Constance Philips Walters Oral History
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CHURCHILL COUNTY MUSEUM & ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY PROJECT
an interview with
CONSTANCE PHILIPS WALTERS
September 17, 1993
This interview was conducted by Marion LaVoy; transcribed by Glenda Price; edited by Norine Arciniega; final by Pat Boden; index by Gracie Viera; supervised by Myrl Nygren, Director of Oral History Project, Churchill County Museum.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this interview are those of the interviewer and interviewee and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Churchill County Museum or any of its employees.
PREFACE.
Constance Philips Walters is a genteel, intelligent and extremely benevolent lady. She and her handsome husband, "Pete" (Frank E.) have been family friends since I was a young girl, and I can attest to the fact that their business and financial success has never changed their caring personalities.
Connie greeted me at the entrance of their Reno town-house, and as I entered I looked to see what artistic innovations Connie had inspired . . . I was not disappointed; the pictures and foreign wall-hangings were lovely.
We sat at a small, highly polished table in the living room, and the life story of a pioneer mining, inventing and farming family unfolded . It included the tragic death in a mining camp of a French grandmother and the resulting raising of Connie's mother by the many Cirac brothers; it continues with the story of Alice Cirac's marriage to a gentleman graced/cursed with a mercurial Irish disposition, the family struggle to survive the shaky economy of post World War I and the Great Depression of the 1930's, Alice's battle with poliomyelitis, and her life in a wheel chair.
Particularly poignant to me as I sat in Connie's lovely home was her story of how she, as a young girl, disguised the holes in her long black stockings prior to catching her school bus! I sat fascinated as she shared her memory of attending the dedication of Lahontan Dam.
Her first teaching assignment in Goldfield, Nevada, her tears as she first saw her school and surroundings, her clandestine "Western Union" romance with her future husband, and their simple marriage ceremony make for interesting reading.
"Pete" and Connie's slow and steady climb from the lowest echelons of financial stability to the joint ownership of the largest real estate firm in Reno is a testament to the pioneer spirit of hard-working Nevadans.
LaVOY: This is Marian Hennen LaVoy of the Churchill County Museum Oral History Project interviewing Constance Philips Walters at her home 2022 Tremont Lane, Reno, Nevada. The date is September 17, 1993. Good morning, Connie.
WALTERS: Good morning.
LaVOY: And how are you this morning?
WALTERS: Just great.
LaVOY: Good. Would you please tell me your full name?
WALTERS: Constance LeeAnne Philips Walters, and Philips is spelled with one "l" which is unusual because most Philips are spelled with two "l's."
LaVOY: All right, and tell me where and when you were born.
WALTERS: I was born in 1912 in Fallon at the hospital there.
LaVOY: What was the name of the hospital there? Do you remember?
WALTERS: No I don’t you would have to ask my mom.
LaVOY: And what year was that?
WALTERS: 1912
LaVOY: All right, now tell me, what was your father's name?
WALTERS: Walter Philips.
LaVOY: And where was he born?
WALTERS: He was born in Santa Rosa [California], and he had a twin brother, Henry Philips, who also lived in Fallon.
LaVOY: Oh, I didn't realize that. When was your father born?
WALTERS: 1875.
LaVOY: Now, how did he happen to move from Santa Rosa to Fallon?
WALTERS: He joined a survey crew that came into Nevada up in Elko County, and they surveyed first all of Elko County, and I think Art Keddie was the one who was running the survey crew, [See Nadine Domonoske's oral history] and after they completed Elko County then they moved down here, and it was just then that they were starting doing the surveying for Lahontan Dam. So that same crew worked on the surveying for Lahontan Dam.
LaVOY: Did he tell you any stories about the surveying of Lahontan Dam?
WALTERS: No. You know, that's one of the great regrets of my childhood is the fact I didn't ask more questions, but, you know, when you're growing up, somehow those aren't the things that interest you. You're too involved with yourself, and you don't realize the importance of all things that have gone on before. He used to come home with a hatful of arrowheads that they picked up down on the [Carson] Sink at the Indian battleground, and I think through the years we have given away most of them. Have a few, but, of course, they just have some wonderful collections down in the Fallon Museum.
LaVOY: You mentioned the Indian battleground. I'm not familiar with that.
WALTERS: Well, I think that it's where the Greenhead Club is. [9165 Pasture Road] In that area of the Sink.
LaVOY: Why do they call it the battleground?
WALTERS: Well, I think there were Indian wars there. The Paiutes were a rather contentious group, and they were always in need of having a greater area in which to live, and at one time why they were thinking of expanding to Austin. Finally the, I think Bannocks were in around Austin, and they and the Paiutes had a confrontation, and I think down there, probably, was one of the sites of it.
LaVOY: Well, now, when your father brought all these arrowheads home, what did you do with them?
WALTERS: Well, some of them we mounted, but, as I say, through the years we've just give most of them away. I think I probably have thirty or forty left.
LaVOY: You mention that Art Keddie was head of the survey crew. He's the gentleman that was killed in the plane crash in Elko.
WALTERS: Right.
LaVOY: Was he head of the crew all of the time?
WALTERS:I think so.
LaVOY: And did your father survey from the very start of the reclamation project until the end of it?
WALTERS: I believe so. Had that same group.
LaVOY: Well, was he married at that time?
WALTERS: No. Not at first. But, I think they were headquartered down in Stillwater, and my mother was living in Stillwater at the time with my Uncle Charlie [Charles Cirac], who had the Stillwater Hotel, and that is where she and my dad met.
LaVOY: Now, what was your mother's full name?
WALTERS: Alice Cirac.
LaVOY: When was she born?
WALTERS: She was born 1886.
LaVOY: Now, your father meeting your mother down there probably he was staying in the hotel, was he?
WALTERS: I think so. Uh-huh.
LaVOY: With her living with your uncle, Charlie, how did she happen to be there that she wasn't with her own family?
WALTERS: Her mother died when she was about a year and a half old. Her folks came from France. Her father was going to make his fortune in the silver mines, and her mother had some medical training and was, I imagine, a midwife traveling up and down Reese River Valley. She went to Austin, and there were two other French ladies living there. The three of them had lunch together, and they ate poisoned mushrooms, and all three of them died. Now I have tried to research that, and I looked through the Austin Reese River Reveille for that period 'cause Mother said she was about a year and a half old, so that would have made it about 1888, but I couldn't find any trace of it. I think it would take some digging, but I'm sure there must be a record of it somewhere. So she was raised by her five brothers, and when mining seemed to run out, then they finally decided that maybe they weren't going to make their fortune in the silver mines. Although, my grandfather did sell one of his mines for ten thousand dollars, put it in the Tonopah Bank and three months later it went broke.
LaVOY: Oh, what a shame!
WALTERS: So he lost his fortune. (laughing)
LaVOY: Now, one of your uncles was quite an inventor.
WALTERS: Yes.
LaVOY: Which one was that?
WALTERS: That's Uncle Charlie, and that's who had the Stillwater Hotel.
LaVOY: Do you recall some of the things that he invented?
WALTERS: Well, the principle thing he invented was what he called the shaft lock, and it was what has now become the hill holder.
LaVOY: The what?
WALTERS: Hill holder.
LaVOY: What is that?
WALTERS: If your car stalls going up a hill, instead of going back down why you engage this hill holder or the shaft lock, and it held it right there so that you didn't have the danger of doing that, and I guess probably roads were a lot more precipitous then and also likely it was a hazard. He did go to several leading auto makers and always felt sure that when--I think it was Dodge came out with the hill holder--that actually it was a variation of his invention, but he didn't ever get anything out of it, and there were people around Fallon and Stillwater who invested in it. He was always somewhat embarrassed by the fact that it didn't turn out as well as he thought it would.
LaVOY: Well, that's too bad he didn't patent it either.
WALTERS: Oh, yes, it was all patented and everything, but you know in patents you need only make one or two basic changes and it's a new patent.
LaVOY: My, what a shame!
WALTERS: Yeah. (laughing)
LaVOY: There was something else that I read in the paper he invented. I can't right at this moment recall what it was, but it was something else to do with machinery. You don't know?
WALTERS: No, I don't. That's the only thing that I knew about.
LaVOY: [tape cuts out] Well, Connie, how long did your mother live with your aunt?
WALTERS: Well, with her uncle. (laughing) With my uncle because there were no girls in that family. She had an older sister who died in childbirth when Mother was still very small, so she lived with them all through the years. When she was sixteen was when they moved from Berlin, Union Canyon, because the Ciracs had a mill at Union Canyon, and I guess the mills, well, the ore petered out and the mill no longer was useful.
LaVOY: Now, was there no woman in the house other than herself?
WALTERS: No. Well, this was at the hotel. Not that I know of.
LaVOY: Which one of your brothers ran the hotel, or did they all?
WALTERS: No, just my Uncle Charlie. Uncle Leon was a prospector. My Uncle Henry was a cowboy, and Uncle George worked for the I.H. Kent Company, so they all worked at something different.
LaVOY: The thing that is in my mind is who took care of the linens and food at the hotel?
WALTERS: Well, I think they had people working for them. One of the longest standing employees there was Toy Tong who was Chinese. Toy was the cook, and the other night I was visiting with Jim Bailey who is also from Fallon, and Jim was talking about Toy Tong, so apparently he had worked for a number of other families. After my mother and father were on the farm that he homesteaded, Toy used to come out there to raise cantaloupe, and one of the things that he brought along with him was a grass mat full of rice, and there was always a potful of rice on the back of the stove just as long as Toy was there raising cantaloupes.
LaVOY: Well, that's a wonderful story. I'm still just a little confused about the hotel that your--rooming house or hotel--that your Uncle Charlie, ran. Now, your mother, where did she go to school while she lived in Berlin?
WALTERS: Well, they had a school there at Union Canyon.
LaVOY: Did she ever mention anything about the school?
WALTERS: No, I don't think so, and, you know, I think she told me that she had the equivalent of one year of high school. Later on Mother became a teacher and got her equivalency of high school diploma through correspondence courses, and through summer school why she was able to get her teaching certificate.
LaVOY: Where were some of the places that she taught?
WALTERS: Oh, she taught at Death Valley Junction. She taught at Diamond Valley. She taught at Genoa [Nevada], and she was going to teach at Stillwater, and they were cleaning out the cesspool and think, perhaps, that was the basis for her having come down with polio [poliomyelitis]. There was another, a young man, in Stillwater who contracted polio at the same time. He died. Mother was incapacitated and in a wheelchair or a walker the rest of her life. She was sixty at the time, and she died at the age ninety-four.
LaVOY: My Goodness!
WALTERS: So she spent her last thirty four years incapacitated.
LaVOY: That's a shame. In other words she taught all the time that she and your father were married.
WALTERS: Yes.
LaVOY: Now let's go back just a moment to when she and your father married.
WALTERS: They were married in 1906 in Stillwater, and theirs was not a particularly happy marriage. My dad was Irish and loved a good stiff fight in the morning. Mother was quite the opposite, and she would be silent for a week at a time which is a very difficult atmosphere in which to live. In 1924 our house burned down, and my mother left then and went down to San Francisco taking me with her. I came back about a year later, and she, by that time, had had her high school equivalency verified and was able to get a, I think a temporary teaching certificate. She taught down at the Island [School District] first and lived with my Uncle Henry and Aunt Fanny down there while she was teaching, and that's when Ruth Philips was a baby and Mary was born at that time. Uncle Henry was a ditch tender and telephone was his arch enemy. The telephone would ring and he knew it was somebody wanting water or complaining about somebody taking his head of water, so he'd lift up the receiver and he'd take two steps back and then just yell at the top of his voice. He didn't need the telephone at all. You could've heard him, (laughing) and that was how he talked on the telephone all those years that he was involved with the ditch tending. My father, also, was a ditchrider. After he left…He worked for a while for T.C.I.D. [Truckee Carson Irrigation District], and then he left because he wanted to be a farmer, but he found out that there wasn't enough money really in farming to support a family, so he worked as a ditchrider. I don't know what he covered, but the canals that were up above us, the T-Line, probably, and could have been the S-Line, but I don't know.
LaVOY: For awhile, did he, too, work for I.H. Kent?
WALTERS: Yes, he worked for Kent's when they had the alfalfa mill. He worked as a sack sewer, and I can remember as a child his demonstrating to us exactly how he sewed up a sack of alfalfa meal.
LaVOY: That must have been interesting.
WALTERS: (laughing) It was. He seemed to take pleasure in it. They were careful enough to wear masks, you know. One of the great dangers in the alfalfa mill was the flying dust that was there, and they did wear masks in order to protect themselves.
LaVOY: Approximately what year would that have been?
WALTERS: I'm not sure, but I would say maybe around 1922, 1923, 1924. Somewhere in there.
LaVOY: I read in the Fallon paper a little excerpt that your father had a team of horses and a load of lumber on Maine Street and the horses ran away. Can you tell me about that?
WALTERS: (laughing) No. I didn't even know about it until you told me.
LaVOY: It mentioned that the only damage that was done was a piece of lumber had gone through the horse's jaw which I thought was pitiful, but the article was in the paper. Now, let's regress just a little bit. You said your father and your mother met down in Stillwater. When were they married?
WALTERS: In 1906.
LaVOY: And who… do you know anything about who married them or where they were married?
WALTERS: No. Don't know anything about that at all.
LaVOY: Then, did you have a brother?
WALTERS: Yes. I have a brother, Theodore, who was born in 1907.
LaVOY: And how long did he live?
WALTERS: Well, he still is living.
LaVOY: Oh, I didn't realize that.
WALTERS: He's in a nursing home right at present.
LaVOY: And where does he live?
WALTERS: He lived here in Reno. He went to University one year, and after that he found a job somewhere and then always worked, and those were very difficult years to go to University because that was during the height of the Depression. Nobody had any money, and it was hard to get along without it.
LaVOY: Then when were you born?
WALTERS: I was born in 1912.
LaVOY: Tell me something about your life. After you were born, I surmise you were living on your ranch at that time.
WALTERS: Uh huh.
LaVOY: And where was your ranch?
WALTERS: Well, it lay right along the Carson River [2975 Reno Highway]. My father homesteaded 140 acres, and part of it was on the north side of the river, and twenty acres of it were on the south side of the river. That on the north side of the river, ninety acres of it was our upper pasture, and that was sold later to Laurada and John Hannifan who lived on it for many years. Now it belongs to Mrs. Wallace, I think, the real estate lady.
LaVOY: Can you tell me something about your home?
WALTERS: Well, I think it was three-rooms…let’s see…a four-room house, big kitchen, and then a combination dining room, living room, and then a bedroom and a porch. [Tape cuts out original transcript continues:
LaVOY: Did your father build it?
WALTERS: Well, he and some neighbors] built it. I can remember lying on the bed and looking back over my head and seeing a big tree outside. That's the first memory I have of anything.
LaVOY: Well, that's interesting.
WALTERS: But it was during those years that we were living there that Lahontan Dam was finally finished, and I was three years old when they opened Lahontan Dam. That was in 1915. We went up in the horse and buggy, and there was a road then that went right along the river. We went up to the celebration for the opening of the Dam, and on the way up I remember my father pointing out an old tree to me and telling me that was Hangman's Tree.
LaVOY: Did he explain why?
WALTERS: (laughing) No. I was thinking about it the other day because I ran across a picture up at the museum [Nevada State Historical Society, North Virginia Street, Reno, Nevada] of Hangman's Tree down in Fallon, but it seemed to me that it was probably down in Island District. It looked more like that part of it, and it didn't seem to be along the river. This was right along the river, and I just surmised that maybe it had been used by the pioneers for some miscreant that they needed to discipline.
LaVOY: Do you remember music and speakers at the opening, or were you too small?
WALTERS: I was too small. The only thing is I remember somebody gave me a candy bar. A man in a dark suit pulled a piece of candy--maybe it wasn't a bar--could have been just a piece of candy out of the pocket of his suit, and always after that when I'd look at a catalog that had pictures of men in suits, I'd wonder if there was candy in the pockets of those suits.
LaVOY: (laughing) Oh, dear! [tape cuts] Well, I think it's marvelous that you were at the dedication of the dam. Probably Senator Newlands was there in all his glory. [tape cuts. Original transcript continues:
WALTERS: Yeah. You know, I wouldn't know] any. I just remember going up, and I remember all of the people and that's all.
LaVOY: Then, as years went by, what were some of your early chores at your house?
WALTERS: Cleaning the lamp chimneys.
LaVOY: Oh, and how was that done?
WALTERS: How I hated it! (laughing)
LaVOY: Well, tell me how that was done.
WALTERS: Well, of course, they were always just full of soot because the wicks were never trimmed evenly or there was too much breeze or for some other reason they would smoke, and then the soot would gather in the chimney, and of course we didn't have detergents or anything of that sort that would really cut grease. Just old Fels Naptha soap which was miserable stuff to use.
LaVOY: The brown bar?
WALTERS: Yeah. I'd wind up with soot all over my hands and all over the edge of the dishpan, and I thought it was just terrible, and finally along the way, years later when it didn't do me good, somebody said well, you know, the trick was to clean it up with newspaper. Clean out all of the soot with newspaper before you ever tried to wash it. But we didn't know that then. (laughing)
LaVOY: (laughing) Oh, dear! Well, what other chores did you have besides that miserable one?
WALTERS: Washing the separator.
LaVOY: Oh, and explain that to me.
WALTERS: Cream separator which had disks in it, and I've forgotten how many there were, but I think maybe thirty or forty disks, and the same thing was true there. You know, that was all grease and no way of getting rid of it, and I think that we used to use sal soda and soak them first in sal soda and then souse them up and down and then wash them, and there was a lot of washing to do around the separator in order to keep it clean and fresh so that you didn't have traces of milk souring in it.
LaVOY: Now, something I'm curious about. You must have had to put your water on the stove to heat it before you put it in the dishpan.
WALTERS: Um-hum. We had a stove that had a reservoir at the back, and I think it held probably two or three gallons, and as long as there was a fire in the stove, why you had warm water to work with, but you usually had to have a tea kettle full of water, too, to make the water hot enough to be really effective.
LaVOY: There were no such things as water heaters in those days.
WALTERS: No.
LaVOY: Now, did your father have a lot of cows?
WALTERS: Well, at one time we milked forty, I think. He and my brother together milked forty, and I used to herd cows. That was also part of my job was herding the cows, and we had the most incorrigible cows in the neighborhood.
LaVOY: Why do you say that?
WALTERS: There wasn't a fence that could keep them in. (laughing) They always seemed to be able to get through, and my father solved the whole thing. He put pokes on them. A poke was a "Y", piece of a tree branch where it split and it would make a "Y" and he would put that underneath the cow's chin and then nail a board across it so that they had this piece of tree hanging down, and, of course, that was to deter them from jumping over the fence. It didn't seem to make a bit of difference. And some of them he just framed. He just put four pieces of wood, a square frame, around their necks to try to keep them in, but they were absolutely fearless. You know, these cattle guards that they have didn't mean a thing to them, and they even would go across the river bridge, the railroad bridge, which most cows would stay away from, but not our cows.
LaVOY: Did you have to go round them up?
WALTERS: And then I had to go round them up, and Mother just hated to have the telephone ring because it was always somebody saying, "Mrs. Philips, your cows are in our . . ." Either it was "our garden" or "our patch of clover" or somewhere that they shouldn't have been, and that would mean that everything had to stop, and I would go get them, and sometimes she would have to go with me. (laughing)
LaVOY: And you were not afraid of them at all?
WALTERS: No. There was one of them I rode. So, I had to walk, why I could ride one of them when I was on the way home. My father had two of them that he thought were especially nice, so he gave them the name of opera singers. One of them was Emma Nevada, and the other one was Tettrazini.
LaVOY: (laughing) I thought Tettrazini was a chicken dish! (laughing)
WALTERS: (laughing) Yeah. It sounds like it is.
LaVOY: Well, when you bring them home, did you put them in the corral then?
WALTERS: Well, yes. But the corral was never quite as safe as it should have been. (laughing)
LaVOY: (laughing) My goodness! Who did your father sell the milk to?
WALTERS: Well, there was a cooperative at that time. A cooperative creamery, and I think all of the ranchers or farmers who had cattle sold to it, and I think they also handled eggs as well as dairy products.
LaVOY: Now tell me. He evidently had quite a few fields in alfalfa and grain and whatnot. When he and your mother homesteaded, did they have the same problem that so many of the other homesteaders did with too much water in the fields?
WALTERS: No, I don't think so. I know that later on that T.C.I.D. decided they should run drain ditches through every place, and one of the drain ditches that they ran was through one of our lower fields. I think occasionally it did have water in it, but I don't think that our fields seemed to need it.
LaVOY: You were probably up a little higher.
WALTERS: I think so. I think we were high enough that we didn't need that.
LaVOY: How did you get across the river to the other side of your property?
WALTERS: We waded or else rode the horses. And we had one horse--she was a little mustang--and it was my mother's horse. For some reason this little mustang did not like my brother, and when he had to ride her, she'd wait until she got in the middle of the river, and then she'd buck him off. (laughing)
LaVOY: (laughing)
WALTERS: She was always in trouble.
LaVOY: Well, now, did you see a lot of interesting things along the river?
WALTERS: Yes, but, you know, we didn't pay too much attention to the river, and I think the reason was because of the mosquitoes. The closer you were to the river, the more the mosquitoes came. I can remember my father getting ready to go out irrigating, and he would have a piece of mosquito net tied down over his head and around his waist and a willow switch in his hand in addition to try to keep the mosquitoes away, but they were just voracious. For that reason the house was quite a little ways from the river. It was maybe two or three hundred feet away.
LaVOY: Well, didn't the mosquitoes bother you at night in bed?
WALTERS: Well, I think Mother used to go over the screen every night with a cloth before we'd go to bed, and that was supposed to take care of all of the mosquitoes that were loose.
LaVOY: Well, that would have been very, very hard. I just wondered if you used netting on your bed.
WALTERS: No.
LaVOY: You survived the mosquitoes?
WALTERS: Yes, I did.
LaVOY: Well, Connie, with so many mosquitoes didn't they affect the animals?
WALTERS: Except to make them miserable they didn't seem to, but I can remember the horses just covered with these mosquitoes that were swollen with all of the blood that they had sucked out.
LaVOY: Goodness gracious!
WALTERS: And, of course, the horse flies, also, were bad.
LaVOY: That was before the days of our spraying and everything.
WALTERS: Yeah. Right.
LaVOY: Now, let's get to the crops that your father had. What were some of his crops?
WALTERS: Well, alfalfa mostly, and then every year we raised a few cantaloupe, and, of course, we always had a vegetable garden so that the fall, late summer, the fall months were spent with canning.
LaVOY: Did you use the pressure cooker?
WALTERS: Yeah. (laughing) And then sometimes, I think finally Mother used what they called "cold canning," and I think you put them in the oven.
LaVOY: Cold packing?
WALTERS: Cold pack. Yeah.
LaVOY: What were some of the vegetables she canned?
WALTERS: Oh, we canned tomatoes and string beans, corn, beets. Lots of beets and especially good pickled beets, just delicious, and watermelon pickle and then chow-chow and pickles in brine. We had three or four big crocks of those.
LaVOY: How about sauerkraut?
WALTERS: No, she never made sauerkraut.
LaVOY: Tell me, with the uh…did she have an orchard, too?
WALTERS: Yes, we had a few fruit trees. We had apples and peaches, but that's all I remember our having.
LaVOY: So, you had the canning session in the fall?
WALTERS: Yes.
LaVOY: One other thing I'm wondering about. Did you have indoor plumbing?
WALTERS: Oh, Lord, no! (laughing) Much too fancy. (laughing)
LaVOY: (laughing)
WALTERS: Finally, the house that was built that replaced the house that burned down had a pump by the sink and that was elegance.
LaVOY: I imagine so. But did it have an indoor bathroom?
WALTERS: No.
LaVOY: Not at all.
WALTERS: No.
LaVOY: You mentioned that you had the coal oil lamps. When did you convert to electricity, or did you?
WALTERS: No. That wasn't until after I had left home. I left Fallon in 1928, and I think it was maybe a year or two after that when electricity came through. My dad had it put in.
LaVOY: Besides the coal oil lamps did you have kerosene lamps or anything?
WALTERS: Well, we had the Coleman lamps that you pumped up. The ones that had mantles.
LaVOY: The lanterns.
WALTERS: Lanterns. Coleman lanterns. Yes. With the moths flying through the mantles and breaking them at regular intervals. (laughing) They had to be replaced.
LaVOY: And you did all of your studying all through school with that.
WALTERS: Um-hum. Yeah. Of course, our recreation was playing cards.
LaVOY: And what games did you play?
WALTERS: Well, as soon as I was big enough to read . .
LaVOY: What year was that? What age were you at that?
WALTERS: Well, I was probably five or six when they first started playing cards, and we used to play Big Casino, and then finally we graduated to Pedro. I was big enough so that I could figure that out, and then, oh, finally, we played Five Hundred and Whist, one of the early forms of Bridge, but there was always cards to play.
LaVOY: No wonder you're such a good bridge player today.
WALTERS: I don't play bridge anymore. (laughing)
LaVOY: (laughing) But you were a very good one.
WALTERS: I've enjoyed it.
LaVOY: Well, now, one other thing before we go on to your schooling. Did your father have a large barn?
WALTERS: No, we didn't have a barn.
LaVOY: The cattle were out in the open?
WALTERS: Yeah, and the horses, too.
LaVOY: What was the weather like in those early years?
WALTERS: Well, I was going to tell you about that. One of my early memories is of the Carson River being frozen solid for two or three miles up and down past our place, and I don't know, probably even beyond that, and I can remember the boys getting brooms and sweeping a big circle--sweeping the snow off--and then taking buckets of water and throwing buckets of water on it so they would have a skating rink. But they also could skate up and down the river for a couple of miles. I think it was that year that my dad and Mr. Piazza cut ice, and they stored the ice in a cave that was on the bank of the river, and they used straw with it rather than using sawdust which so many did when they cut ice, but instead they used straw with it. But I only remember their doing that once.
LaVOY: Now, did he keep the ice until summer? Was that the idea?
WALTERS: Oh, yes! We had ice cream on Fourth of July with our very own ice.
LaVOY: Amazing. Tell me something about your early Fourth of July's.
WALTERS: Well, Mother's brothers all married and all had lots of children, and we have such a big family of cousins that usually it just meant big family dinner with the youngsters all playing games outside. Fallon used to have a parade on the Fourth of July, and I can remember once dressing my younger cousin, Charles, up in an Uncle Sam suit and putting him on the radiator of a car to be in the parade, and I can remember watching the parade in Fallon.
LaVOY: Now, whose home did you go to for this big dinner?
WALTERS: It was always at our house.
LaVOY: That figures! (laughing)
WALTERS: (laughing) I never could figure that out, but I guess because we lived on a farm, they felt that we were-all of them lived in town--that we were better able to accommodate them all. Besides we had all those chickens, and it was my job to hold the chicken and close my eyes while somebody cut off its head and then afterwards to dunk it in this pail of boiling water, and I still can smell those wet feathers.
LaVOY: Did you have to pick them off?
WALTERS: Yes, and then have to pick the chicken.
LaVOY: About how many chickens did you have?
WALTERS: I imagine we always must have had thirty or forty.
LaVOY: And how many lost their lives to the Fourth of July picnic?
WALTERS: (laughing) I imagine three or four every time. Maybe more.
LaVOY: That picking chickens is a horrible job.
WALTERS: Oh.
LaVOY: Did you have to de-bowel them, too?
WALTERS: No. No, my mother did that.
LaVOY: Now, how did she fix them? Did she fry them, bake them?
WALTERS: Usually it was fried chicken in a great big iron skillet full of fried chicken.
LaVOY: Now, just out of curiosity, what are some of the other things you had for your Fourth of July dinner?
WALTERS: Ice cream, watermelon nearly always if there was watermelon ripe. We nearly always had watermelon. Mashed potatoes. Lots of gravy, and I don't remember much about vegetables.
LaVOY: Well, it must have been a wonderful time for all of you to get together.
WALTERS: It was fun.
LaVOY: Was there any other holiday besides Fourth of July that your families got together?
WALTERS: I don't remember them. No, but, you know, they used to come out almost every Sunday. Some part of the family.
LaVOY: That was hard on the chickens! (laughing)
WALTERS: It was hard on the chickens. It was hard on my mother, too. I have often wondered why she kept feeding all those people.
LaVOY: (laughing) I'd like to have you reminisce just a little bit about your first early Christmases.
WALTERS: I don't remember too much about them. I remember Mother telling me that the first Christmas tree they had they didn't have any money for one, and she had gone out and gotten a tumbleweed and put cotton all over it and hung a few decorations on it, and that was their first Christmas tree. Our Christmas trees we had the kind of candies that clipped onto the branches and were always smoking or always singeing part of the tree. I imagine they were terribly dangerous. Think there must have been lots of fires because of them.
LaVOY: I've often wondered how homes survived Christmas with those open candles.
WALTERS: Yeah. I do too.
LaVOY: Did your father go out and cut the pine trees for later Christmases?
WALTERS: No, I think we always bought them, or somebody gave us one. One of the two.
LaVOY: Now, let's get on to your schooling. When did you first start school?
WALTERS: When I was six. They didn't have kindergarten then.
LaVOY: And who was your first teacher. Do you remember?
WALTERS: Yeah. That was Mrs. Grant.
LaVOY: And how did you get to school?
WALTERS: On the school bus.
LaVOY: Well, tell me a little bit about the school buses.
WALTERS: I guess they were primitive. I thought that they were very elegant, but, of course, we still had a horse and buggy then, so (laughing) anything that had wheels and a motor was really upscale. Seemed to me they held twenty or thirty youngsters, and there was always an older boy that was driving them.
LaVOY: Who was the first school bus driver that you remember?
WALTERS: That was Harold Fulkerson.
LaVOY: From Swingle Bench?
WALTERS: Yes. Uh-huh. 'Cause he lived the furthest away.
LaVOY: So he kept the bus and picked up children on his way to town.
WALTERS: That's right. He'd keep the bus overnight.
LaVOY: Who were some of the children that rode with you?
WALTERS: They all came from up above us on the Soda Lake area, and they were the Lucas’s and the McClean’s and the Branches and the York’s and the Aherns and the Bottoms, and there were probably others there, you know, that I don't remember. The Piazzas who really were out of the Soda Lake District, but they were permitted to ride that bus and then Ivy Wallace Ringstrom, and I think she and I were the last ones on the bus and my brother.
LaVOY: What school did you go to at that point in time?
WALTERS: You know, I'm not sure, but I think it was where the Cottage Schools are now in Fallon, but I can't remember what it was called then. Then from there, I know I went to West End and then from West End to Oats Park.
LaVOY: Now, you mentioned something about a song that they used to sing on the school bus. Would you tell me a little about that?
WALTERS: Well, it was when they decided to consolidate Soda Lake with the school district in Fallon, and some one of the music teachers had written a song about, "blow winds of the desert o’er sagebrush sea for we marched to strength and wisdom from Consolidated B." And the buses all had this big sign along the side of them, Consolidated B.
LaVOY: My goodness! Tell me a little bit about your early schooling in what's now the Cottage School.
WALTERS: I think we went, I'm surprised, you know; I know that children now go only for a couple of hours, but I think we went most of the day. We went almost all morning and maybe until 1:30 in the afternoon or so, and that was where I learned to read, learned colors, learned basic arithmetic. I think they taught children much more. Expected more of them. Now, of course, now it's different. They turn them loose on the computer. (laughing)
LaVOY: Then from there you went to West End?
WALTERS: Yeah.
LaVOY: Now, about what years were you in West End?
WALTERS: I think from the third grade to the sixth, and I think seventh and eighth grades I went to Oats Park and then into high school because there was no junior high school program at that time.
LaVOY: Well, now, if I'm figuring right during this period of time World War I started, did it not?
WALTERS: Yeah, when I was in first grade. That was 1918.
LaVOY: Now, do you remember anything at all about how that affected your community?
WALTERS: No, not very much except that everybody seemed to be very enthusiastic about war bonds, and they were really, I think, were very patriotic where that was concerned, but I can't remember what else was expected of us. I think that probably there were some restrictions on food perhaps.
LaVOY: Tell me, did you buy any of the war bonds?
WALTERS: Yes. The school encouraged that, and it seems to me we took a quarter to school once a week and bought a stamp with it, and the stamp we put in a book, and then when our book was full, why we turned it in on a war bond.
LaVOY: Now, it must have been hard to come up with twenty-five cents.
WALTERS: It was. You know, actually there was not very much change floating around when you think of it. At that time our economy was more or less a barter economy, and I know that for our groceries that we got from Kent's my father used to give them cord wood or alfalfa hay, and I can remember one time when I broke my arm, my father paid the doctor with a calf.
LaVOY: Who was the doctor?
WALTERS: That was…Oh I have to think about it…I'll tell you later 'cause I know who it is. (laughing)
LaVOY: How did you happen to break your arm?
WALTERS: Oh, I was running a race with my father (laughing) and stopped. I guess I tripped over, I think, a branch it was and fell and broke it. And that was Dr. Dempsey. He had a son, Bill, that was the most exciting boy in town. He had a cut-down car that used to race like mad up and down the streets of Fallon. He and Andy Drumm were a great pair. One of their favorite places to go was Rattlesnake Hill, and they'd drive round Rattlesnake Hill, and people would shake their heads about that Bill Dempsey and that Andy Drumm (laughing) and, of course, as children we just thought they had most exciting life.
LaVOY: Was Andy Drumm in the construction business at that time?
WALTERS: No, I imagine he was about eighteen or nineteen then.
LaVOY: Oh, I see. That was previous.
WALTERS: Yeah.
LaVOY: Goodness.
WALTERS: That's when they were real young.
LaVOY: Well, how long were you in a sling?
WALTERS: Oh, I think for probably four weeks. It happened at the most propitious time. It was the end of school and I didn't have to take any exams because I couldn't write.
LaVOY: Well! But I imagine you still had to go gather the cows.
WALTERS: (laughing) I guess. Whatever needed to be done, I could still do.
LaVOY: Well, getting back a bit to the war. Were there any songs that you sang at school that were war oriented?
WALTERS: Yeah. Um-hum. We had this one that we sang everyday and each of us had a little American flag, and Mrs. Grant had us follow her around the classroom and we sang about Uncle Sam needs you for service. Uncle Sam needs you today…I forgotten… When he calls, all loyal hearts obey.
LaVOY: Well, and you marched around the room.
WALTERS: Yes.
LaVOY: Singing that.
WALTERS: Singing that.
LaVOY: Did you recall any of the Fallon men that went off to war?
WALTERS: No, I don't remember their names, but I remember going up to Hazen with a carload of my relatives, and my cousin Marie was going up to say goodbye to her boyfriend, and my cousin Thelma and I were about six or seven at the time, and Marie was crying as she was telling this boy goodbye, and I can remember my cousin turning to me and saying in a very worldly voice, "She really loved him, you know." (laughing)
LaVOY: (laughing) The age of seven.(laughing)
WALTERS: Yeah!
LaVOY: Well, did he return?
WALTERS: I imagine he did, but she didn't marry him. (laughing)
LaVOY: Well, did the war years help your father with selling produce?
WALTERS: You know, I don't know whether it did or not. I imagine everybody did whatever seemed to be necessary at the time to further the war efforts, but I don't know about that.
LaVOY: Now your brother at this time would have been what? About eleven or twelve?
WALTERS: Yes.
LaVOY: Who were some of his friends?
WALTERS: Well, the York boys were his friends, and I think Sandy Bottom was a good friend of his, and he and Angelo Piazza were quite good friends.
LaVOY: And they probably made life miserable for their sister.
WALTERS: Oh, well, of course. It was terrible to have that little kid tagging along all the time. (laughing)
LaVOY: (laughing) Who was your very closest friend?
WALTERS: Well, that was Ivy Wallace Ringstrom because they were directly across the river. We could stand on either bank of the river and talk to one another, and when we could we'd con our mothers into letting us go swimming. Mrs. Wallace taught me to swim in the Carson River, and lately when there's been so much talk about all of the quicksilver that was in it and how terrible it is for people and how much damage it must do, and I was thinking with all of that water that I have gulped down that if there was that much quicksilver in it, I should glow in the dark at this point.
LaVOY: (laughing) I was thinking you were swimming amid the throngs of mosquitoes, too.
WALTERS: Yes, and an occasional water snake. And there was a little rapids. Now it is no longer there. I hiked up that area a couple of years ago to see if the rapids were still there, but they're not. They changed. But one thing I was wondering about. We went to Fort Churchill last Sunday and among other things that they had done was to rehabilitate that. They had the CCC [Civil Conservation Corps] crew come in, and they made a lot of adobe blocks to finish the buildings so that they looked very much as they . . . well, they look as they do now and probably somewhat as they did before. They got the adobe from the bed of the Carson River and I wonder if it ever has been tested to see if there is quicksilver in it. (laughing)
LaVOY: Probably it does have.
WALTERS: In that adobe. I thought that would be so interesting. I'm going to ask somebody if the DRI [Desert Research Institute] or BLM [Bureau of Land Management] if either had tested it to see if that adobe was full of quicksilver.
LaVOY: Do you remember when the CCC boys came to Fallon?
WALTERS: No, 'cause I wasn't living there then.
LaVOY: Oh, that's right.
WALTERS: You know, I was gone from Fallon for so many years.
LaVOY: That's right. You left in 1928, and CCC didn't start until the thirties.
WALTERS: Uh huh. Right.
LaVOY: Well, I think that's interesting that you would come up with the point of the quicksilver because it is a real question at this moment. Now, tell me, getting back to your schooling. You were in West End. Who was your teacher?
WALTERS: Mrs. Lucy Burton. Just adored her. Thought she was such a darling person, and the only other one I remember is Ada Gerjets who taught art, and she was the first one who really made me think about drawing and watercolors because she was a watercolor artist.
LaVOY: You became such an artist on your own in later years, so she's the one that started you.
WALTERS: Yeah. She was.
LaVOY: Now who were some of the girls that were in your class there at West End school?
WALTERS: …I don’t know. Isn’t it strange? I don’t remember their names.
LaVOY: Then from West End you moved to Oats Park.
WALTERS: Yes.
LaVOY: Tell me about schooling there.
WALTERS: All I remember at Oats Park was Laura Mills who was one of my teachers. "Choppy" Johnson. Choppy wasn't his real name, but he was the music teacher there, and let's see. We had a domestic science teacher, Miss Wickland, who was from a Fallon family, but I can't recall her name right now, and those are the only teachers that I remember specifically.
LaVOY: Can you tell me something about your graduation from eighth grade?
WALTERS: Yeah. That was the night…let’s see would that be right…No it wasn’t. I don't really remember much about it at all. You know, I think I must have been a very un-observant child. (laughing) I think. I was probably more wrapped up in myself than I was in anybody else.
LaVOY: Tell me what type of clothes did you wear when you were in the junior high school.
WALTERS: Well, not junior high school. Seventh and eighth grades?
LaVOY: Seventh and eighth grades, yes.
WALTERS: Usually ones that my cousin had already worn. Some of my cousins. Hand-me-downs.
LaVOY: Well, you mentioned to me before we started about the long underwear. I love that story that you had a hole in the long, in your stockings. Would you please repeat that?
WALTERS: Oh, well, 'cause we wore black stockings then, and, of course, the white underwear showed through, so you just take some shoe polish, shoe black, and put a dab of that on and it covered it up just fine, except that the underwear kind of slid around during the course of things (laughing), and very often you came home with your white underwear showing through the hole after all. Much to Mother's despair. (laughing)
LaVOY: Well, how long during the year, how much of the year did you spend in the long underwear?
WALTERS: Well, I would guess probably about four months anyway.
LaVOY: And the stockings had to be mended very carefully or out came the shoe polish.
WALTERS: (laughing) Right.
LaVOY: I think that's a wonderful story. Just wonderful. Now, when you graduated from Oats Park School, you went on into high school, and I'd love to know about your thoughts of high school, who some of your teachers were.
WALTERS: Well, of course, the most memorable person in high school was Mr. [George] McCracken who was the principal, and he was really a wonderful man. He was excellent as an administrator, and I think he was a real disciplinarian which was the despair of so many of the students who attended. Especially the boys who just chafed under his discipline, and yet he was fair, and I think also had a real enjoyment of young people. I can remember one time that we were in the girls' locker room practicing our latest Charleston step and all of a sudden the door flew open and here was Mr. McCracken, and all he did was stand in the door and say, "Young ladies." And with that, immediately, why we calmed down. We stopped our practice. (laughing)
LaVOY: (laughing) I've heard many stories about Mr. McCracken.
WALTERS: Oh, dancing was just wonderful. When they had school dances, why he would circulate the dance floor, and if he couldn't see light between you and your partner, you got called off the floor.
LaVOY: Who were some of your partners?
WALTERS: Dancing? I remember Butch Van Voorhies was one of them and Beale Cann, Merle Williams. That's about all. I never really was belle of the ball.
LaVOY: (laughing) Who played the music for your dances?
WALTERS: I don't know whether Frank Woodliff's group was playing or not, but Louise Witherspoon was the pianist. We have a picture of all those, and I think they have one at the Museum of that particular group, and I think they may have played for them. At least, some of them.
LaVOY: Now, I understand that during this era that there were dances every Saturday night at the outlying schools.
WALTERS: Um-hum.
LaVOY: Did you ever go to those?
WALTERS: I did after I had been in University and came home one summer and we went to . . . and that was square dancing principally, and we went to Union. I can remember going, and I think Northam and [
LaVOY: Well, did you dance at any other schools besides Northam?
WALTERS: Union and Sheckler. Both. And that was such fun because then we weren't doing so much square dancing.
LaVOY: Did you dance at the Fraternal Hall, too, because I understand that was a number one spot.
WALTERS: Yeah. Now, I don't know whether it finally by that time whether they were still having those Saturday night dances, but that was just wonderful because I can still remember coming up the steps, and I could hear Harry Marsh's slide trombone. You know, it was just like the pied piper. Come on up and dance, (laughing) and there would be children lined all along the benches covered up with coats. Nobody bothered to have a baby sitter come in. You just took the children to the dance with you, and they laid down on the benches and would sleep, and they were never too young to learn to dance. There were dancers of all ages.
LaVOY: Was there a charge?
WALTERS: Yes. I can't remember what it was. I don't think that it was very much though. There were always one or two fights out in the alley.
LaVOY: (laughing) Did you all run out to see the fights?
WALTERS: (laughing) No, but we found out that we could stand up on the bench, and we could look out the window and see. (laughing)
LaVOY: What prompted these fights?
WALTERS: Well, I imagine being overly joyous and imbibing a bit too much.
LaVOY: (laughing) Now, when they had the intermission, did you stay in the hall or did you go for ice cream or something?
WALTERS: No, we stayed in the hall, but I think there were a great many who did that.
LaVOY: Now, where would they go for their ice cream?
WALTERS: Well, Laveaga's was right downstairs right near it. Their ice cream parlor. That was where we used to go after the show. We would go to the ice cream parlor. My father dearly loved pineapple sodas, and he would have a pineapple ice cream soda, and the rest of us would have some other kind of a soda that we would like.
LaVOY: You just happened to mention the theatre. Where was the theatre?
WALTERS: Well, I think it was on the same side of the street that it is now, but I'm not sure about that. It seems to me that it was.
LaVOY: Who were some of the old actors that you were particularly fond of?
WALTERS: Well, we didn't go too often. And the only one that was really memorable was Jack the Giant Killer and I was sitting down front with the rest of the children and I can remember tearing back up the aisle and burying my face in my mother's lap because I was so frightened. (laughing)
LaVOY: And who was Jack the Giant Killer?
WALTERS: (laughing) I don't remember. But, you know, I can still see that horrible giant coming out of the screen at me.
LaVOY: Something I want to ask you. I know we did this in Elko, but every Saturday there would be a drawing for soap or something like that at the theatre. Did they have something like that in Fallon?
WALTERS: Yeah, I they did. Only, I think it was dishes or a dish, but I don't remember that we ever won anything.
LaVOY: That would be the sort of the old Depression-style dishes?
LaVOY: WALTERS:
WALTERS: Um-hum. Yeah.
LaVOY: And they drew a number from your ticket?
WALTERS: I don't know.
LaVOY: I think when you bought your ticket when you came in.
WALTERS: Probably. You got the stub, and they had the drawing from the part of it they kept.
LaVOY: Now, with your high school years, what was your favorite subject in high school?
WALTERS: Well, I liked English, and I like Spanish, and I was on the debating team. I enjoyed that, and that was with Merle Williams and Seward Blair and Allen Bible and Mary K. Morris were all part of the group who were debating, and we used to come into Reno. They had forensic contests at that time, and not only was there debating, but there was also dramatic readings, and I still remember Harry Atkinson reading Boots, thumping up and down, and he was thumping up and down the stage as he was reciting Boots.
LaVOY: (laughing) Did you win any of the contests?
WALTERS: Yes, quite often we would win. We went to Elko to debate. Mr. McCracken drove us up in his car, and let's see. Merle Williams and I, and I don't think it was Seward Blair. There was one other along, but I remember Merle especially because I had a real crush on Merle at that time, and we were trying to hold hands under the lap robe so Mr. McCracken wouldn't see us.
LaVOY: (laughing) Did Mr. McCracken, didn't he marry one of the teachers at school?
WALTERS: He married Olive Colpitts, and I think they had twin daughters.
LaVOY: Oh! Well, did that calm him down any?
WALTERS: (laughing) No. Well, you know, he really didn't need calming. It was just his belief that there were certain standards of decorum and you were supposed to adhere to them.
LaVOY: Well, I'm sorry we don't have those standards today.
WALTERS: Yeah, we could stand a little of it, I think.
LaVOY: Now, what were some of the entertainment's that you had at school?
WALTERS: Well, there was school plays.
LaVOY: Were you in any of those?
WALTERS: Yeah, I think I was in one or two of them, but once more I don't remember much about it, but, you know, I didn't really participate in school activities as the youngsters did who lived in town because it was a little too difficult to come in and we didn't have a car. It was a long time before we had an automobile. We were still driving a horse and buggy while most of the Indians had cars.
LaVOY: (laughing) Well, now, your graduation was in 1928?
WALTERS: Yes.
LaVOY: Did your entire class graduate?
WALTERS: Yes. Far as I remember, except for the ones who during the course of the year had passed away.
LaVOY: Well, now they passed away. Was it in accidents, or do you know?
WALTERS: You know, I don't remember. But Lucille LaGasa I remember was a terrific basketball player, and she was one who had died and then Ernie Lofthouse and Upton Travis, but I can't remember the cause of their deaths, but I do remember that they were among the ones who didn't graduate.
LaVOY: Now, something that I'm wondering. Regressing back a little bit. You mentioned that your mother left your father in 1924. Is that correct?
WALTERS: Um-hum. Yeah.
LaVOY: So, in other words, that would be, you didn't have your father with you during high school. Is that correct?
WALTERS: No, I was living with him, and Mother was away teaching at other places.
LaVOY: Oh, I see. One thing I want to ask you. I was talking to the lady that is living on your property right now, and she told me that you had an old Harison's yellow rose bush there that she felt was something that was important to your family. Could you tell me about that?
WALTERS: Well, Mother brought it up there from Stillwater, but it was one of the ones that came with the pioneers. The old yellow rose was one that seemed to travel well, and somebody had brought it down to Stillwater, and I guess this was maybe was a cutting from the one at Stillwater that Mother grew.
LaVOY: It's getting to be quite a huge bush now.
WALTERS: Yes, it is. I wonder what they're going to do with it. (laughing)
LaVOY: Oh, I think it'll stay around for a while. You also had a Persian lilac. Was that your mother's, too?
WALTERS: Yes.
LaVOY: And where did that come from?
WALTERS: I gave it to her one year for Mother's Day.
LaVOY: It's a beautiful, beautiful bush.
WALTERS: Yes.
LaVOY: Well, now one thing I want to ask you. Do you remember going back prior to your graduation, do you remember the old watering trough on Maine Street?
WALTERS: Yes, I do remember that.
LaVOY: Can you tell me something about it?
WALTERS: Just that it was there and that I had seen horses drink from it, but aside from that I don't remember anything about it.
LaVOY: Didn't it have the upper part for the horses and the lower part for the dogs?
WALTERS: Oh, I don't know. I didn't know that.
LaVOY: I'm not sure. I believe that it did. Then in talking to an old friend he told me that there used to be cattle drives down what is now Allen Road. Did you recall seeing any of those?
WALTERS: No. One of the characters I remember seeing about when we were living on the ranch was Old White Feather who was an Indian who always wore one white feather in his hair, and he seemed to make the rounds of the community and would come and visit, and I think he always wanted something, some little thing from wherever it was that he went.
LaVOY: You mean food?
WALTERS: And I remember my mother giving him food once. And then another time we were just overrun with ground squirrels, and the Indians asked if they could come and have a ground squirrel drive, and of course it delighted my father. There was quite a group of them came out, and they rounded all of these ground squirrels and then they had banquet afterwards right there, and they made a spit out of a long piece of willow. There were lots of willows growing along the river, and they made a spit out of a long piece of willow and just threaded the ground squirrels onto it. In the back, out the mouth, and roasted it fur and all and then, of course, peeled the fur off, and I guess it was perfectly delicious. They seemed to have a marvelous time.
LaVOY: Did they take the entrails out?
WALTERS: I think they were well cooked.
LaVOY: (laughing) Oh, goodness gracious! About when was this? About what year, you recall?
WALTERS: Well, I think that would have been, oh, maybe 1922 or so.
LaVOY: (laughing) That was an interesting tidbit.
WALTERS: (laughing) And the Indians also used to come down from Pyramid [Lake] with the trout. They would start with a bed of willow in their spring wagon, and on top of that then they would place the fish and then have another layer of willow and on top of that gunnysacks and on top of that canvas. They would start from Pyramid Lake during the night, and they would be down to Fallon by morning, and I can remember their coming to our ranch and Mother would buy one of these beautiful big trout for maybe a dollar and a half. Salmon trout.
LaVOY: How long did they do that? For how many years do you recall?
WALTERS: 'Well, I can remember a couple of years anyway that they did that.
LaVOY: Do you recall anything about the sugar beet factory?
WALTERS: No, I don't. I think one year my father tried to raise sugar beets, and it was complete failure. For what reason I don't know.
LaVOY: I believe a virus got in the beets.
WALTERS: Oh, did it?
LaVOY: That's what closed it down. Now, do you remember the oil drilling?
WALTERS: Oh, the only thing I remember about the oil drilling was, of course, one of the wells was down at Stillwater, and they hit hot water, and it was a regular gusher. It gushed maybe three hundred feet into the air, and I can remember my cousin, Thelma, and I running in and out under this warm water. Was great fun.
LaVOY: Did they cap it?
WALTERS: I think eventually. Yes. And, of course, the rumor was that they really had struck oil, but the oil companies capped it. They just didn't want that much more oil, and they were saving it for their reserves, and I guess it's still reserved.
LaVOY: (laughing) Now that the hot water is so valuable now.
WALTERS: Yeah. It's more valuable than the oil would be.
LaVOY: Well, turkey raising was such a business in Fallon. Did your family ever raise any turkeys?
WALTERS: Oh, yes. We had turkeys. And one of the years I remember probably when I was a sophomore or maybe a junior in high school, I was taking care of the turkeys, and I think Mother was teaching down at the Island then, and they got a cold in their heads and it just spread through the whole flock, and for that you use Permanganate of Potassium in a solution and then you had to wash their heads off, and I can remember doing that, and I thought it was the most miserable job I ever had was washing the turkeys' heads when they had this awful cold in them.
LaVOY: What would you do? Take a washcloth and
WALTERS: Yeah. Had a rag.
LaVOY: Wash each head separately?
WALTERS: Yes.
LaVOY: And they survived from it?
WALTERS: I think most of them did.
LaVOY: Well, turkeys are not known for their intelligence.
WALTERS: Oh no! They are so dumb! (laughing)
LaVOY: When it thunders, they run in a corner and smother and everything.
WALTERS: Yeah.
LaVOY: Well, now, did you sell them picked?
WALTERS: I don't think so. I think that . . . no, I don't believe we did. I can remember picking some, and I can remember the theory that if you picked them right after they were killed that the feathers just almost fell off if you did it almost immediately, and all you had to do was run your hands down over them but I can't remember ever having done that. I think it's just a theory as far as I'm concerned.
LaVOY: Did your father sell the turkeys to Kent's then?
WALTERS: Yes.
LaVOY: Do you recall some of the other people that were turkey raisers?
WALTERS: Well, of course, Mrs. [Minnie] Blair was so famous for her turkeys and her white turkeys. She really became known as one as one of the ones to provide great turkeys.
LaVOY: Now, she used to put little hoods over her turkeys after they were butchered, and I just wondered if your family did the same thing. But, if they sold them alive why then they would never have had to do that.
WALTERS: Oh, well, I think ours were killed all right or dead, and I don't think we were that delicate.
LaVOY: (laughing) You didn't have "Atlasta" across them.
WALTERS: (laughing) Right.
LaVOY: The Indians raised a lot of turkeys, too, I understand.
WALTERS: Yeah. Uh-huh. Down near Stillwater.
LaVOY: Well, now, you mentioned that this Chinese man came to your property and raised cantaloupes. So I surmise that the cantaloupes were sold to Kent's, too.
WALTERS: Yes.
LaVOY: And how was this done? In huge quantities or?
WALTERS: Yeah, by crates. And we would pick, and I think that Kent's furnished the crates, and then all you did was to fill them up and take them in.
LaVOY: The name Kent comes up so often in the oral histories that I do. Could you describe the Kent store to me?
WALTERS: It was long and narrow. My uncle worked there. There was this wonderful rolling ladder that I always wanted to climb up on. Never could, and when my mother paid our bill I always got a bag of candy.
LaVOY: Well! In other words, he carried all of the farmers throughout the year.
WALTERS: Yes! Right.
LaVOY: And then you paid your bill once a year.
WALTERS: Uh-huh. Well, sometimes I think it varies, and I think that was true of the larger ranchers, larger farms, but it seems to me that we paid our bill every few months.
LaVOY: Well, now, one thing I wanted to ask you. Did your family ever go away on vacations?
WALTERS: No.
LaVOY: And then you mentioned that you were in the horse and buggy. When did you get your first car?
WALTERS: I think 1923.
LaVOY: And what kind was it.
WALTERS: Model A Ford.
LaVOY: Did you learn to drive it?
WALTERS: Oh, you bet. Right now! (laughing)
LaVOY: Who taught you?
WALTERS: I guess my father did. But there was always a mad scramble. My brother wanted to drive it, and, as a matter of fact, he wasn't very much in favor of my driving it at all.
LaVOY: I can see that.
WALTERS: And I was a little young as I think of it.
LaVOY: And I imagine that that was a tremendous outlay of money for your family.
WALTERS: Yes. Well, we'd of never had it if Mother hadn't been teaching.
LaVOY: Now, you mentioned it you got the car in 1923, and you mentioned that your mother became ill in 1924?
WALTERS: No, she was 60yrs old. So that would be that was 1940 something wouldn’t it.
LaVOY: When she got the polio?
WALTERS: When she got polio.
LaVOY: Oh, well, we'll catch up with that when we get into the forties. We're still in the twenties now.
WALTERS: (laughing)
LaVOY: So, you learned to drive then approximately in 1923?
WALTERS: Um hum.
LaVOY: Did you have a job in Fallon at all?
WALTERS: Once in a while I was waitress, you know, one of the girls that waited on tables for some of the meetings like probably Rotary or maybe a convention we'd have, but that was all.
LaVOY: You were too busy helping at home.
WALTERS: Yes, and, you know, it was too hard to get in and out of town.
LaVOY: Now, what prompted you to go to the University?
WALTERS: Well, I guess my mother did. It never occurred to me that I would do anything else. You know, that was from as early as I can remember. I was always going to go to University, and I'm sure that Mother instilled that in me.
LaVOY: Did your brother go?
WALTERS: He went one year, and then he decided that he'd rather work.
LaVOY: But, now, when you started, tell me, did you live in Reno?
WALTERS: Yes. Mother came up here to Reno, and she and I lived out on Valley Road. We had a house at there, and she used to baby-sit. So did I. But, I did work at the university library that first year. The second year I worked at the J.C. Penney Company, and then my junior and senior year I was an usher at the theatre.
LaVOY: Which theatre?
WALTERS: All of them because they were all owned by the same chain, and our assignment would take us from the Majestic to the Granada to the Wigwam and back again. We would circulate between the three.
LaVOY: What were the courses that you took at the University?
WALTERS: English once more and Spanish and, of course, education. Took a course in philosophy from Dean Thompson, and at the end of the year he said that he would be pleased to have me in any of his philosophy courses, and it scared me to death. (laughing)
LaVOY: (laughing) Well, that was certainly an honor because he didn't have much patience with the rest of them. (laughing) With you and your mother having to work so hard while you went through the University, were you able at all to have much of a social life at the University?
WALTERS: Very little. Almost none.
LaVOY: Did you take further art courses at the University?
WALTERS: No, I didn't ever take any at the University. It was after I was out of school and we were living here that I went up to the University to take some courses. Adult education, I guess it was part of.
LaVOY: Did you go back to Fallon during the summers?
WALTERS: No.
LaVOY: You stayed in Reno?
WALTERS: We stayed right in Reno. If you had a job why you hung onto it for dear life.
LaVOY: That would have the years from 1928 to 1932.
WALTERS: Right.
LaVOY: Now, the Depression was really starting, really going full swing during that period of time. Tell me some of the things that you saw of the Depression yourself.
WALTERS: Oh, I don't know. I was painfully aware of a lack of money, you know, for everyone. And wages were so poor. When I got thirty-five cents an hour, that sounded great.
LaVOY: I wondered if you saw so many homeless on the trains.
WALTERS: No. I probably wasn't that aware.
LaVOY: Well, living on Valley Road you were quite a ways from the railroad tracks anyway.
WALTERS: Yeah.
LaVOY: Now, tell me, who were your favorite teachers up there besides Dean Thompson that you were afraid of.
WALTERS: (laughing) Yeah. Oh, I liked A. E. Hill who was head of the English department and… I really don't know because it seemed to me I…I traded or had a variety of professors through the years. I can remember practice teaching under one of the Harrises and being monitored, and that was always kind of a harrowing experience. (laughing)
LaVOY: One of the professors at the University that was so flamboyant I wondered what your impressions were of him was Doc Martie.
WALTERS: Yes. We lived next door to the Marties when we came back to Reno, Pete and I, after we were married. They lived next door to us out on Clover Way.
LaVOY: He was always so interesting because every function that I would attend when I went to the University Doc would be there. The only man in a tuxedo with all of the medals.
WALTERS: (laughing) Is that right?
LaVOY: On, you know, the front of his tuxedo. And, oh, I was in such awe of him I just wondered if he was as flamboyant when you were attending.
WALTERS: Well, you see, I don't know because my social life was so circumscribed.
LaVOY: Now, when you graduated, did you get employment?
WALTERS: Yes. My first…my first school was in Goldfield [Nevada], and got that immediately upon graduation. I had never been any place but Reno and Fallon, and I didn't know there were places in Nevada that looked like Goldfield, and I cried the whole first week I was there. (laughing)
LaVOY: (laughing)
WALTERS: I managed to survive for two years. (laughing)
LaVOY: What did you teach?
WALTERS: Everything. I was teaching in high school, and I taught English and typing and shorthand and Spanish, and I had girls' basketball which was a traumatic experience because I had spent my whole life trying not to take any kind of a physical education class, so I knew absolutely nothing about it, and for another thing there were only eight girls, no, I guess it was nine girls in the high school, and in order to have two teams, why I had to play also, and when I would make a basket, the girls would all stop and clap. (laughing)
LaVOY: (laughing) Who was the principal of the school?
WALTERS: That was A. E. Jacobsen. He was from Minnesota, and think that he, too, lasted only about two years.
LaVOY: About how many people were in the town?
WALTERS: I think there were around three hundred then.
LaVOY: And where did you live?
WALTERS: Well, I lived at a boardinghouse at Mrs. Richardson's boarding house the first year. The second year I rented an apartment that was the other half of the house that Tex Rickard built in Goldfield, and it was very nice, and Mrs. [Chase]. . . ah, I can't think of her name--her husband was an attorney--lived in the other half of the house, and it was pleasant. We bought water by the bucket, and it was the same mining camp routine that you always went through that when you took a bath, why you also washed out a few pieces of clothing and then scrubbed the floor before you finally threw the water out, and in mining days they also saved it for them to use in the mines with the single jack for part of the drilling, so that water was thoroughly used.
LaVOY: I should say it was! Was this famous Mrs. Hugh Brown in Tonopah at that time, or had she gone?
WALTERS: Not that I know of and, you know, I really didn't know about Tonopah.
LaVOY: But you were in Goldfield.
WALTERS: Yes.
LaVOY: That's right. She was Tonopah and Goldfield, believe. Both. You lasted for two years. Then, what did you do?
WALTERS: Oh, I happened to find Pete. (laughing)
LaVOY: Now, wasn't Pete's family from that area?
WALTERS: Yes, his father was telephone operator…not operator…well head of the telephone company in Goldfield, and his mother was the chief operator. They married in Goldfield, and Pete was born there.
LaVOY: Well, how did you happen to meet him?
WALTERS: At University. And the Goldfield background is all incidental.
LaVOY: Now, with your having met Pete while you were attending the University, did he come down to Goldfield to visit with you?
WALTERS: No. We just had this hot and heavy correspondence going, and once in a while we would even send to each other telegrams in code. Wasn't that romantic?
LaVOY: Yes, it was. (laughing) And when did you decide to marry?
WALTERS: Well, let's see. We met in March, and we got married in July.
LaVOY: Now, you met in March of 1934?
WALTERS: Mm-hm.
LaVOY: But you had known him at the University. Is that it?
WALTERS: Yes.
LaVOY: And then you went down teaching.
WALTERS: Uh-huh.
LaVOY: I don't quite understand what with all this distance between your meeting him and… you met him in March of what year?
WALTERS: Oh, well . . . now, I, the year we were married because at University it was just a very casual sort of acquaintance, and then in March of 1934 was the first time I really went out with him, and then we were married in July.
LaVOY: Well, was that in Reno?
WALTERS: Yes, it was in Reno during Easter vacation.
LaVOY: Oh! And you were married in…?
WALTERS: July.
LaVOY: Of 19…34
WALTERS: The same year, 34. Long courtship.
LaVOY: Yes, I should say so. Especially with all that--it was the coded telegrams that did it.
WALTERS: Yeah. (laughing)
LaVOY: Where were you married?
WALTERS: Here in Reno at Dean [Rheuban] Thompson's house [Riverside Drive].
LaVOY: Oh, and who were your attendants?
WALTERS: His mother and I think one of the sons.
LaVOY: One of Dean Thompson's sons.
WALTERS: Yeah.
LaVOY: And where did you honeymoon?
WALTERS: In Reno. Our honeymoon was… that we called officially our honeymoon was a year and a half later, and we took our infant son along with us.
LaVOY: Oh. (laughing)
WALTERS: Some honeymoon!
LaVOY: Yes. (laughing) In other words, you just got married and went on with living.
WALTERS: Right.
LaVOY: And what was Pete doing at that time?
WALTERS: He was working at the Hotel Golden and Riverside [Hotel].
LaVOY: And what was he doing?
WALTERS: Split shifts on the desk.
LaVOY: He was working at the desk?
WALTERS: Um-hum.
LaVOY: Oh, that's very interesting. And where did you live in Reno?
WALTERS: Well, we lived in the Pines Apartments which are no longer in existence. Circus Circus is there now. It was on the corner of Fifth and Virginia, and then later we lived in the duplex on Vine Street.
LaVOY: Now, how long were you actually living in Reno…did you live in Reno before you moved to Elko?
WALTERS: We lived here for two years. We lived in Elko for seventeen and a half. Then we came back to Reno and lived here for twenty-five years and then down to Fallon for eight and a half, almost nine.
LaVOY: Now, I just want to quickly go over your Elko years. Just a cursory following of them. What did Pete do in Elko?
WALTERS: He was at Commercial Hotel, and when Newt [Newton] Crumley went to war, why then he managed the hotel while Newt was away. After Newt came home, Pete opened an insurance office and had it for about six years.
LaVOY: Now, while you were in Elko you um…um… Pete became a legislator.
WALTERS: Right.
LaVOY: What were your responsibilities as the wife of a legislator?
WALTERS: It was to sit in the balcony and watch what went on and knit a dress.
LaVOY: Oh! (laughing) Were there a lot of different social functions that you attended as a legislator's wife?
WALTERS: Yes, there were quite a few, and it was interesting, and, of course, one of the things were the other wives that you got to meet and visit with. We enjoyed that.
LaVOY: Did you feel that Pete was a very successful legislator?
WALTERS: Oh, yes, I thought he was wonderful.
LaVOY: That's the answer that I expected to have. (laughing) Then you left Elko and you came to Reno, and what business did Pete go into in Reno?
WALTERS: Well, he came to Reno as the Federal Housing Administration administrative director, and then he worked for a while for the Probasco Company who were developers, and then we opened our own real estate office.
LaVOY: And the Walters Real Estate office became one of the most prominent ones in Reno.
WALTERS: Yeah. It was well known.
LaVOY: Now, we're going to take you right back to Fallon. What prompted you to return to Fallon?
WALTERS: Well, there was still five acres left of my father's homestead, and we thought that would be an interesting place to retire to. Pete found it difficult to retire here in Reno because he'd still have friends who called and people who wondered about different things about real estate, and he actually wanted to be done with it, and Fallon was appealing to us.
LaVOY: Had your father sold all of the land?
WALTERS: Yeah, he'd sold it all except those five acres.
LaVOY: Did your mother ever return to Fallon from Reno?
WALTERS: Yes, she did. After she got polio.
LaVOY: Now, let's just stop right there for a moment. Tell me, she had gone back to Fallon and was teaching in Fallon when she got the polio.
WALTERS: Well, she was going to teach at Stillwater, but she had been teaching in the outlying districts.
LaVOY: Of Fallon.
WALTERS: Well, I think just before that, she had been teaching at Death Valley…Death Valley Junction [California], and she had taught at Genoa [Nevada], and I think immediately before that she had been teaching at Diamond Valley, and then was going to be teaching at Stillwater. After she got polio, she went to live with my Uncle Charlie in Stillwater at his place and then she and my father decided to remarry, and they lived on the place now where the Flower Tree Nursery is [2975 Reno Highway].
LaVOY: I did not realize that they had divorced. When did they divorce?
WALTERS: In about 1933.
LaVOY: And then they remarried in 19…?
WALTERS: Oh, let's see, 1949 or 1950.
LaVOY: Now, this was after, or before, she had the polio?
WALTERS: After she had polio is when they remarried.
LaVOY: What makes you think that . . . you mentioned that you thought she got polio from the cleaning out of the septic tank or cesspool.
WALTERS: Well, that was what the authorities thought was the source of the infection.
LaVOY: She happened to be in the area?
WALTERS: Yes. She was getting ready to move into the teacherage.
LaVOY: What doctor cared for her?
WALTERS: Dr. Anderson in Reno here because she was brought into Reno, and I think we insisted that she have Dr. Anderson. We thought that he was the best doctor at that time, and she was terribly, really crippled afterwards and spent the rest of her life either in the rolling walker or a wheelchair, and she lived to be 94, so you know that she had a lot of years for them to go through.
LaVOY: When did your father pass away?
WALTERS: In 1971.
LaVOY: In Fallon?
WALTERS: In Fallon. Well, he was in Reno in the Veteran's Hospital, but he had lived in Fallon right up to then, and Mother had taken care of him all that time.
LaVOY: Even though she was crippled.
WALTERS: Yeah.
LaVOY: She was a stalwart lady, wasn't she?
WALTERS: She really was.
LaVOY: You mentioned that um…um…well I’ve lost my train of thought but you mentioned that she lived in with your uncle Charlie. Now, he had settled in the Stillwater area,
WALTERS: Yes.
LaVOY: And she lived with him until she died.
WALTERS: No. Until she and my father were married. She was with him a couple of years.
LaVOY: And then they moved back to the homestead.
WALTERS: Yes. Right.
LaVOY: And she lived there until she died.
WALTERS: Uh huh.
LaVOY: Oh, I see. Then you and Pete decided that you were going to retire in Fallon.
WALTERS: Yes.
LaVOY: And, tell me. I know you made great changes at the place. Would you tell me one of the first things that you had to do that was very upsetting about taking the kitchen and whatnot out of your old home.
WALTERS: (laughing) Well, that was because we had moved in another triple wide mobile home right along the river, and that is not zoned for two residences so it meant that we had to do away with the kitchen in Mother's original house (laughing) which we did.
LaVOY: And then you used some of the rooms for your art work, did you not?
WALTERS: Um-hum. And we used it as a kind of a guest house, and it was a studio for me and worked great and it was the means of gathering a whole lot of stuff together that just had to be moved when we finally left.
LaVOY: Your having a studio. When did you really find that you had the talent that you do have in art?
WALTERS: Oh, I think we were still living in Elko then. Pete bought me my first set of pastels which was a beautiful complete set, and I started working in pastels. Enjoyed it thoroughly.
LaVOY: And then went on to watercolors?
WALTERS: Yes. I've tried everything. I worked in watercolor and acrylics and oils.
LaVOY: Have done some beautiful work.
WALTERS: And enjoyed them. Liked it. And every once in a while I have a yen to do that again.
LaVOY: Oh, I see. Well, now, did you build the Flower Tree Nursery?
WALTERS: Yes.
LaVOY: With the idea of your running it?
WALTERS: No. Actually, Dan Luke came to us, and he wanted to put a trailer up to use as a sales room for a nursery, and we didn't didn't feel that we wanted a trailer there, so we offered to build a store that would do for them to sell their nursery products.
LaVOY: That's when it was known as the Two Bears.
WALTERS: Right.
LaVOY: And why did they name it that?
WALTERS: Oh, that's because young Dan was on the Highway Patrol. They were the bears, and he and a friend of his were two bears that started out.
LaVOY: Now, how long did they manage the store?
WALTERS: They were there for two years.
LaVOY: And then to whom did you lease it?
WALTERS: And then after them it was the Hendrix who are there now.
LaVOY: And they changed the name to the Flower Tree.
WALTERS: Right.
LaVOY: And they moved into your home.
WALTERS: Right. When we moved up to Reno, why they moved into the house.
LaVOY: Living in your house, how did you find that the river had changed?
WALTERS: Well, I was much more aware of it. I don't think I paid too much attention when I was growing up around it, but it was so interesting to see an old blue heron, and then we had Lonesome George, the resident frog, and we had also a resident muskrat, and it was fascinating just to watch it.
LaVOY: Did you have deer?
WALTERS: Yes. One night we counted thirteen across on the bank of the river, following the river down.
LaVOY: And I do recall your talking about the spawning of the carp.
WALTERS: Yes. Oh! What a noisy process. (laughing)
LaVOY: But, you had huge, huge swarms of carp right outside your door, literally.
WALTERS: Yes. They were.
LaVOY: Did you enjoy going back to Fallon to live as an adult?
WALTERS: Oh, yes! Like it so much. And probably if he did not become ill, we still would be living there.
LaVOY: And you moved for what reason.
WALTERS: Because of his illness. We just needed to be closer to doctors and hospitals.
LaVOY: And so you moved back to Reno.
WALTERS: Right.
LaVOY: You've come full circle. You had two sons. Would you mind telling me a little bit about them? We'll start with the elder.
WALTERS: The older is Warren. Warren went to the Naval Academy [Annapolis, Maryland] and spent twenty-eight years in the Marine Corps, retired as a Colonel, and he now works for the Atlantic Research Corporation which writes programs and creates software for businesses, for the government and for other corporations. David our younger…
LaVOY: Excuse me just a minute I want to continue on with Warren for a moment.
LaVOY: When was Warren born?
WALTERS: In [September 5] 1935.
LaVOY: And his… the story of the lady that he married is very interesting. I'd love to have you tell us that.
WALTERS: He was vacationing in Denmark and it was raining, and he and this girl ducked under a canopy to get out rain and introduced themselves. He in English, she in Danish. Together they went to a museum and there was a man in the museum who could see that they had somewhat of a time communicating with one another, and he spoke both English and Danish, so he was their guide for the day. Then Warren was to go to… oh not Vietnam but too…I’m sorry can’t think of the name…it’s the island that the Japanese had taken…Okinawa. He had an assignment to Okinawa, and during the year he was in Okinawa, he and Vibeke [Christiansen] wrote to each other. He out of a Danish dictionary, she out of an English dictionary. I do hope they saved those letters. They should be just great. (laughing) And then when he came back, his next assignment was to be Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where he was to teach ordinance, and he decided that he really couldn't manage to teach and to have a new bride at the same time, so he wrote us a letter that we were to have a Christmas gift…uh guest and we had no idea who it was going to be, but we thought it was one of his Naval Academy friends, and then he told us that it was going to be this Danish girl and please, to write to her mother and invite her. (laughing) So, we did as we were told. We wrote to her mother and invited her, and we met her at the plane and about all she could say in English was hello and yes and no and thank you, so we enrolled her at the University of Nevada just as an auditor, so that she would get accustomed to hearing English spoken, but I think she learned more just from watching television than she ever did going to University.
LaVOY: And how long did she stay with you?
WALTERS: She was with us four months.
LaVOY: And then she and Warren . .
WALTERS: And then she and Warren were married.
LaVOY: That's an interesting story. And your other son?
WALTERS: David.
LaVOY: And when was he born?
WALTERS: He was born in [February 27] 1940, and David went to University of Nevada, took a course in civil engineering, and about that time why the draft was breathing down his neck. He was supposed to spend some time in it, and he decided that he'd like to do that and get it out of the way because he felt that it would be silly to finish his education, then put in his service time. So, after one year at the University, he decided, among other things, that he did not want to be a civil engineer, and he'd just go get his service over with. So he sent four years on Treasure Island. Was home every weekend. (laughing)
LaVOY: Was he in the Navy?
WALTERS: Was in the Navy. Yeah. Home every weekend. We had a place at Tahoe at the time, and it was just wonderful. It was like having a job you liked and off every weekend. And then when he finished that, he had concluded that he wanted to be an architect, so he started looking for schools, and it's very difficult to find a school in the West that has architecture because almost of them are state universities and their own students usually fill up their architectural classes. But Arizona State finally said they had room for him, so he was in Arizona State for five years, and he works for an architectural firm here.
LaVOY: Which one?
WALTERS: He works for Sheehan-Van Woert, and he is not married. He has his own home. He lived in our condominium unit for the years we were in Fallon, and then when we came back, he bought a house. Loves it. Is always doing something to it.
LaVOY: Well, an architect, he has many ideas.
WALTERS: Yes.
LaVOY: Do you have any great-grandchildren or do you have any grandchildren I should say?
WALTERS: Well, yeah, we had two grandsons, Peter and Michael, who are Warren's two boys. Michael has never married. Peter recently married, and they have a little girl, so that's our great granddaughter. First child…uh girl in the Walters family in three generations.
LaVOY: My goodness, and what's her name?
WALTERS: Her name is Linden [Walters].
LaVOY: Linden. That's a very pretty name. All right, I think that we have pretty well covered most everything. Oh, no. One thing that I have forgotten that I wanted to ask you. What organizations are you involved in?
WALTERS: Well, the only one… long lasting one which I feel lost when I am not part of it is the PEO Sisterhood, and aside from that I don't belong to any.
LaVOY: When did you join the PEO's?
WALTERS: Well, let's see. It was over fifty years ago. I was still in Elko. I think about 1941.
LaVOY: And you have continued right through today?
WALTERS: Um-hum.
LaVOY: What chapter do you belong to today?
WALTERS: I belong to Chapter T now. I originally was part of Chapter A, and then when I went to Fallon, they took me in and I was Chapter D, and then when I came back to Reno I was Chapter T.
LaVOY: Well, that's quite a long time to be in one organization, but it is a marvelous organization. I know you enjoy it. The very last thing that I want to ask you. I should have asked earlier in the interview, and probably when the transcriber finishes transcribing, she may put it where it belongs if that's all right with you.
WALTERS: Oh, surely.
LaVOY: I neglected to ask you about an incident that occurred in Fallon in 1918 and there was a gentleman by the name of Mark Wildes who was the second mayor of Fallon and a sheriff and he was shot and killed by a draft evader socialist named Paul Walters on May 19, 1918, and a thousand-dollar reward was offered by Governor Emmett Boyle. Could you comment on that for me, please?
WALTERS: Well, the only thing that I remember about that, remembered my folks talking about it at the dinner table, and they're telling about the search for him and how finally they got Indian trackers to find out where he was, and when they finally found him, why he was killed.
LaVOY: Oh, he was killed by the sheriff?
WALTERS: Well, I think by the posse, you know, who were looking for him?
LaVOY: Do you recall anything further about the funeral and whatnot? Was there a great write up about that in the paper?
WALTERS: You know, I don't remember, and, of course, I was just learning to read then, probably would not have read about it anyway.
LaVOY: Well such a big-to-do about it, that I just wondered if you recalled it at all?
WALTERS: No. I really don't. Just outside that little bit about it.
LaVOY: And then one other little thing that I neglected to ask you was your haying enterprise on your ranch. Could you tell me what kind of stacking you did?
WALTERS: Well, we used a derrick with a derrick fork, and we had to have a team of horses that pulled the derrick fork up and let it down. It was loaded from the wagon and pulled up and then dumped onto the stack. And I drove the derrick, and I had a horse and a mule, both of them with very tough mouths. I can remember sawing and sawing away, and I think I weighed probably eighty or ninety pounds (laughing) at that time (laughing) and had a terrible time with it. It was hot, and I would come back into the house just beet red, and my mother'd give me some cold lemonade, and I'd stay there and then go back out again for the next time they came in with a load of hay.
LaVOY: You mentioned her giving you cold lemonade. I know you didn't have ice.
WALTERS: No.
LaVOY: How did she keep it cool?
WALTERS: Well, we had a desert cooler. You know, the sacks that are around a wooden frame and water drips down over them and cools things.
LaVOY: You had a well.
WALTERS: Yes.
LaVOY: I see. Right. Well, on behalf of the Churchill County Museum Oral History Project I want to thank you, Connie, for a very, very interesting interview.
WALTERS: Well, you're so welcome. I enjoyed talking about it.
LaVOY: This is the end of the interview.
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