DYER: so actually Thanksgiving then was not one of your favorite special days.

BLACK: No, I don’t think so.  We had nice food and just stayed at home quietly. 

DYER: What about Memorial Day?

BLACK: Memorial Day was rather nice. It was sad for some people, but Sonora had a wonderful memorial program.  They had speakers, and they had flags out all over, and they had a parade up and down the street, and band music, and, in most cases, the crowds were quite large and they didn’t always go to the cemetery, but we did go out to the old city cemetery and the parade would march as far as the gate and then the girl scouts, or whatever the group there was, would put the flags on several of the graves.  And the decoration of the graves was about like it is now—all the graves were decorated—but the street in Sonora was very, well, colorful with the flags and the flowers and people with flowers that were going to go to the cemetery.  And we never missed a day taking flowers to if it was out families graves, or the neighbors (___) riding with someone else.  But the cemeteries were never forgotten on Memorial Day…and the parade and the speaker.  So I think Memorial Day was one of the highlights of my time.  I can’t remember very much else about it other than the speaker and the bands and music. 

DYER: Of course, the schools were in session at that time, so there probably were observances at the individual schools too.

BLACK: Well, in most cases—in some cases I might say—but in most cases it was a holiday, and the school was closed on Memorial Day.

DYER: But schools were still going…?

BLACK: Oh yes.  But on that day, all the schools that could, would participate in the parade on Memorial Day.

DYER: Were there special project in the class room: crafts that you made or poster contests?

BLACK: Poster, but not very much else.  We didn’t have very much to do in school for Memorial Day, but I know when Mrs. Davis was at Curtis Creek, we always had our useful program for Memorial Day.  She never missed a holiday without music.

DYER: Mother’s Day, Father’s Day?

BLACK: No.  Nothing was done for Mother’s Day or Father’s day.  In fact, now, the teacher say that each child take a little plan hoe that they planted to the mother, or something to that effect; but we might have made some little postcard or a little card with “to the mother I love,” or something to that affect.  But we very seldom ever made anything and brought it home.  It was a nice little card we brought home. 

DYER: Mom didn’t get served breakfast in bed?

BLACK: No. she was up to help the family in most cases.  Mother’s day is made so elegant and so large now that I don’t know what mother would do now if she saw what we used to have to do.  It was just a nice, soft day for mother in those days. 

DYER: Election Day?

BLACK: Election Day.  Oh, yes, that was good.  I remember going up to Standard on Election Day and I never will forget the first day that women voted.  And that was, I believe, if I’m not wring, you can probably help me on this, wasn’t it 1919 women’s suffrage? I believe it was about 1919. And how well I remembered is because the flu epidemic was still on.  And my mother was able to vote for the first time.  And it was at this big pool hall and dance place that the election was held in Standard.  And my mother took my sister and I up in the horse and buggy…my father might have been with her too. No, he was on the election board.  My father was on the election board and she went up to vote and had to take up to go with her because we were small and she couldn’t leave us home.  And that was the first time that she was allowed to vote.

DYER: did your father support her right to vote?

BLACK: Well, I think he did.  I think my father was great for women helping the community and helping with the booty.  He was never against it as far as I know.  He never talked against women not voting or women not being able to do this or that.  Whenever it come time for women to take part in school activities, he wanted them there.  So when it came time to vote, I can just still remember her going in to vote.  We had to sit outside, but she went in to vote.  And it was just during the time of the flu epidemic because we had to wear our masks up to the voting place.  And she had hers on.  Whenever you went in a crowd, you had to take this little gauze mask.  And so it must have been about 1919 that she voted first.  Because it wasn’t very long that she had to vote.  She died in 1921, so she didn’t have much time to vote.  And she did serve on the census—taking the census. 

DYER: the census of 1920.

BLACK: …1920

DYER: So she probably started in early 1920 then. 

BLACK: 1920.  Because I remember we were in school, and she had to go around in the horse and buggy and she had a certain area she had to take up as far as Cavaler Road.  She took all of Cavaler family.  And they had something like eight, nine, or ten children in their family.  And she had quite a time talking to the mothers because they still al spoke Italian.  And I remember a time that I suppose she was excited when she got home after taking the census and she was telling my father that the Cavaleros had large families and it was quite a job to get all of the data down for the Cavaler family. 

DYER: what about church holiday? Do you have any special observance of the church of special holidays?

BLACK: No, I don’t remember anything special other than the Christmas church programs. We were always in the church programs at standard church.  But we didn’t have anything special on the church days.  My mother was a fairly religious person; my father wasn’t as religious as she was.  But we didn’t have anything special on church days other than Christmas and Easter.  Christmas and Easter were the two programs that we were always in. 

DYER: Birthdays?

BLACK: Birthday? Every birthday was a nice big dinner and a fancy cake.  But we didn’t invite any other children or anything. Out birthday present was either a nice shirt made for the boys, or a new dress for the girls, or something to that affect, but there was no toys or presents from each of the brothers and sisters to the others.  Just from the family. 

DYER: It would seem that you were a close-knit family. 

BLACK: Yes, we were. My mother kept us very close, and I think one thing that did it was the things that we had to do at home together.  There was no way to go anywhere very far other than Standard, and we had to make our own entertainment, and, like I say, my mother read a lot. And if it was cold at night we couldn’t go anywhere or we had to stay at the house she did a lot of reading for us because each of us then could hear the story or seething like that.  And we only had the phonograph—there was no radio, no nothing else and there was only this small house, so there wasn’t anywhere we can go for entertainment other than keeping it right here in the home. 

DYER: there are various types of entertainments, and as long as we are telling about some of these types why don’t we talk just a little bit about the special seasons as you think about them.  For example, maybe we got to start with the summers, since this is summer now, and as you think of the summer, was that a favorite season for you or was it a season of lots of hard work and little fun. 

BLACK: No, we had lots of fun during the summer.  I just remember so well of swimming in our creek hear ws more fun because all of the neighbor kids came o swim too.  And we had so much outside activity.  We had the horses to ride and climbing the trees along Curtis Creek was something else.  There were so many alders there that we were able to climb a lot and there were great vines growing there in the alder trees and we’d make our tree swings—just swing out over Curtis Creek with all kinds of wild grapes.  And so it was easy to have fun on this ranch all summer long.  And fishing in the lake…I wasn’t much of a fisherman, but, boy, my brothers were.  We fished all summer long—fished for frogs…we just plain had fun here because all of the kids from Standard would come here because my mother liked children and she would rather keep us at home and let the other children come here where there was lots for things to do.

DYER: were you relatively free to move about once your chores had been taken care of?

BLACK: Oh yes.  We had o do our chores in the morning.  I helped in the house and my brothers helped with the feeding outside and irrigating.  And in the garden—we always had an acre of garden because we had to sell a lot for our living.  And my father wasn’t real strict with the boys; I mean he didn’t make them do too many jobs, they had so many to do, and if they wanted to go fishing and they finished their work, they could go.  And I think that this ranch was open to all the children of the community here and we enjoyed a real real good summer. 

DYER: As you look around now, Agnes, do you see a difference in the landscape because of a change in the amount of water available? Was it dryer then, is what I’m really asking you.

BLACK: Yes.  The fields were dry and the hills were dry and, oh, I don’t know; even though they were dry, it didn’t seem to stop the young people from running around.  They found something to do throughout this ranch anyway.  They…oh, there were slingshots.  You don’t go off and see a boy with a slingshot anymore.  And marbles…how many times do you see boys playing with marbles today?  Our yard here was filled with boys playing marbles, or twenty-two shooting, or the fishing pole, or…there were just any number of things to do.  They put can’s up on the post and see if they could shoot them off.  Of course, now with the houses so close and people living closer together, you have to be careful with the shooting.  Even if you were shooting up in your own apple trees someone now would really complain about a gun being shot too close to their house.  But in those days, all my father had to say was “be careful, you don’t shoot near the cattle and don’t shoot near the chicken house or our house.  Shoot out in the field, or go hunting, or cross the creek.”  We had no trouble with anything for the boys and girls to do in those days.

DYER: What about the fall of the year?

BLACK: Oh the fall; it was always nice here.  That was the fun time; we dried our own fruit.  So at the end of summer it meant get the apple peeler out and start peeling and coring and slicing.  It did all that with just turning the handle.  So my mother dried about, possibly, fifty or a hundred pounds of fruit every year.  We had the blind trees and they were up in the back here.  And our worst enemy here was the yellow jackets.   She had to keep a screen…in those days we used to use a mosquito netting, they called it.  And we put that over…my father made a sort of a frame, and we put the mosquito netting over that because, it might have been because we couldn’t afford screen.  I don’t know, but we used a mosquito netting and covered the trace, and we had dried peaches and dried apples and figs here enough to last us a big part of the winter.  So all-in-all, with the charge to build and the 135 acres of land to run on with the creek going all summer and a large lake, there was no trouble to find fun and entertainment. 

DYER: what about the color, the trees, the field at the time.  Do these still seem vivid to you?

BLACK: On yes. 

DYER: …change in the weather?

BLACK: Yes they do.  The black oak…we have lots of black oak on this ranch and they turned just gorgeous colors.  And what seemed to interest me a lot was the many oak balls on the trees.  People nowadays don’t even seem to see them, but when we were children we would try to get them down out of the trees and throw them at each other, or play ball with them, or whatever.  Now, as I go along, I hardly notice the old oak balls myself.  But there were lots of them, and the trees were colorful, and of course, we had lots of poison oak that would turn red.  You could see it all over the hills. Of course, everybody is fighting it now, which I don’t blame them.  But poison oak was real red all over the hills. And another thing that used to grow a lot and you’d notice on the hillside was the wild peach.  As we’d walk home from school, the wild peach was all over the hills.  Of course the boys were great from trying to get it and smoke it and…

DYER: Smoke wild peach?

BLACK: Yes.  They would…

DYER: that’s not marijuana is it or something? (laughing)

BLACK: No, it wasn’t.  But I don’t know how they could smoke it, but they did.  Any boy that could get the dried peach seeds and roll them up and they could mix them up some way or other, but the fall was nice.  It seemed to be that it was sort of a quiet time of the year.  And I can remember very well the creek running here. When the leaves would fall all of us would watch the leaves go down and maybe one of us would say, “oh, that would be my boat,” or something like that and we watched the water carry the leaves down; that was very interesting.  So we did have…the fall was very nice.  I remember rains started.  During the summer, we children used to sleep outside a lot.  So as soon as September came and we’d start the school, oh, we might sleep out for two weeks and then the rain would come and in would come to beds.  So we all had to carry our own beds and get in the house the first rain. And nearly every year we got caught with the rain.  So that was fun too and we’d sleep on the floor until our mother got our bed ready for us.

DYER: Well, with the rainfall, where was…certainly just around the corner, did you have fond memories of the first snowfall?

BLACK: Oh yes; one especially.  The most different snow storm here was when we were all in a church program on the little church in Standard. We had to practice and practice and practice and then right when the program was to be held, it snowed so hard and so heavy that my father wouldn’t go out and hitch up the team to take us there.  It was just too deep and was coming down too thick.  So we missed that beautiful program.  But right after New Years, even though it was a Christmas program, the church and the school got together and put it on again at the schoolhouse.   So even though it was a bad snowstorm, we didn’t miss out on our program.  But the snow and the storms here seemed to be more…oh, they were longer.  It seemed like it might have been because I was a small child and just tired of staying in the house or wearing wet clothes to school or something to that effect.  But we walked for days and days to school in the rain so we wouldn’t miss school, and I can remember walking home when the snow was so deep that we just trudged and fought our way through it. Of course, now the roads are all clear and you don’t notice that so much…

DYER: Was there any clearing then? 

BLACK: No. Maybe sometimes the country grater would come out and get it off enough to get it off the Tuolumne to Sonora highway.  The old grater with the horses came down, but our roads here, when the snow came, the horses and wagon just plowed through until the snow finally drifted off the road or walk. 

DYER: Did the snow seem to linger on longer then?

BLACK: It seemed to. I can remember this particular winter: it was just so thick and heavy that it seemed for days that it lasted.  And now if a storm lasts for two days or three on the ground here now, we think that’s quite a long time.  But that’s one or two storms that I remember very well. My father had quite a time getting from the house to the barn with the milk.  He couldn’t hardly make it; he had to dig a trail. And I know my oldest brother was a pretty god sized boy, and he helped him dig the trail over to the barn and the cattle and had quite a time.  But we did have a great huge barn that the cows were able to stay in and feed, so they didn’t suffer.  And they had a good shed and a barn to get in.

DYER: What about the water supply at the time with the ditches frozen.  Was this a problem?

BLACK: No, because when winter came, the ditch was shut off.  The flume was taken out of the creek and there was no water in the ditch.  But the water we used for the house, of course, was pulled up out of a well.  And it was pulled up by rope, so we never had to worry about freezing water.  We just had to pull a lot of water because it was too hard…we also had a spring, also, down further in back of the house, that we used for wash water or if we needed extra water we had the spring and the well.  So if the well didn’t supply enough for our family needs, well, we used the spring; but it was usually enough.  Of course, in those days you didn’t have you washers and dryers where it took so much water and your sinks to run a lot of extra water.  You used water out of the well, and you used what you needed and that was it.

DYER: Was it difficult to keep the house warm?

BLACK: Well, not too bad.  We had a wood stove in the kitchen—which was a fine stove—and it really heated that part of the house.  Then this part of the house, our fireplace was here and we always had plenty of wood.  We never wanted for wood.  So we kept a good fire going here, but a fireplace without a circulating heater of some kind, you’re usually cold to the back of you. And of course if you get up close to the fire, you’re all right. But in the back of the house was kind of not as warm as it could have been.  But in the far bedroom, was always kept a real good heater, and we had plenty of wood for that.  So that heated the back part of the house, the fireplace for this, and the kitchen stove for the kitchen.  So we fared pretty well with heat.  We very seldom ever got cold. 

DYER: And homemade quilts?

BLACK: Homemade quilts.  And we did have good blankets—we were fortunate enough to afford good blankets.  And then my mother made quite a few quilts and, so, all-in-all out house was fairly warm, even though it was just a single wall house, we managed to keep warm. 

DYER: what about springtime, Agnes?

BLACK: Oh, Spring.  That was just as nice a time of the years as you’d want because all of the grass was growing, the hay was being mowed, and the garden was in, and all the baby chicks were coming along, and the baby cows were coming, and spring time was just fascinating for me because everything was new, everything was pretty.  The grass was growing, the flowers were starting to bloom, and I’ll never forget our lilac tree out here and it still blooms and it is…well, I would say it’s close to a hundred years because it was here at the time of Mr. Stokesdale, the same old tree is here and it’s still growing.  It’s mulled and knotty, but it still blooms the same lavender lilacs.  So I always did like to see the lilacs when they bloom in the spring.  So I think springtime was one of the interesting things because of all the new little animals and baby chicks and such…and rabbits—we always had rabbits and ducks. 

DYER: What about the activities that your father had to get started with the planning that took place.  Did this require a great deal of his time and…?

BLACK: Yes, it did.

DYER: …and your mother’s time?

BLACK: Oh, I should say.  We saved our own potato seed, and that was one of the jobs for two of us at a time. My father would put the sacks seed potato out in a big tub and the peeling knife and two children went to work on the potatoes.  And we had to cut them and he said, “Always see that there is one or two eyes in each piece of potato that you put in that tub.  If you don’t have it—and eye or two eyes—they won’t grow.” So we always had to fix the potatoes for the spring planning.  And then we he had the garden ready and it was planted, just as the new plant came up, I will say one thing, we had a fine horse that cultivated all the roes, and many a time, if my brothers were busy with something else, I would leave the horse and he would hold the cultivator.  And that horse walked down those roes and never as much as stepped on a plant.

DYER: an educated animal. 

BLACK: Well, he...it was just a natural horse for walking in a row. And we had an acre of garden, like I said before, and if I didn’t lead the horse down, well, one of the boys did. So we always had a job for springtime and then it was to irrigate.  We didn’t have sprinklers or anything, so it was irrigate-down-the-rows.  And lots of times the gofers would get ahead of us so it was get-down-that-row-and-close-that-gofer-hole-up before all the water went somewhere else.  And then picking the vegetables when they were time—we had to help with that.  And he saved corn by the sack.  So I remember very well he looked at every ear of corn before us kids were allowed to put it in a sack because he would not take wormy corn to the market.  And he took corn to Standard, he took corn to Tuolumne, and to Sonora. And our corn here was named to be the very finest corn.  It was a golden denim corn and stoles evergreen—those were the two kinds of corn he’d planted.  And if people didn’t get it in a store that we took it to, they came here to get it. So it was well known that we had good corn and good tomatoes. 

DYER: Well, I think that we ought to reserve that for our, perhaps, our next tape when we really talk about some of the activities here on the ranch directly related to your fathers work: the crops, the animals.  And since we’ve spent about two hours, why don’t we pause and do it again sometime.

BLACK: Fine. 

DYER: Thank you Mrs. Black

BLACK: That would be fine.

END OF TAPE

General Information:

Interviewer: Dyer, Richard

Interviewee: Black, Agnes

Name of Tape: Agnes Black on the Black Ranch (black_a_3_1)

When: 9/5/1973

Where: Wards Ferry Road

Transcriber: Ariella (3/5/09)