As a Young Fellow.

The Picture, I am not sure about, it was taken somewhere around 1938 or 1940. in front of our home at 233 Terraville Ave. Lead S.D. My age would have had to been nine or ten at that time.

At that age my legs were good and my feet carried me just about anywhere within a forty mile radius. My folks never knew where I was! I could have been in Spearfish fishing or at Roubaix lake or who knows where. Mom never seen me all day from the time I got up until I went to bed. Yes, in those early years I was always home by dark. Sometime a few friends and I would go to Roubaix lake and camp there for a few days. The lake was about seven or eight miles south of Lead. We always had to walk there and back
as there were very few cars on the road in those days.

At night, The neighborhood kids would all gather under a street light and play games until the parents called then home at nine pm. That was when the Home stake whistle blew.

I loved to go to Deadwood and have a hamburger and a bowl of chili at Pop Collen’s little cafe on Lee street. They were the best that could be found anywhere. I visited the city dump in Lead on a regular bases. People throw away the best stuff and I always had a use for most of it.

A brother to my friend Mickey , his name was Pat, he had some trucks and was hauling posts and polls to a Saw Mill in Sturgis, and I was usually on one of his trucks a lot of the time. I wasn’t much help but he tossed a few cents my way every now and then. Mickey and I were in the navy together. He was a year or two older than I was.

Mickey had his own car( an old ford with mud flaps and a radio with a coons tail hanging from the antenna). He had lots of girl friends and I was always tagging along, learning what could be learned. Like how to tease girls and things like nude swimming. Mickey was a good friend, he even let me help pay for the gas we used! He changed all the flat tires by himself.

Mickey saved his money and when he had enough for a down payment, he bought a new Indian Motor cycle and his brother Pat helped him pay for it. We were at a place called Gauhn's Dairy at Pluma, they had a stand there that sold ice cream and other stuff like that. We left the ice cream stand on his motor cycle and headed for Deadwood. There is a big corner right after one crosses the rail road tracks and a service station there that looked like a Indian Tee Pee. The kick stand on the bike wasn’t all the way up and it caused us to run into the side of the Tee Pee station. I never got hurt but Mickey broke his leg. It was good-by Motor Cycle after that. He was laid up for a long time and I was on my own.

That year the folks moved to a house in Nevada Gulch and when I started school there, I was the sweetheart of all the bigger girls in the school. Hawthorns lived up the gulch from us and Sorenson’s lived just down the gulch from us. There were kids in both families and we were all friends. The next summer we moved again to Central City. And I had the same old ugly teacher ( A miss Twyford ) who was going to be my teacher in school there. She had just given me failing grades at the Nevada Gulch school, the year before, so I was at the top of her list. It took some time to get her straightened out, but it all ended the following year. She moved on and so did we. Somewhere around this time, the world war ll started.

The mines closed and Dad was sent to Hawthorn Nevada to do defense work. Dad had just bought a brand new Ford car and had to let it go back to the dealer. He found an old 1934 ford car that had four doors and they were called, suicide doors. ( they were doors that opened from the front and if the wind caught them, the door would be ripped off) He put on a trailer hitch and loaded the trailer with everything we had and off we went, headed for Nevada. You couldn’t buy new tires anywhere and we had at least two flats a day with most of them on the trailer. The jack couldn’t lift the trailer when it was loaded, so we had to un-load the trailer, get the tire and tube off the rim while it was still on the trailer, patch the tube or fix the tire, pump it full of air and do everything in reverse. Down the road we went until we heard the next explosion. It took four days to get to Nevada.

Dad had a sister ”Mary, that lived in Hawthorn” her husband was also sent to Hawthorn to do defence work. Harry and Mary had bought a lot with a small house on it and they let Dad build a shack on it to live in. I wasn’t long before Dad was sent to Portland Oregon to work in the ship yards. He wanted to sell the shack and move it off of Harry’s property, but Harry wouldn’t let him do it. Harry said it belonged to him now and there was nothing Dad could do about it. Mom and the kids rode the train to Grants Pass and Dad had to locate another car before he could leave Hawthorn . The old Ford was really in bad shape. Dad bought a 1936 Oldsmobile and they joined up at Grants Pass and went to work in the Hop fields grubbing Hops. Once they got money enought they headed for Portland, Oregon.

Both Dad and Mom worked in the ship yards, he as a plumber and mom as a plumber’s helper. Places to live were really hard to find and our old friends from Nevada gulch (The Sorenson’s ) they had moved to St. Helens Oregon and were also working in the ship yards. There was a tourist cabin for rent close to them and the folks moved to St. Helens. Later they found a place to live called the University Homes in Portland. Late in November. 1944, the war effort was wearing down and Mom and Dad returned to South Dakota. He found work as a cab driver in Rapid City Later the folks moved back to Lead and this was when I left home and didn’t want
to go to school anymore, so I left home and ended up at Fallen Nevada.

Got a job working with a guy that delivered milk and dairy stuff to road camps in the area. He gave me three shinny silver dollars everyday after we were done for the day. One day he left me off at a lake called Walker Lake. I went swimming and almost cut my big toe off on some glass. After making my way back up to the high-way, I caught a ride into town and had to go see a doctor. He sewed my flesh back together and it finally healed.

I had never told anyone my real name or where I was from. People were asking questions and I talked this guy I was staying with into signing a paper saying I was of age and I enlisted in the navy and attended boot camp in San Diego California. It was early in February ,1945.

After boot camp I was assigned to a station on an island called Adak, and was on my way to the Aleutian Islands. We were traveling by train from San Diego to the Naval station in Seattle. On the way the train had stopped in Grants Pass Oregon and I knew that mother’s sister lived there. I thought I would call her and say hello, which was a big mistake! She got a hold of Mom and they got in touch with the Navy Depart. and they stopped me before I left for the Aleutians, I was discharged an sent back to South Dakota.

It wasn’t long before I turned sixteen and Dad signed the papers and I went right back into the Navy and was sent to Port Hueneme California to a Marine training station for some special training with the Sea Bee’s. After that I was again assigned and sent to the Aleutian Islands. This was my station and I traveled to many islands in the Aleutian chain. This is where I remained until I was discharged again in 1947

But back in my earlier years from 1935 up to the early 40’s I was the most adorable and loveable little red head one could find. This, besides my Red headed cousin and she was a girl and even prettier than I was. Her name was Ann and she was Kate’s youngest daughter. I loved Ann, why did she have to be my cousin? Kate always said we were about as close to being brother and sister as one could be with out being a brother and sister, our father’s were brothers and our mothers were sisters.

As a young kid I had my favorite things I liked to do. One of them was art. I loved to draw cars and air planes and they were good drawing, They were featured at some of the school’s yearly exhibits, I was really good at building thing out of wood also. I once built a bird house that was so good they accused me of having my father build it and wouldn’t put it in the exhibit. I was so dam mad I was thinking of burning the school down. They don’t know how close they came to losing it!

But I fell in love with a teacher and I didn’t want her to lose her job. I think she was kind of growing attached to this little red head, as she kept me in her class for an extra year. As for the subject they taught in those early grades, they didn’t interest me at all. I figured as long as I could sign my name and add two and two, that was all I needed. As for geography, I wanted to see those things for myself and as for history, I was going to be busy making It for by myself.
As for spelling, one can find a dictionary anywhere!

It wasn’t long before Blue turned to Black and White was a dull Gray.( meaning things change) OH well! Life goes on no mater what! Just take a good look at my children and grand children!

I never cared for sports, wasn’t much good at any of that stuff. I played some soft ball and managed to hit a ball once in a while. When I did hit one, someone caught it and threw it back at me. I decided to quit paying as the game was getting dangerous.

There was one game that the girls played and I liked that one. It was called spin the bottle. I found out if I loaded the bottle with iron ore, I could control it with a magnet. But them girls were sharp so I had to be careful. I thought I was turning into a lover, but when two little girls beat the hell out on me, so I turned into a fighter. I was never very popular after that.

On Saturday mornings I went to the movies, if I could find enough bottles to sell, If not I stayed home and rode my stick horse all over the hill side. He was the biggest, best and fastest horse around. The lone ranger’s horse ”Silver” couldn’t catch him. I think I have already told the story on the Magic paint, if not I‘ll try to locate it for you.

I had chores that I had to do, Dad seen to that. He would also give my little brother some things to do, but he wouldn’t do them. He would tell Dad that it was my turn to do them. Well, off Came Dad’s belt and it hurt and made a loud sound on my butt! Dad did some thing with his belt that made it really loud sound and you thought you were being killed.

Once I had a soap box car and it got wreaked and Dad had some 4 x 8 sheets of celitex that he was going to use for wall covering in the house. Well, I decided to convert the old cart into house trailer and used up his celitex. I thought that was the biggest mistake I had ever made and life was about to come to an end. Well, he looked at my work and told me what I should have done, then he let me work off the cost of the celitex.

Them there was the time I built an model airplane and flew it off the bank above the houses, It went quite a ways then through my uncle John’s living room window. It seems like I am going to work my life away paying for things that go wrong.

Then I remember the time I crawled to the top of a pine tree and was swinging back and forth, the top broke off and down I came, no parachute or padding to help my fall. A neighbor man by the name of George Smith took me down to the Home stake hospital so they could sew up my arm with stitches, I was the talk of the neighbor-hood for a while there.

Move over Huck Finn, I’m gaining on you!

Ben R. Bauer