Grandma's Growing Up Years

Here is just a little more on the person who has Grandma's Pantry. I was born in Goldendale, Washington, up into the mountains. My folks had 3 kids (2 girls & a boy). The boy didn't live very long.

We moved down to the Toppenish area on the reservation. My dad worked for the Indians at that time. He had an old Model A pickup and he would toss me into it and we would take off for the mountains as his job was to bring the wild horses down to where the Indians would put them into corrals and then would sell them to the rodeos. I really thought it was a lot of fun.

The Indians at night would sit around a fire gambling. It was fun to watch them. The ladies were busy making items to sell to the tourists.

We soon rented a farm where we raised milk cows and our crops were sugar beets, sweet corn, peas, potatoes, carrots, and we also had a vineyard. My mother also worked as a supervisor in the "hop yards".

We had not even heard of a TV but we had a radio. You see this was the dirty thirty's and no one had much of anything. We had no basement but we had a storm cellar built a short ways from the house.

My Dad worked the farm with horses. Whenever he needed the horses he would send us girls after them as they knew if he came then they would have to work. The horses would come right up to us and follow us home. This all was during WWII.

I remember coming home from the first grade one afternoon and hearing President Franklin D. Roosevelt announcing the attack on Pearl Harbor. Us girls really didn't understand the enormity of all that was being said.

One day at school some people came into the school and took out all the Japanese children and took them and their parents to a holding camp for their own protection. You may not understand why this happened---but it was because most of them had many relatives in Japan and the US didn't trust them and they didn't trust us either.

During this period we had to have black shades on our windows so the lights wouldn't show at night. Our lights were kerosene lamps. We could see the search lights flashing up in the mountains because of our proximity to Japan to keep watch so we wouldn't be attacked.

We also had rationing of sugar, metals, tires, gas, oil and many other items that time has erased for me. Us girls didn't really realize how bad things really were.

Oh, the innocence of children.

Be sure to come back as I will continue on about Grandma's growing up.