We lived in Ft. Laramie. That’s where the first fort was build west of the Mississippi years ago. We lived out at the old fort one time in one of the soldier’s – where the soldiers used to live.

Now they have started to rebuild that old fort and I was out there about three or four years ago and they’ve rebuilt some of the buildings. There were families living in there. We lived in the house that was the officer’s quarters for a while and we lived out at the old fort.

Mother had nine children, I was the fifth one. I had four older brothers and I was the fifth and then I had a brother, and a sister, and then a couple more brothers down the line.

We went through the Depression but we never were hungry. My mother canned stuff by the hundreds of quarts. We always had a big garden so we never did get down to the place where we had to have beans three times a week.

Then we moved to Fort Collins because when the boys were graduated from high school mom and dad decided that if they wanted to go to college they’d have to move to where there was a college and my brother just older than I did go there after he got out of the Army.

I was a Tomboy. I wanted them to change my name to Tom because I had four older brothers to chase after! Just a normal gal.

Well, our town was small enough so everybody knew everybody else. It was just a very small town. Everybody played the old games like Kick the Can and Red Rover, Red Rover and I probably don’t even know what those games are. But everybody knew where their kids were, and if we were out playing and my dad whistled we’d better get back home!

Anywhere in town or even if we were out in the country because he had a loud whistle and we better get home. We lived in a four-room house for a while. There were two rooms upstairs and there were two rooms down in the basement. We got along just fine. It didn’t feel like we were missing anything because other people were in the same situation we were, you know?