When I was about 6 years old we moved to Topeka, Kansas where we lived for 3 years. Not much happened there. Papa worked in the railroad shops. While we lived here Mama milked 3 cows and my brother and I delivered milk in little tin buckets. One day my brother fell down and the lid came off and cut his eye. One time while delivering milk, we stopped to watch a fire and Mama cane to hunt us up. My Grandpa came to visit us while we lived here and took us to our first circus, Ringling Brother’s Circus, We saw a man pushing a woman in a wheel barrow and thought it was part of the act but found out they lived there and she didn't have any legs. I started to school when I was 7.

When I was 9 years old we moved to Eskridge, Kansas. Grandpa family went with us. ‘When we went to Eskridge we sold 2 cows. When camped over night, the milk froze amd Grandma skimmed off the frozen cream and let me eat it. Papa bought a small place but had to wait for the people to move. While waiting, we camped in a big, old house that had never been finished. There were 2 upstair rooms and 2 shed rooms on the back. Some of the neighbor kids told us it was haunted, that you could see lights upstairs and hear chains being dragged across the floors. We camped in the shed rooms and the door to the stairway was nailed to. There were only laths across the front. My brother and I would climb through the laths and play upstairs. One night the kids were there telling their ghost stories and Papa slipped out and pilled a stick across the laths on the stairway. We never got the kids back to our house again. Finally we got to move in the house Papa had bought. The plaster was off. There were rats and mice everywhere. My brother and I trapped them and made a graveyard in our front yard. After about a week, we decided to dig them up and you can imagine the smell we had.

Grandpa’s family had left and came back to Oklahoma. We only stayed a few months when Papa bought a wagon and team. We started to Utah in a covered wagon. Papa worked in the harvest to make our way. IP remember his working west of Burton for a Mr. Bontriger, who had 7 sons and 3 son-in-laws, all with places in the same area. They were Dutch and the kids didn’t learn English until they started to school. However, we could play all day, having a lot of fun, without any of us understanding the other. My brother and I climbed every tree that had birds nests just to look in them. If they had baby birds, we would feed them and they open their mouths just like they did when their mothers fed them.

On my tenth birthday we went on toward Utah. Then we went through Kingsley, Kansas, Papa stopped on a bridge and bought a watermelon. He bought me a pair of shoes in town. My brother and I heard Papa sing the song, “Oregon Trail”, about 10,000 graves we found as we passed this way, which makes me think some Christian race passed this way..So, wherever we stopped we made little graves and fixed them up with whatever we could find. On July 3rd we camped not far from Newton, Kansas. Early the next morning a couple came by going to the Fourth of July celebration. They told us to go across the road to their orchard and get all the peaches we wanted. They were a real treat to us kids. One place we stopped for water, a man came out with a pitcher of cold milk for us kids. We found such fine people all the way.

We worked west of Hudson, Kansas for awhile. We finally got to Garden City where they told us that it was too late for us to go on as we couldn’t cross the mountains. We turned around and came down into