Messages

Thanks to all for the good wishes.   Yesterday was so much cooler than the weeks past, and a fine day for rodeos and fireworks displays.   

Yep.  My Mom taught me that too, and I do it at her house...   

                                                   For some reason it seems to get skipped a lot at mine...

     Thel oldest child was Wilbur.   He was already attending college when the family moved to Howard.   Grandpa was John, and was always known as J.B.

     I kind of wondered where the name came for Excelsior myself.   Dad referred to it as Hardpan.   
     I remember going in the building.   It still had the blackboards and a lot of the desks in it.   It had a coal shed and outhouses North, and a horse rail to the West fence.   It had a smell to it that was distinctive, but I can't quite place it (some type of cleaner).   Some of the groups met there periodically.   Grandma went to Farm Bureau, and took me with her once in a while.

Frank, I know that Dad attended Excelsior, and I would assume that Aunt Wanda did also.   Grandpa moved to the farm in January of 1930, so I am thinking the other kids would have been in High School.   Marty

Frank, I think the Excelsior school house had two doors on the South.   The building was moved into Howard by Bud Meisch and it is part of the house where Jim Stange lives.   Marty

     Thank you all for celebrating my birthday.   I especially enjoy the rodeos and fireworks.   The hamburgers off the grill were pretty good also.   It makes me feel kind of special.

Myrna, Dale was married to Berneice.   Berneice was with Stanley Home Products until she retired, and Dale was a union electrician.   Jack Hunter was the Farm Bureau agent at Abilene.   He lives in Bella Vista.   Marty

     The farm is on Junebug Road.   We wondered at the time what we had done to piss you off, but the name kind of grows on you.   Now if we could just get people to stop stealing the sign.    I bet it has been taken 5 or 6 times, and it is gone now.

     Dad always said that Buttermilk Hill got its name from my grandparent's dairy (John and Ida Hunter).   We always milked on our hill, so I don't understand how the name was applied to the other hill rather than to ours.   
     We had the dairy from 1930 until about 1974 when we shut it down.   Our farm was already a dairy when we moved to it, so the name may be older than that.   
     There was a dairy barn built on the other hill by the Gilbert family after WW2, but I don't think there was commercial milking on Buttermilk Hill prior to that.
     

     Grandma Hunter used to tell me that during the depression she would be visited on a regular basis by hoboes.   She said they would do some chore and she would feed them.   She was not sure why they came so frequently.
     The railroad track ran below our hill.   I used to explore the bridges and found a bunch of markings on the underside of the bridge that was just South of our road.   I copied them down and asked around until I found out that the hobo population had its own set of codes.   They would mark them on the rails, and it would say something like-nice lady who will feed you, or bad dog, etc.   
     The tracks were torn out in the mid-70's so the markings had to have been placed there 35-40 years earlier.   I wish I had saved what I had copied down, or better yet taken a picture.