Page 21 - Ninety Miles From Nowhere

about seven o’clock at the cabin of an old- timer, Joe Ashley, in his sixties and living alone except for his dog. Joe had a big pot of antelope stew simmering on the back of the stove and I never smelled anything so good in all my life.
True to the custom in the area of any man refusing to make biscuits if a woman was around, Joe insisted that one of us make them that night. Luckily Dixie was there, for I was no cook. All my life I had escaped somehow, for at home my mother and sister did the cooking while I cleaned house and looked after my younger brothers. When I was attending college, I stayed in the dormitory during my freshman year, and in the other years I boarded with a private family, the Forman's. During the two years I’d already taught school, I boarded then also.
While the biscuits baked and the stew simmered, Dixie and I set the table and had everything ready for at least three hungry people.
My father had decided to file on a homestead claim in the Beaverhead area, and he and Jeff Moore took care of the paper work through the mail. In the fall of 1931, my eldest brother, George (three years younger than I) and his wife Sally came out to my Dad’s claim so that George could build a cabin in preparation for Mother’s coming out the next summer with the other three boys.
Money was very scarce that year, so when Jeff offered me the use of an old Buick of
his, I accepted. I could then board with George and Sally and drive to school, thereby giving them a little extra cash. This lasted only a few weeks, however, before the car finally expired and left me to walk the last two miles to school. Then I boarded with Ed’s family and slept in the schoolhouse.
I spent most of my spare time in the house with the family. I had all my meals with them and sat in the kitchen with Diana after we had washed the dishes. Everybody sat in the kitchen except Ed who went off in the living room alone to listen to his crystal set. One night in early March, Ed called us in to listen to some news coming over the radio. Nothing could be heard through the tiny set except through the earphones. We passed them around as we learned for the first time of the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby. For several nights we held vigil, and Ed finally contrived an ingenious method that enabled all of us to hear. He placed the earphones in an aluminum dishpan, and as we hovered over it, we could hear the broadcast faintly.
Thus it was that over a hundred miles from Magdalena, in an out-of-the-way place, thirty miles from a neighbor, completely isolated from civilization, we first heard of the Lindbergh kidnapping.
One of the pupils I had registered in school was a small daughter of a homesteader who lived over near George and Sally. Her parents stopped bringing her to school, and on one of my weekend trips to see George and Sally, I found out why.