“That was before I got married, so I must have been 17 or 18. Silly looking picture. You know a long time ago, they came out and they tinted pictures. That was before they had color photographs, that’s one of those.
“Well, I married Dean and moved to the ranch in 1937, and we lived in a caboose down on –his father had a homestead down there by the sandhill. Even in the little boxcar, uh caboose, I had a little radio. Mr. Fite won it in a punchboard in Datil, and it had a six-volt battery, and we got a little wind charger and put it up on top of the caboose. And it would blow in the wind and charge that battery, and I could have radio. That was my connection with the world. It was WONDERFUL!
“To me, I wouldn’t even consider building, living anywhere that there wasn’t decent water. I lived with all that – not having water, it’s AWFUL. It was just awful to do laundry.
“We caught cistern water, you bet. I drank cistern water. We had an old barn when we lived at the caboose, and that’s all the drinking water we had, was what we caught off the roof of the barn, and we had a pit in the ground, caught it off the roof and it ran down into that concrete. Before I was married, Dean dug a hole and plastered it and covered it, caught rain water. And you had to be very careful with it. It didn’t rain that much. But it was wonderful. But most of the ranchers in that country used cistern water, ‘cause the water’s SO bad. But now they got water softeners and things like that, but still, the water on the ranch is terrible, except for that one well at the house, and that well under the hill there on the highway? He has that good water. That’s the only good water I know from there to El Paso. It’s terrible water!"
