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JIM: Well, girls, here is some more tape for your pleasure. Easter time is the time for eggs and the time for eggs is Easter time. As Baldy Roberts well knew when he called out to his numerous brothers to come to breakfast for "we are having eggs because they are cheap."

GRANT: Aunt Hattie sang a song about a lady who beat up her lover for philandering that ended up:

JIM: Then there was another one that should not be allowed to pass into limbo. It went something like this:

I remember a song that went something like this:

Father and his bosom friend, (as Mother called Bill King) started up the manufacture of sand lime bricks. Royalties were paid to the inventors of the machinery in Germany and the machinery was imported from there.

I was given a job in this enterprise at a very moderate salary - $3.00 per week for 60 hrs of arduous labor. I was provided with a long stick and was required to poke the mix of which the bricks were molded into a hole at the bottom of a large vat situated above the press on the floor below. I was also required to tap a large cylinder-shaped revolving screen near the ceiling through which the mix was sieved for it would not pass through the screen unless the screen were sharply tapped nor would it move down the hole at the bottom of the vat unless it was contlnually poked.

The sun beat down on the metal roof making the place insufferably hot. There was a stone crushing machine there which made an ear-splitting roar at all times. After a week or two of this torture, it is easy to understand something had to be done. The screen was mounted at the end of a shaft. I noticed a hole in the iron at the rim of the screen so I drilled a hole in the end of the stick and bolted it to the screen so when it revolved, the stick bobbed up and down as pretty as you please right in the middle of the hole in the vat leaving me only to tap the screen. Not so arduous but just as confining. I found some very large bolts, tied thongs to the ends of each and nailed the other ends of the thongs so they dangled down in such a manner as to tap against the screen when it revolved. This kept it clean. I was careful to tie the bolts off the screen when the machinery stopped for when the engineer started up the Corliss steam engine, he always reversed it to get it off dead center and the bolts would have punctured holes in the screen.

I was free to walk down to the river every day and started in to really live. One day Father and Bill King came up there and found me gone and came upon me at the river bank. Father said, "Well, Jim, it looks like you've invented yourself out of a job." I was fired right there. I forgot to tell them to take the bolts off the screen. The way it turned out, they had to send to Germany for another screen and they were shut down for weeks waiting delivery of it.

Shall I tell the girls about the farmer who found out his white horses ate more than his black horses?

GRANT: Who hasn't heard about the farmer whose white horses ate more than his black horses? It was because he had more white horses than he had black horses.

JIM: No, not this farmer. He had the same number of white horses as he did black horses.

GRANT: Now, Jim I believe I could be considered an authority on this subject after spending most of my life in an occupation kindred to animal husbandry and I know white horses do not ever eat more than black horses if they are of the same breed and have equal access to the feed.

JIM: No, these horses were all the same kind but the farmer was sure the white horses ate more than twice as much as the black ones.

GRANT: This is nonsense. How did the farmer account for the unbelievable miracle?

JIM: Well, the farmer said it was because the white horses were the mama horses and the black horses their little ones.

Lucy took Otto see a psychiatrist.

GRANT: Oh, my, why did she do that?

JIM: Well, for some time, he has been setting a pail of water right in the middle of their living room floor and fishing in it for three and four hours every day.

GRANT: That's a sad case. Lucy must feel awfully bad about it.

JIM: Yes, she hesitated for a long time before turning him in because she enjoyed eating the fish he has been catching.

GRANT: It cost 10-20-30 cents to attend Vic Hugo's variety house, the People's Theatre, in the olden days on First Street East. They'd hear Jack Benny, Fred Allen, Eddie Cantor, Walter Winchell, Georgie Jessel, and other entertainers back at the start of the century. Ray Faye sang popular songs accompanied by colored lantern slides. Sometimes the slides were so badly smudged with finger prints, they were barely dicernable.

JIM: Then there's the one about the boy and girl traipsing across the field of new mown hay as sung by the Floradora girls.

JIM: Father sure had a great sense of humor. He'd laugh till the tears rolled down his cheeks.

GRANT: One would think that many of us fell heir to that same trait. I've seen them all wet cheeked from laughing.

JIM: I do not remember that Mama ever laughed like that. Do you?

GRANT: It seems to me that she did on occasion. Maybe she was a little more serious-minded.

My earliest recollection was when Mr. W.O. Johnson, who lived across the valley or maybe Lelia put me on their white horse in the alley. I think thay gave me a silver-headed cane. I can remember proudly carrying it as we walked from the house where I was born over to 360 First Avenue, West. Yes, Jim, 360 was the number of the old house. It was soon changed to 226, though.

JIM: We lived in the Bettis house for quite a few years before I inherited the chest of tools that had been used to build our house.

GRANT: It used to be a delight for me to go down and hitch up Rex to the buggy and pick up Mabel and go for a ride. Rex was an uncertain quantity, though. He was no horse for a woman to drive. Jim, you've often told about that chest of tools. Do you remember what was in it?

JIM: [-listing tools]

GRANT: I've heard you tell of Father catching Rex after he'd break out and have a run down the neighbor lawn. Can't you describe such an incident?

JIM: Tells of risks Father took with Rex.

GRANT: When Father came to Indianapolis to live with Jim and Bess, it was too far for him to go there for lunch. When we moved to Indianapolis, we rented a half of a double house just a few blocks from the factory and Father could walk out from the factory, eat his lunch and lie down for a nap before returning down there. Then we moved to a flat across the street, where he also would come for lunch. We played many games of cards with him evenings. Too bad that it lasted for so little a time, October to March, and he was away from mid-February at Rochester.

Jim had a grove of Kiefer pear trees in his yard and he gave us barrels of those big, hard Kiefer pears. Mabel finally got the hang of it and would put up pear sauce out of them, which was very tasty. Told that we could wrap them in tissue paper and put them in a cool, dry place and they'd be nice to eat around Christmas, we stowed away hundreds, in such fashion. When we tried them, we found they had shriveled to mere dried-up cores, every one.

JIM: Can any of you girls remember Father buying a half hog and having it out in the barn?

GRANT: It seems to me that Father made sausage on more than one occasion. I do not know why it is so hazy in my mind.

DUET:

GRANT: Code remembers how Ralph Moore would be hidden in a box on a wagon with John and Jim for horses and Grant for driver and Red would holler whenever we were approaching a person, "Look out for the Ama roo jin. Hold your horses."

Mama asked Ralph Moore how he was one morning and Red said, "All right only we had pancakes for breakfast, this morning, and they rifted on me." Mama surely laughed plenty telling about that incident. Mama used to tell about the folks who returning to their farm found their boy feeling ill and his mother asked what he'd been eating and he replied, I didn't eat nothin', all I had was six biscuits and a piece of meat.

JIM: Who remembers how John would talk low over the wall telephone in the corner to Edith while we all sat at the dinlng room table?

GRANT: A white-haired woman asked me the today if I were John's brother. She said that she was in nurse's training at St. Luke's when Edith died and John was bedfast with a ruptured appendix. She said she and Helen were good friends.

How I laughed at Code's bringing to my recollection the time I wrangled the pony and cart from her to go riding with Mabel. That was a dirty trick on my part and it is no wonder Code remembered so well. Sure sorry, Code.

Maybe you can remember the ditty often sung around 226 in ye olden, golden days:

Betty's recalling one of the times she dressed in Jlm's clothes of an evening and went out with me on a prowl. Poor Charlie McDaniel regretted it to his dying day that he sputtered so at "that kid with the cubeb [sic] cigarette and expressed his disdain and disgust." Charlie was smitten on Betty always.

Ede Sutliff's house looks just the same and the Sutliff house next west but the next west, also a Sutliff house (where Wally Baker held forth for years) is changed considerably. The three Sutliff brothers were in the wholesale grocery business and lived in those three houses and had a cement walk and not a wooden one as almost everyone else had.

Haven't seen Belle Giberson Steele since she called here to see us many moons ago. Ought to go over and get some ideas from her. Belle always had a good sense of humor and she knows a lot about us.

I can remember Grandpa Giberson having his fine black team which he drove to a light delivery wagon for his greenhouse. Dan and Dick were stabled in Ede Sutliff's barn. Dick got a bad shoulder and 0ld Doc Griffith used to come over of a Sunday morning to doctor the shoulder and the air would be blue around that barn because Dick resented the treatment.

JIM: Do you remember the pile of cordwood stacked to the eaves of the barn in the alley?

GRANT: I ought to. John and I sawed and split many such a pile and toted it into the kitchen and to Molly's stove in the barn for washing.

JIM: Do you remember the cold cellar in the south part of the basement?

GRANT: I can remember that it was well stocked with shelves full of preserves, jellies, jams, etc.

JIM: Wasn't the opening of the ash pit from the parlor and Mama's room in the cold cellar?

GRANT: I think I emptied that ash pit more than once.

JIM: Do you remember any jokes Father pulled on April Fool's Day?

GRANT: Yes, I well remember his calling up to me in bed to say that I had left the spigot open to the cider barrel and all the cider had run out onto the basement floor.

JIM: Do you remember that little dog that the hired girl spilled kerosene on its face?

GRANT: I remember Old Nig, the cat, better.

JIM: You used to crawl under the Wentch barn after wild cats, I remember.

GRANT: Yes, there was a sweet-smelling tall grass around that barn that seemed to attract those cats. I was always after them.

JIM: Do you remember the old Seth Thomas clock in the dining room.

GRANT: Yes, it would give the day of the week and the day of the month when Father got it to going good.

JIM: Do you remember the high window over the sideboard in the dining room?

GRANT: Mama sat with her back to it, always. Father faced it when at the table.

JIM: Do you remember the high cupboards in the dining room and the medicine cabinet?

GRANT: Yes, and I remember John climbing up and getting into some carbolic acid in the medicine cabinet when real small. I also remember the girls putting great pans of luscious Christmas candies they had made up in that cupboard to age.

JIM: Do you remember Alice going to cooking school?

GRANT: Yes, and I can remember the first thing she ever learned to make. "Margarites." We had a superfluity of margarites for a while. I still like them.

JIM: She made croutons, too, to put in soups.

JIM: Do you recall the dudes who courted our slsters back at the start of the century?

GRANT: Yes, how well I remember the plastered hair, choker collars, tight pants and high, pointed toothpick shoes of those gents.

JIM: The girls always entertained them in the parlor. I have been trying to remember who it was played the piano in duet with our sister, Ruth.

GRANT: That was Margaret Burr.

JIM: Alice sang beautifully such songs as "What's this dull town to me. Robin's not here." It seems the guy took a powder. It was high class to mispronounce words in the songs she sang. ""I stewed on the breedge at midnight as the clock was striking the hour."

GRANT: Once a stranger drunk, walked in and took a chair in the parlor to hearken to a duet played by Ruth and Margaret Burr. Father was sitting in the sitting room reading his CHICAGO INTER-OCEAN. The girls had a terrible time making him understand but then he kindly helped the drunk out. Don't ask me why some of the gents with the high collars didn't think of it.

JIM: Do you remember any of the dudes who used to come?

GRANT: I remember a Harve Getty who was typical. I think he worked at the gas company.

JIM: The girls always put out a snack on Sunday nights for these guests, many of whom may have saved up for such treats.

GRANT: I well remember that hot chocolate and small jelly sandwiches were often served. I've liked jelly sandwiches with chocolate ever since.

JIM: Do you remember the big storm shanty built on the porch over the dining room door?

GRANT: I ought to because I helped put it up many a time and take it down. It was nice while it was up. I cannot for the life of me remember where it was stored when not in use.

GRANT: I remember Father learning to ride that bicycle up on F Avenue, West. He had quite a time learning and wanted no help from us boys.

I'll always remember, the Christmas when I peeked under the sliding doors and saw the bicycle tires in the parlor by the Christmas tree. I was sure it was for me. Come to find out, it was a lady's bicycle and was a Christmas gift to Betty and me. Grandfather Breed taught us both to ride it out in the back yard that Christmas day. The grape arbor caught many a smash that day.

JIM: Who remembers the peony bed Mama was so proud of? And the big tile on the west side of the house with flowers in it? It had to be protected on Halloween by us boys.

GRANT: Do you remember the hydrant in the backyard. Once I was at the hydrant in the twilight just having fed Nig, the cat, at the back porch. A big black dog went by me llke a flash to chase Nig but he came back faster with Nig on his back clawing into the back of his neck like fury.

JIM: Do you remember how the milk came in a big tin vessel with a cup for a spout cover? Mama would skim the thick cream off the milk after it had stood in a shallow pan.

GRANT: We always had cookies or doughnuts for breakfast. Pie or pudding for dinner at noon. Cake at supper at night. Never any variance.

How I despised the fried potatoes at 226. How I would welcome the change to rice. I was 19 before I ever liked fried potatoes.

Jim, I do not suppose you remember the fire at Cad Barto's flat. Maybe she had already turned it over to Coe College by then. A gang of us boys carried all the furniture out of the little house across the alley.

I never knew that Cad Barto's mean-looking ma resented kids wearing out her wooden sidewalk till I heard Betty tell it. Didn't know Betty liked choke cherries till then either.

Funny that Betty remembered Doctor Poor at the picnic in Huston Park where the hammocks were said to be slung between non-existent trees from which nuts and fruits were gathered. Doctor Poor ran back for his nigh-forgotten bean-kettle and Liveryman Aden Sheriff whipped up his nags before Doctor Poor got back to run for it and was so exhuasted, he made a pillow of his companions' feet all the way back to town. Quite dignified, wasn't it?

JIM: The OPTIMUS had an item that Will Stepanek had returned from Chicago. When asked, Will said he had never been out of Cedar Rapids in his life.

GRANT: I have a hazy recollection of a party which I think Libbie Stepanek gave on the SE corner of Third Street and B Avenue, West. There was a fence all around the front lot. Scott Tid attended the party. It was across from Will Kaufman's house. Do you remember it, Betty?

Peg probably doesn't remember when I relieved her of her bicycle because I had to go somewhere and she cried.

When we moved to Kansas City in 1908, Father's spring frame bicycle was left behind. I wonder what ever became of it.

GRANT: To make up to me for not taking me to the 1893 World's Fair at Chicago, Father took John and me to Chicago for the unveiling of the John A Logan monument in Grant Park on Michigan Boulevard. A grand parade and a wonderful time at the old Saratoga Hotel on Dearborn Street. In the diner enroute home, the waiter was so tickled because John and I liked the corn muffins that he brought more than we could eat. We got to see Libby Prison while in Chicago, that time. It impressed me more than tongue can tell.

JIM: Father took all three of us boys to the Omaha Exposition. I remember some Bolshevik on the train was condemning the Northwestern Railroad Company in a loud voice for miles and miles and disgusted us. We saw the greatest of sham battles between soldiers and thouands and thouands of Indians.

GRANT: Wonder if Betty remembers when we went on the Sunday School excursion to visit the Anamosa prison. And the hoodlums who got smart with her on the train coming home.

Father took me to a Fourth of July celebration at Marion when very young. Veterans were using an anvil to make explosions which would lift the straw hat off my head each time.

When Mary Grace and Sam bring Frank to start school at Ames in June, we'll kill the fatted calf.

When Fred McDaniel and I (Fred is now a millionaire banker in Blunt, S. D.) attended a vaudeville performance at the Chicago Opera House in 1900, an actor told the following story with pathos:

He climbed into a stock car in the Chicago railroad yards to go out to Iowa. Got into a feed rack high up on the side of the car and went to sleep. A commotion at the door awakened him. A lad in good clothes got in and made a bed of another hay rack. A big bump when the locomotive hooked onto the train awakened the actor. Pretty soon a brakeman's lantern showed the well-dressed lad and the conducter ordered him down and out. They asked him where he was going in very stern terms. He said he was going out to Marion, Iowa, to his grandmother's bedside, as she was dying. Having no money, he had to steal a ride out. The trainman laughed and said, "That's an old, old story. You cannot ride on this train."

The lad blubbered and said, "If you don't believe me, read that telegram." The conductor read the telegram aloud, "Dear Willie: If you wish to see your grandmother alive, you must come at once." The trainmen wiped their eyes and turned away and they chanced to see the actor. They demanded, "And where are you going?" The actor answered, " I'm going to the funeral."

I used to rob the Siberian crabapple tree behind the Bettis house. That pleasant-looking woman who staid there wouldn't seem to mind nor Mr. Bettis either.

Father asked Engineer Brant (Belle Brant's father. Belle used to kiss Jim through the picket fence) to look after John and me when as small boys we went to visit Aunt Birdie and Uncle Gus in Moline. He never did as he promised and Father never liked him thereafter. Uncle Gus finally came and took us across the Mississippi on a ferryboat.

In looking over a 1939 article about Washington High School, I see the Class of 1892 pictured with the following members identified:

Stella Clark Jennie Hayford Jean Gairns John Berry Alice Lounsbury Lucile Powell Clyde McMillian Minnie Watt Amy Moorhead Minnie Peck Clara Ferguson Blanche Stevens Charles Billau Harry Hennett Ed Tuttle Fannie Ure Mabel Cooper Nettie Turner Mae Durlin Ed Monilaw Bessie Lovejoy Walter Morgan Charles Stoddard Hattie Van Vleck Jennie Hildebrand Sara Hrbek Nellie Cobden

At one place, it says Miss Abbott just got the distraction of horse and buggy rides broken up when the horseless buggies gave her trouble. She was disgusted with the invention of automobiles.

Otto "Busy" Ambroz. Grant Wood was called "Gussie." He was the artist for the 1908 yearbook. Beardsley Ruml was in the 1911 class. Otto Ambroz, Howard Whitmore and George Burrows hanging around Miss Hubbard's desk after school talking over parts in a new play. Ray Swem started the Alpha Rho society in 1896.

Miss Witwer was teaching in a classroom when Miss Abbott came by and said, "Rachel Witwer, hold your stomach in."

Miss Abbott's favorite poems:

The yell:

GRANT: I have been reading the letter written by Grandfather Munger more than a hundred years ago, April 9, 1852, from the vicinity of Crescent City, California. That's away up near the California-Oregon line.

JIM: Grandfather Munger was a forty-niner and crossed the Isthmus of Panama to get to California.

GRANT: In the letter, he states that prices on food were very high. Salt, $3. to $6. per lb. Sugar, flour, coffee, $1.00 per lb. When I go to the food emporiums today it looks as if history were repeating itself.

JIM: Yes, the reason for high prices was scarcity out there but now we have magic of super-abundance with scarcity prices plus heavy taxes to reimburse producers for not producing. What a farce.

GRANT: What ever possessed our grandfather to leave his family and make the journey out to California? Didn't he homestead on good land in Illinois on the site of the town of Canton? He had a grist mill on a stream and should have been getting along all right.

JIM: In the letter, it seems that he was grub staked by someone in funds back east. A Lewis Beaven, I think, for he addressed the letter to him. He stated that he had been sick and could not send his benefactor any money.

GRANT: He left his wife (our stepgrandmother) and family in Illinois where he was certainly one of the first settlers of the community.

JIM: Father told me that his father operated a saw and grist mill along a stream powered by a water wheel.

GRANT: Father told me that they lived on corn meal and molasses mostly.

JIM: Yes that was the wintertime diet of most of the early settlers. He told me that when he was very small, he saw a deer across the stream from the cabin. He got the gun from over the fireplace, took careful aim and fired. His father scoffed at him and scolded him for shooting the gun and in the sprlngtime, found the carcass of the deer where father said it would be. He said that the venison would have been most welcome that winter.

GRANT: The pioneers made a batter of corn meal, salt and water, put it on the under side of a hoe, held the hoe in the open fire until cooked.

JIM: Yes, they called them "hoe cakes."

GRANT: We sure have it soft today compared to what our forefathers put up with.

JIM: Father made sulphur matches and sold them when he was twelve to fourteen years of age and living with Uncle Jim Hanchett in Deansboro, New York, after his father had left for California. He split a small block of wood criss cross into splinters so they could be torn off the block one at a time, dipped the ends into "brimstone" as he called the sulphur solution.

GRANT: Yes, they still used sulphur matches when we were kids. What a fearful stink they made when lit.

JIM: Well, it beat the flint and tinder fire-making method in use up to then. They used powdered dry, charred linen or ground-up willow bark for tinder. They put a little of it in a pile, struck a piece of flint stone with a piece of steel to throw a spark onto the tinder. As you may suppose, one would need to be very expert to make a fire in that way.