Oral history as revealed by Faye Kennedy to Stella Estrada on October 17, 1996.
The people I grew up with there in Fruitdale are still my closest friends. To this day, when I go to Denver to visit my daughter, the first thing I do is pick up the phone and call my former neighbors.
At one time Fruitdale was really quite a town. A grocery store operated for many, many years under the name of Fruitdale Mercantile. As a matter of fact, we had two grocery stores at one time. We had our golf course, and we put on our own dances. We would hire an orchestra and then we put out the word, all the kids from Belle and Nisland would come down.
Fruitdale had a Grange. It was like a Community Hall. It sat down by the river. All of the community activities were held there because it was convenient for everyone. My dad played for the Saturday night dances. The Grange was flooded in 1924, when the big flood in Belle Fourche came. Eventually they built a community hall uptown and that is where they had all the their activities.
We always called our house the Radisson... you know, the Radisson Hotel in Minneapolis. Our house was a real tiny place. In the winter time people that lived in the out-lying areas would leave their kids at our house, sometimes for months at a time. They couldn`t get back and forth to their places because of the deep snow. The roads weren`t all that good. We would get so many staying there at one time, thats` why we called it the Radisson. I`ve never really known why it was always my house except my mother was good. She was one o those kind of people that welcomed everybody. We didn`t have much. We were very hard up. I often wonder how she managed to feed all that bunch on what we had. She did. She could make the best soup out of just a plain soup bone! I wish I would have learned how she did it.
Electricity came into Fuitdale in 1924. An electricity unit sat where you came into town. It was kind of open like. My brother rode up there one day to see if we could see our brother coming in. He had been out haying. He couldn`t see them, so my brother crawled up on this picket fence that was around the unit. He lost his balance and his hand caught on a live electric wire. The power was so strong that it shot from his arms to his legs. He was hospitalized for many, many years. His arm grew back like a chicken wing. So my mother took him to Rodchester. They broke the bones and took skin off his leg and spliced it. They got home just in time for a Christmas Program. My mother was so proud that she had finally had got his arm straightened out!