They lived in the basement a year or two before he put the house on it. We got the rock for the fireplace from Dryhead (Deadman). While Dad was building the fireplace, my, Mark's and Jim's job was to haul rocks and mortar up the ladder. On one of my trips up Dad dropped a rock on my head and had to take me to town for stitches. That's why I'm so stupid.

The land near the house south of the highway was formerly good farm land that became essentially boggy waste land after they started irrigating above the bench. Dad got it for a low price then set about reclaiming it by drains, leveling it and neutralizing the salt with gypsum hauled from sheep mountain. He bought an old Case crawler tractor and a disk to take out the greasewood. The crawler was necessary because the greasewood would puncture rubber tires. The land was an assortment of very heavy grey clay and very coarse sand. There were 2 or 3 days out of each year when the grey clay wasn't either too dry or too wet to plow. The sand was easy to plow, but needed to be irrigated every ten minutes to keep it wet. The land became productive, but required all of Dad's knowledge and skill to farm it. A lesser farmer could not have done it, I speak from having tried it.

My recollection is that the round table came from the Robertson place, but I can't specifically remember the event. The round table is now in the garage of our Las Cruces house. I restored it to its original height and we used it for many years

Grandma used to can fish from the creek in Red Lodge. She would sit in the creek with her skirt held out as a net. She would then send the kids up the creek, then they would get into the creek and wade downstream to where grandma was sitting, thus catching the fish in her skirt. The fish were little brookies not big enough to fry, so she canned them whole in Mason jars. They were delicious, the bones would disappear

Tom Tippetts