A ..
Yes, okay.
Q ..
All right.
A ..
One summer I hired out as a farm hand all summer on an Ohio farm. My brother,
who I mentioned before, had studied agriculture in high school, and he planned to
raise grapes and farm on the farm that my father owned on the Maumee River. But
during the procedures after my father died, that farm got sold. He bought a Dodge
touring car, cut down the sides of the front seat so it would lay down and make a
bed, and he started roaming all over the country. So one summer, I hitchhiked to
Philadelphia and was with him there where he was working with the Fireworks
Company at the Sesquicentennial Exposition. That would have been in 1925, I
guess.
One summer, I hitchhiked out to the middle west where he was following the grain
harvest. They start down in Texas and go all of the way up to Canada. I joined him
in South Dakota, and went up to North Dakota, and then I had to come back to go
to school. But the thing I remember about that, one of the men that was cutting
wheat, he carried a rifle with him. He'd shoot jackrabbits on the move as he was
cutting grain. He could hit them.
But anyhow, the one I really was working up to, my mother had left Toledo around
1930 and joined my brother, who by that time had settled in Las Vegas, Nevada,
where he spent the rest of his life, and she spent the rest of her life. So, in 1932,
that summer was the one before I graduated because I had to go the fall quarter to
finish, I hitchhiked out to Las Vegas and then went on to Los Angeles and saw some
Olympic games. Then, when I came back to Las Vegas, the construction on Boulder
Dam they called it then, was just beginning. I figured the best way to see it would
be to get a job, so I heckled the local Bureau of Reclamation man until he finally
gave me a job as a rodman on a survey crew.
They were drilling the tunnels then, and we were checking tight rock in the tunnels.
We had, I guess they called it, the swing shift. We'd drive out from Las Vegas in
the middle of the afternoon when it was prettyhot. It got to 120 [degrees] or so in
those tunnels. Then when we'd go back to Las Vegas at night, we'd almost freeze
to death in the desert. It's amazing that when I retired, they found and I got credit
for, I think it was one or two months, working for the Bureau of Reclamation in Las
Vegas.
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