures. These were coated with a glossy resin and sold for a good price. Large cattle ranches in the lowlands ordered customized clocks, and using the copier with clear acrylic sheets, I could create just about any design requested. This was before the days of computers and high-resolution printers, but our products were top quality, and sold well throughout Mexico and were even exported to other parts of the world. I was amused one day while shopping for hardware in San Cristobal, a 3½ drive from our school. I noticed one of our Chiapas shaped clocks in a Travel Agency, and acting like a tourist, I asked the lady at the desk where she got the clock from. She looked at it and said, “Do you like it? This is a product of our lovely state of Chiapas!” “Yes, I do like it” I responded. “But where did you get it? “Oh,” she 179

responded. “Some students from a school in these mountains sold it to us. And it was made right here in our lovely state of Chiapas!” I was amused at her enthusiasm about it, but never told her that I was behind the production of her source of pride. Another time while at the airport in Mexico City, I saw a display showing typical dresses and other items from Chiapas, and one of our clocks was right in the center of the display. OK, back to life at Linda Vista. At first, we lived in the small cabin built for our family in 1965, but I decided to build a nicer wood frame house, hoping that the school administrators would follow my example instead of building additional cold block or brick houses with no heating whatsoever, taking many months to build, and costing multiple times the $5,000 it cost to build our house. First, I built a suitable workshop, outfitted with all the basic tools and hardware I needed, including a miter saw, table saw, planer, jointer and drill press. Daddy and his helpers cut lumber for us, and after my parents left, I hired men to cut the rest of the lumber by hand. After it cured, I prepared all the lumber necessary to frame the house, and collected the roofing, insulation and everything else. During that transition, I expanded the woodshed behind our cabin to 14’ by 24’ and moved our things and family into it, and we were very cozy. We had no bathroom, but at night we used the toilet when we tore down the old cabin, and neighbors let us use their shower. Our expanded woodshed had a large walk-in closet that had all our things stored and labeled in boxes. The living area was one large room with a kitchen counter and sink, propane refrigerator, hot and cold running water, electricity, our wood stove with coils to heat water in a tank behind it, Daniel’s 180

crib, our bed, desk, file cabinet, copy machine, table, benches, a rocking chair, bookcases and even our stereo cabinet. While living there, I carried on with my teaching responsibilities. Other staff and administrators were amazed that we as Americans were happy living in such simple accommodations, but we loved it! The foundation for our new house was expanded and a concrete floor poured over the old one. Then my four helpers age 12 to 14, plus a few staff men who didn’t leave for Easter vacation, helped me frame the walls, put up trusses and beams, and put on the sheet metal roof, all within 8 working days. Everybody was amazed to see a house go up so quickly! I ordered aluminum frame windows from Tuxtla, which were better than wooden ones or steel frames that rusted and had to be repainted. I made all the doors, installed the electrical wiring, and had the school maintenance crew put in the plumbing. Our stainless steel kitchen sink came from the U.S.—in the very roomy engine compartment of our 1957 yellow Chevy Carryall. We had a bathtub-shower, nice bathroom sink cabinet, a loft above the hallway for Daniel to play in, and extra storage in the loft above the guest bedroom. When we had to make trips to the border to renew our papers, we hid our valuable easy-to-steal items like the copier, slide projector, stereo, kitchen appliances, picture albums, cassettes, stereo, etc. in a hidden storage area accessible behind a secret hidden locked door in the master bedroom closet. 181

Nearly every Sabbath, we took a load of students to remote Indian villages so they could help with the children’s and adult church services, which we found to be rewarding. Sabbath afternoons we hiked through the pine forest, or up to the thick jungle cloud forest on top of the mountain, or to the cliffs where we could pick large colorful orchids, or explored caves in the area. We saw colorful butterflies, and birds with songs that outdid any mockingbird. Even though we served as missionaries, our lives were in many ways like living in an earthly paradise. Yes, we had our share of problems, and had people constantly coming to our house to ask for money for medical needs, tuition, church construction, and the never-ending stream of people needing copies made, as we had the only copy machine within 50 miles over steep winding mountain roads. On two occasions, I visited remote places, hiking for many days through the mountains, where I heard of miracles happening. I got the details firsthand from the people whose lives were changed by amazing circumstances. The last trip I made was only a month before February 17, 1987, when my life took a totally unexpected change. (See Appendix 1) Many times, Diana and I talked about how blessed we were, and wondered if God was preparing us for an uncertain future that would change our lives. We read the book Joni, about a teen girl who became a quadriplegic in a diving accident. What would we do if I were to be paralyzed? We concluded that since I am such an active outdoor person, daily involved with hands-on activities training students and faculty, doing chainsaw work, riding my Honda 90, creating nature trails to beautiful parts of the school property of difficult access, and a lot more, that God would probably not allow me to become paralyzed. But, if I did get paralyzed, I’d have plenty of time to read books 182

and magazines, which my busy life never seemed to allow enough time for. And then it happened. (See Appendix 2). While I was working with a team from Maranatha putting giant trusses on a new furniture factory building, one truss snapped, and 15 tons of wood beams came crashing down so fast I barely had time to throw up my arms and shield my face before they hit me, slamming me backwards onto the concrete floor. After a loud roar of cracking timbers, all was quiet for a few seconds. Then I heard people calling for help, as they were trapped in the rubble. I was amazed that anybody was even alive, but everyone survived—most with minor injuries or none at all. As I lay there under the mass pile of lumber, I felt a numb, buzzing sensation throughout my whole body. I figured I was probably in shock, and soon I would begin to feel pain from all the broken bones I must surely have suffered from the blows. It might take surgery and several months of pain and rehab before I could get back to my former activities, but I felt total peace. It wouldn’t do me any good to wish I was up on the hill where I had stood only 10 minutes before, taking a photo of the progress. God had allowed this to happen for some reason, but I was still alive, and He would see me through whatever adventures the future held in my life. The numb sensation continued, and breathing became harder. Men clambered over the beams toward me, pulling shattered lumber away and off of my body. That took some time, but my body was freed, and they straightened my twisted body. Then it hit me—I was paralyzed. I told them not move me until Dr. Sánchez from Yerba Buena could check me. When he arrived, he tested my reflexes and said I was responding, so it was safe to move me. I was carried on a makeshift stretcher to the less-bumpy part of the road, where I rode a mile up the hill to Yerba Buena Adventist Hospital. Two other older American volunteers had back and lung injuries, but after several months, they were back at work again. After 5 days at the SDA hospital in Villahermosa, I was flown to Loma Linda University Medical Center for surgery and 183

rehab after they determined I had a broken neck at the C6-7 level. I had been moved around for five days with no neck brace or support before arriving at Loma Linda. With shards of broken vertebrae around my spinal cord, it’s a miracle that I survived. After going through a variety of tests, the specialists determined that my spinal cord was crushed, and I would never walk again. My entire family felt devastated. But I was grateful that I was in a place where I could get good care, and I looked forward to whatever new and different adventures that God had for me in the future. I also felt thankful that my accident happened while on the job, instead of while doing come crazy motorcycle riding or other dumb things I’ve done in my life. My sister Linda was studying medicine at LLU, so she arranged with Dr. Lloyd Dayes to do the surgery, replacing the shattered vertebrae with a piece of leg bone. After 5 months in rehab, I was able to move my arms and wrists, but not my fingers. I have no normal feeling from my chest down, my arms are partially numb, I have no trunk control, and I wear a catheter to a leg bag for urine drainage. My caring, loving, devoted Diana has stayed by my side, faithfully spending 3 to 4 hours every single day, doing my bowel and bladder care, dressing, bathing, ranging my legs, cleaning up my messes and a whole lot more. She has been a real blessing to me, and it’s good that we are best friends, because we are together every day! And the part about having more time to read if I became paralyzed? With all my personal care, and taking longer to get things done as a quadriplegic, I seem to have less free time than ever before! After a year and a half adjusting to wheelchair life, we returned to continue serving at Linda Vista. I taught shop classes, started a computer training program, coordinated laymen sharing Jesus in unreached areas, and a lot more. Then in 1997, we moved permanently to California, where we enjoy our peaceful, quiet home among the pines in the community of Mosquito, 30 minutes from Placerville. 184

I continue coordinating mission work in Mexico by computer; Diana enjoys working in the garden and kitchen. We taught monthly vegan cooking classes at the Camino SDA Church for 10 years. Now I spend most of my time in bed because of severe burning pain which leaves me completely fatigued physically and mentally, but I am joyful, because I have hope of a better future throughout eternity where there will no longer be pain, suffering, sickness and death. My greatest desire is to see each of my loved ones choose to live following God’s ways instead of those of the world. Every year we see signs of things getting worse and worse, just as predicted in God’s Word, and the end of time is very near. We each need to be right with God every day, because the end can come for any one of us at any moment.

Thankfulness Tradition Whenever we were at Grandma and Papa’s place on weekends, we’d gather in the living room on Friday evening and take turns sharing what we were thankful for, either that day or any time that week. It was a nice time to relax, unwind, and look back on the positive things that we’d experienced. It also gave us a chance to talk and interact all together as a family. And we could begin our Sabbath rest relaxing and peaceful with a positive attitude. 185

Pancho and the Setting Sun

Grandma and Papa Adams worked hard in their gardens and orchard, always growing way more than they could eat. They sold and gave away the surplus, but every winter when the seed catalogs came in the mail, Grandma ended up buying and planting more than she and the rest of the family could keep up with. Toward the end of a long day as the sun was setting, Papa liked to point out Pancho behind his burro silhouetted in trees on a ridge in the distance. He explained that every year as June 21, the longest day of the year approached, the sun would set closer and closer to Pancho. But when summer started, the days began getting shorter, and the sun moved further away from Pancho, so the poor fellow could never make any progress.

And so it was year after year, as we watched the sun get closer to Pancho, we watched and wondered, “Will the sun reach him this time? It’s so close! Will Pancho be able to get moving and on his way?” The last time we looked, Pancho and his burro were still there, waiting for the sun to give them a nudge. And the memories of Papa with his stories, pranks, smiles, and the twinkle in his eye when he had something up his sleeve remain in our lives to this day. ~Freddie~

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Appendix 1 VICTORY IN "EL JARDIN" Some of the fiercest battles to spread the Gospel have been fought in the mountains of Chiapas. The Lord's workers are simple men, but of extraordinary courage and willingness to give their all for the sake of Bible truth. In their work, they have faced suffering in merciless weather, economic hardship, religiouspolitical persecution, incarceration at times, and a multitude of other dangers. A good example of this is the case of Brother Pedro Nuñez Cruz. He is a consecrated lay worker of proven faith who lives in a small town by the name of Huitihupan. Our Brother Pedro ventured to carry the Good News over 12 miles of steep mountain trails to a village named "El Jardin" (The Garden). This village, inaccessible by road, is carved into a rugged mountain in an eminent coffee growing region in the state of Chiapas, Mexico. It has been known as a dangerous place to visit because of many wicked people living there. Even local residents were afraid to go outside their huts at night for fear of being murdered. Family feuds, land invasions, and adultery cases were among the reasons for frequent murders in the village. This was all happening in spite of the presence of a Presbyterian church and two Catholic churches. During his first visit to El Jardin, Brother Pedro took some clothes to sell. In each garment he wrapped a piece of truthfilled literature, and very soon people began to ask him questions. With pleasure Pedro responded as he saw their interest. The person who was the most interested was Marcelino Perez who, after several days of study with Pedro, decided to accept the Adventist message. Marcelino's father and sister followed, and they began to invite their friends to hear the word of God presented by Brother Pedro. Then one day the Authorities requested that Pedro appear before them to answer the accusations which had been made against him. When he appeared, the village Commissioner told him, "You have this afternoon to leave our village because you have come here to take away the wife of one of our men." Of course, this accusation was entirely false, but Pedro humbly answered, "That is not true. I will leave as you have requested, but if it is the Lord's will, I will return within a week." This courageous lay worker again visited his little group exactly one week later. The authorities kept silent during Pedro's 3-day stay. He made the best of this silence and returned a third time. By now, the new believers were being prepared for baptism. Once again Pedro was summoned to appear before the Authorities. The Commissioner greeted him with these words: "You are deluding our people and will bring an end to our organization (an opposing 187

political party). Stop coming to our village. Stop bothering our people with your preaching. We will no longer have power to fight for land by invading ranches and plantations." Pedro stood to his feet and faced the Commissioner and a dozen accusers, saying, "I would not have come back here except it be the will of God. I am not carrying out the orders of men but of God, who commands me, 'Go and preach to all the world." Pedro continued his visits to the believers in El Jardin, in spite of the anger of the Authorities. After several months, the group had grown so much that there was no longer room for them all to meet in a house, so they decided to build a little chapel. They borrowed some money (they still owe part of this loan) and built a chapel of mud walls and corrugated iron roof. When the members of the other churches in the village saw how rapidly the group was growing, they became angry and prohibited Pedro from visiting the village. But he didn't pay any attention to them and kept on coming. Then they threatened to have him put in jail, but he still wasn't frightened away. One day they decided to try to kill him, and went with guns to hide in the forest near the trail where they knew he would pass by. Pedro had heard about the plot to take his life, but he trusted in God and sang hymns as he walked down the trail. Pedro made the four-hour hike to his house safely, because the men who were waiting to kill him neither saw him nor heard him. God's promise had been fulfilled: "For He shall give His angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways." Psalm 91:11. Pedro continued visiting the village and meeting with the brethren week after week until a group of 96 Sabbath School members was formed. This became Adventist church Number 1 in El Jardin. During this time, the members of the Presbyterian church had been listening to Pedro's messages in their homes each Sabbath, as they were broadcast over the battery-powered loudspeaker. They had also become interested in our message, but their leaders said not to pay any attention to what they heard, as it was all false. Some were becoming convinced that Saturday is the true day of worship according to the Bible. In order to convince their members that this was false, the Presbyterian leaders confronted Pedro, but they were unable to find any texts in the Bible sanctifying Sunday as a day of worship. As Pedro showed them the Bible truth, they were convinced. They went back to their members and told them they had been in error on one point of the Law of God. Two thirds of the members of the Presbyterian church accepted the Adventist message. They were so happy to find a church that believes in all the teachings of the Bible. They decided they would continue to meet in the same building, and just change the name of their

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church to Seventh-day Adventist. Presently there are 108 believers meeting in Adventist church Number 2 of El Jardin. In late 1984, nine persons were baptized, and on January 14, 1985 another 57 persons demonstrated their commitment to the Lord by baptism. Included in this baptism were the village Commissioner and his family - his life completely changed by the power of the Gospel. He was proudly smiling ear to ear as he received his baptismal certificate! What happened to the rest of the Presbyterian church members? They moved to a different building and continued meeting there for several months. Then in February of 1985, they requested Pedro Nuñez to come and speak in their church. They are seriously interested in becoming Adventist church Number 3 of El Jardin! Within less than a year this village of 315 inhabitants has changed from being a village of murderers to an example of the power of the true Gospel. This can assure us that even in these days, our loving heavenly Father continues to work miracles to save the lost! Colegio Linda Vista February 19, 1985 Newsletter #25 I'd better get busy and tell you about my adventures during the six-day tour I took in the rugged mountains of the Chiapas interior. Even though I'm accustomed to visiting the Indian villages around here, I still felt like I was in a different world during that time. I went with Herberto Zuñiga, a good friend and former classmate of mine. He is a pastor in the Simojovel district about 40 miles from here, and is in charge of 48 churches and groups in the surrounding mountains. Most of these are inaccessible by car, so he spends much of his time visiting the churches by foot or muleback. I had been wanting to go with him on one of his pastoral tours, especially after I heard about what was happening at El Jardin (see story above). I drove two hours over bumpy roads to Simojovel on Friday, February 8. There I met Herberto and we rode mules for four hours up a hill, down into a canyon, across two wide rivers about three feet deep, then up a very steep slippery mountainside to El Jardin. We were greeted by the sound of gospel music being broadcasted over the entire village by a battery-operated sound system. Soon an announcement came over the speakers that the Pastor and a special guest had arrived, and inviting everyone to the evening meeting. We were invited to stay at the house of Señor Gomez, the former Commissioner that had so strongly opposed the Adventist work at first! Now he beamed a happy welcome to us, feeling honored that we would stay at his home. Like most of the 189

other houses in the village, his has a dirt floor, mud walls, and a corrugated iron roof. A nearby thatched-roof mud lean-to with a firepit and small table is the kitchen, and the interior is black with smoke and soot from the fires. We were fed plenty of good black beans and tortillas while there, along with potatoes, eggs, rice, and oranges. We slept in hammocks slung across the middle of the room, while the rest of the family curled up on hard board platforms with no mattresses. For bathroom needs you go outside and find a bush - they don't have such things as bathrooms. A year ago, however, it was very dangerous to go out at night, and if desperate, they would relieve themselves in a corner of the hut. Sabbath morning at 5:20 I woke up to music over the loudspeakers and a call to the early-morning devotional. I got up sleepily and wandered over to church Number 2, where I was immediately requested to lead out in the service. Since they rarely have visitors, they are hungry for any messages from guest speakers. After I taught them some hymns, I gave a devotional message and ended the meeting - I figured they would want to go home and eat breakfast. But no, they stayed and wanted me to speak to them some more. I also asked them a lot of questions, and got much of the information for the enclosed story. Eventually we did get to eat breakfast, and then I preached in church Number 1 while Herberto preached in church Number 2. Then I went and spoke in church Number 2 while Herberto spoke at church Number 1. Even after all that, people wouldn't go home for lunch they stayed for over an hour asking me to tell them more about the Christian way of life, the worldwide church work, and the Holy Lands. Most of these people are new Christians, struggling to change from their old ways, and so happy for the peace and fulfillment they've found after committing their lives to Christ. At the beginning of my trip into El Jardin, my camera broke down and absolutely refused to work. I was quite disappointed, because my purpose for the trip was to get a series of pictures depicting the El Jardin story. I hope I can go back and try again sometime soon! Sunday, we went to the village of Zacatonal, where a lay worker's meeting was scheduled. Nearly 100 workers from many villages in the surrounding mountains were in attendance. Since there are so few pastors in this conference, most of the soul winning work is being done by the lay workers, such as Pedro Nuñez. These workers meet once a month to share ideas on how to improve in their work. As in El Jardin, they too were eager to hear me preach and kept asking questions and inviting me to visit their villages. Soon after we got to Zacatonal on Sunday afternoon, I was visiting with several men - an Adventist brother and his friend Abran Mendez. Abran was showing off his switchblade knife, and I 190

mentioned that people often get killed with those. But he assured me it was only for peeling oranges. He was interested in joining the church, but had a drinking problem. I talked to him about the Christian life, and the importance of living a life surrendered to Christ in order to have victory over problems. Abran was in his late 20's, and a very friendly, likeable person. He had a wife and three children, and lived up the mountain in nearby Cacateal. After we had visited awhile, Abran said he had some other business to take care of, and started to leave. His friend invited him to be sure and attend the evening meeting. Abran just grinned, and his friend warned him, "Don't go get drunk!" I didn't see Abran at the meeting that night, but at 6:00 the next morning while Herberto and I were on our way to the early meeting, we saw a man lying in the road below the church. It was Abran, and he was dead. The evening before, instead of going to the meeting, he found some drinking companions, and after getting drunk, they had a disagreement. Abran was stabbed in the chest with a knife, and within a few minutes he was dead. We saw him just hours after it had happened, and it really made an impression on me. When I was talking with him the day before, I never even thought that it would be my last chance to speak to him about Christ. I'm sure if he had known the future, he would have come to church instead of going to the bar. We can never know when our lives here on earth will come to an end, but we can decide to live in such a manner that if our end should come, we would be ready to go home with Jesus when He returns. What a joyful time that will be, with no more suffering, pain and death that we experience here on earth. Yet it will be sad at the same time, because of loved ones who choose not to follow the way to eternal life. How much I hope we can all be together as a happy family in Heaven! Abran's body was left there on the road all day until an Authority could come from Simojovel, five hours away by foot, to examine it and authorize its burial. Monday afternoon we hiked about six miles over a mountain, down a canyon, and up a ridge to Mirador, where we had a meeting in the church that night. Herberto was to baptize some new believers the next morning, but heavy rains caused the rivers to rise and made the trails too muddy to be able to do so. We sat shivering in a wood-slat hut with a dirt floor and thatched roof by a smoky fire. As I was sitting there all miserable, I wished I could be by the woodstove in our clean cabin and look forward to a warm bath. But no, here I was stuck in a smoky hut in the mountains with no way to get out! And to think this is home for so many families who spend all their lives in these places! We spent the morning visiting with the church members there - they were so happy to hear news from the outside world. 191

Around 2:00 p.m. the rains dwindled down to a light drizzle, and we decided to try to get back to Zacatonal. The trails were extremely slippery and creeks very high, but we made it O.K. The rain stopped by evening, and by the next morning the largest river had gone down enough so we could wade across safely. By noon we were back in Simojovel, and I came on home. What a trip! And what a life Pastor Herberto Zuñiga has to live, hiking to all those churches through mud and rivers and mountains! His poor wife and 4-year-old son really miss him. Diana and I had never been apart for more than one night at a time, and we really missed each other too. Colegio Linda Vista January 29, 1987 Newsletter #82 Since we last wrote we've had some interesting adventures. My worker Antonio Diaz has often invited us to visit his village of San Lorenzo. We had wanted to go there over a year ago, but never were able to get away. This time we decided to go in spite of the heavy work schedule which never ceases. With permission from the school administration, we left on Friday morning, Jan. 16. Besides our family, we were accompanied by Antonio and Ismael (my workers), Manuel Pacheco (construction supervisor), and Sara Ocampo (teacher). Mrs. Pacheco drove us down the road towards Villahermosa for an hour and a half. Then we had to walk across a long hanging bridge to get to the other side of a river. After walking a little, we caught a ride on the back of a truckload of food supplies going up the mountain. It took about half an hour to get to the trailhead, where two mules and a horse were waiting for us. Our packs and bedding were tied onto the horse, and the ladies started out riding the mules. Daniel rode in the saddle with Diana and soon fell asleep. The weather was hot and humid, the trail was steep, but the tropical scenery was beautiful. We climbed two hours, and at the ridge had a fantastic view of tall peaks and large valleys. Diana really enjoyed her first mule ride, and decided she wants to get a mule instead of a horse. After riding over several difficult places where a horse would normally slip or trip a lot, she felt she could really trust that mule to take her just about anywhere. He would carefully and yet confidently put his feet in just the 192

right places, and never once did he slide or stumble. Mules are more surefooted and eat less - but cost about three times as much as a horse! After 5½ hours on the trail, we made one last steep climb, and then arrived at San Lorenzo. The village is small, and just past it is the campus of Colegio Venustiano Carranza. This school is located at the base of a high mountain with three imposing peaks towering above. And yet it also looks out over several wide canyons far below on the other side. There are wooden structures for classrooms, dormitories, storage, and a primitive cook shack. Water is piped down from an underground river that appears from the base of the mountain. Presently, most of the students come from nearby San Lorenzo, since there are only 8 dorm students. Antonio studied there for 3 years, and he said at times they had over 40 dorm students there. There is a short grassy airstrip on the campus where David Gates comes once in a while to bring supplies or visitors. Nearby is a large cave on a cliff face with a river flowing out of it which becomes a waterfall. About 3 years ago a group of volunteers from MPI (Mission Projects Inc.) came and put in a wooden flume, then a pipe down to a turbine for generating electricity. However, the water pressure was so great that the pipe burst where it funnels into the turbine, so the project never did work out. I feel the situation could be remedied and electricity could be produced for the school and even the entire village if they could fly in a large enough generator. We explored inside the cave - beautiful white stalactites, stalagmites, drapes, and delicate tubes and much more. The area has many holes and caves. We explored one near the end of the 193

airstrip - again easy walking and with pretty white and colored formations. The climate is tropical and suitable for growing oranges (we feasted on the absolutely sweetest, juiciest ones we'd ever had on our hike in and during our stay there.) We also enjoyed bananas, papayas, pineapple, sugarcane, and more. The school was founded with the purpose of providing a Christian education for students who cannot afford to come to Linda Vista. Dorm students pay $10,000 pesos a month (about $10.00 U.S.) plus their work. Village students work to pay their tuition. The five teachers are supported by donations sent through MPI. The director of the school asked me to please help find someone to come live there to help improve the school. They need help with building construction and maintenance, agricultural development, administration, funding, etc. I would enjoy such a challenge, except that I have my work here, and I don't like the tropical climate. I guess I've been spoiled by living in this cool place for so long! Friday and Saturday night I showed slides on the Holy Lands and the life of Ellen White, using a batteryoperated portable projector. There must have been 250 people squeezed into the small church, and they really enjoyed the slides. I preached on Sabbath about the Origen of Sin, using felt figures to illustrate the scenes. That really held people's attention! Daniel had lots of fun playing with the little kids there. He also liked the turkeys he saw, and kept trying to make squeaky noises like a turkey! On Sunday morning, all but Ismael, Antonio, and I started back to civilization. My boys and I took off in the opposite direction, getting deeper and 194

deeper into the mountains. Along the way we saw villages and ranches, and many coffee plantations. Coffee is the main cash crop of the area - and all the coffee is hauled out by mule back. Sunday night we arrived at the village of Porvenir, where I showed my slides again. The tiny church was packed. We heard several numbers from their musical group, which included a marimba, big bass guitar, and even a set of drums and cymbals! That night we slept on the dirt floor of the head elder's house, and woke up the next morning to the sound of drizzly rain. We bought a sheet of plastic to cover our packs and continued up through a rain forest and down through other ranches and villages. By evening we reached Zacatonal, a village I had visited on my tour two years ago. We spent the night with an Adventist family there, then the next morning (Tuesday) we got a ride on a coffee truck out to Simojovel, over a very bad road so bad we could have walked just as fast as the truck went! From Simojovel we got a ride in a produce truck up a high mountain to the village of Morelos. The road was so bad we had to push the truck at times, and we had to walk the last part, arriving by dark. At Morelos we met Pastors Othoniel Gomez and Villaney Vasquez. Pastor Gomez takes care of the Simojovel district, and he has 38 groups and churches in his area. Pastor Vasquez is in charge of Evangelism for this Conference, and spends his time visiting many villages and cities, teaching, preaching, 195

and baptizing those who are prepared. I showed my slides in Morelos that night to a large gathering of lay workers who had come from many villages in that area. We slept on the dirt floor of a church member's house among sacks of coffee beans. I had a sleeping bag and foam pad, but the others had only woven mats to stretch out on. A small cot was brought out for Pastor Vasquez. Light blankets were found for my boys and the pastors, since at that high elevation it was pretty cold. As we all lay stretched out for the night, I wondered how pastors and Conference workers in the U.S. would react to such conditions! Pastors Gomez and Vazquez had been out in these mountains for 5 days, hiking from village to village, encouraging congregations and baptizing. Each night was spent either on a dirt floor, hammock, or hard wood platform. One night they slept on a pile of dry unhusked corn their most uncomfortable night! The bugs in the corn kept them awake, plus the discomfort of lumpy corncobs! Meals on these treks consist mainly of beans and tortillas - sometimes rice and eggs too. Fruits and vegetables are not grown much - oranges are the only fruit that is plentiful. Wednesday morning, we had more meetings with the visiting workers, and I presented the Plan of Salvation using felt materials again. Pastor Vazquez baptized 16 people, then he left and returned to his duties at the Conference office in Tuxtla. Pastor Gomez, Ismael, Antonio, and I hiked on along the high forested mountain ridge to Planada Villa Luz.

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Most of the buildings in this small village are made of split bamboo with thatched roofs. As soon as we arrived, we met Daniel Juarez, a former leader of the Catholic Church in this village. Now the entire church has decided to become Seventh-day Adventists, based on their own study of the Bible. (See, story below). We spent some time visiting with Daniel Juarez, who described himself as "very Catholic" before he got into the study of the Bible. We showed slides in the bamboo church that evening, and the folks there seemed to be really happy in their new way of life. I hope to return and visit them in April when the entire congregation plans to be baptized. We slept on the church benches that night, and were up and on our way by 4:00 a.m. the next day. It was drizzly again, and after many hours of sloshing through mud and riding a truck over bumpy roads, we were back in Simojovel where Pastor Gomez lives. We were tired and sore and ready to head for Linda Vista. Pastor Gomez got to eat lunch with his wife, and then had to be off to another section of his district to attend to the needs of more churches. Pastors and their families don't have it easy here!

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God's Leading Seen in "Village of Light" The members of an entire Catholic congregation high on a remote mountain ridge in Chiapas, Mexico have decided to change the name of their church to "Iglesia Adventista" (Adventist Church). The story begins back in 1982 when members and leaders of the Planada Villa Luz Catholic church began studying their Bibles of their own accord. Soon the leaders realized that the tradition of worshiping saints and images is not in harmony with the Scriptures. About half of the 160 members of the Catholic Church decided to build a separate bamboo chapel and worship God according to their findings. As the years went by, the new chapel became more crowded as more members joined from the old church. Soon it was necessary to erect a larger bamboo church to accommodate the interested new members. The sign over the doorway still said "Iglesia Catolica" (Catholic Church), but no images or saints were found inside. Instead, families brought their Bibles and searched for further truth as they met each Sunday. This study convinced 14-year-old Teresa Perez that Saturday is the Bible Sabbath. Teresa shared her convictions with Daniel Juarez, the Catholic Church leader. He had also studied about the Sabbath and felt convicted, but was afraid that the rest of the congregation would not accept it. Teresa urged him to present it to the other church members anyway. They all agreed that if the seventh day of the week is the Bible Sabbath, then that is the day they wanted to keep! Soon Daniel Juarez realized that his "Catholic" congregation was beginning to resemble an Adventist church. He sent a request to the Adventist believers in a nearby village, and soon lay worker Sebastian Lopez arrived to preach and study with these Catholics. In September, 1986, the members decided to change the name of the church to "Iglesia Adventista," and presently the entire congregation is preparing for baptism.

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In December 1986, the Catholic priest in charge of the district stopped by Planada Villa Luz for a visit. He asked Daniel Juarez how things were going in the church. "Just fine" answered Daniel. "We no longer worship images; we keep the Bible Sabbath in fact we are all becoming Seventh-day Adventists!" The priest smiled and answered: "Good for you - you have found the true way. I should be following your example. I don't believe in worshiping images either. Give thanks to God and continue on in the Way you have found. I should follow your example" Presently there are 161 people attending in this split bamboo church each Sabbath. They are preparing for baptism in April, when an Adventist pastor will be available to enter this remote location. As the end of time gets nearer, we see continued evidence that God is actively at work gathering together his precious children. Certainly God is working in this village which is so appropriately named - Villa Luz is Spanish for "Village of Light."

Appendix 2

Why? It happened within five seconds. The collapse of 15 tons of wooden roof trusses flung me down backwards to the concrete floor, and a numb feeling came over my body. My neck was broken. I was paralyzed. Until that moment everything had been going so well. My wife Diana and I were in our sixth year of happy married life, enjoying the challenge of rearing our lively 1½ year old son. I was involved in genuinely fulfilling work as a vocational teacher in the mission field. 199

While helping with the construction of a large building designated to house the school industry of furniture making, the tragedy happened. One truss snapped, overhead and the entire roof structure came down instantly. A long plane trip to Loma Linda University Medical Center in California was followed by surgery and five months of intensive rehabilitation. I faced the future as a wheelchair rider. I was given no medical hope of ever walking or even using my fingers again. Many times, the question would come up: "Why, God? Sure, these kinds of things happen to other people, but to a missionary in overseas service? I don't understand, God." I have been paralyzed for over a year now. I may never fully understand why God allowed me to become a quadriplegic. But I don't have to. Something occurred several months after I was discharged from the hospital which has helped me to understand the situation a little better. Our son Daniel had been sick all day, and couldn't keep food or liquids down. By evening he was weak and very thirsty. With a phone call to the pediatrician, we were informed to wait two hours since Daniel had last attempted to take liquid. Then he could have two tablespoons of water. If he kept it down, he could have increasing amounts every half hour. By then it was 7:00 p.m. Daniel was pleading for a drink. It was so hard for us as parents to hear Daniel's heart-wrenching sobs and pitiful cries: "Mama, wa-wa. Daddy, d'ink p'ease." Over and over Daniel kept pleading. The time seemed to go by so slowly, and how we wished 9:00 p.m. would come! As loving parents, we wanted to explain the situation to Daniel that he would get the drink he wanted so badly; that we were making him wait because this was the best thing we knew to do for his situation. But he was too young to understand, and kept on pleading. "Mama, j'oos p'ease." Oh, how our hearts ached for him! But if we gave it to him then, it would have done more harm than good. As we waited through those long agonizing moments with our son, I began to think about my situation. Every day I plead with God for healing. I am asking for a perfectly good thing. Then I realized that God is suffering here with me and with each other person in this world who suffers. I can almost feel His big loving arms around me, holding me close to His shoulder. He softly strokes my head while big tears 200

roll down His cheeks into my hair. And He says: “Fred, I love you even more than you can understand. I have the power, and really want to heal you, but it isn't the right time yet. My precious child, I am so very, very, sorry that I had to permit this to happen to you. Oh, what I would give if there were any way to spare you from this! But Satan must be permitted to demonstrate his works of darkness before the universe. That old Dragon claimed that he should be king! Well, just let everyone see what planet earth has become under his rulership. My child, you are fulfilling the highest purpose you could ever have in existing—to vindicate My goodness to the universe. When the other created beings see how sin destroys all that is beautiful and causes only sorrow and suffering, no one will ever again question My sovereignty. Because of your suffering, millions of billions will be spared such agony. My child, someday, someday soon, I will make it up to you. Satan and his followers will be eternally destroyed and I will wipe away all tears. Even now I am preparing a new home for you, one that far surpasses your wildest dreams. Just you wait!! . . .” And He is sobbing still, squeezing me close—unable to speak anymore. Little Daniel was able to have his uncomfortable thirst satisfied that night, and by the next morning he was feeling better. Just as certainly as Daniel was healed, I know that God can heal me, either instantly, or gradually at any time. But if He doesn't, that's O.K. I definitely will be healed when Christ returns. I can continue living and working for Him paralyzed as I am, confident that He will do what is best for me. God loves each of His created beings so much more than I will ever be able to love Daniel. But certainly, the love I have for Daniel is helping me to grasp the reality that God is a caring Father in whom I can fully trust! By Fred and Diana Adams (Adventist Review March 22, 1990)

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Divine Encounters from Diary Excerpts Friday, August 5, 1977 Wright Lakes to Shepherd Creek (7 miles) Mark Williams hiked out last night to get another backpacker. We slept out in the open, and our sleeping bags had frost on them. Jeff Waite, our Assistant Leader led the group and I stayed back, looking up at the sky and enjoying the mountain scenery. I dozed off briefly, and then woke up to the sound of angels singing “I Need Thee Every Hour.” It must have been a dream, but it sure seemed real! I caught up with the group going over a low pass, down some switchbacks and up Shepherd Canyon. We ate near a pretty creek, then went up a high pass to some lakes at the base of Mt. Williamson, but it was too high and rocky, so we returned and camped at the grassy lunch place. Fat Pete got mad, said some strong words and moved his tent 200’ away from camp because of bad things going on, but tonight I talked with the kids and led a group to ask his forgiveness, and he accepted, returning to camp. Very cold, with ice in the stream! Sunday, August 7, 1977 Climbed Williamson-Versteeg-Tyndall (7 miles) We left at 6:00 and eight of us climbed steep rocky chutes to top of Williamson, in some parts crossing slanted granite slabs with small gravel that made it difficult to get safe traction. I arrived first at 9:30 and enjoyed the view. Mark and the others arrived an hour later. The top is 14,375’ elevation, only 130’ lower than Mt. Whitney. We ate lunch and rested a while before heading down. I went town a different chute looking for a safer route, but only found cliffs. I followed a ridge and found a route that looked safe, so I climbed down using handholds, footholds, cracks and ledges to the bottom. The last part was a 20’ corner, with only a few finger cracks and toe holds. Mark called from the top and asked me how to get down, so I told him to go to the right. He looked around and said, “There’s nowhere to go!” He looked some more, and then disappeared. A few minutes later, he appeared on a ledge further down and asked me what to do next. I told him to continue coming down, following the rock face with the best places to hang on. He yelled to the rest of the group to go back to the original way we had 202

climbed up. He descended more, getting to the 20’ corner. “Now what do I do?” he asked. I told him to come on down. He said, “It’s impossible!” I told him that’s where I had come down. He studied it a long time, shook his head and carefully inched his way down. When he finally got near the bottom he let go and jumped. He scrambled down to where I was standing and said, “Freddie, I admire you. I’ve done a lot of rock climbing, but never in my life have I gone down a place like that without a rope. That was straight down. I can’t believe it! I’m just shaking all over. I think I’m in a state of shock!” He certainly did look scared. I wasn’t afraid going down, because I had asked God to help me find a safe way down, and I placed my life in His hands. Besides, I’d never done much rock climbing, and I figured that’s what rock climbers do all the time. We prayed together right there at the bottom of the cliff, and then continued on easier surfaces to the base of the mountain. The rest of the group took 3 hours to get there. I still had some energy left, so I climbed another steep chute to the top of Mt. Versteeg, 13,470’ high and signed the register. Nobody else had been up there this year, and one person signed the register last summer. From there, I followed the ridge over to Mt. Tyndall at 14,018’ elevation. It was quite difficult, and all along the way there were cliffs and drop-offs going hundreds of feet down. I prayed the entire way, trusting God to lead and protect me, and only went where I felt I could do so safely. Several times I came to dead-end chutes, cliffs or pinnacles, but I didn’t want to go back, and eventually I found a safe route to the top, where I signed the register as well. Many others had been up there this summer. From the top it was a fairly easy but long route down a hogback ridge with plenty of granite rocks to clamber back down to our campsite, to which I arrived at 6:00. It was the longest, hardest mountain climbing day I’ve had in my life, but so worth it 203

to me, because I was able to experience what it is like to depend totally on God for protection and safety every moment. I felt so blessed, and the promise of Psalm 91:11 & 12 became more real to me, which says, “For He shall give His angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways. They shall bear thee up in their hands, lest thou dash thy foot against a stone.” Many in the group were in awe and very respectful to me when I got back, and we had another prayer of thanksgiving at campfire tonight. Clear-Cold Thursday, August 23, 1979 Camp-Glacier Divide-Camp Chuck, Sue, Karen Matthews, and I hiked up by stream and neat terraced rock shelves and ledges up north of camp towards Glacier Divide by nice lakes, a stream with many flowers along the edges in a nice meadow with a pretty lake. We see so much beauty everywhere we go! We decided to climb a peak, 13,004 ft., from which we saw glaciers and a clear view all around. The peak didn’t have a name, so Chuck decided to call it Susan Peak, since it’s the highest Sue has ever climbed. He christened it with water from his canteen. On top, there are castle-like rock formations that stand out by themselves. It was cold and windy, so we found a sheltered place to eat, left a note in a jar at the top, and then headed down. At the treeline we saw grouses (or grice?) that look as big as bantam chickens! Further down we saw many neat little streamlets winding through the grass and flowers, making it look just like a fairyland! Closer to camp, I let the others go on ahead, and I sat under the juniper trees and just meditated, thinking about how good God has been to me. It’s so great to find a neat quiet place and listen to God. He’s been so good to me, and I love Him so much, I want to do His will always! Tonight’s mashed potatoes, Ramen and corn sure tasted good. We had nice singing and talking around the campfire. 204

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Friday, September 3, 1982 Placerville-Lake Sylvia Matt McMearty and I went to the Forest Service Station at 6:30, and at 7:00 were able to get a permit to go into Desolation Wilderness. I went to the Lumber Exchange and got redwood lumber for my parents’ deck. We picked out the best of seconds, and it’s much cheaper than other places. We packed our stuff in packs, and when Tammy Beaton arrived, we drove up to Lyons trailhead, and at 7:30 started hiking. A full moon came up, and it was sure beautiful! We sang and talked and enjoyed the beauty. We almost lost the trail several times. After about three hours, we were getting tired and still hadn’t reached Lake Sylvia, but we found a nice place to camp, so we decided to sleep, and go on to the lake in the morning. We have two tents, and Matt expected me to sleep with him in his tent while Diana and Tammy slept in our tent. I told him no way, I’m sleeping with my wife, and Tammy can sleep on the other side of Diana! Saturday, September 4, 1982 Lake Sylvia-Pyramid Peak-Lake Sylvia We woke up to see the lake only about 150 feet away from our camp! It was a beautiful day, and after breakfast we hiked up to a former pack trip campsite, then up through the trees, grassy meadows, a flower-strewn creek, and several small lakes, and it’s all so pretty! Our goal was Pyramid Peak, and I decided to try a different route. The snow chute looked too steep and dangerous, so we headed for the ridge east of us. Some men coming down said there was no way we could make it – there are steep cliffs at the ridge. I decided to give it a try anyway, and sure enough, after scouting around I found ledges and steps we could use. I encouraged Tammy and Cherub to take slow, careful steps, and enjoy the flowers and lichens in the 205

rock cracks as we eased along ledges and down cracks to easier walking. As we crossed the last ridge with a rocky cliff on the west side and a steep snowbank on the east side, we rested to enjoy the amazing views toward the Sacramento valley and Lake Tahoe on the opposite side. After drinking from our water bottles, Tammy lost her grip on her bottle, and it went sliding down the steep snowbank to the rocks below. There was no way I could retrieve it. We continued climbing, and soon we were on the rocky NE face of Pyramid Peak, and within minutes we reached the top, at 9,983’ above sea level. Everyone did fine, and I was proud of Cherub and Tammy, who were scared at times, but didn’t give up. We enjoyed amazing views in all directions as we ate our lunch, rested and talked. We went down the easy west side, and I carried Cherub on my back a while as we slid down the sandy slope. We got back in two hours, and were a little tired and sore. We had fun eating popcorn and talking around the campfire that night. Matt and Tammy are really enjoying themselves! Clear-Cool Sunday, September 5, 1982 Lake Sylvia-Lyons Lake-Lake Sylvia We slept in, ate late, and walked around in the beautiful woods enjoying ourselves. We hiked over to Lyons Lake and found many people fishing there, compared to just a few at Lake Sylvia. We came back, ate lunch, relaxed and read all afternoon. Diana read in Tisha. Matt and Tammy enjoyed being together a lot. Diana and I walked around in the woodsy places near our campsite, and found neat little ledges and meadow places – just right for a cabin, garden, trails through the forest, etc. This evening as we were gathering 206

wood, we heard someone yelling, but I didn’t pay any attention to it. When we got back to camp, Matt told us that someone had fallen down the snow chute onto the rocks on the north side of Pyramid Peak. His companion came running down to Lake Sylvia yelling for help and trying to find someone to hike out and get emergency help. Surprisingly, no one seemed to want to go – some had just hiked in and didn’t want to leave, others had hiked all day and were tired, and so on. The companion got his pack and rushed back up to the injured man – without hope of someone getting help, or even someone to go back up with him. When Matt told me about it at dusk, I got all the information I could, we prayed together, and then I jogged five miles out to the trailhead (50 minutes). As I ran down the trail, I felt almost like I was floating along, as if angels were helping me sail down that rough trail. I drove over to the Ranger Station at Wright’s Lake and gave the information to the Ranger. He called the Rescue Team, Highway Patrol and Sheriff, and then I drove back to the trailhead and went back to camp – 70 minutes this time. I almost got lost going up dry creek instead of the trail, but I finally found it. It was really neat going out and coming back – as I lightly jogged along Bible verses and Scripture songs kept running through my head, and in the moonlit darkness, I could feel an angelic presence around me. Back at camp (10:40 by now) Matt, Tammy and Cherub were sitting around a cheery campfire, waiting for me. Diana was all happy and proud of me, and I felt all warm inside. But my concern was still for the injured man, so Matt and I hiked up through bushes, meadows, and rocks to the location of the injured man, and found him badly battered and bruised, but nothing real major, I hope. He definitely could not walk out. His companion had brought sleeping bags and food. We told them that help was coming. Around midnight we started back down, straight over a steep rocky incline and somehow safely found our way to the meadow below and on to our camp. The full moon was so bright that we could see clearly and hike safely. It was really

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neat to find our faithful women around the fire waiting for their “heroes.” It felt good to finally climb into bed and to cuddle up to my Cherub. Fair-Warm Monday, September 6, 1982 Lake Sylvia to Placerville At 3:15 a.m. the Ranger came by. We told him the condition of the injured man and the best route to get to his exact location. Behind him were 18 rescue team workers, from the Growlersberg prison near Georgetown. We watched their headlamps bobbing past us and on up the mountain. At 7:30 we watched a CHP helicopter land, and soon its cargo was taken to a hospital in Lake Tahoe. It was really neat being involved in the rescue, and I feel somehow that I have been enriched by that experience. We hiked out and drove to Placerville. Matt and Tammy ate with us, and then went on to PUC. We really had a great time!

Daniel Hears His Guardian Angel Monday, January 23, 1995 Linda Vista I hired a man to cut down a dead thorn tree on the driveway and saw it up into firewood lengths. While he was doing that, Daniel was stomping on big ants just 2 or 3 feet away from the chainsaw. I was inside the house behind the screen door, and wanted to warn Daniel to stay back, but the saw was too loud. Suddenly Daniel looked up and ran over to me, asking why I had called him. I hadn't called, but I was glad he thought I did. Just as he got to me, the saw finished a cut, causing one end of the log to fall and flip over unexpectedly. A thick branch flew through the air, exactly where Daniel's face had been just seconds before. I believe Daniel's angel intervened directly to save him from serious injury. 208

Final Thoughts When I first began this project, I only intended to collect a few childhood memories to include in the 1961-1970 diary project I compiled from diaries by Grandpa Wesley Landstrom and Grandma Marjorie Adams. I also used excerpts from letters written by family members during that time period, along with photos, to create a complete searchable reference resource. However, as I wrote my memory stories, more and more ideas continued adding up, and eventually I had more than enough to add to the diary project; hence this book project. I’ll probably think of other things as time goes by, but for now, I plan to stop here so I can move on to other projects. Freddie Adams Mosquito, California February 8, 2023

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