Oral history as related by Norine Franke to Kelly Geraci on October 21, 1996.
The memory that sticks out in my mind about living in Albion, Montana was the country store that my folks owned.
They bought it in the `30s or `40s for $1,000.00. It was a country store and a filling station. I remember the old gas pump. My sisters and I used to help pump the gas once in a while. Most cars in those days only took about ten gallons to fill up. We sold different kinds of products, mostly food. My parents ran the store, my dad took a lot of other jobs to make ends meet. No one really made a lot of money doing anything back then. He sheared sheep in the spring and was also a brand inspector. My mother was a nurse by profession, so if anyone in the country got hurt, they would come to the store and she would take care of them. I will never forget one time a boy came running in and he was terrified. He was just sure that he had been bitten by a rattlesnake, but he never saw it. If he had been bitten she would give him a shot of this serum, if he hadn`t been bitten this serum would kill him. Mother kept questioning him over and over. She concluded that he hadn`t been bitten by a snake. He hadn`t seen the snake, he just heard a rustle and he was riding through some high brush. My mother figured out he had just scratched himself on a branch or something.
I remember one particular winter. . . I think it was January of 1949. . . A blizzard hit. It was the worst blizzard I`ve ever seen. The snow started one day and kept going for three days afterwards. There were miles and miles of snow everywhere you looked. The snow probably lasted for about six weeks. There was also a huge loss of livestock. My parents only lost a few chickens. We were lucky. A lot of sheep, cattle and horses died in that storm.
Trying to go anywhere was hard. My family and I lived above the store, so we didn`t have any trouble getting food. You could walk off of our roof and right on to a snow bank. The snow was so deep. We would have to shovel our way out of the house if the snow got too bad. We were the post office for that area, but with all the snow they couldn`t get the mail through. Clyde Ice from Spearfish, South Dakota, flew over with the mail and dropped it. This didn`t make much sense, because no one could get to the store and get the mail anyway. They also air-dropped food, medicine and livestock feed during that time.
It was so cold, I had to sleep in a bed with my two sisters. The worst part about that was there wasn`t any heat, so we had feather pillows and mattress. We also had homemade quilts. If you got stuck sleeping in the middle, you would get too hot.
So we always fought about who had to sleep in the middle of the bed. There was also no insulation upstairs either, we had wallboard, but no insulation. When it snowed it came through the windows. If you had a glass of water sitting on the dresser, it was frozen by the time you got up in the morning.
Different ranchers that had emergencies got word out somehow to people... we had a telephone... We had the old kind that you would have to crank. Our ring was two longs (two long rings) and emergency was one long. (one long ring) If there was a prairie fire you would ring one long and everyone would listen to see where the fire was.
School wasn`t canceled either. That`s the part I hated. The school was in Albion and was pretty close to our house, so we had to go to school. Not everyday, because it didn`t stop snowing for those first few days. But when it stopped, we went over the snow drifts to school.
We didn`t have much for entertainment either, we didn`t get television until 1955, so we would listen to the radio at night. We had a stove in our living and we would close all of the doors, sit next to the stove and listen to the radio. Sometimes we would even pop some corn. The radios back then were a lot taller than they are now. You could sit down in front of it and dial it my dad had to do some business and he dropped all of us kids off at Ben Franklin. He told us we could buy some things while he was gone. We grabbed everything we could think of, lipstick, perfume, fingernail polish we bought it all. We bought such strange things. We had the counter plum full of all different kinds of things. Mother brought some of it back and got the money back. That was the first time I had ever gone shopping in my life. I remember only going to three movies that year too. We didn`t go to very many because Albion was about 50 miles away from. So is was such a long drive home.
My brother, sisters and I fought a lot. It didn`t take the storm to make us fight either. Mother let us fight so we would grow our fingernails long, file them to a point and we would fight. We would also pull each other`s hair. Being three girls we fought constantly. So when I became a mother I wouldn`t allow my children to fight. My brother was the oldest and it took all three of us girls to sit on him and keep him pinned down. He was the only boy so he had the disadvantage. We wouldn`t get off of him until he promised he wouldn`t hurt us. Of course, it didn`t last too long. The moment we let him up he would chase us through the store.
The store was a wonderful building for kids to grow up in. We would play in the store all the time, especially during the blizzard we were there. We would get the canned goods out and write up tickets. We would cut off a big chunk of cheese, wrap it up in paper and pretend we had real customers.
My mother had many remedies for different things. If you got sick she would put a mustard plaster on you. If someone stepped on a nail they would go and get a cow patty to draw out the poison and slap it on their foot. Back in those days they really believed in taking kids tonsils out. When they were five or six they would go to the doctor and have them taken out. My dad had a bad experience with his tonsils when he was about ten or eleven. He rode his horse twenty miles across the prairie to the doctor to have his tonsils taken out. Well the doctor was drunk and he passed out before he got my dad`s tonsils out. So when my dad woke up from the ether, the blood was spurting in his face. He got on his horse and rode home. The blood froze on his face and clothes, he just let his tonsils heal up until they started to bother him again. When he was older he got them taken out.
After interviewing Norine Franke, I now realize some of the hardships my grandparents` generation had to face. I am appreciative of the modern medical facilities and improvements in communication and all weather transportation that I enjoy, even though I take them for granted.