Howard Harmon Conner Oral History

Howard Harmon Conner Oral History

Howard Harmon Conner Oral History

Churchill County Museum Association

Churchill County Museum Association

August 18, 1994

Analog Cassette Tape, Text File, Mp3 Audio

English

41:49

128kbps/44100hz

CHURCHILL COUNTY MUSEUM & ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY PROJECT
an interview with
Howard Harmon Conner
August 18, 1994
OH
Con
This interview was conducted by Eleanor Ahern; transcribed by Glenda Price; edited by Norma Morgan; final by Pat Boden; index by Gracie Viera; supervised by Myrl Nygren, Director of Oral History Project, Churchill County Museum.
PREFACE
Howard Conner was chosen to be interviewed for the Museum's Oral History Project because his maternal and paternal grandparents were members of two historic families that were early settlers in Lahontan Valley, Churchill County--the Sanford and Harmon families.
Howard relates his early childhood memories of his grandfather William Harmon who homesteaded 300 acres east of Fallon and for which Harmon School and Harmon District are named. At different times his grandfather served as a member on the first TCID Board, November 1918, and as Churchill County Commissioner, 1922-1930.
He relates his recollections of Lahontan Dam when it was full
and at another time when it was absolutely empty. Mr. Conner
describes his boyhood activities at play such as ice skating and swimming, and his daily farm chores one of which was tending seven thousand laying hens.
From 1950 until his retirement in 1975 Howard and his wife,
Ann, lived in California. Upon retiring they travelled for
approximately 10 years. Consequently, all of Mr. Conner's
remembrances of Churchill County are limited to his early years prior to 1950. His narrations would be of much interest to the members of our present generation who have no knowledge of early farm life in Churchill County.
Interview with Howard Harmon Conner
This is Eleanor Ahern of the Churchill County Museum Oral History Project interviewing Howard H. Conner at his home at 750 East Stillwater Avenue. The date is Thursday, August 18, 1994. We're sitting in his living room. The time is 5:30.
AHERN: Good evening, Mr. Conner. How are you?
CONNER: Fine.
AHERN: Good. For the record, would you please give me your full name?
CONNER: Howard H. Conner. The "H" stands for my grandfather's name, Harmon, so it's Howard Harmon Conner.
AHERN: Please tell me your birth date and the place you were born.
CONNER: November 12, 1917, in my grandfather's house which is still standing out there and still lived in.
AHERN: Could you give an idea of where your grandfather's house is?
CONNER: It's two miles out of town. If Stillwater Avenue still went straight, you would go right past it.
AHERN: Would that be East Stillwater?
CONNER: Yeah.
AHERN: Could you give me the names of your parents?
CONNER: That's Fred and Nina Conner.
AHERN: What's the maiden name of your mother?
CONNER: Nina [Elizabeth] Harmon. She was born and raised and lived in this community her whole life.
AHERN: Tell me something about your grandfather. Could you give me his full name?
CONNER: William Harmon. What his middle name was, I don't know, but it was William Harmon, and he lived here from his early age till he passed away.
AHERN: And do you recall how your grandfather's family came to settle in this area?
CONNER: He came over from Santa Rosa [California]. Why, I don't know, but they settled out here and built the
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house, and he and my grandmother married and raised their family out there at the same house.
AHERN: What was your grandmother's full maiden name?
CONNER: She was Inez Sanford before she married Grandpa.
AHERN: From what I understand, your grandfather had something to do with the Lahontan Dam. Could you tell me something about that, please?
CONNER: Yeah, he was on the TCID [Truckee-Carson Irrigation District] board for years and one of the, I guess, pioneers of the TCID district. I don't know whether he was on the board at the time they was building the dam or later on. I know he was later on, but not at the start.
AHERN: Do you recall how he came to be on the board of TCID?
CONNER: It was through election. He ran for and was elected to the Board. The TCID office was on Maine Street. The building they were in at the time, and part of their yard was where the Fallon Waterworks Building is now. It was right in that area, and their corporation yard was further down the railroad tracks, and at the time that he was on it, as a matter of fact, my dad worked for some of them when they was digging all the drain ditches. They had two or three big--I think they were --linked belt drag lines that they used to dig all of these drain ditches around here at the time.
AHERN: Do you recall what your grandfather did as a member of the TCID board?
CONNER: Well, TCID, at that time, you might say, in its infancy, and he helped bring it along to what it was when he passed away and what it is now, but they had, it seems like, more water than they had now. I can remember the dam being so full that it was going over the spillways up there at Lahontan.
AHERN: Back then, I suppose, no one had any problems with a shortage of water.
CONNER: Not that I know of. Yeah, they had plenty at the time. However, in later years, about nineteen thirty something, they run out of water, and the dam went dry. All there was was the little channel through the bottom of it which was the Carson River that they had dammed off. It was interesting to see that because there were still trees standing in the bottom of that dam.
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However, when it did go dry, they lost all their fish.
AHERN: Now, tell me about that time. Did you recall how old you were when the dam had dried up?
CONNER: Oh, I was probably twelve, thirteen years old. Somewhere along in there. That was a long time ago.
AHERN: What did they do with all the dead fish?
CONNER: They just let them lay there and rot. It was quite strong to go up there and stand there and look at it. You wanted to hold your nose most of the time. (laughing)
AHERN: Was your grandfather always into the TCID business? Did he do other than . . .
CONNER: He was a county commissioner here for several years. How long, I don't remember. I can remember him running for county commissioner and the cards that he was passing out, us kids used to play with them (laughing) while he wasn't looking.
AHERN: Tell me your recollections about Lahontan Dam when you were a young boy.
CONNER: Well, we used to go up there and swim in it, picnic up there. I can recall when I was going to high school that we had a pretty severe winter, and the dam froze completely over, and we would go up and ice skate on the dam close to the shore, and three of us idiots decided that the ice was strong enough to hold us, and we skated from right the other side of the dam clear across to an island out there. However, we were skating together, and we were skating pretty fast, and the ice, when you'd put a skate down or your weight on it, you'd hear the cracks go out, so we scattered out and made it to the island, and then we sat out there for a while and wondered if we dare go back (laughing). We finally got up our nerves and started off real fast and came back across. Skated across the dam.
AHERN: You were telling me that in the evening there are lights up at the dam?
CONNER: Yeah, there was lights across the dam that they kept on all the time every night.
AHERN: What was the purpose of the lights?
CONNER: As far as I know, just ornamental. The road went
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across the dam, so it was just like street lights. They weren't real bright lights, but enough to illuminate the dam roadway across there.
AHERN: Was there someone posted at the dam at all times?
CONNER: Well, there was three houses up there. The people that operated the power plant and worked with the dam lived in those houses. They belonged to TCID, and the people working for TCID and their families lived in them.
AHERN: What year was the water dried up in the dam? Do you recall how long the water was gone?
CONNER: It was gone pert near all winter, and then we got storms, and it started filling up to where they would get enough to irrigate with. And for years it didn't fill up to overflow, and I guess it still hasn't.
AHERN: From your recollections, has the dam always operated properly?
CONNER: I think it did. When they had the water, they run it down the canals to the farmers to irrigate with, and they had no problems with getting water to irrigate their farms. When it was short, they were, naturally, short on irrigation. In the canals, they used to have what they called drops every so far, and that's where we used to swim. That's where I learned to swim, was in the canal, and we had to be fairly strong swimmers because you had to swim upstream part of the time.
AHERN: These drops, were they just a deeper part of the canal?
CONNER: They were cement drops so they could control the flow of the water downstream. They could open them up or close them, whatever the requirements along the canal was. As a matter of fact, that reservoir that's out east of Rattlesnake Hill, Granddad was on the Board when they developed that. I can remember that they stored water in that, and in the wintertime, that, again, was our skating rink out there.
AHERN: Do you know of any natural disasters that might have damaged the dam, like an earthquake or slide or something?
CONNER: No, I don't. I know that the spillways deteriorated, and they put flash boards up in the top of the dam so the water would not flow over, and they tried to maintain a level so as it wouldn't flow over those because they was afraid of it. Since then the drops,
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or whatever you call them, I guess, the drops, the steps coming out of the dam where the water would flow had been repaired, but I can remember of playing up and down on those while they were dry, and the cement was just flaking away.
AHERN: Did your grandfather do some farming on the side?
CONNER: He had three hundred acres out here about two miles out of town. As a matter of fact, he gave my dad and
mother acreage, and that's where I was raised.
AHERN: Was this acreage given upon marriage of your mother to your father?
CONNER: I guess so, yeah. However, we lived in town till I was about three or four, and then we moved out there.
AHERN: Do you recall what kind of farming your grandfather did? Was it cattle or alfalfa?
CONNER: It was mostly alfalfa and some grain. In the wintertime, they used to ship this--I'll go back a little bit. The hay in those days was stacked in large stacks, and in the wintertime, you'd use your derrick and Jackson fork to tear it out of the stack and put it back on the wagon and then go out and feed it to the stock. They used to ship in cattle in the wintertime and they'd send them out to the different farms. You'd have two or three hundred head of cattle in the corral, and you fed those two or three times a day.
AHERN: Who shipped the cattle in?
CONNER: I don't know.
AHERN: Were they from out of town?
CONNER: They were from out of town. I can remember they used to come in by rail and was unloaded at the stockyards where Mackedon's cement plant is now. They used to go in with their saddle horses, and they'd get so many head out and herd them out to the ranch that they was going to be fed on. Fattened up, and then they'd ship them back out for slaughter.
AHERN: What did your father raise on his ranch?
CONNER: Mostly just alfalfa. We only had a small acreage. Twenty-two acres, and Dad worked in town most of the time. Different jobs. As a matter of fact, he worked for Standard Oil Company when the tank wagon was still
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pulled by a team of horses.
AHERN: Did your grandfather own a team of horses?
CONNER: He owned lots of horses. He did some freighting. In those days, all of your farm work was done by horses. When you were plowing, it depended on the size of your plow whether you had two or three shares on it how many horses you'd have pulling it. Sometimes you'd have five, six to pull the plow because it was heavy pulling, and then he used them to mow the hay, rake the hay, haul the hay into the stack. Horses were essential then. They didn't have such a thing as a tractor.
AHERN: You said your grandfather had a freighting business. Where did that business take him?
CONNER: He freighted some. He didn't have a freighting business. I imagine it was more if there was a load and he was available, he'd take it out. He would freight out to Rawhide.
AHERN: And what did his load consist of?
CONNER: I don't know what they hauled. Supplies, I imagine, out to Rawhide. He'd have several head of horses strung out, and they'd usually ride on the wheeler and control the teams of horses with just one line which they called a jerk line.
AHERN: You mentioned wheeler. What is considered a wheeler?
CONNER: The wheeler is really a strong team of horses that they used at the wagon. They were the last ones down the line. You had the leaders out there that were trained to the jerk line, and you would use the words, "gee" and "haw" whether you wanted to go right or left, and you jerked the line, and those horses would come around. The wheelers would have to take the load while they were turning on a sharp road, and then, as they turned, the rest of the horses would have to jump the chain that they had tied to the wagon from the leaders back, and as they turned and came around the corner, the wheelers took most of the load till the other ones got strung out in front again.
AHERN: Did your grandfather train the horses himself?
CONNER: They broke most of their horses, yes.
AHERN: Were you ever on a trip with your grandfather when he
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was freighting?
CONNER: No. That was before my time. (laughing)
AHERN: Do you have anything more that you can recall about
your grandfather? Any of his other ventures?
CONNER: Well, not really. Just that he was a great guy. I thought he was real good, and we got along pretty good. I can remember meeting him in town and tugging on his shirt, coattail to get a nickel for an ice cream cone or something like that. That's about it. He was just a great guy.
AHERN: Did you spend quite a bit of time with them?
CONNER: Yeah. Of course, we lived just a mile apart, and I used to walk back and forth between the two places through the fields and visit with my grandmother and grandfather. Grandfather was usually out working. They kept about eighteen or twenty milking cows that they, in those days, milked by hand twice a day. I can remember going out there and watching that. I was never much of a milker so I didn't get in on it. (laughing) But then they would take the milk in and run it through the separator so they could get the cream out of it, and that went to the creamery that was here in town where they made butter.
AHERN: Tell me a little bit about your grandmother. She was a Sanford?
CONNER: She was a Sanford. Sanford was an old family here. Lash Sanford was her brother. Manie Sanford was her brother. Dave Sanford were all her brothers. Her parents had a hotel down in Stillwater years ago, and her father got killed when a team of horses run away with the buggy, and Grandma Sanford moved to town and lived in town for the rest of her life. She came through here originally on wagon trains across the desert out here. It was out here at Ragtown, and then she was also over at Fort Churchill and took care of the soldiers when they had a smallpox outbreak over there, but she was too wiry to get the disease and she kept going.
AHERN: Was she a nurse, or was she just helping out?
CONNER: No, just helping out.
AHERN: Your mother was a Harmon. What was her full name?
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CONNER: Nina Elizabeth.
AHERN: Do you recall any of her brothers and sisters?
CONNER: Yeah. She had three of them. She had Otto Harmon, Art Harmon, and Whitney Harmon.
AHERN: Were you an only child?
CONNER: No, I have a sister.
AHERN: And your sister's name?
CONNER: Iola Elizabeth.
AHERN: Is she older or younger?
CONNER: She's three years older than I am.
AHERN: Did you do a lot together as children?
CONNER: Uh, yeah. We played together and got into trouble together when we were kids, and then as we grew older, we kind of went separate ways. We still stayed fairly close. She's living in Texas now.
AHERN: As children, you both had chores around the place?
CONNER: Yeah.
AHERN: What were your chores and your sister's.
CONNER: Well, Sis helped around the house and the cooking and the dish washing and cleaning and what have ya'. Mine was outside with tendin' to the chickens. At one time, we had about seven thousand laying hens out there, and that took a lot of time to care for them. We had two or three cows that we milked, and my job was milking the cows at night, and Dad would milk them in the morning. Then we had, as I say, twenty-two acres out there, and we had hay on it, and we'd have to irrigate that and, of course, cut it and put it up and feed the cows that. When we had all of the chickens, I had a big police dog that I made a harness for and I took the tongue out of my play wagon, and fixed a single tree on it. Then I would put five five-gallon buckets of feed on that and tell him where to go, and he would take it to the chicken house, and then I'd scatter the feed out for the chickens. As we grew older, we got jobs in town, and we still took care of the ranch.
AHERN: With that many chickens, did you ever have any help
CONNER: 9
collecting the eggs?
No, we'd gather the eggs in five-gallon buckets and carry them in. In those days you used to have to grade the eggs. Every egg had to be weighed. We had a cellar built there, and we put the eggs in there, and the next morning when Mom got through with the housework, she would go out and grade those eggs and put them in different cases to be sold.
AHERN: Who did you sell the eggs to?
CONNER: Oh, they were shipped into Reno, some of them. Some of them were sold here. We did pretty good until the Depression hit, and the chickens kept eating, and you couldn't give the eggs away, and we went in the hole.
AHERN: What did you do with all the chickens, then?
CONNER: Well, they kept eating until we finally found somebody that would buy them, and then we finally got out of the chicken business. They probably sold them off or killed them or sold them on the market for food.
AHERN: As a youngster, what type of entertainment was afforded to you?
CONNER: We didn't have a whole lot. When we were young, I can remember when we got the first radio out there on the ranch, and I had to put up an antenna so as we could play it. The big program was Amos and Andy at that time, (laughing) and once in a while you'd go to a show in town, but that was about it. And, as we got older they used to have Saturday night dances up in the Fraternal Hall pert near every Saturday night, and we'd go up there and dance and have a good time.
AHERN: Did your family ever take vacations?
CONNER: Yeah, once in a while. My father's sister lived in Oakland [California] and their family, and they'd exchange visits. We'd go down and stay with them, or they'd come up and stay with us. That was about the extent of our traveling.
AHERN: You attended school in Fallon, right?
CONNER: All the way through school, yeah.
AHERN: After high school, what were your plans then?
CONNER: When I was senior in high school, I quit school and
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dropped out for one year and then went back and finished, and then I went to work for Dodge Construction and learned to be a mechanic. I went on from there for my occupation, and that was the way I
earned my living. Incidentally, this picture right here. That building stood where the Cottage Schools
are now. [255 East Stillwater]
AHERN: This is a picture of the high school .
CONNER: Of the old high school.
AHERN: And what year was this? From 1910 to 1918?
CONNER: That's when it was a high school. Then it became a grade school. I went to the first and second grade in that building.
AHERN: Did you ever join the army or the service?
CONNER: Yeah, I was in--when'd I go in? 1944, something like that. Took my basic training in Mineral Wells, Texas, then we shipped to Japan and spent about a year and a half over there.
AHERN: What branch of the service were you in?
CONNER: I was the walkin' army. I was in the infantry.
AHERN: And after you had served your army time, you came back to Fallon?
CONNER: Yes.
AHERN: And you've been here ever since?
CONNER: No. It's a long story, but I was married before, and when I came back, things weren't working out, so we separated. Then Ann and I got together and got married, and we lived here for about four years, and then we moved to California for different reasons, and we were down there from about 1950 until 1975. At that time, I worked as a mechanic and was a service manager in San Francisco [California], and then we owned two different motels that we operated, and when we sold the last one, we bought a trailer and just traveled for ten years and lived in the trailer.
AHERN: When you moved back to Fallon, did you ever participate in the Portuguese Festival?
CONNER: I didn't. We would go down to it, and Ann knew most of
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them down there, but we would go down for the festa, and late in the afternoon, we'd come home. We didn't really participate in it.
AHERN: As a youngster growing up in Fallon, what were some of the things you liked best about it?
CONNER: I guess living on the ranch. You had a horse you could ride. 'Course sometimes we didn't want to ride because we were forced to ride and herd cattle out in the fields so as we could keep an eye on them. They wouldn't get out or get in the green hay and bloat or something. We had to watch that. I can remember my uncle and I taking cattle down to the government pasture for the season or however long they left them there, and we would have to herd them down there and ride horses behind them all the way which was pretty long ride
AHERN: This government pasture was the BLM [Bureau of Land Management]?
CONNER: Yeah. It was operated out there.
AHERN: Well, tell me what didn't you like about Fallon? If anything?
CONNER: I can't think of much that I didn't like about it. I enjoyed growing up here. The things we used to do. Ice skate in the winter, do swimming in the summer along with the work that had to be done on the ranches.
AHERN: Going back to your grandfather, what do you remember most about him? To this day, what sticks in your mind about him?
CONNER: Gee, that's a hard question really. He was a determined person. When he spoke, you listened, but he was gentle. He used to get irritated at some of the kids, myself included, but it never lasted, so he was just an all around good person. There's several pictures of him over there in the Museum of him working. Going back to his days in TCID, I can remember when they, for some reason, was going to shut the power plant down up there, and when they gave the order, whoever went over and shut the water off on about a four-foot flume that run from the dam to the power house, they shut the valve so fast that the pipe collapsed, and I can remember of them talking, and Granddad had pictures of it as a flat pipe, and they kept wondering what it was going to cost to replace that or what they were going to, and some guy finally
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says, "Well, let's try turning the water on." So they turned the water back on slowly, and the pipe came back up into its shape.
AHERN: Was this a metal pipe?
CONNER: A metal pipe. Granddad had pictures of that, but I don't know whatever happened to them,
AHERN: Is there anything else that you can recall about him? Any stories?
CONNER: No.
AHERN: About the dam?
CONNER: No, not that I can think of. He had a bunch of pictures from years ago of them building that dam. That was built with teams of horses and scrapers that they called Fresnos, and they was two-horse Fresnos and four-horse Fresnos, and that's the way they built the dam was with horses and packed it down, and it held.
AHERN: Well, Mr. Conner, thank you very much for allowing me to interview you. On behalf of the Oral History
Program at the Museum, I'd like to thank you.
CONNER: Okay.
Howard Harmon Conner
Index
Birth Page
Conner, Fred 1
Conner, Iola Elizabeth 1, 2, 5
Conner, Nina Elizabeth Harmon 8
Farm life 1, 7-8
Freight hauling 5-6, 7, 8-9. 11
Harmon Brothers 6
Harmon, Inez Sanford 8
Harmon, WIlliam (Will) 2
1-2, 3, 5, 6-7,
11
Lahontan Dam 2-5, 11-12
Marriage 10
Military service 10
Old High School 10
Rattlesnake Reservoir 4
Recreation 3, 4, 5, 11
Sanford family 7
Schooling 9-10
T.C.I.D. 2, 4

Eleanor Ahern

Howard Harmon Conner

750 East Stillwater Avenue, Fallon, NV 89406