Howard Herron Memoir - University of Illinois Springfield

Howard Herron 19
came over here. Gertrude was her first name and she had a birthday party
out there and out at the farm and everybody was invited in our class and
everybody was boy, girl, boy, girl. I had my first date that night.
Q: How old were you then?
A: Oh, 1 was ten or twelve years old then and Anita Bradley was her
name. She's dead now and oh, all we done was held hands and help them
over the fence or something like that. Went out in the timber and picked
flowers and came back and had ice cream and cake and then they brought us
all back to town and we played ring-around-the-rosie, old style games.
Q: Talking about this pheasant farm, what would be the price of a
pheasant in those days?
A: Oh, they didn't sell them.
Q: They did not sell them, they were not used to eat?
A: No, well, yes, they were, they would ship them in crates to other
parts of the state and turn them loose to inhabit the state with the
pheasants. The farmers got so that they hated the pheasants because the
pheasants would go along and the corn would get up about that high and
they'd pull the corn up and they'd eat the grain off of it, finally the
State had to do away with the State Game Farm. I remember one time they
had a cyclone came over across here and it blew over all the coops and it
just killed them by the thousands. They took two cars from the railroad
here and then went out and went around and picked up them dead birds and
put them on these boxcars and took them to Chicago and took them to the
poor people. They were New Pork dressed. That same night of that cyclone
we went to Pawnee to a football game at the high school over there, and
it broke all the window lights in the train and had telephone poles down
on the tracks between here and Pawnee. And we couldn't, some of us, the
rest of us had the hotel reserved there, all the rooms in the hotel, what
rooms they had. And some of the boys, some of the Pawnee football players
took some of the boys home with them to stay all night and about ten of
us stayed up in the jail, the courtroom. And the professor over at
Pawnee went, every town had a livery stable then, didn't have automobiles
then. If you went any place, you'd go hire a horse and a buggy. And so
the professor, went and got blankets, horse blankets, they had nice
cloths, they kept the horse blankets clean, they were nice, and they gave
us all a blanket a piece and that's when we came home. When we went over
there it was just short sleeve weather and that's, that was the eleventh
month, eleventh day in 1911 when it happened. I'll never forget it as
long as I live and we slept on the tables there in the courtroom and come
home the next morning on the train. And the window lights were out and
it was pretty cold and we had a horse blanket around us. We brought the
horse blankets to school and they got them all together and took them
back over to the livery barn.
Q: A cyclone in November?
A: Eleventh month, eleventh day in 1911. Quite a cyclone in Texas too
then. They said the ~utton's Clothing Store here that hail came down