Annabell E. Eckert Oral History

Annabell E. Eckert Oral History

Annabell E. Eckert Oral History

Churchill County Museum Association

Churchill County Mueum Association

September 28, 2000

Analog Cassette, Text File, mp3 Audio

English

Recording 1, 1:02:52
Recording 2, 19:29

128kbps/44100hz

Churchill County Oral History Project
an interview with
ANNABELL E. ECKERT
Fallon, Nevada
conducted by
MARIAN LAVOY
September 28, 2000
This interview was transcribed by Glenda Price; edited by Norine Arciniega; final by Patricia Boden; index by Gracie Viera; supervised by Myrl Nygren, Director of the Oral History Project, Churchill County Museum
OH
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Preface
Annabell Eckert is a self-effacing and delightful woman who exudes the aura of a capable and solicitous wife. Her Scandinavian background is confirmed by her efficient handling of home and finances. It is obvious that her home and family are paramount, and her vision as a young bride left with her parents while her husband served his country was well rewarded by her astute buying of large farm machinery to replace the time-honored horse for leveling fields and doing heavy plowing.
She kept the home and ranch in Fallon running smoothly as her husband branched out into numerous businesses that took him all over northern Nevada. When supplies or equipment needed to be replaced, it was Annabell who drove miles to locate his camp in deep canyons or on lonely high country plateaus. At times she got lost in the pitch black darkness of the night, but her honing instincts always came through and she would eventually find the camp.
As the family fortunes improved and more land was purchased, Annabell's attitude never changed. She remained close to home and family enjoying family picnics, card games, etc. and square dancing which she can no longer do because of a leg injury. Her upbeat attitude prevails, but her only concern that I can ascertain is one that bothers all Fallon ranchers, and that is the loss of irrigation water.
Interview with Annabell Eckert
This is Marian Hennen LaVoy doing an oral history of Annabell Wilslef Eckert for the Churchill
County Museum Oral History Project. The date is September 28, 2000, and the recording is
taking place in the annex of the museum building.
LAVOY: Good morning, Annabell. How are you this morning?
ECKERT: Oh, fine.
LAVOY: Good. I was noticing here on your biographical questionnaire that you were born in Yerington, Nevada. Can you tell me when?
ECKERT: December 26, 1924.
LAVOY: Did you stay in Yerington for the rest of your life?
ECKERT: No, I left when I was about five.
LAVOY: And why did you leave?
ECKERT: They lost the ranch. That was in 1931, I think, I moved to Reno,
so my dad moved to Reno to go to work. He did work through all the Depression in Reno.
LAVOY: Your parents had a ranch in Yerington?
ECKERT: Yes.
LAVOY: And you lost it?
ECKERT: Yeah, they lost it apparently. I don't remember much about Yerington. I left when I was five.
LAVOY: And 1931 is when you went to Reno.
ECKERT: Probably 193.0 or 1931. I think the Catholic school had just opened. That's probably Arlington. I'm not sure. I started the first grade in the Catholic school. I wasn't a Catholic, but it was close.
LAVOY: That would have been St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic School.
ECKERT: Yeah, and I went there for two years. We moved three or four times in Reno. I went to Northside for a little while when I got a
little older. I graduated from the sixth grade at Orvis Ring into Northside. In those years the school years were split high first, low first. So when we moved here in 1939, I only had a half a year left in the eighth grade, so when I come out here, I had to go to Harmon. I go in that day. I say, "Where's the eighth grade?" They said, "You're it." [laughing] You can imagine, coming out of Reno at that time which I thought was big. I was the only one in the eighth grade.
LAVOY: My goodness. Let's digress just a bit. You lived in Reno then until 1939. Why did your parents come to Fallon?
ECKERT: They bought a ranch.
LAVOY: And where was that?
ECKERT: In Old River on Gummow Drive.
LAVOY: How large was it?
ECKERT: That ranch there was a hundred and six acres.
LAVOY: Were you happy to leave Reno and come to Fallon?
ECKERT: Not really because I'd been raised in the city, but I grew to like it.
LAVOY: When you came to Fallon, tell me something about the town.
ECKERT: It was at nine o'clock, I mean, they pulled the sidewalks in. There was nothing uptown in 1939. Now in the forties when the base opened up, there was a show here. In those years there was two matinees, and it was packed because there was nothing else to do. It was just a little nice ranch town.
LAVOY: What did you think about the base and the naval air station coming to Fallon?
ECKERT: It didn't bother me 'cause I was really very war minded. It didn't bother me a bit, but in 1942 my folks then went to Hawthorne to work in the ammunition depot up there.
LAVOY: Who took care of the ranch?
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ECKERT: The neighbors. They were Basque. They rented the place and took care of it. The worst part of that was I still had three months of school to go, so I couldn't go, so they said, "Well, you can just live with these Basque people." Well, they couldn't speak English, and I couldn't speak Basque.
LAVOY: What was their name?
ECKERT: Bilbao. Their heirs are still on that ranch over there, so believe me I had a tough time.
LAVOY: I bet you did.
ECKERT: But I got to know the people up the way. They were Portuguese, and they could speak English, and I said, "Hah!"
LAVOY: Who were they?
ECKERT: Amarals. I thought, "This is the time to move" because I was having a hard time communicating.
LAVOY: I imagine that you were.
ECKERT: They were nice people..
LAVOY: And you were not very old at that time either.
ECKERT: No, no.
LAVOY: What about sixteen?
ECKERT: No, I wasn't even that old at the time. Maybe thirteen, fourteen, something like that. Then we went to Hawthorne for about two and a half years.
LAVOY: Then did you graduate from high school here?
ECKERT: No. I went to Hawthorne in the fall of 1942 and started school there, and like a lot of girls those years, I meet a Marine and go get married. I was a junior, but it lasted.
LAVOY: Been a very happy marriage.
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ECKERT: Oh, yeah. I don't know what I'd do to my kids if they did something like that. We only went together five weeks, and he
was only there five more months, and he was gone.
LAVOY: And this is your present husband?
ECKERT: Yes. We were from different parts of the country. When they left, I heard from him, but I never talked to him again. If the War hadn't been over I wouldn't have talked to him in 1945. It was a blessing that it ended in 1945. I left Hawthorne when he left. We came back to the ranch.
LAVOY: Your parents came back with you?
ECKERT: Um-hum, and I stayed on the ranch. I wasn't real wild. I'd go out in the desert, go out in the ditch, and I did fine. I never really went up town hardly. I wasn't much of a dancer, so I did a lot of reading. I kept a scrapbook of the War and stuff like that.
LAVOY: Did you receive many letters from your husband?
ECKERT: Yes, and I'm sorry now I burned them. I had a box about that big [a large shoe box]. Then they're telling us later, but there wasn't too much in them 'cause the first years they cut them all to pieces for the censor. I bet that censor got an earful sometimes. [laughing] Then when they went to V mail, there wasn't, but he was good. He wrote a lot.
LAVOY: Oh, that's wonderful. Now, digressing just a little bit, how did you happen to meet Curly?
ECKERT: I went to school with a Jeannie Lewis here, and her dad went to Hawthorne, too, in the War 'cause he was retired, but he went back in. She moved to Hawthorne, and it was her sixteenth birthday. He had just got to town that day. Those girls cut school. I didn't. They said, "Let's go out. We got a couple of Marines we're going to blind date." They called him Curly. They didn't tell me that he didn't have no hair. They'd come from boot camp, you know. So I met him at the base. When he took his hat off, I thought, "Oh, Lord." [laughing]
LAVOY: Well, the Marines are great for shaving the heads.
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ECKERT: Oh, yeah. But he couldn't leave the base. He'd just got in, but they knew when those guards walked back and forth in Hawthorne. They both went over the fence. Boy, if they'd caught them. They didn't.
LAVOY: You mean, the men went over?
ECKERT: Yeah, they couldn't get out of that 'cause both of them came in that day. Jeannie's father was there. He was a commander. He was in the submarine service, and the party was at his house, but he probably didn't know when they came in or anything. We just started going together.
LAVOY: It was sort of love at first sight.
ECKERT: I don't really believe too much of that. In those years men were so polite in all ways, and he was just nice. Then we went out more. We didn't really go out that much 'cause I was still in school, and I had to study.
LAVOY: What did you do on dates in Hawthorne?
ECKERT: We went to the USO. Then there was other Marines that was married that he got to know, and we went to their house. Like I say, he wasn't off the base that much. He might be on duty for forty-eight hours, something like that. So, actually, I didn't see him a real lot.
LAVOY: But, still in five weeks you decided you loved one another.
ECKERT: It was New Year's Eve, and someone says, "Let's get married." I said, "You're out of your mind." We thought about it, and I'm not the kind. I didn't even tell my folks. We went and got a license on the sixth of January. We went and got married.
LAVOY: You got a license where? In Hawthorne?
ECKERT: In Hawthorne. I was just eighteen a couple of days, and he was only seventeen and a half, but he was very mature. In fact, I thought he was lying about his age when he told me. [laughing] He had to go before the captain, naturally, because he had to have permission from the base. And the other girl, there was another one that was married with us.
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LAVOY: Who was that?
ECKERT: That was Betty Richards. That didn't last. She divorced him.
LAVOY: What was his name? Do you remember?
ECKERT: Lyle Kuloff. He was our best man. She divorced him about a month after that. Then she went on and got married five more times.
LAVOY: Well, that's quite a record.
How long did you honeymoon before Curly left?
ECKERT: We got married January 6 [1943], and he left around the first of June.
LAVOY: So, you had a few months together living in Hawthorne.
ECKERT: Yeah. Living in Hawthorne, although we didn't see each other all that much because he did guard duty out there on the base. That's what the Marines generally did there. They was only there just a short time and then they headed for Camp Pendleton.
LAVOY: Did you go to Pendleton?
ECKERT: No, I come back to Fallon.
LAVOY: Did your parents come back at the same time?
ECKERT: Yeah, we all came back.
LAVOY: Your father, was he working in the munitions factory?
ECKERT: Yeah. During the War they needed help real bad, and it was good wages at that time. I can't remember what they were. My sister was also up there, but her husband was a leading man in the area which means a boss. We came back because we decided we'd had enough of Hawthorne.
LAVOY: How did the Basque family feel when they had to move off your place?
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ECKERT: They were next door. They didn't care 'cause they were farming their place, too. They were just living in our house. No, they were fine.
LAVOY: That's good.
ECKERT: They were real nice..
LAVOY: When you returned, did you take up life as it had been before?
ECKERT: No. I mean, by then, I got pregnant about two months after we got married, and so I just kind of stayed on the ranch, but I did have to go to Reno to have our son because the first hospital in Fallon wasn't much.
LAVOY: What was the name of it?
ECKERT: Handley's Hospital, so I went to Reno a month before I was due. Then I hadn't really had much medical attention. Those Navy doctors up there in Hawthorne were not really great, so I went to Reno and spent a month with my sister.
LAVOY: You lived with your sister for the month prior? ECKERT: Yeah.
LAVOY: Where was the baby born?
ECKERT: Washoe General at that time.
LAVOY: What was his name?
ECKERT: David Eckert.
LAVOY: How did you get word to your husband that the baby had arrived?
ECKERT: We sent a telegram through the Salvation Army. My husband was very fond of them.
LAVOY: What was his reaction when he got the word?
ECKERT: I don't know what his reaction was. He wrote back. He was in this country. He was in this country at the time, but you didn't
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leave then because he was getting ready to go aboard ship about four days later. They said, "Is she dying?" "No, on that ship." [laughing]
LAVOY: Oh, yes. Typical.
ECKERT: He said some guys were really foolish, went over the hill. He says that was stupid.
LAVOY: Indeed it was.
ECKERT: Yeah, that was stupid.
LAVOY: So, how old was the baby before he actually saw him?
ECKERT: Nearly two years.
LAVOY: Goodness!
ECKERT: Yeah. That's the way it was, though. When he come into Reno, we handed the baby to him, and the kid went into hysterics like, "Now, who's this bum?" [laughing]
LAVOY: Oh, my. So, you lived on the ranch with your parents and helped them with their work?
ECKERT: Yeah. The ranch wasn't really that great because it [the ranch] wasn't leveled till my husband come home.
LAVOY: Did you do any work outside the home during those two years?
ECKERT: I worked a little while at Kent's.
LAVOY: What did you do at Kent's?
ECKERT: I was a clerk, but I did when he was gone I bought two horses. My dad says, "You gotta buy horses." My husband was good about sending money home. He played a lot of poker. He was real lucky, and he was always sending money home. Then they brought three big tractors into the valley. I think my husband might have told you that. There was no big tractors here, and one guy didn't want his. My dad says, "That's the coming way," so I bought that damn tractor.
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LAVOY: With your money that you earned at Kent's?
ECKERT: Well, I bought it on time. I think-it was only twenty-five hundred dollars for that big tractor those years. I wrote and told him. When he come home, he says, "It's a good thing you bought the tractor because if I'd had to farm with horses, we wouldn't a been farming. [laughing]
LAVOY: So, he got out and came to Reno?
ECKERT: Yeah.
LAVOY: Did you go in to meet him?
ECKERT: We met him. His folks in Texas thought he'd come home, but he didn't go right home because we didn't have that much money, and Texas was a long way. We didn't get back to Texas till 1949.
LAVOY: My goodness. Your boy was several years old.
ECKERT: Yeah, by the time we got to Texas. My son was born on my birthday [December 26].
LAVOY: Oh, how nice!
ECKERT: And I think the day after he was born, his grandfather in Texas died.
LAVOY: Oh, that's too bad.
ECKERT: So, we did go back in 1949.
LAVOY: When your husband arrived home and came out to Fallon, what did you do? Did you live in the home with your parents?
ECKERT: Yeah. We got along good. We had no problem. Then, eventually, they moved to California for a while.
LAVOY: Your maiden name was Wisleff.
ECKERT: That's Danish.
LAVOY: And they actually lived in Fallon for how long?
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ECKERT: Well, they got here in 1939. I don't know exactly when, but they went down to Pismo Beach. During the War, too, we used to go out to Gardnerville quite a bit. We had quite a bit of family there `cause my dad's people came to Genoa a long time ago.
LAVOY: Oh, I see your father was born in Gardnerville.
ECKERT: Yeah, but my great-grandfather lived in Genoa those early years. I think they came there about 1870.
LAVOY: When all of the Danish people settled in that area.
ECKERT: Yeah. My dad told me, you know when Brigham Young was going to declare war against the United States, those people just walked off practically and left their farms 'cause they was called back to Salt Lake. Then he said after they left a lot of Germans and Danes moved into Genoa and Gardnerville. There's still a lot of them there.
LAVOY: Very many of them.
ECKERT: Yeah.
LAVOY: Was your mother from that same area?
ECKERT: No, she was from Missouri.
LAVOY: And how did they happen to meet?
ECKERT: She'd left her second husband. She was in Los Angeles and she seen an ad in the paper for someone wanted a cook. She was only twenty-three years old, and that would be my grandfather. His wife had died and left him with ten kids.
LAVOY: Oh, my goodness.
ECKERT: She came out there and took the job and then married the oldest boy which was my dad.
LAVOY: Oh, I see. What was her maiden name?
ECKERT: Florence O'Niel.
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LAVOY: And where was she from?
ECKERT: Missouri. We've been tracing our genealogy for about thirty years, and we finally found them.
LAVOY: Oh, that's great.
ECKERT: I don't know how a twenty-three year old girl took care of ten kids and cooked on a ranch.
LAVOY: Well, in those days they were very able.
ECKERT: Oh, man!
LAVOY: It was a thing that was expected.
ECKERT: Yeah, yeah. My dad eventually left, and that's when they moved to Yerington and bought a ranch.
LAVOY: When you and Curly got started ranching here, he mentioned something about you had a dairy. Would you tell me something about that?
ECKERT: We had a grade-A dairy, and, of course, those years the dairies were small. I think he said fifty cows is about all we milked, but there was not the automation. I never learned to milk a cow. That was not real good sense, [laughing] but I did clean up the barn. By then our daughter was born. I used to bundle her up and take her down to the barn and sit her up on a table like this while I cleaned the barn. Those early years were really very tough.
LAVOY: I imagine so.
ECKERT: When we bought that house there was no water in it, no bathroom in it. They put the bathroom in, but they never finished it, and they had a pump outside. When I look back, hard as it was, I didn't mind.
LAVOY: You were young.
ECKERT: I didn't even think, you know, and eventually we got plumbing
into the house, but I just didn't really think about it.
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LAVOY: Well, indoor plumbing really didn't come into being until in the forties.
ECKERT: No. They had an outhouse back there that was built by the CCC [Civilian Conservation Corps] boys. There was a camp here one time, and it's still standing. They're going to kind of restore it.
LAVOY: Oh! I believe that I read that they were looking for these that had been built by the CCC.
ECKERT: I knew there was a CCC camp there, but I don't think it was operating when we moved here. It was there in 1936, I know.
LAVOY: You mentioned your daughter. When was she born, and what was her name?
ECKERT: Her name was Sharon, and, believe me, she was born nine months after he come home, and I said, "That's it." I never had no more. [laughing]
LAVOY: [laughing] What was the date of her birth?
ECKERT: August 9, 1946.
LAVOY: So then you had your family of two. You started as a family unit then.
ECKERT: Yeah, we started as a family unit. We were with kids all our lives. We raised, naturally, our kids, and there was a family next door. I became friends of theirs, but we were different in every way. They were alcoholics, and when they split, I ended up with two of their boys. Those years people never asked where I got them. When I put them in school they never asked nothing'.
LAVOY: Did you put them in school under their name?
ECKERT: Oh, yeah. We helped send the one boy to college in Susanville, and then we raised our grandchildren. Now we're working on great-grandkids. We've had kids all our life.
LAVOY: You've enjoyed them though.
ECKERT: Yeah, yeah.
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LAVOY: With the dairy, besides your cleaning the barn, what else did you have to do dairy oriented?
ECKERT: I'd feed sometimes when he was gone, but I had to go down early in the morning and put the equipment together.
LAVOY: Explain the equipment because most people don't realize what was involved in diary equipment.
ECKERT: That's those things that they put on the cows. It was a milking machine.
LAVOY: Must have been one of the early milking machines.
ECKERT: It was one of the early milking machines. There was no pipe lines. The buckets were heavy, and he had to lift them into a thing, and then they went into a cool tank on the other side.
LAVOY: Did you have to wash the cows before you put those on?
ECKERT: He did that. Those cows got pretty smart. We had one. She was always the first one up there, except she learned how to open that barn door with her horns and she'd open it and all those cows would get in there before they were supposed to. She was a very smart cow.
LAVOY: They would come in and put their heads in the stanchion.
ECKERT: Oh, yeah, they knew that there was food in there. They put four at a time in. The others were in the holding pen. They'd open the door and four more would come in.
LAVOY: The milking machines at that time, did they automatically know when the bags were dry?
ECKERT: No. You had to know what you were doing because if you didn't, you could get mastitis in your herd and you ruin a herd. That's when the bags get hard if you don't get them milked out. Sometimes they had to strip them out. I think when they started to milk, they'd strip them, and then they'd put these four teat cup things on and start milking.
LAVOY: Then when they realized that the bag was empty, they would
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remove the cups?
ECKERT: Yeah, they'd remove it and make sure that their bags were dry. You can ruin a cow.
LAVOY: You said they would strip them before and after. ECKERT: Yeah.
LAVOY: Then the cows would get their heads out of the stanchions . . .
ECKERT: Yeah, they'd let 'em out. The holding pen which is the sides and the lane, they opened the doors, and they went right back out to the corral. Sometimes I fed for them.
LAVOY: And the next ones came in.
ECKERT: Yeah, and the next four came in.
LAVOY: About how much milk did you get every day?
ECKERT: That I couldn't tell you. I knew nothing about weights and measures. At the time we had a Grade A dairy. Our first dairy was holstein.
LAVOY: Was that first diary a grade A or grade B?
ECKERT: We sold cream for a while, but you separate it.
LAVOY: That would be grade B?
ECKERT: Yeah, grade B, but then we built a Grade A barn.
LAVOY: What's this grade B? Did you have to wash all of the machinery?
ECKERT: No, it was entirely different. You had to keep it clean for your own use, but as not as strict as you were on a grade A barn, and they separated. Then they got the cream, and they took it to Fallon. They had a creamery, and it was shipped to California.
LAVOY: I know it's very involved cleaning those separators. Could you kind of explain that for us, please?
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ECKERT: When you took the thing out, it had a cap that went over all these things. It was like a bowl but they were metal. It was all stacked on each of other.
LAVOY: They were like strainers.
ECKERT: Yeah. You had to wash them in between and wash out all the spouts. The cream went one way, and the milk that was no good anymore went the other way.
LAVOY: Did you have to keep brushes?
ECKERT: Oh, yeah.
LAVOY: How did you get hot water out there? Did you have to carry it out?
ECKERT: No, no. When the barn was built, there was hot water in the barn. All that was hot water then.
LAVOY: So that wasn't quite as bad as having to carry it out.
ECKERT: Oh, no. No, you couldn't because you had to wash those barns down with the hose and everything and make sure they were spotless. Those inspectors, you never knew when one was going to show up.
LAVOY: These were state inspectors?
ECKERT: Yeah. Your equipment, you could get a disease. If your
equipment wasn't clean, they were very touchy. When that milk went into a tank, these agitators come on. That kept the milk mixed, so if the cream didn't raise to the top, it was always mixed in.
LAVOY: Did they come with trucks?
ECKERT: Trucks, and then they plugged into this big tank and pumped it into a big like a gas truck, one of those bog round trucks.
LAVOY: Yeah, they're still going around the valley here.
ECKERT: Oh, yeah. But, now, you hardly don't touch the cow. Everything is so automated.
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LAVOY: Yes, but you had your years of doing all the cleaning afterwards and all of that.
ECKERT: And the kids, those years we raised a lot of calves. The kids took care of the calves. Sometimes we had forty-five baby calves, and the kids would line the cows up. They'd line the buckets up on a fence with nipples on, and then they had to fight to make sure each calf got his bucket. That's why kids in those days didn't get in trouble. They had chores.
LAVOY: Yes, they were busy all the time.
ECKERT: They were busy all the time.
LAVOY: I know what these buckets are, but for the sake of people in the future that will reading this, would you explain how these buckets have the nipples on them?
ECKERT: Just a bucket with a big nipple in the bottom, and when you poured that milk, those calves would run up and grab those nipples. It was terrible when you had about forty calves in there, and when they get done with theirs they was trying to eat the guy's next door to them. It was kind of interesting.
LAVOY: Did the young people keep those buckets clean, or did you have to do that too?
ECKERT: They brought them back to the barn, and we washed them out.
Then they'd put the milk in. The two kids did that.
LAVOY: The colostrum that you got from the new cows, did you sell that, or at that point in time was it not as valuable as it is now?
ECKERT: No. They just milked it on the ground. That first milk that comes out of a calf, after they got a good start, they just threw it away.
LAVOY: And now it's quite valuable.
ECKERT: Oh, is it?
LAVOY: Yes. Well, you had a busy, busy life. With these children that you raised, did they sleep at your home?
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ECKERT: Oh, yeah.
LAVOY: And you fed them and everything.
ECKERT: The father moved to California, the mother'd ran off. It first started out I'd go and pick up the kid. When we was doing desert work, we took them out to the desert work. I never knew where the father was. I never knew where the mother was.
LAVOY: The first two that you took in . .
ECKERT: They were the neighbor's kids.
LAVOY: Those were the neighbor's children, and they lived right with you.
ECKERT: Oh, yeah. They went to school, and they learned how to really work, too.
LAVOY: Are they still in this area?
ECKERT: Yeah. One is here as a contractor.
LAVOY: Well, that's very nice.
ECKERT: And just before his mother died, she says, "Well, that's one thing they taught you." I was in contact with the mother through the later years, but they never really got close to her.
LAVOY: That's because you had raised them.
ECKERT: And the other one, he went to school in Susanville. He went to two years of college up there, and he went on to get a good job.
LAVOY: That's most admirable on your part.
ECKERT: There was another boy. We never took him, but he did fine. He went on to become a Episcopalian priest. When the father of these died, the sister come forward and got his Social Security for the youngest one. He had about three thousand dollars worth of Social Security we turned over to him.
LAVOY: What did you do? The Social Security check would come to the boy, and you would . . . ?
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ECKERT: We would put it in the bank for him, and we never touched any of his money. We just raised him on our own. It worked out fine.
LAVOY: And when he left, he had . . .
ECKERT: He had about twenty-five hundred, three thousand, I think, and we give him that.
LAVOY: That's most admirable.
ECKERT: Because we could afford to clothe them and feed them. We always did fine that way.
LAVOY: That's most admirable on your part.
ECKERT: We're still in contact. The sister kind of adopted me as the mother, and her daughter comes to Christmas every year at our place, and her daughter comes, so they're all part of our family, yet:
LAVOY: That's great. Getting back to your life, how long did you have the dairy?
ECKERT: I don't know.
LAVOY: When did you sell it, do you remember?
ECKERT: I don't know. I think we sold the last diary in 1962 or 1963 'cause we was in Vegas when they let off one of those atomic bombs.
LAVOY: How did you happen to be there?
ECKERT: When we sold our second dairy, this man wanted Curly to come down and work with him for two or three months in the dairy down there, so we took our cows. They were sold to a man in Pahrump, and I can remember standing at the barn door looking over that way when that bomb went off. That's how come I knew they sold it then, and we never went back in the dairy business. Big mistake. Dairy business is very good business, but the boy didn't seem interested in it. Now he is, but it's too late now.
LAVOY: Well, that's typical.
ECKERT: But, at that time he didn't want anything to do with those cows.
18
[laughing
LAVOY: Did you truck them down to Pahrump?
ECKERT: Yes, they trucked them down. We put him [David Eckert] in school there. It was a one-room schoolhouse like the one I went to in Harmon. He didn't mind it, and then in about three months we came back.
LAVOY: Your folks took care of the .
ECKERT: After they come back from California the first time, he went up to the Lake [Tahoe] and became a caretaker. He stayed up there twenty years, but my mother didn't go.
LAVOY: Where he'd caretaker?
ECKERT: He took care of the people for the, I think it was Hills Brothers coffee. They had an estate up there, and I went up there to visit. That was some place, I'll tell you.
LAVOY: And your mother stayed here next to you in the house in Fallon.
ECKERT: Yes. We moved in a house, and she stayed here with us 'cause my brother was in California, my sister wasn't that well, and my other sister was in Alaska.
LAVOY: So, your mother stayed right here.
ECKERT: Yeah, she stayed to the very end.
LAVOY: When you came back from Pahrump, what did you do?
ECKERT: He was leveling by then. He did a lot of leveling. I think he leveled half of this valley. He was very, very ambitious. He'd work eighteen hours a day. He'd rather work than eat. I says, "You're sick." [laughing]
LAVOY: [laughing] While he was doing all this leveling in the valley, were you keeping the ranch going?
ECKERT: No, he come home• every night. He'd just level in the valley and come home every night. I did some irrigating. Not a lot, but I
19
always have plenty to do on the ranch. Those years I was canning and making jelly and every year we had two hundred chickens. What a chore that was 'cause we'd get the whole bunch, and we had a assembly line. We put in about two hundred fryers every year in the freezer.
LAVOY: Where did you buy your chickens?
ECKERT: We bought them at Kent's when they were babies about like that.
LAVOY: And did you have the incubator and everything?
ECKERT: Yeah. We had the regular incubator. Chickens are pretty hard to kill, but the turkeys are a different story.
LAVOY: They're very dumb.
ECKERT: They're dumb, and we had three hundred of those. We never raised turkeys again. [laughing]
LAVOY: I understand that they'll all run in a corner and smother one another.
ECKERT: Oh, they're terrible. But we raised a lot of chickens.
LAVOY: How big was your chicken house if you had three hundred?
ECKERT: The brooders was big and when we'd open the doors, then they'd go out into the corral. It was always in the spring, so when they got big enough to go outside in the corral, they'd roost outside.
LAVOY: And you didn't have coyote problems?
ECKERT: No. There were lots of coyotes, but they were fenced. When we first moved here, there was coyotes all over the place, but we never lost anything to them.
LAVOY: Because you had good fencing.
ECKERT: We had good fencing. They would not come into a farm yard like that. Coyotes are real cowards.
LAVOY: Now they're coming into farm yards.
20
ECKERT: Oh, yeah; because they're hungry, and people are treading on their ground.
LAVOY: With these three hundred chickens, you would raise them until they were how old?
ECKERT: Good fryers were about three pounds, three and a half
LAVOY: Tell me about your assembly line.
ECKERT: Oh, well, somebody was chopping their heads off, then they'd dump them in the hot water, then the cold water. They'd pick them and then they'd send them to me and Mary Ann. We was cleaning them and dropping them in cold water and drain 'em and then we'd put them in the freezer.
LAVOY: Who is Mary Ann?
ECKERT: She was my daughter-in-law at the time. My son worked. Everybody worked. This was Curly's idea of raising chickens. The kids, none of them really appreciated it. Only when it come to eating.
LAVOY: [laughing] How big a freezer did you have to hold three hundred?
ECKERT: There was two hundred, not three. We had one at the time, they had a food plan out. I think that was huge. It was a great big double-door freezer. We had plenty of freezer room. And we also had lockers down town at the time.
LAVOY: Where down town?
ECKERT: Like Heck's Meat Market. They had food lockers. They still do some places.
LAVOY: And you rented that?
ECKERT: You rented them because those years I canned a lot.
LAVOY: Did you have a garden?
21
ECKERT: They didn't dehydrate those years, and we didn't freeze because
we didn't have that kind of room. We freeze now, but I don't do that anymore. One of the big things we did was every year we made sixty gallons of homemade root beer. God, it was good!
LAVOY: How do you make root beer?
ECKERT: You get root beer extract and then you get the yeast. Then you put your water in and your sugar and you stir it up. The last time I did it, I must have got too much yeast in. You could not go in that cellar. They was blowing up all over the place.
LAVOY: Oh my!
ECKERT: If you get too much yeast in them. It blew up half my bottles. [laughing]
LAVOY: Did you have regular beer bottles?
ECKERT: Yeah. We was going to try make some for this generation and show them how. I doubt if you can get the extract, and we was worried that you wouldn't be able to cap these new bottles 'cause, see, we used the old nickel coca cola bottles. And everything those years came in bottles and we capped them just fine. I think I might get the extract, but I don't think that you could cap those new beer bottles. And another thing I've never seen anymore Fleischman's yeast in the cube. 'Cause a lot of it comes now is dehydrated. If you didn't know what you was doin'.
LAVOY: I can just see the root beer bottles exploding.
ECKERT: It was really great stuff. And we made some ginger beer. That was ginger ale, but I didn't care for it, and I can't remember what kind of extract we used.
LAVOY: About how many bottles of root beer, when it wasn't coming out of the bottle, did you put up?
ECKERT: Well, we went by the gallon, but we put up about sixty gallons a year. We had a big crock like that, and we'd go out in the yard and fill them and cap them. They had to be laid down in a dark place, and we had a root cellar. We packed them down there. When I went down there and smelled this root beer, I knew what had happened. It was blowing up.
22
LAVOY: [laughing] Oh, dear. What did you raise in the garden that you canned?
ECKERT: I had a garden, but I didn't can vegetables. I canned all right, but those years you could buy fruit real cheap. We canned a lot of peaches, apricots, pears, like that., but I really never canned 'cause I didn't like a pressure cooker. Although I did can a hundred and twenty quarts of tomatoes one year, but you did that in a hot water bath. Now you can't do that they say. It's a different kind of tomato.
LAVOY: It doesn't have as much acid.
ECKERT: So you have to pressure them now, I guess. In fact, we open kettled most of our tomatoes those years. I did do a few beets `cause pickled beets aren't too bad to do.
LAVOY: And you have the acid from the vinegar.
ECKERT: Yeah.
LAVOY: A lot of people do not know what you mean when you say open kettle and what-not, so explain that to us.
ECKERT: Open kettle is when you just put your tomatoes in a big pot and cook them for whatever long they're supposed to be cooked. You pour them into hot water. Bottles have been sterile and sealed.
LAVOY: Tell us about the hot water bath.
ECKERT: A hot water bath you put them into a pot with warm water. You don't want to pour boiling water on those bottles--they might break-- and put the water over them for generally, I think, it was about thirty-five, forty minutes boiling under the water.
LAVOY: Before the water was hot boiling and left them in. Then when you took them out?
ECKERT: You took them out and just sit them there and let them cool. And because it was canned, my mother told me this years ago--we always put water--you got the jar, and when you take your ring off, your lid's still sealed, you put water on that lid. You take a can opener and punch it. If it stays on the lid, you don't touch it. If it
2.3
sucks it in, it's good. We've done that for years.
LAVOY: That tip keeps you from getting botulism.
ECKERT: Oh, yeah. A couple of times we've seen it standing it and just tossed it out.
LAVOY: How many hours did you spend canning, do you think, each summer?
ECKERT: I don't know. I put up about fifty pints of jelly every year and jam, but I have no idea about time.
LAVOY: Well, there's nothing as good as home canned jam and jelly. ECKERT: Yeah.
LAVOY: It's wonderful.
ECKERT: And we made a lot of homemade ice cream.
LAVOY: Oh!
ECKERT: In fact a couple of years ago we still got several of the old-fashioned churn and I had the young generation out there making and churning it, and I says, "This is how you do it our way." We had an electric one going, but we was making them churn the other one. [laughing]
LAVOY: And you put the salt on the ice?
ECKERT: Yeah.
LAVOY: The whole bit. There's nothing as good as homemade ice cream.
ECKERT: Oh, gosh. Peach is excellent. With fresh peaches. I was showing them how to do it.
LAVOY: I'm glad that they're learning something that we used to know as youngsters. You were canning during the summers. When your husband was out on these seeding projects, did you ever go out for the whole summer, or did you just go out visiting?
24
ECKERT: Oh, for t while, I went, my daughter went, and my daughter-in law went. We had three different trailers. They might be in different jobs. It was up to me to get there and stock those trailers with which I thought they might need 'cause once they left here, they was out there, if you was out of something, you stayed out of it till somebody went to town.
LAVOY: This is when your husband was seeding out?
ECKERT: Seeding. Elko, Ely. A lot of times I would come back in and stay and then I would take supplies out to him. A couple of times I got lost out there in the desert at night. I was out there with this one guy I was taking to the job. I didn't think he was all there, and he says, "Well, I think we'll have to spend the night," and I says, "Oh, no. I can see the lights of Austin over there." I thought that they'd be looking for me. They was playing cards when I found my way into camp.
LAVOY: Oh, my goodness.
ECKERT: One time I got lost in Reese River. That was a nightmare. I didn't find my way into camp till two-thirty in the morning. That valley was pitch dark. Curly says, "Oh, I was sure you and the dog would be fine." [laughing]
LAVOY: Oh, my. You always waited until evening?
ECKERT: That's because they called in late. I was waiting for parts. I never will forget, and I took out one of the boys that I raised. That's another time I was lost. I was standing outside, and those coyotes were howling. That kid jumped in the car and locked every door. I said, "Chuckie, open the door. They're not going to hurt you." It took me about fifteen minutes to get him to open the door. I'm standing out there, but he was scared to death. -
LAVOY: About how old was he?
ECKERT: He was about nine. He was petrified.
LAVOY: Well, being out in the middle of the Nevada hinterlands with no lights or anything else and not knowing where you're going, I can understand it.
25
ECKERT: And you'were much safer there than you was in any city. I wasn't afraid out in the desert.
LAVOY: You would leave Fallon whenever the parts came in.
ECKERT: Yeah. Sometimes I went six hundred miles on a weekend. I did a lot of traveling.
LAVOY: Now, like for example, when you went up out of Elko, you would go to the northern part of the county.
ECKERT: Yeah. We was out towards Jiggs and then the coke ovens.
They're at Ely, I guess. We was camped at the coke ovens. That's where our dog got bit by a rattlesnake. We'd seen him. He couldn't bend. His legs were straight. Someone says he'd bet he'd been bit by a snake, so we took him to Ely. There was no vet. They said take him to this woman that raises dogs, but sometimes people even took them to the hospital, and they'd give them a shot. She give him a shot. She said if he'd been bit by a Arizona diamondback it'd killed him. From that day he was real tender in his chest. We never did find the snake.
LAVOY: What kind of a dog?
ECKERT: He was like a little dachshund kind of.
LAVOY: A little fellow.
ECKERT: Yeah, and he was close to the ground, but I was always cautious walking around out in that desert.
LAVOY: Oh, especially walking around at night.
ECKERT: The daughter-in-law she was petrified to even go out and go to the bathroom. I wasn't as scared, but I was always looking for those. Another thing we did out there, we collected horny toads. I bet we had a hundred horny toads. I was so bored with collecting horny toads.
LAVOY: What did you do with them?
ECKERT: Well, the kids was going to bring them back to Fallon. That's the Lambert boy. When I went out I kicked them over so they'd get
26
away. They'd die.
LAVOY: Oh, yes.
ECKERT: I brought six back and the cat ate them, so I knew that I wasn't going to bring that whole bucket back, so I just went over there and kicked it over. They was trying to find their horny toads. They were gone.
LAVOY: Well, it's very good on your part to do that because they're so rare now.
ECKERT: And then we also collected bush bunnies. They'd get caught in the plows.
LAVOY: What are bush bunnies?
ECKERT: They're miniature bunnies. They're really small.
LAVOY: Oh, the tiny, tiny babies.
ECKERT: They weren't babies. They were just miniature bunnies. They're wild.
LAVOY: They're smaller than a cottontail?
ECKERT: Oh, yeah. They're about that big. [size of a tennis ball] They'd get caught in between the plow thing, and we'd reach in and pull them out. They'd be okay. We must have had twenty-five or thirty in a pen. That's what us women were doing, but we turned them loose because we couldn't get them to eat. They would have died, so we let them go.
LAVOY: So while you women were out there at the time that you were, you had to entertain yourselves.
ECKERT: Oh, yeah. I read a lot.
LAVOY: You collected homed toads, and you got bush bunnies, and what else?
ECKERT: We did a lot of cooking. I was cooking for ten men at one time in a sheepherder's shack. Believe me it was hard cooking on a wood
27
stove that I wasn't used to. I had to get up at four 'cause there was
a lot of men to cook for. They had to eat in shifts 'cause there wasn't
enough room around the table.
LAVOY: Did you make a table, or did you bring one out with you?
ECKERT: There was a table in that sheepherder's shack.
LAVOY: But it had to be pretty small.
ECKERT: You could get about four men around it, but they ate in shifts and left. Then I had to fix lunches 'cause they was gone all day. You never seen a soul out there, and you also had to, when the wind blew you had to get out there to the windmill and get your water `cause if you didn't then you wouldn't get any water till the next day. Only when the wind blew did you get water.
LAVOY: Did he make it a point of putting camp up by windmills?
ECKERT: They always stayed by a windmill. One time there was no
windmill. We was by a stream. Cold mountain stream, and so we just took the water out of the stream 'cause it was ice cold. But every once in a while a cow would walk up above us. Then we had to wait till the water cleared. Another time we had a terrible electric storm out there. I used to take dishes out and wash them by the tank. I says, "I ain't steppin' out of this trailer by that tank." That lightening was striking ever place. That's the worst
lightening I've ever seen.
LAVOY: What county would that be?
ECKERT: Pioche. [Lincoln County] And the gas man come out that day. He was about to have a fit. He was trying to fill up the tractors, and that lightening was striking every place. I wasn't even sure we was going to get any gas that day 'cause it was so bad.
LAVOY: My goodness! And the gas man would come from the closest town?
ECKERT: Yeah. Pioche at that time. I should have kept a journal out there `cause it was really interesting.
LAVOY: Oh, a journal would have been just wonderful.
28
ECKERT: Yeah, of the different places that we went, and we looked for colored bottles. We never found hardly any.
LAVOY: I don't think too many people lived out there. [laughing]
ECKERT: No. [laughing] But it was interesting.
LAVOY: I know it must have been.
ECKERT: And that's the only place I ever seen fireflies in my life. We was down by Dinah's punch bowl. That's out in Monitor Valley out there on the other side of Austin, and there was this great big huge pond there bubbling hot water and mud. We went and got in it, and these fireflies at night. It was really a pretty sight.
LAVOY: That's so unusual because fireflies, for the most part, you think of them being down south.
ECKERT: Yeah, and it's warm, but, see, that was warm water, and then we went over to Dinah's punch bowl.
LAVOY: What is Dinah's punch bowl?
ECKERT: It's a big hole. It's huge. It's like a crater, and it goes right down to just about that much opening at the bottom.
LAVOY: About a six-inch opening.
ECKERT: I don't know if people went in there or not, but if they did they was nuts, but since we was there, we went to see it.
LAVOY: Is it still in existence?
ECKERT: Oh, yeah. It's a natural thing.
LAVOY: Was the water in that cold or hot?
ECKERT: There was no water in that Dinah's punch bowl. It was just a big hollow crater. As I remember, it looked like rock around it.
LAVOY: Like a meteor had landed there.
ECKERT: Yeah. Like a meteor or something had dug a huge hole out in the
29
desert. That was purty interesting out there except the night I tried to give my husband fried snake. He says, "I'm not eating snake." David says, "You know how to fix it?" I says, "No, and I ain't cutting it up either."
LAVOY: How did you happen to get snake?
ECKERT: Oh, there was a BLM [Bureau of Land Management] man. He was chasing these snakes all over the desert, and he'd eat them.
LAVOY: Oo!
ECKERT: And then when I open my icebox there set this big rattler. He was dead. He was on my milk cooler. I says, "Just what are we going to do with this?" So, he skinned it and cut it in strips, and we fried it. It tasted kind of like chicken and tuna crossed. Lots of bones, but I never ate it again 'cause I heard sometimes in their death throes, they'll grab a hold and bite themselves. I don't know if they poison the meat or not, but I wasn't that thrilled about eating it in the first place.
LAVOY: I think you were very brave to even cook it.
ECKERT: No, Curly wouldn't eat it. He had a hamburger.
LAVOY: Did the rest of the crew eat it?
ECKERT: Oh, no. We didn't give it to the crew.
LAVOY: It was just for the family.
ECKERT: Yeah. There was just three of us there. I made a lot of cinnamon rolls, and I'd take them out and set them in the pickup out there so they'd raise. I went out there one day, and the pickup was gone. They'd come in. They took off with my cinnamon rolls. Well, you know what that did to those cinnamon rolls. They were flatter than a foot when they got back. [laughing]
LAVOY: And they didn't even notice that they were there?
ECKERT: They were busy. They were busy. They just jumped in it and took off Oh, God!
LAVOY: And they didn't have cinnamon rolls the next morning.
30
ECKERT: No. Thai took care of the cinnamon rolls.
LAVOY: I believe you told me that one of the trips you took that you had a prisoner.
ECKERT: Oh, yeah.
LAVOY: Would you tell me about that?
ECKERT: Bradley was a teacher at the high school and then he went over to Carson, and he said they had a man there that could get out of jail if he had a job. He called Curly up and asked him. Curly wasn't too enthused, but he said, "Yeah, I'll take him." Well, Curly was leaving that next night, and I was leaving in the morning, but they called that day and says. "We'll have him there in the morning." I says, "You mean I got to take this man to Elko out in the desert?" I got the warden when he come over, I says, "What's he in here for?" He was in there for manslaughter in a DUI. I had one of the grandsons with me, and his man was so nervous. He was a well-educated man. He worked in the library at the prison, and, of course, he was soft. He couldn't do the kind of work we were doing. He set a napkin on fire he was so nervous.
LAVOY: How'd he do that?
ECKERT: I don't know. He was smoking a cigarette and it got too close to the napkin. I says, "What do you want to eat?" "I don't care. You just order it." You see, he'd been in prison, and then the little grandson kept beating on him with his baby bottle, and I said, "Oh God!"
LAVOY: [laughing] Poor man. It's a wonder he survived the trip.
ECKERT: Then I went over to one man that'd ordered his guns. I went over to pick them up, and here's the guns. I says, "I gotta take them?" I made him put them way in the back of the station wagon and pile all these groceries on them. I finally got him there. He stayed about two weeks. We had to take him back into town the next day to Elko because he had to check in with his parole officer. Curly went in there that day and he sees these women sittin' there talkin'. One of them say, "We're kind of busy. Why don't you bring him back tomorrow." He hit the ceiling. He said, "This man has to report within seventy-two hours, and if someone don't get off their
3I
butt, I'm calling Carson City." Man, about three of them hit the floor at the same time because this man had to report in. He says, "I drove some sixty miles to bring this man so he could [report in]." He'd have been right back in there. He told us quite a bit about the prison. Like seven years, he says, they're about impossible to reform them. He was there at the time that Sonja, that girl that got her head chopped off in Reno, he was there at that time telling us about that. Mmm.
LAVOY: I can understand your being uncomfortable.
ECKERT: He was very nice and polite, and eventually he says, "Gee, I just can't handle this." Curly says, "I know it." But he had a job and then we took him back, and then he could go on from there.
LAVOY: So, you took him to Elko, and then Curly left him in Elko.
ECKERT: We took him back to Fallon. We were coming in. They brought him back to Fallon. I think he was out of Reno, so we brought him back on one of the trips in.
LAVOY: And did you ever hear anything further of him?
ECKERT: I was a friend of one of those who was a warden over there at one of the prisons in Jean. Bill Lattin was a warden over there, and I think he went back to prison 'cause he married a felon which I thought was wrong because a felon cannot live with a felon. I didn't know that. But I don't know whatever happened. How strong it was or anything.
LAVOY: Well, it was very nice of you to take him. When did Curly stop this seeding?
ECKERT: We stopped about 1966 or 1967, I think. By then the other generation was coming on, and we couldn't take all those little teeny kids out on that job. Shane, the oldest, was out there a little bit.
LAVOY: That would have been your son's child?
ECKERT: Yeah, and the others were never out there because it was just . . .
LAVOY: Oh, it was too primitive.
32
ECKERT: Yeah, and so we quit. And besides that, by then there was getting a lot of people in it. They was dropping the price, and Curly says, "I don't need an education on how to do it." He made good money while he was doing it, but then he quit. Now they seed it by air.
LAVOY: Oh, I see. Then you came back to Fallon, and you took up your ranch life.
ECKERT: Yeah, we was back on the ranch.
LAVOY: When did you buy your current ranch?
ECKERT: We bought this in 1969. We bought four places.
LAVOY: What ones were they?
ECKERT: Where the Portuguese family lived, we bought the Gladwill place. I don't know when we bought it. We bought one down on Pasture Road.
LAVOY: Whose was that?
ECKERT: Pattison place. And then we bought this one over here, and we still have all four of them.
LAVOY: And this one over here was?
ECKERT: Where we live, yeah. We called it the Civish place. He was about to lose it. We square danced with him 'cause we were avid square dancers, and he asked us if we was interested. Curly went over and looked and we bought it.
LAVOY: And that's where you're living now?
ECKERT: Yeah. It's a nice place.
LAVOY: I understand that you bought some land that your son went out on.
ECKERT: We bought a place in Antelope Valley. That's a whole different story. The first time I seen that place, the valley was pitch dark. There was a Mormon family on one side of us and a Mormon family in back of us, so we bought that place, and our son moved out there. His children, Lance and Marnie, she was in the first
33
grade, they rode a hundred and twenty miles to school every day .. and back.
LAVOY: Round trip?
ECKERT: Yeah. It was sixty miles back to Battle Mountain, sixty miles back home. Those kids grew up right out in the sticks.
ECKERT: When the kids was out there, there was range bulls out on that range. Beef masters. Big ones. A lot of times the folks had to go to meet them. The bus let them off, and they had to go down and meet them because it was too dangerous to walk a mile with those beef master bulls out on that range. There was generators, no electricity. There is now, but then there wasn't. I asked the guy, "How come you always leave your kitchen light on?" He says, "'Cause if you wake up at night and the light's out, the generator's stopped." You couldn't use an iron hardly or a toaster. They had a propane to cook with.
LAVOY: You son and his wife certainly--that was pioneering.
ECKERT: Oh, yeah. That's about as much pioneering as you could get. We eventually sold the place.
LAVOY: To whom did you sell it?
ECKERT: I can't think of his name. We only sold it by a quirk. It wasn't even up for sale. This guy--he had a lot of money, and he come out and he was going to buy the place next to us because he had to get rid of this money. He went to buy it, but their well papers were not in order. So he stopped in at us. He says, "This place for sale?" We wasn't really thinking about selling it. He says, "I'll give you an offer you can't refuse," so we sold it 'cause the farming was so different. Curly went out there and tried to put in big checks like they do here, and it didn't work. We had a cement ditch. We were in the cement business, also, pouring cement ditches, and our ditches froze because the cement got too cold. It was cold country. There's nobody there now that was originally there. The one Mormon family, they was there when we been there, and their heirs are still there.
LAVOY: Do you remember their names?
34
ECKERT: I can't thtnk of their names. They were really nice people, and they had two little kids. If you seen a car coming down the road with those kids behind you better move over. We called them the Katzenjammer Kids. They were driving the other little kids to the school bus stop.
LAVOY: Oh, my. [laughing]
ECKERT: Oh, God, if you seen these kids, Curly says you'd better move over. They went right down the middle of the road. [laughing] There was about six of those little Mormon kids.
LAVOY: And then you sold the ranch more or less on a fluke. ECKERT: Yeah.
LAVOY: And then your son and his wife came back. They're in Fallon?
ECKERT: Yeah. They come back to Fallon. We've had quite a varied . . .
LAVOY: Yes, you did. These cement ditches that you said you were in the cement business, have you put in a lot of cement ditches that are here in Fallon.
ECKERT: Miles of it, I think. You poured the cement ditches and you put the head gates in. That's why we got so many ditches on our place. They did a lot of that.
LAVOY: Does he still do that?
ECKERT: No. We still have the equipment. The boy might put some in later, but we haven't done any of that lately. They're not putting in so much now with this water situation the way it is. People are afraid almost to do anything because of this water the way it is.
LAVOY: It's been a very bad situation right now. Are your water rights fine here in the valley?
ECKERT: No. We have three hundred acre feet of that. They took it away from us. They just flat out took it, and we are not hardly getting enough water to irrigate our ground.
LAVOY: On the four ranches, or just one?
35
ECKERT: No, the three hundred acres. Any of our ranches were short of water. My boy run out of water this year.
LAVOY: Where is his place?
ECKERT: That's our first place in Old River. He's on that ranch, but our place that we're on now, he won't be able to water it.
LAVOY: On Sheckler?
ECKERT: Yeah. It's a real water war that's going on with our government. Especially our Senator [Harry Reid]. We have no--I won't even put that on tape. [laughing]
LAVOY: [laughing] Now that the seeding is done, and you've come back, and you've bought so much land here in Fallon, have you been
able to settle down a little bit and not work so hard?
ECKERT: I really don't have to. After I broke my ankle, I wasn't really able to go out.
LAVOY: How did you do that?
ECKERT: Oh, they dug the sewer up to do something, and there was a hole there. It was about this wide and about so deep [three feet wide and two feet deep], and they didn't fill it up. Now, everybody knew it was there, and they put some lodge poles around it. One night the son didn't take his dog home, so I thought, my sister-in-law was there, I says, "Come out and I'll put the dog in your car." Well, I didn't realize that the dog was backing up towards that hole, and apparently I went backwards, and my foot must have went under the lodge pole, and it cracked that ankle. I almost lost my foot, it was such a bad break.
LAVOY: Did you fall backwards?
ECKERT: Yeah, I was laying in that hole. I couldn't have got out unless someone had been out there. I knew my ankle was broke 'cause I could feel it flopping. It's been a real struggle with it.
LAVOY: That's too bad. You mentioned that you and Curly liked to square dance.
36
ECKERT: That ended our square dancing.
LAVOY: When did you start this square dancing?
ECKERT: In 1965, I think. We danced for years.
LAVOY: Here in Fallon?
ECKERT: Yeah. We was with the Arsenic Swingers. He loved it, but when I broke that ankle . , .
LAVOY: Getting back to the square dancing, did you have the regular costumes?
ECKERT: Oh, yeah. I got lots of them. We got lots of pictures we took through the years. David and Sharon, our daughter didn't care for it. We taught two of our grandchildren to square dance.
LAVOY: You mentioned David and Sharon?
ECKERT: Yeah.
LAVOY: You had mentioned David and Mary Ann.
ECKERT: Mary Ann was his wife.
LAVOY-: And Sharon was his . . ?
ECKERT: Sharon was David's sister. That was our daughter.
LAVOY: And they didn't care for it like you did?
ECKERT: No. We traveled all over. We went to the Silver State festival every year in Reno. It was good clean fun.
LAVOY: Who all was in your square dance group?
ECKERT: Gomeses and Soares, Halls and Civish, there was just a slug of them. A lot of them are gone now. The club folded almost last
year. When we were dancing we had a local caller.
LAVOY: And who was that?
37
ECKERT: Brian—I can't think of his name. He's dead now, and she moved away. They had good callers in Reno, and we danced with a lot of clubs in Reno. We probably would have still been square dancing, but I was never able to dance after that.
LAVOY: That's a shame. What did you take up for entertainment after you were no longer able to dance?
ECKERT: We play a lot of pinochle. Played a lot of cards. Then, of course, with the television now and that, I have a lot of movies 'cause I can't handle some of those programs they got on tv. So I got really good movies. The other generation doesn't like them, but I do. [laughing]
LAVOY: Well, that's understandable. Did you join any organizations?
ECKERT: I wasn't a joiner. I was a Girl Scout leader for three years. I was doing that when I was on the ranch. I never was a joiner. I always had something to do.
LAVOY: A busy lady.
ECKERT: Yeah. Going and sitting there and drinking tea or eating cookies or listening to them fight, no. That was not my bag.
LAVOY: With pinochle do you have a group that you play pinochle with?
ECKERT: No, we never had a pinochle club. We just had different friends we played with.
LAVOY: You'd invite friends to your home?
ECKERT: Yeah. Those early years before television we did a lot of that. We did a lot of getting together, and we used_to sometimes have scavenger hunts. That was interesting.
LAVOY: Oh, my.
ECKERT: I don't think the younger generation would know what a scavenger hunt is.
LAVOY: Well, a few do, but not many.
38
ECKERT: We had scavenger hunts.
LAVOY: Tell me about the most interesting scavenger hunt that you had.
ECKERT: I can't remember 'cause we were supposed to put things down that they thought they could get a hold of. It's been too many years. They used to go frog giggin'. I didn't like that. I don't like them sticking those frogs, and I didn't like frog legs either. Wintertime sometimes they'd go ice skating. I grew up on skates, but not ice skates. I did not like snow. When I grew up, Reno was colder than it is now. Reno had a lot of snow those years, but now it doesn't get much snow.
LAVOY: But here in Fallon, basically, they'd go frog gigging?
ECKERT: Yeah, and then Curly was an avid race car driver. Him and David both drove hardtops.
LAVOY: How did you feel about him racing like that?
ECKERT: It didn't bother me. I drove it once. That was enough. Sharon, our daughter, drove, and she got flipped over and hurt her hand. That was the last time she drove. [laughing]
LAVOY: Was that up at Rattlesnake?
- ECKERT: No. They were racing in the old fairgrounds. That's before they
built Rattlesnake.
LAVOY: Oh. Did you go to the races to watch?
ECKERT: Yeah. Curly growing up Texas, no water. I was an avid swimmer. Water there, I was in it. I grew up learning how to swim in the Truckee River. It was legal then. You could still swim in it.
LAVOY: But, he didn't care for swimming.
ECKERT: No, he went through nine Marine swimming schools. They put him up on a thing, he said, and shoved him off. In full battle gear they have to go down and retrieve him and shove him off again.
LAVOY: Because he couldn't swim. [laughing]
39
ECKERT: He couldn't swim. [laughing] He said his ship did get torpedoed once, and he said if it'd sank he'd of been in a world of hurt, but it got torpedoed in the locker room and it made it in, but he just couldn't swim.
LAVOY: I think that's funny. [laughing]
ECKERT: He says Marines have to all know how to swim. Pearl Harbor, he said, there was eighteen LSTs all in a row, and they blew up. He was jumping from one to the other. When he got to the end, they almost had to pull him out of the water 'cause he'd a drown. He just couldn't swim.
LAVOY: Oh, my. Now, he wasn't in Pearl Harbor when it was bombed. He was just there aboard ship.
ECKERT: He was there aboard ship getting ready to go wherever they sent him, but he never learned to swim. If the Marines couldn't teach him, no one could.
LAVOY: That's very true. Now, your life has sort of settled down a little bit?
ECKERT: Yeah.
LAVOY: He's still busy working, though.
ECKERT: He's busy. He's a workaholic. I think that's from the years that he grew up in Texas. He come out of a family of fourteen during the Depression, and to survive, they all learned to work. All his sisters are good workers.
LAVOY: There's nothing wrong with that.
ECKERT: No. He's highly intelligent. He only went to the seventh grade, but he's highly intelligent. Like figuring out on jobs percentage and that. I told him it's too bad you never went on to school.
LAVOY: Well, but, during the Depression many people did not get a chance to go on.
ECKERT: There were so many of them they never knew one holiday from the another. Christmas was another day. They just all blended in
40
together, where I came from a family that really took holidays serious. Those days my mother said years ago they celebrated from Christmas to January.
LAVOY: But you have brought your customs to him, and he has brought his customs to you, and you seem to have melded together very beautifully.
ECKERT: It's like when he told me about okra. I says, "I ain't going to eat that stuff." I went and bought a can. He said to eat okra. I put it in this pot, and I said, "God, look at that slop!" I didn't know how to fix it, but when I went to Texas, then they went out and showed me how to cook it.
LAVOY: That's still very hard to eat.
ECKERT: Oh, when it's dipped in corn meal, it's delicious. They showed me how to fry it. I had never had a black-eyed pea, and they was eating them on New Year's Day. I said, "Why?" I didn't know it meant good luck. But, of course, we had things that he hadn't back there.
LAVOY: Black-eyed peas and hog jowls is what southerners eat on New Year's Day.
ECKERT: He never thought about ever going back to Texas.
LAVOY: Well, he had a very fine wife here.
ECKERT: He had a start here. I don't think I could have survived in Texas. [laughing]
LAVOY: It just seems to me that the two of you have worked very hard and have done very well for yourselves.
ECKERT: Yeah, we did fine.
LAVOY: I think that we've pretty well covered everything that we can think of with your life story.
ECKERT: Yeah, we had a varied . . It was never dull.
LAVOY: And you're both in relatively good health.
41
ECKERT: We're trying to get him to retire, and it's not being easy.
LAVOY: I don't think you should have him retire.
ECKERT: I didn't want him to retire, but I wanted the younger generation, a son, to take over the places because the third generation is not going to make it on a ranch. I can see that right now. It's just a different--I told one of the grandsons, "If we give you these ranches--they're all clear, you would lose it in a year because they have a different idea." "Why are you running that old baler?" you know. I said, "Because you cannot go out and buy an eighty thousand dollar baler and make it." They don't understand.
LAVOY: So what do you think that you are going to do?
ECKERT: I don't know what we'll do. My son is a good farmer, and like I say, we had four places and we sold one. Now we've got three. We just got three places now. Of course, we sold Antelope, but the water is ruining us.
LAVOY: I can understand that completely. How many grandchildren do you have?
ECKERT: Just four. Now great grandchildren, we've got five girls and one boy. Everyone of our family is here. Not one of them has left which is unusual in this day and age.
LAVOY: Indeed it is. It shows a happy family.
ECKERT: It's like we've got four great granddaughters all in the same school now at West End.
LAVOY: You never went to West End?
ECKERT: No, David did. But I went to the high school for a while.
LAVOY: Do you have any that are old enough to be in high school?
ECKERT: Not great grandchildren. The oldest great granddaughter is ten. We just had a class reunion last week, and I said, "God, I hope they don't have anymore." It was fifty-five years for our class, and I says, "Who do you think's going to dance? You got some oxygen out there?" [laughing]
42
LAVOY: [laughing] I think that's wonderful that you got to your class
reunion, and you knew a lot of the people that were there because you have lived in this area.
ECKERT: But, it's surprising I didn't know that many 'cause I only went to high school here two years. Most of these people went from the first grade to high school. I came from Reno, was here briefly, and then I went to Hawthorne. We knew the people if they were
farmers, but other than that a lot of those people I just didn't know.
LAVOY: That's understandable.
ECKERT: But the Harmon reunion. It was a seventy-five year reunion.
Anyone who ever went there. That was interesting. There was two hundred people at that one?
LAVOY: When was that?
ECKERT: 1990? The school closed in 1957, and I went a half a year at
Harmon. That was an experience. Four grades in one room. That was interesting.
LAVOY: That's the way it used to be.
ECKERT: Yeah. When we tell the kids about the war stories and that, they just don't understand. We watch a lot of World War II. I don't watch Viet Nam. I never approved of it.
LAVOY: You had the rationing and everything else.
ECKERT: I still got ration books. I put them in both of my kids' books. And the telegram that came when he got wounded in Iwo Jima. We still got the original telegram.
LAVOY: Those are wonderful, wonderful mementos to have.
ECKERT: He was not a souvenir collector. He says they'd preach to them, "Don't bring anything back. Don't pick up anything. It could be booby-trapped." He did bring back a Japanese flag.
LAVOY: And you still have that?
ECKERT: I still have it.
43
LAVOY: You have really set up a nice generation scrapbook and whatnot for your children. I think that's most admirable. 44
ECKERT: What I did was I took all the pictures, had them duplicated, and handed everyone in the family their own book, so all of them got pictures.
LAVOY: I think you have led a most interesting life, and I think we've
pretty well covered everything. On behalf of the museum I want to thank you for taking the time to come and be interviewed.
Annabell Eckert
O Index
Birth, 1
Children, 7-8, 9, 11, 12, 19
Eckert, Wyndell Lee "Curly", 4-5, 9,
See also: Farming experiences, land purchases and land seeding experiences
Education, 1-2, 3, 42-43
Fallon, NV, 2
Farming experiences, 8-9, 11-12, 13-16, 18-24
Foster children, 12, 17-18
Grandchildren, 42
Hawthorne, NV experiences, 2, 3, 5-6
Land purchases, 33-35
Land seeding experiences, 25-33
Marriage, 3-4
Parents, 9-11
Recreation, 37-40
Square dancing, 37-38
Water problems, 35-36, 42

Marian Lavoy

Annabell Wilslef Eckert

Churchill County Museum Annex