TINA BROWN: Following is a tape interview with Adel Bach.  In this interview we will discuss early Sonora life and hope to discuss her work with the Sierra Railway.

BROWN: Okay, can you tell me a little bit about when you were born and where?

ADEL BACH:  I was born in Oakdale…

BROWN: …Oakdale?

BACH: … in 1890.

BROWN: …1890. And when did you come to Sonora?

BACH: I came to Sonora in 1987…not to Sonora, Jamestown 1897.  I wasn’t quite seven years old. We came in June, and my birthday was in August. I would have been seven in August.

BROWN: What was it like when you started school? Like, how old were you when you started going to school?

BACH: I came in June, see.  And I started in September when school started. They took you then.  I was about seven-and-a-half when school started.

BROWN: Where was the school at?

BACH: It was on the hill out of Jamestown, about a mile up.  A mile-and-a-half from where I lived and it’s gone now. The three rooms up there is teacher s that taught three grades.  The first, second, and third, fourth, fifth, six, seventh, eighth and there was a ninth grade that you could get you certificate to teach if you would when you entered the ninth grade, which I didn’t do. I didn’t want to be a teacher.

BROWN: Um, how did you get to school? Did you walk or did you…?

BACH: Walk

BROWN: …walk? Was it far enough to ride horses or anything?

BACH: Oh, I imagine it’s a good mile.  And it’s gone. And we had to come before the Board of Education, of course, we didn’t know any of them but Mr. Morgan, he was the superintendant of school and he used to come down to our school and was a very nice man.  He had a good voice and he played the piano.  He didn’t ask us any questions, he just entertained us.  And we came before the Board of Education to get our diplomas, and I got mine in 1906.

BROWN: How old were you then?

BACH: I wasn’t quite sixteen.

BROWN: Did you have a library?

BACH: yeah, we had a very small library.  Very.

BROWN: Not very many books?

BACH: No, very small.

BROWN: Was that in Jamestown?

BACH: that was in Jamestown. Oh, I don’t know what they have down there.  They ghouled it up in New Town what we called New Town. 

BROWN: Okay, um, when you were going to school, was there any clubs you were involved in?

BACH: Clubs?

BROWN:  yeah, clubs…

BACH: no we didn’t have anything like that.

BROWN: …or athletics or anything?

BACH: No.  Nothing.

BROWN: Nothing like that huh? When you got done with school, you just came home?

BACH: Yeah. And we stayed…didn’t go on home until four o’clock.

BROWN: How old were you when your parents allowed you to date?  How old did you have to be in order to date?

BACH: to date? Well, we didn’t do any dating at all until we were at least sixteen. Our parents were very strict. Not like they are today.

BROWN: Okay, I’d just like to ask you some questions about your home and you family life.

BACH: Yes?

BROWN: I was just wondering…what kind of activities did you like to do with your families? Did you go to the movies, or…?

BACH: Didn’t have a movie for year.  When we did have a movie, we didn’t go very much because we just couldn’t afford to go to the movies. We had one ice cream parlor—a very small one—and we’d go down there and get a dish of ice cream for ten cents and mostly out ice cream was made at home.

BROWN: What kind of entertainment did you do…were you involved in growing up?

BACH: entertainment? We entertained ourselves.

BROWN: How did you entertain yourself?

BACH: Well, we’d have parties at the house.  My sister played the piano and we’d have…while we got older we’d take up the carpet and the rug on the floor and dance.  That’s when we were older…that’s when we were working.  That wasn’t as a young girl.

BROWN: what was Christmas like?

BACH: Hm?

BROWN: What was Christmas like back then?

BACH: Christmas? Well, it was very nice.  You didn’t get much presents.  And, but we had a nice dinner.  My mother always had a very nice dinner most of the time, sometimes it was turkey.  Went out (___) and got a turkey.  You picked it yourself and all, but we (____) quite often was chicken, which we raised ourselves.  People were poor in those days. We just couldn’t afford a lot of things. My first doll.  Mostly Christmas we hung up our stocking we got an orange and then maybe an apple and hard tack candies. You know what hard tack candy is.

BROWN: what is hard tack candy?

BACH: It is the cheapest candy you can buy.  It’s very hard, and sometimes it had red stripes on them.  I guess you’ve never seen it.  Well, we called it hard tack. There were no chocolates or anything. And we got babies and hair ribbons.  Some of us braided our hair in those days and we tied it with hair ribbons.  But I met my first doll—my brother bought it.  He was working and he bought my sister and I each a doll and I was about, must have been, about eight years old when I got that doll. And there were not very many rich people.  Very few.  I guess Mrs. Hardin’s family was maybe one of the more...he had a… I think he was mining.

BROWN: what types of trips did you go? Did you ever go on vacations or anything like that?

BACH: when we were young, you mean?

BROWN: Yeah when you were, you know, with your family.  Did you ever go on trips?

BACH: when we got to working, my sister and I went down to San Francisco very often to the plays.  We went to see…I saw Annahel, Billy Berk, Ethel Barrymore and the two Barrymore boys.  They had beautiful theatres in San Francisco. I heard Caruso in San Francisco and followed by the name of Jose—Richard Jose. He had the best…I liked him better than Caruso to tell you the truth.  But it was fine because when we were working at the rail road, we could go from Jamestown to San Francisco and (_____) we got passes over the roads.

BROWN: Right.  That’s how you got there.  On the railroad.

BACH: yes.  On the railroads.

BROWN: how long did it take you to get there?

BACH: Oh, from Jamestown to Oakdale was the longest ride which was maybe an hour-and-a-half to two hours. And an hour from Oakdale to Stockton…I mean San Francisco, rather.

BROWN: What about church?   Did you go to church every Sunday?

BACH: Yes, Catholic Church.

BROWN: Catholic Church? What church did you go to? What church did you go to?

BACH: Catholic Church. 

BROWN: did you go to St. Patrick’s Church?

BACH: Well no.  This was here.  They had their own little church in Jamestown.  It was in the cemetery—the church was.  The cemetery still lives, but the church is gone.

BROWN: What about foods?  Did you have your own gardens and things?

BACH: We had a nice flower garden, but no vegetable garden.

BROWN: what about the stores?  Did you have a lot of stores where you could buy things?

BACH: There were no stores in New Town.  Well, in the beginning there wasn’t any. Then they had one small store up in New Town and then they had a couple of stores in the Old Town we call that. Was there a few people living in new town?

BROWN: How much was a loaf of bread back then?

BACH: I don’t remember.  My mother did all that.  I don’t think it cost a loaf of bread. No, we never bought any bread.  My mother made her bread.  Everybody made their own bread.

BROWN: What was it like to bake in the kitchen…the types of tools…?

BACH: We baked n a wood stove. And in the summer it was awful hot (laughing).  In the winter it was nice.  But you used a wood stove.

BROWN: what kinds of utensils did you use to bake the bread with?

BACH: Those old Black’s real bread pans. I think I have them.  I think I…I remember I had them.  I have a couple f my mother out there somewhere.  About that long, and they’re black, and rather heavy, and made delicious bread.  That was a bread pans.

BROWN: what did the stove look like?

BACH: The stove?

BROWN: How did you use it?

BACH: well, the stove wasn’t very beautiful.  My mother’s was pretty good looking and I had a beautiful stove, and even when I got married, which is a long…I was married in 1916, and I was using a wood stove then.  And you can everything that you could find to can because it cost too much money to buy canned goods.  You got your canned peaches, everything and apricots first, and cherries, and tomatoes, and (_______) and all that. You didn’t buy anything accept the staples. When we had chickens, we raise chickens.  We had pig, and they slaughtered the pigs, they killed the pigs and put it in brine, mix it up.  I know they did something with BROWN sugar.  I never did it, but my family did—my mother and father. But it was a good time.  We had a good time.  We enjoyed ourselves. We didn’t have to have any other entertainment.  We could entertain ourselves.

BROWN: what types of chores did you have to do around the house? Did you all have your…?

BACH: Yes. We had chores always. The boys had to take care of the wood—the kindling.  We had to help mother in the cleaning, which wasn’t bad at all.

BROWN: How did you wash your clothes back then?

BACH: We washed it with a washboard.

BROWN: …with a washboard (laughing).

BACH: (____). In fact, I was washing clothes when I was married. That was in 1916.

BROWN: did you just hang them out to dry?

BACH: yes.  We had no dryer.

BROWN: How did you get water to your house? Did you have a well?

BACH: We had a well. On the (____) then we had a pump.  First, we had a pulley and then we put in a pump. And it’s still there, I guess.  The people that bought it afterwards, I don’t know what they… then they did have running water up there now. And they have sewage up there. We didn’t have any sewage.

BROWN: Okay, I’m just going to ask a little about your older years now.

BACH: My what?

BROWN: You older years.

BACH: The older ones?

BROWN: Yeah, like where did you work, and how much did you get paid?

BACH: Me? I worked at… well, first I worked at the post office.  I got twenty-five dollars a month.  And then a girl was leading the Sierra Railway and going to San Francisco, and she was making thirty-five dollars a month.  And she said, “try for my job.” And I did and I got it.  Then, of course, after a few years, why, they raised it.  I think the most I ever maid was seventy-five and then left.

BROWN: Seventy-five dollars a month?

BACH: A hu.

BROWN: what type of work did you do?

BACH: Well, I was called ticket officer.  And I checked all of the agent’s tickets that they sold and they had them send in a report and… But my job, they’d give me anything to do and I had to do it. But you got an awful good education in the grammar school.  The children that come out of grammar school now couldn’t even pass the Board of Education’s exits.

BROWN: what types of questions did they ask you on that test?

BACH: Well, they gave us arithmetic.  It wasn’t questions, you just had to…anything from arithmetic to spelling and everything else.  I stayed at the jail with Mary Deferrerri—he’s quite a man here now (___)’s son.  ...a lot about Tuolumne County.

BROWN: what types of entertainment did you participate in when you were older? Like, did they have square dancing or any big occasions?

BACH: No, they didn’t have square dancing when I…we waltzed and two-stepped with the one that came out and shocked all of the old ladies—two step.

BROWN: It was too quick for everybody?

BACH: I don’t know what was the matter with it. I didn’t see anything wrong with it, but that was supposed to be… We waltzed and chaddished and did those kind of dances. And they brought in the two-step.  It was a nice dance, and I didn’t see anything wrong with it at all, but the old ladies thought it wasn’t very nice.

BROWN: You’re mom didn’t like it. Huh?

BACH: No.

BROWN: Okay.  When did you get married and what was it like?

BACH: I got married in San Francisco and we stayed… My sister and I went down a week before we got married and we were married at the minister’s home.  Not much of a wedding.  It wasn’t a fancy wedding.

BROWN: You didn’t have a lot of people—relatives?

BACH: No.  Just two other people were there—friends of mine in San Francisco.

BROWN: did you have any children?

BACH: Yes. I had one daughter.  She lives in Stockton.

BROWN: Can you tell me a little bit about motherhood back then?

BACH: Well, I don’t think that it’s much different than what it is now. You look pretty awful for awhile and that didn’t bother anybody. And when she was born, I had a little rough time then. Her eye—we didn’t know whether she was going to be able to see.  They had to take her and gouge her eye, and we couldn’t tell whether she was going to see out of that eye until she was able to distinguish things. But she was alright.

BROWN: When did your daughter go to school and was it during the depression at all? During that time?

BACH: No, my daughter went to school—she went to Sonora Hammer School and it wasn’t like it…I was one big building up there. Where we took our (__) was just a beautiful big…the big building held a class room.  She went up there.  And she didn’t have to go before the board of Education to graduate.  They had done away with that. But she was very brilliant; she was very bright—even skipped a grade up there.

BROWN: going back to where you worked, was it hard to find a job then because of the depression?

BACH: Yes.  Not very many women worked then.  It was very (____) in Jamestown.  I don’t know a lot about Sonora.  We didn’t get to Sonora very often because we had to drive up in the horse and buggy, or take the stag—the stage that came from Stanton. But we had to come on the horse-and-buggy and the roads were pretty bad.  And if we had story weather, you couldn’t cross the creek.  I got up in a horse-and-buggy; the stage could go across it. Anytime you’d have to turn around and go back home. Then they got to riding a train.  They I worked the railroad.  They put, what we call, the caboose, which is a very small car for the conductor and then they had some seats for people so that they could ride up here.  That was twenty-five cents.

BROWN: What types of ethnic groups were here? Was there lot of different Chinese and…?

BACH: We had in Jamestown when I first moved; they had a lot of Indians. And we had quite a few Chinese too. They were very fine.  They never bothered anybody. They were very very good people.  They had Chinese restaurants and we had, what they call, a reservation that’s bellow Jamestown for the Indians and they were all fine.  We had an Indian boy that went to school.  He was a very nice boy, and very smart boy.

BROWN: What was early Jamestown like?

BACH: Old Jamestown?

BROWN: Well, it was practically the same at it is today.  Except there’s, I noticed it last time I went through it, why, they have a bypass going through Jamestown.  We used to always have to go through it to go to Oakdale. But they are fixing up the buildings and it’s looking very nice, I think. And it wasn’t bad when I lived there.  I thought it was a pretty nice place.  And, of course, New Town was quite a ways.  That’s where the railroad is—up in New Town.

BROWN: What was the population of…do you know?

BACH:  Of Sonora?

BROWN: Of Jamestown.

BACH:  Of Jamestown? Oh, I can’t even remember.  There was quite a few people, but that was because the mines were running—all of them. Jumper, and the one in Jamestown the Harvard—there was quite a lot of men working there.

BROWN: Is that where your husband worked?

BACH: No.  My husband, he lived in Sonora. He lived up here in Sonora.  But I don’t know too much about what was happening here.  As I say, we got to Sonora very seldom.

BROWN: what ere the hotels like?

BACH: We had one beautiful hotel—hotel Nevel’s. It was beautiful.  It had a beautiful garden—a flower garden—and a beautiful vegetable garden.  And it was like…I have a picture where I worked, I’ll show it to you afterwards, where it’s burning. That one burned down.  Hotel Nevel’s was the nicest. The train stopped there and—right in front of the hotel—and all of, we call them salesmen now, but we called them drummers, they all stayed at the Hotel Nevel’s and then they’d come to Sonora and go around (______) to take their orders.  But they all stayed at the hotel.  But the boys that worked in the round house, the men that worked there, they stayed at the hotel too.

BROWN: How much did it cost to stay there?  Do you know?

BACH: I don’t know what they charged, but I do know they couldn’t have charged much because my sister’s husband was a mechanic.  A first class mechanic that took six engines and to kept those engines running he got forty cents an hour.  And the helpers, like my brother Jimmy was at that time, he got twenty-seven cents an hour.  I’m taking four dollars an hour to pull weeds.

BROWN: It’s changed a lot.

BACH: Yeah.  I’ll say it is.

BROWN: what were the saloons like? Did you ever go into the saloons?

BACH: Oh, we had a lot of saloons. But I’ve never seen one.

BROWN: You never got to go in, huh?

BACH: No.

BROWN: Did anyone ever tell about what they were like?

BACH: No they didn’t.  The only thing that I used to hear…we went with a crowd of boys that didn’t drink in saloons and some of the other boys called them a pie-bunch.  They go to the restaurant and ask for a cup of coffee, and then I guess the other folk was going into the saloon for a drink. I don’t know.  They were going to the (___) and they were in a saloon in Jamestown.  I have never been into many in Sonora; I think I was in the hotel salon once…twice.

BROWN: Was there any prostitution going on back then?

BACH: I’ll say there was. Plenty. Right now where the…I told Mrs. Teathers the other day I said, the place where we get our hair done now, that was Backstreet.  And that was when I was working in the post office, they got their mail.  They didn’t deliver mail then at all; it had to come through the post office.  And they were very nice women, they were really nice.  You’d never know to look at them or talk to them, but they were in the back of town at all.  They were very nice.  There was one, Chisona, she was beautiful.  She told me she had a little girl living in San Francisco.  Nope.  They never bothered anybody. They kept their place—I guess they had plenty of that.  I guess they had it in Sonora too.  I don’t know.

BROWN: Well, what about the automobiles and the roads?

BACH: Well, there were no paved roads at all. And the automobiles…I only know three automobiles and we’d run out to look at those.  Mrs. Winn’s husband was an agent—a ticket agent—here in Sonora, and she had a small one—a very small car. Mr. Hampton, the man that I worked for, he had a small car.  But Mr. Junking, who was head of the West Side Lumber company, he had a touring car. And my husband…he was his chauffeur.  I got to ride in that once in a while.

BROWN: That was probably neat, huh?  

BACH: Got to ride in that.  But, no, there were very few cars.

BROWN: did they go very fast?

BACH: No.  They didn’t have much cooling power either.  We went a little afterwards with Jan and we got a better car and we ran off to Mercer Cave.  That’s where I was working on the railroad.  And it took, oh, we had some very good hills there and we had to make a run from them, but nothing like today.  We had a ford—a ford car—one o those Model Ps.  Well, they were a terrible car. And my sister and her boyfriend, who they married sometime after that, we decide we take a ride to Oakdale.  Te road, of course, wasn’t paved then at all.  So, on that car they had almost all of the mechanisms on the steering wheel.  So when you wanted to go fast and slow, you slid something up and down.  So we said, “Let’s see how fast it will go?” All we got was twenty-eight miles to the hour. 

BROWN: That’s all huh?

BACH: That’s all.  That’s as fast as…she had the thing wide open.  My sister, Pearl, was driving it.

BROWN: How many brothers and sisters did you have?

BACH: I had three brothers and three sisters.  And my brother Jimmy and myself are the only ones left.  The rest are all dead.

BROWN: Mr. Dyer told me that your brother…two of your brothers, one was a conductor.

BACH: One was a conductor and another was an engineer. The engineer is still living.  The conductor died. He died quite a long time ago.

BROWN: Can you tell me a little bit about what they had to do—their jobs and stuff?

BACH: Well, conductor…my brother was a conductor.  Not on the passenger car, he was on the fey. The other had to know how to switch all these cars and have them ride in the right place to drop them off to where they belonged and had to go. The engineer…I have to ask Jimmy. He comes up all the time. I’m too sure, but I think when—I don’t know about Jimmy—but before Jimmy got into the picture running in the engine he had to work in the round hose. He had to know something about engines.  So I got it into my head that they’d burned coal for some time.  Then he worked at…the last thing he ran was a diesel.  Now, I don’t know what they run a diesel with, I must ask him.  The last engine that he was running was a diesel. We had a great big tank—oil tank.  We used oil fro awhile on the engines.  But at first, I don’t know; I have a picture of him shoveling coal into the fire blocks.

BROWN: Do you remember when the first railroad came to Sonora when it was built?

BACH: 1897.

BROWN: 1897.  And did they have a big celebration?

BACH: I don’t know.  You see, I didn’t come up on the first train.  It hadn’t been running very long.  All it came was to Jamestown when I came on it. Then afterwards I came to Sonora and then from then they went on to Tuolumne. 

BROWN: So those were the main stops of the trains? The main stops were just Tuolumne…?

BACH:  the main stop when I came up was Jamestown. They tied up there for the night, and then they’d go out in the morning.  They used to have a lot of fun.  On New Year’s Eve the master-mechanic and his wife ran the shop very well and New Years’ Eve we all woke up then to all of the engine whistles (laughing).  At twelve o’clock.

BROWN: Wake everybody up, huh?

BACH: That was a lot of fun. Now, we had to make our own good times. But we did go to a lot of dances because they had dances in Sullivan Court; they had dances in Stampp; and dances in Jamestown.  You never came to Sonora to a dance. But we had a good time.  We had quite a lot of dance in Jamestown.  We had (___) there.  Of course, when we first went, we had to have my aunt as our chaperone.  They when we got boyfriends, we were old enough that we could go out with the boys. If you had a boyfriend he’d take you to the dance.

BROWN: How late could you stay out with your boyfriend?

BACH: We’d have to be home when the dance ended which was about one o’clock.

BROWN: At night?

BACH: yeah.

BROWN: That’s not too bad.

BACH: No.  It wasn’t bad.  Because I remember going to the restaurant to have a bite to eat at twelve o’clock and the dance didn’t…I think it might have been open until two; I’m not too sure.  But we all had to be home at one.

BROWN: what were the restaurants like in Jamestown?

BACH: Why, we didn’t have any there.  But we had good places to eat.  They weren’t very classy, but thought the best food that I ever had down there was at the Ringo’s Hotel.  And it was kind of uh…wasn’t much of a place.  It had a bar room in front, but they served very good food. 

BROWN: Do you remember the Willow? The Willow Hotel?

BACH: the Willow now, well that…I never went into the Willow in those days at all. I don’t think they had…I just think it was for people to stay there.  Now they serve some very delicious meals. And high.  We could afford to go there in those days.  Didn’t make much money. But we were happy.  I’ve been a lot happier than most of the people are today.

BROWN: Do you remember the Frog Jump?

BACH: I’ve never been to the frog jump.

BROWN: Never went to the Frog Jump. Huh?  When your children were growing up, was it hard to raise them?

BACH: hard to raise them?

BROWN: Yeah, because…

BACH: No we all minded.  We started since we were little to mind our parents and we just didn’t get out of line.  Now, I don’t remember my father or mother ever whipping any of us. Never. And my father didn’t believe in whipping anybody. And I don’t remember any of us ever getting a whipping.  We got chastised or we might not be able to go some place that we wanted to go to.  Something like that, but never struck us.

BROWN: Was there ever any port people that came up on the railroads?

BACH: Yes.  Mr. Blake, who owned the railroad, was suppose to be quite a big man, and he used to come and he’d stay at the hotel. In fact, he had a room—a suit—there. Mr. Freshmen Lisden, he was important for the railroad and Mr. Smith was another one.  Mr. Smith worked in our office.  Now, an important one that I don’t remember, oh, I think that the most exciting time that we had was when they started having movies and they’d make a movie down there.  That was the most excitement for us. 

BROWN: What was that like?

BACH: We were in one one time and we didn’t get any money for it.  Oh, they wanted a crowd going into the theatre, and a bunch of us weren’t doing anything—just watching them.  So we decided we’d go into the theatre and they were yelling at us to do this and do that.  They took quite a few pictures down in Jamestown.  Took one up at the railroad and one time just watched if we were in it.

BROWN: Did you ever see any movie starts?

BACH: Well, not like they are today. Not like they are today. They took a lot of pictures here, though, in Sonora; a lot of them.  I don’t know if comes here anymore or not, oh, Michael Landen—he was up here two-thirds of the time. He used number three engine on the railroad.  But I remember I used to look at his pictures.  It was number three, I never could figure out any place and I walked to Jamestown on the railroad many many times back and forth and I just never could figure out where they were being taken.  But the way she shows then and all the places that I have ever seen aren’t the same at all. And I like him… I think he’s a very good (____) pictures except when he writes them.  Then he always puts pictures on that are sad.

BROWN: Could you go to the movies a lot?

BACH: Not a lot, no.  We only had one movie house down there. And when we worked we went more often than when we weren’t working we didn’t go to the movies.  We just didn’t have the money then.  It was all…

BROWN: How much did it cost?

BACH:  I think it cost twenty-five cents. But twenty-five cents was a lot of money in that day. But as we got to working, my mother and father let us do what we want to do with our money.  But we all did pay our board.

BROWN: How much was that?

BACH: Twenty dollars.

BROWN: Twenty dollars a month? And you got to eat all the food you wanted?

BACH: my mother was a marvelous cook.  Yes, we had a good pleasant home.  My mother was a wonderful person.  She never went nay place. She was home when we came from school my mother was there and we could bring anybody that we wanted home and she always had a pan of doughnuts or nice, fresh bread out of the oven.  She’d fix a sandwich for us all and any of our friends that their mother would allow them. Usually you went right home from school—you didn’t loiter. But now I don’t know what the children do.

BROWN: what types of food did your mom fix?

BACH: Oh, it was common food. It was stews and road and things like that.  Very good food.  Macaroni, we had chicken.  We had lots of chicken because we raised our own chickens. 

BROWN: Do you remember the rodeo at all?

BACH: Yes.  We had it out at the high school, the first one that I ever went to.  And Mrs. Burnum—my husband worked with Mr. Burnum—barbequing the meat out there.  And Mrs. Burnum and I cooked all the beans.  And that was a job.  We cooked all of the beans that was cooked—she and I.  They had the ice cream parlor here and they served sandwiches and pies and so they asked us if we could fix the beans. So, she and I baked all of the beans.  We didn’t bake them.  We spoiled them and made them…they were seasoned up with tomato and stuff like that.  They weren’t really baked.

BROWN: Was the rodeo, did everyone attend the rodeo?  Was that the highlight?

BACH: Oh, the first rodeos were beautiful.  But you see now, we had Dobbins and Dobbin.

BROWN: what are those?

BACH: He was a…

BROWN:  He was a man.

BACH: …he just faded.  There were people…the ones that we had at the high school were a lovely group.  There’s nothing like these things. In fact, I quit going to them.  How much did it cost to go to the rodeo?

BROWN: how much did it costs to go to the rodeo?

BACH: In those days? I think we paid a dollar…a dollar-and-a-half, I don’t know.  It wasn’t very much. But then they had…when they first started down here you could get a boxed seat and they were nice, and they put on some pretty good ones.  But the last one we went to, my bother and my husband and I went, it was huge.  And we left before it was half over.  It was just in those grand stands the seats were so narrow you couldn’t hardly sit on them and when we got tired of the show we left.  I t wasn’t like anything we used to have. 

BROWN: What about the fair?

BACH: The fair? I’ve never gone to it.

BROWN: You went to the fair? Do they ever have any jam…

BACH: Oh, I did go to a couple of fair down there. Oh, usually I’d just go to where the food was or to where the needle work, something like that.

BROWN: Did you do needlework? Did you do needle work?

BACH: Yes, I did a lot of crocheting, just a lot of it.  In fact, I made a beautiful table cover for myself crocheting. 

BROWN: When you made and bought clothes back then did you just buy the material and make the clothes yourself or did you go and order them?

BACH: When we worked we bought already made clothes. And when we weren’t working, we learned to sew ourselves and I made many dresses for myself.  Even when I was working at the railroad office mama had an old fashioned sewing machine. I had one that’s a portable one. I don’t use it anymore. 

BROWN: So you had the kind that you had to push with your feet?

BACH: hum? Oh, pedal.  The pedal. Mama’s was a treadle.  It was a big machine.  Hers was big. Mine was just a table model.  (______) what you call them now?

BROWN: So, what would happen if you wanted to go on with school? If you got out in the ninth grade.  You didn’t have college or anything.

BACH: Well I believe that they had some kind of a high school up at the court house.  My husband went to that for a little while, but I never got there.  We couldn’t afford it.  You had to get your own transportation and we didn’t have the money to get…all we could get was horses.  My sister went to high school.  She rode horseback and my father had her furnish the hay. And she’d get to ride up on the horse.  All the out -of-towers could afford it.  And she’d ride up on the horse.  She had a riding habit of trying to get by in a scurry, rain or shine.  And he’d have a bale of hay out there, and has to get off the horse, unsaddled, un(___), feeded and watered and then go over, there was just one big room out there, and change and go to school. And she took a commercial cart, and she took the two-year commercial cart.  And she came out and got a job at the Sierra Railway, and she took dictation for a man in the office and she was good.  She was real good. She stayed there until she got married.

BROWN: when you got married you couldn’t work? After you got married?

BACH: Well, I could, but my husband didn’t want me to. See, I was in an office down in Jamestown.  I’d have to come back and forth on the train.  And he’d said when he married me he married me to take care of me. So, he was working for the forest service.

BROWN: A lot different than it is now huh?

BACH: Hu?

BROWN: a lot different than it I now.

BACH: He got 116 dollars a month.  And that was supposed to be pretty good, but in those days.  I don’t know what they pay them now. Then he left the forest service and went into the bank.  He got more money there—a teller in a bank.  And then after (____) he knew the judge very well.  He wanted him to (______) get all that in high school when he went to high school and he went to San Francisco school for a week to brush up and of course he didn’t use a machine.  Well, it was hard work, but he stayed there for quite awhile and he didn’t make much money out of that because they only pay…you only got paid if you work for the county.  They didn’t have any regular salary like they have now.  If you work for them, they pay you.  But, of course, any on the outside suing up in court they had to pay him.  But then he decided…well, he was working and he wasn’t busy in the court while he was working for Mr. Eric Seigstom who runs that Sonora Abstract Title Company.  They after awhile Mr. Seigstom had insurance too ….

END OF TAPE

General Information:

Interviewer:  Brown, Tina

Interviewee: Bach, Adel

Name of Tape: Adel Bach

When: 1982

Transcriber: Ariella

Transcribed: 11/7/08