Katie's childhood The year of Mom's birth the family bought a house on Ridge Road, in the nicest section of town. Mom recalls that "our family wasn't really affected by the depression because Dad always had the mine job." But because of the danger of the job, Carrie wanted to find another place to be. So in 1939 Carrie and Karl sold their house on Ridge Road and bought a new Buick, and packed their seven kids in the car and "traipsed around the West Coast, according to Aunt Edith." They stopped in Corvallis, Oregon and Karl negotiated the purchase of a cherry farm with the money from the house, and while the deal was being completed the family drove around to Washington and Minnesota to see Karl's brother Hans. Finally going back to Lead for work, the cherry farm deal having fallen apart, the family now had nowhere to live, so they rented a small apartment on Gwynn Avenue owned by an old Slovakian couple. In May, 1942 they moved to a huge house on McClellan Avenue. Mom remembers: "In my early years we played store and house. We would create areas in our "barn yard"; there was really a nice big barn there and it was fenced in but we never had any animals so it was a nice yard. We made houses and created rooms and played in them for hours. We also were required to work quite a bit. As an early teenager I cleaned house all day long on Saturdays and did not have the freedom to wander to town or go visiting as most of my school friends did. Actually I loved scrubbing and cleaning. I remember getting the floors sloshingly wet and wiping it up and cleaning a lot. We also hung all our clothes on the line with mom and we did a lot of washing. I broke my arm when I was about 12 because I had my arm inside the wash machine cleaning it and David turned it on and the gyrator snapped my arm. We also remembered Bonnie, when she was only two or three, she went downstairs where the wash machine was and tried to put clothes through the wringer. She got her hand into it and it pulled her all the way up to her shoulder and did some serious damage. I don't know that it broke her arm but I know she showed results of it for years. "In the early years Helen and I were constant companions, but in high school Bonnie and I were closer. Part of the reason was that Helen went away to boarding school as soon as she left eighth grade --- wild when I think of it now. I did too but in boarding school we didn't live in the same dorm so we had different friends." Left: Mom in yard with cousins Charlie Ball and Bernard Kouba, about 1937 Previous Table of Contents Next