``When I was twelve years old, I got pneumonia. That was the only time I ever saw the doctor, until later on when my brother shot me with a shotgun. We were hunting prairie chickens. I came up over one side of the hill; he came over the other side. A chicken flew between us and he got me as well as the chicken. The stray shots peppered me. It`s a funny thing. I doctored in Fort Meade when my shoulder was giving me problems. They took an x-ray and asked what the little dots in there were. It never dawned on me until later when I got to looking back. That`s where I was shot.``
``During the 1949 Blizzard the stores in Belle Fourche were open. They sold what they had on hand. There weren`t any deliveries. Parkway Grocery was running back then. My folks bought it back in 1937. My husband and I bought it from them in 1961 and we`ve had it ever since. We closed the store in 1993 when they stopped allowing students from Roosevelt off-campus for lunch. We just didn`t make enough dollars after that.``
``I used to work a little bit with my dad. He worked for an outfit that had coal and building materials, and I could work. The first job I ever had [paid] fifty cents a day. Dad took me out on the farm and I went to work. We took two teams of horses and walking plows and started plowing a twenty acre field. I was nine years old.``
``The discipline was different then. What the people of authority said, they meant. You did it or else. If a teacher told you to do something, you just didn`t question it. You did it. And you didn`t call teachers by their first name, ever. In those days, if parents found out that a teacher had slapped a kid, that kid better watch out when he got home. If he were bad enough for a teacher to have to discipline him, then he was a bad kid and they were gonna straighten that kid out when he got home.``
``I went to the Ingersoll school when I was young. There wasn`t a bridge across the Belle Fourche River then, so the kids who lived on the north side of the river had to go way around in order to get to school. People built a swinging bridge across the river for the kids. The bridge hung on two cables. Its sides were woven wire and for the bottom of it, they just had a couple of planks. The north kids would ride their horses and leave them at the Story farm, where Richard Olson lives now. Then they would walk across the bridge to school. I remember hanging onto the bridge and watching the ice break up and go by.``
``My first recollection of trying to impress somebody with my trumpet was when I was about 8 to 10 years old. Some little girl was visiting someone across the street. I grabbed my brother`s trumpet and went out on the front porch. I could squeak out little sounds. I thought I was really impressing somebody. That was my first solo, I guess!``
``In the 30`s the grasshoppers were so bad that the train from Fruitdale couldn`t get up that little rise going up to Belle Fourche.``
``In the later Forties and early Fifties, there was a big polio epidemic. Polio was often called infantile paralysis, but that`s not a new disease. Even President Franklin D. Roosevelt was a victim of polio. I worked in the polio department at Sioux Falls where we had 23 iron lungs going at one time. Then in 1955, the vaccine was discovered. That was just a blessing. ``
``I remember Earl Clarkson. He was an old timer around here. He had a lot of sheep. He would start out at Newell with a band of sheep and he and his little dog would trail them from farm to farm. He would buy people`s beet tops. His sheep would eat them up and they would go to the next place. When he ended up, he would be at that feedlot just outside Belle Fourche with his sheep all fattened up.``
``A lot of people would ask if I felt spooky living that close to the cemetery. I knew all of those people that live up there, and they aren`t going to go anywhere.``
``They had huge wooden vats along the railroad tracks. As they processed the pickles, they would put them in there. I don`t know how they handled them after that because I wasn`t interested. I was more interested in watching the birds flying over. The vats didn`t have lids on them, and there were a lot of birds. I always wondered if there were going to be white pickles!``
``There were two years when I went raccoon hunting with my husband after all the kids were in bed. We would take our dog and go down beyond the creek. There were a lot of `coons and they sure got into the sweetcorn.``