Page 3 - Sanger Herald 12-20-18 E-edition

Random thoughts Best wishes for lots of divinity and chocolate fudge candy during the new year ...
By Dick Sheppard
Please accept a most sin-
cere tip of my red Santa hat
to all Sanger’s wonderful
people who help others this
time of the year without
posting selfies or calling
attention to themselves
while doing it. I figure the
ones who post selfies and call everyone's attention to the good work they're doing already have the recognition they’re looking for. Asmymamausedtosay,“Theymean well, they just don’t know no better. Bless their hearts.”
My mother was 93 when she died 17 years ago and I still miss her, especially at this time of year. She used to make the greatest divin- ity and chocolate fudge candy with walnuts every Christmas.
My mama's homemade candy is what I remember most about my early childhood Christmases in Oklahoma before our fam- ily, with all its possessions in an early 1930s model Ford stake truck that leaked oil and water, headed for California.
In Oklahoma we lived in a little wood frame house held together by tar paper, with no electricity or indoor plumbing. It was near the small town of Macomb in Pottawatomie County. That’s south of Oklahoma City, near Shawnee. Macombhadageneralstoreand
a service station/garage where my daddy sometimes worked.
When I visited Macomb earlier this year it didn’t look like more than a dozen people and twice as many stray dogs still lived there. The general store and service station were gone, replaced by a minimart and gas station across the street from an elementary school. The minimart was the town's only store.
It looked like a lot of people probably did what our family did when we all climbed aboard the truck, my brother and me in the truck bed with furniture, bags of clothes and kitchen stuff piled around us, and set out for California.
My mama's divinity candy was a real Christmas treat back in the days before we set out on our California odyssey.
She didn't make it any other time of the year. Mama made the candy in the same cast iron skillet she used for almost everything else she cooked. Many, many years later I tried making divinity for Christmas using her recipe of sugar, corn syrup, egg whites and vanilla extract but it didn't taste the same. Must have been that old cast iron skillet.
She always made enough for the family and for gifts for aunts, uncles and cousins who lived nearby.
My brother, AB, was eight years older than me and he was always my hero. His name was just AB - some of my cousins were named JD and JR. I’m not sure, but I don't think the letters stood for anything. It was just their name. An Okie thing I guess.
My brother and I had an old .22 single shot rifle with a broken stock and it was our jobs to go into the nearby woods and shoot something for dinner. Mama only gave us a
few bullets each day so we had to make them count. We nearly always brought home a rabbit or a squirrel. One time we shot a pos- sum but after we tasted it at dinner we didn't shoot any more possums.
Mama raised a few chickens and one time we had a mighty tasty pig.
We had a little cellar, just a big hole in the ground covered with boards that had red dirt heaped on them, where mama stored eggs and other perishable food.
There were always snakes in the cellar and my brother and I would catch them and tease our sisters with them. One time we put a snake in my sister Lois's bed. When mama found out about it we didn't do that again.
Compared to what was to come we had a pretty good life and some good Christmases in that little tar paper house in Oklahoma.
My first memory of Christmas in California is from when we lived in a 12x16 foot metal cabin in Linnel Farm Labor Camp near Farmersville in Tulare County. The cabin had no electricity and no indoor plumb- ing. Our light came from an old smoky coal oil lamp. Our drinking water was in a bucket we filled at a communal faucet and sink out- side. We went to the bathroom and showered in separate buildings for men and women.
Mama gave me a shirt that first Christmas at Linnel. She somehow found time to make it out of a colorful flour sack. We had cold biscuits soaked in bacon grease covered with sorghum molasses. We sang Christmas and church songs and went to bed when it got dark. There was no divinity candy and it was mighty cold in that little metal cabin.
We all worked in the fields, vineyards and orchards, the whole family, mama and daddy, my sisters Lois and Betty and my brother and me. Mama made me a little sack for pick- ing cotton. We always tried to get to the field early because we got paid by the pound and the dew made the cotton heavier when we weighed it. The bolls cut my fingers when
I pulled out the cotton. I'm not sure which hurt more, finger tip cuts from cotton bolls or paper cuts between my thumb and first finger from putting down and turning grape trays later on when I was a freshman in high school.
Mama sang a lot, church songs mostly. Daddy drank a lot. I guess, looking back, California didn't turn out to be the land of opportunity he hoped it would be.
We settled for awhile in Exeter where we lived in a little trailer house that seemed like it was always covered with black soot from the smudge pots farmers used to protect their crops on cold nights in those days
Christmases were pretty much the same as they had been at the labor camp.
I didn't do well in school. Teachers acted like they thought it was impossible for Okie kids to learn anything and I didn't want to disappoint them. In one of the several fights I got into at school, a boy split open my scalp with a brick and I bled a lot.
Mama said the school thought it might be a right good thing if I just stayed home for awhile.
Staying home did turn out to be a good
thing because that's when I learned to read. Thanks to what I had heard but not applied
at school and the words on cereal boxes and in my daddy's Zane Grey pulp western maga- zines I became a pretty good reader.
I figured the teachers who expected so little of me would either be surprised or dis- appointed. I never found out which because I never got to go back to school in Exeter.
My daddy got in a couple of bar fights and mama said the police told her they thought it might be a right good thing if we just moved to another town.
Moving did turn out to be a good thing because that's when daddy got a job at a laun- dry and dry cleaners in Dinuba. We stayed for awhile in someone's garage and then lived in a little old trailer house behind the laundry.
When mama also got a job we moved into a real house with electricity, indoor plumbing
and a swamp cooler.
Mama said we were finally "living right
high on the hog."
Mama, at Christmas time, started making
divinity candy again in that old cast iron skil- let she had somehow kept with her.
The next Christmas she made divinity and fudge with walnuts and I got a store bought present and a pair of shoes that didn't fit my brother any more.
I guess some people thought we were one of those "needy families" because in addition to what mama put together for us, women from the First Baptist Church and men from the Rotary club brought us bags of food and clothes.
The Rotary men gave me the best warm, almost new coat I'd ever had.
I loved it.
We may have been considered poor by
SANGER HERALD 3A THURSDAY, DECEMBER 20, 2018 EDITORIAL & OPINION
Dick Sheppard
See more Random Thoughts and Letters to the editor on page 6A In my OPINION
Let's pray for more rational political thinking
By Fred Hall
Times change and the proliferation of left- leaning policies with high taxes and a con- stant intrusion by bureaucracy in the form of regulations and implementation of out-of- control welfare programs began to take a take a toll on this economic giant. Ignoring Einstein's assertion that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different result, we continue to return the same party to power which dug such an overwhelming hole.
We now have the highest rate of poverty in the country; major cities are awash with homeless living in the streets; the housing shortage is critical with no resolution in sight and we are building a completely illogical high-speed railroad which is devouring bil- lions of taxpayer dollars with no realistic end in sight.
Thrown into this mix is an increasing indi- cation of election fraud with claims of “ballot harvesting” and youngsters under the age
of 18 being provided absentee ballots. Why would anyone have any doubt when voter registration is placed in the hands of The Department of Motor Vehicles.
Anyone—that would mean almost every- one—who has been forced to deal with these people is well aware of their incompetence!
Perhaps this Christmas we should all pray for a little more rational thinking statewide when it comes to managing the affairs for the state. Revisit the idea of eliminating absen- tee ballots and the mischief that seems to surround them and think twice about opening our borders to people who become a burden to society—especially when we already have double the population our infrastructure was meant to handle.
There can be little doubt that, as we approach year's end in 2018, the struggle for continuation of publication of newspapers is beginning, financially, to prove to be an over- whelming undertaking. That's why we want to take a moment to personally thank each and everyone of you who are readers and advertisers with one of the Mid Valley family of publications.
Your continued support helps assure that our communities continue to get the most current reporting on the going-ons with local government, school news, sports coverage as well as reports on local police and fire activ- ity. If we don't tell you the real story, who is going to? Think about what I've said, and let me know how you feel. Merry Christmas to you and yours, may “climate change” give us plenty of water for the farmer again this year.
But, as always, that's only one man's opin- ion.
In addition to the Sanger Herald, Publisher Fred Hall oversees two other Mid Valley Publishing newspapers - Reedley Exponent, and Dinuba Sentinel. He can be contacted by phone at (559) 638-2244 or by email at fred@ midvalleypublishing.com.
Christmas is just days
away, having slipped up
on many of us as it always
seemstodo, andtheNew
Year is right around the
corner. Perhapsthisisthe
ideal time to wax philosoph-
ical about what it all means,
especially since all of those
with both political parties appear to have done everything within their power to divide our country along the lines of the party line voter constituency.
While “divide and conquer” seems to be a relatively new tactic, history tends to prove otherwise. Ithasalwaysbeenused,and since the people are relatively slow learners, there has always been the ancillary nega- tive impact, making it a “win at any cost” undertaking. Wethinkitonlyappearsworse because so many are more brazen in their efforts. WhileItleavesthepractitionerwith a sense of instant gratification, it also leaves longtermproblemsinitswake! Thereal losers in this failed strategy are the people, themselves.
Time after time, during especially try-
ing times, the American people have shown themselves to be above all the ridiculous machinations of their political class. We have absolute confidence that is exactly what will happen as a result of the infighting and silli- ness that is emanating from our nation's capi- tolaswellasall50statecapitols. Alittlebit of understanding, compassion and common sense will go a long way toward helping cure the injuries being internally inflicted on the world's greatest country.
The simplest, most direct step which could be taken to ameliorate the current hatred and outrage would be to simply accept the results of the 2016 election. The people have indeed voted and they elected Donald Trump over the Democrat candidate, Hillary Clinton.
The continued tantrums on one side of the political spectrum only results in dividing the Americanpeopleandnothingelse. Hillary did not win and there is nothing they can do about that except to begin to make prepara- tionsfor2020. Thegreatergoodofthisgreat country is more important than the pique of a few.
If we, as a country, are so awful and rac- ist as claimed, then when the wall is built, we should have people going over the wall headedsouth. Iseriouslydoubtthatsuchan event will occur.
Aside from a couple of Republican gov- ernors, a simple review will quickly demon- strate that the State of California has essen- tially been under Democrat control since about1960. TheGoldenState.Asitwasonce known, enjoyed such an abundance of natural resources and a climate that was a magnet for young talented entrepreneurs it essen- tially fell into the category of “too big to fail.”
Fred Hall
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