This blog post will be a continuation of my last two blogs, containing snippets of our life in New Mexico, as I remember them.
The phone. The first several years that we lived on the ranch our phone service was what was known as a party line. That meant that the phone line was always open to anyone on the line, i.e. if you were talking, anyone on the party line could pick up their phone and listen to your conversation. And you always had to pick up the phone to see if it was presently in use before dialing a call out. Clearly we didn’t spend much time on the phone.
After several years, we finally transitioned to a private
line. It was pretty much a given in our
family that the phones were for communication needs and not socializing. My parents felt that 10 or 15 minutes was
plenty long to be on a call, and we weren’t to be on the phone after 8:00 pm
unless it was an emergency. If anyone
called for me or my siblings after 8:00 then my Dad would answer and say that
it was too late to be calling, and we could return the call the next day. Even when I went to college, I understood
that long distance calls were expensive, and instead I wrote a letter home each
weekend, usually on Sunday, and mailed it on Monday.
Watering trees with a fire engine. The house that we lived in was at the far side of a mesa and the road that went across the mesa to our house had multiple S-curves in it. It was kind of graceful looking, and one might think that the curves were to keep cars slow as they approached our house, but actually the curves were in keeping with the terracing in the pastures on each side to hold water when it rained. In any case, Mom and Dad decided to plant some trees along the winding road and purchased about a hundred Scotch pine and Russian olive trees that were simply twigs when they were first planted.
Dad was also a member of the Bonito Volunteer Fire Department and he was often called to fight local fires. The fire department had a small water tank truck, and periodically if we hadn’t had any rain, Dad would pick up the fire truck and use it to water the trees. Dad would drive and Bob or Jeff would ride on top and use the water hose to water the little trees. Riding on the fire engine was great fun!
Our family dogs. Lucky was the first of our childhood family dogs and a much loved little sheltie dog. Mom and Dad got him for Bob while we were living in Yuma, and he came to New Mexico when we did. Lucky was followed by Sally, a sweet grey Weimaraner, and Tillie a blue heeler, then Misty (short for Mistake as she was Tillie’s pup) a blue heeler mix. We also had a Dalmatian puppy named Gumdrops that unfortunately died after only a few weeks with a congenital lung problem. And then in their later years, my parents had a sweet little labradoodle companion that they also named Tillie. After my parents’ died in 2006, Tillie found a much loved home with my brother Dave’s family.
Most of our dogs died of old age, and a wonderful life they did have with daily free roaming and adventures across our ranch. The exception was Lucky, our first dog. One morning we sadly learned that Lucky had died. We were told that some bad people had driven up to the house and shot our dog during the night. I never knew the rest of the story until one of my brothers shared it with me as an adult. It seems that we were scheduled to go on a family vacation but for some reason it was delayed or cancelled. Dad heard the gunfire that night when Lucky was shot and grabbed a gun that he always kept near his bed. He went out on the porch and could see a van that suddenly turned and started to speed away from the house. He realized that they had just shot Lucky and had probably been planning to rob our home. Dad unloaded his gun at the back of the van as it sped away leaving broken glass on our drive.
Celebrity visitors.
Sometimes celebrities would visit the horse races at nearby Ruidoso
Downs, and once or twice someone would bring a celebrity up to our ranch. One such person that came several times was
Dale Robertson, an actor who was famous for his many western roles in film and
television. Another actor that I
remember that once came to our home was Alfred, the butler in the television
Batman series – his name was Alan Napier.
And once we even had a visit from the father of Queen Noor, the young
American wife of the King of Jordan. He
had once been a Navy test pilot so he was likely an early friend of Dad’s.
The Scribner family recipe book. Mom and Dad realized that after we had left home, we were often calling them to get a recipe for something. In demand were favorites from our childhood like buttercream Easter eggs and jets, our apple pie, winter squash, and so much more. They enlisted David to help with the computer formatting and compilation of a family recipe book and told us all to request which recipes would be included. They also allowed us to add a few of our own recipes to the project. I guess that you would call it an early form of self-publishing where you make copies of each page and then assemble spiral bound books. The result was the Scribner Family Recipes book with almost 250 recipes that each of us children received in 1998.
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Key Individuals:
Robert Gordon
Scribner (1923 – 2006)
Ann Hart Hughes
Scribner (1921 – 2006)
Jane Hughes Scribner Simonitsch McCrary
(1953 – and more)
and my four siblings: Bob, Jeff, David and Mary Ann
- Jane
Scribner McCrary
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