Some of Veta’s happiest memories are of the cookouts we had especially for our combined birthday parties. Allen and Virginia’s friends would come to the house with their kids. Mainly it was Thurman and Reta Miser, Grace and Jim Pearce, and Gene and Valeta Odell. Each family had kids about our age. We would build a big fire outside and fry fish in a big black kettle. We would also make homemade ice cream. A kid was drafted to sit on top of the ice cream freezer. The ice cream was in a canister that was turned by a crank inside a wooden tub of ice and salt. A grown-up turned the crank, but the kid was required for weight to keep the canister from floating. The grown-ups played cards and the kids played hide-and-seek and kick-the-can. Sometimes these same families traveled to Turner Falls or to Platt National Park in Sulphur for all-day outings. We picnicked, and swam and played to our heart’s delight.
Veta also remembers Virginia playing with her on the inside porch of the house. The inside porch was Veta’s playhouse and she and Virginia played dolls there.
In 1954, when Portia was 11 and Veta was 6, Allen built a dairy barn. On one end was the door where the cows came in. Six at a time were locked in the stanchions. While the cows ate, Allen milked them. For a year or so he milked them by hand as he had done before the barn was built. Eventually, he was able to buy an electric milking machine. The other end of the barn was the milk cooler room. The milk cooler was an enormous, covered electric vat filled with very cold water. The vat could hold a half dozen cans of milk ready to be picked up to take to the Kraft factory. Between the milking room and the milk cooler room was a small room where cow feed was stored and where Allen kept snakes in the feed room, which he preferred to cats, to eat the feed-thieving mice.
Allen was very proud of his dairy barn. It was his kingdom. Portia got in lots of trouble the year she got a BB gun for Christmas because she loved hearing the BBs ping off the tin of the barn when she shot it from the porch of the house. Unfortunately, she sometimes missed and hit the barn windows making little BB-sized holes in them.
© 1997, 1998, 1999, 2003 Portia Isaacson Bass and Veta Leigh. All rights reserved.