Robert Lyle Wall Growing Up

Robert Lyle Wall from an interview by Tatiana Larsen. Robert talks about what life was like growing up in his family.

What was home life like as kids? It depended on which house we were living in at the time, one of the houses was back behind the Winchester mystery house. It was an 11 room farm house and we had a bunch of chickens and rabbits and a couple of pigs. Part of our chores were feeding the chickens and the pig and gathering the eggs. We were also supposed to take care of our rooms; we weren’t the world’s greatest about that. That was about the 5th house we lived in. This was on an 18 acre prune and apricot ranch. It had a very large section of the orchard where we had apples and cherries for the family mainly, just one or two of cherries, crabapples, figs, pears, apples, and peaches. We always had canned apricots wherever we lived mom always did a lot of canning, mostly fruit, peaches, pears and apricots. We always had a lot of dried prunes. One of my favorite things was dried apricots. My parents rented so we changed houses quite often. Right after that mystery house they bought a little house.
By the time I was 6, I was selling newspapers on street corners after school in the evenings. The papers were three cents per paper and I got one penny per paper. I used to sell quite a few, seemed like it used to be 25 or thirty papers, you could buy two big nickel candy bars for a nickel, a loaf of bread was 10 cents, milk was 10 cents a quart. I got to keep some of the money that I earned, but much of it growing up went to the family. As I got older I started delivering the newspaper and we had to go collect the money at the end of the month, that was always the hard part. By the time I got into high school if I wanted to wear genuine Levi pants and jacket I had to buy them myself.
The 2nd house we moved into was also on a big orchard, and during the summer the whole family would go out and pick prunes. We were actually working commercially; the owner would pay us about 6 cents for a 65 lb box of prunes. Charles could pick 100 boxes a day, $6 a day was mighty fine money. I was just very tiny when we lived there, so I’d carry my bucket around and I was more just a fixture trying to keep me out of mischief, I probably ate more that I picked, I never got to where I could pick like my brother did, but I did get where I could do 60 boxes a day if the picking was good.
In the summer when I was old enough to cut an apricot without cutting myself, then we would cut apricots in the summer so that we could dry them. We’d pick them in 65lb boxes and you’d have to cut them nicely in half and take out the pit then lay them carefully in straight in rows on these big drying trays 3 or 4 ft wide and 8 or 10 ft long. These were at farm houses, this was what we did during the summer for spending money for our own clothes. The apricots came in first, then the prunes, they used a similar process for the apricots and prunes, they used the same trays, but the prunes had to be dipped in a warm lye solution before putting them on the tray to kill any bugs so they would dry out in the sun. They were both sun dried. They would have great big sections to lay huge trays out. The lye also kept the birds off them. You couldn’t tell when they were done that the lye had been on there. The apricots had a big sulfur place they’d stack all the trays on the cart with 1 inch between each layers and push it into this building and close the door. Then they’d burn sulfur in the building. It would treat the apricots so no bugs would bother them and it would bleach them ripe if they were still green.
They still treat dried apricots this way unless it says no sulfur dioxide.
In junior high study hall we were supposed to do our homework. We usually had it in the library and I’d go in there and get these books on poetry that I enjoyed and some were The Charge of the Light Brigade, Robert Service and the Cremation of Sam McGee.
Our Christmases were very festive there was never enough money for anything too elaborate. We’d hang our sock and get nuts and hard candy and an orange or an apple, and we decorated a tree. For Christmas we used to have a turkey and mashed potatoes and yams and some kind of salad (waldorf or green salad). Usually my brother Ted and I would get a fairly large gift between the 2 of us. One of them was a wind up train. We were very excited about that one. The older kids got their own presents, but theirs were usually clothing. We were just thrilled to get a toy to share. My dad usually raised chickens and rabbits wherever we were so we ate lots of chicken and rabbit wherever we were. But my dad being a rancher knew his meats very well. We learned to eat all parts of an animal.
We always had lot of fruits and veggies in the house. My family would buy fruit by the case, apples, oranges, so almost always had oranges and apples available in season. We always had grapes and strawberries, not many bananas, since they were sort of expensive because they had to ship them so far.
My dad always had a garden, with lots of corn, cucumbers, squash and tomatoes, I always loved tomatoes.
My dad was not very expressive, but I knew how much he loved my mother. The folks would take a lot of nonsense from us kids, but one thing we never any of us talked back to our mother, because we knew if we just opened our mouth then if we said another word he was going to take our head off. He demanded a great deal of respect for our mother. They didn’t talk much around us kids. My mother did a lot of talking especially with grandma and aunt Susie who were there so much of the time. Just as a demonstration, when we were living in this big house, we had a family get together and my mother and aunt Susie and grandma were there and I brought Bonnie down. My family had a tendency to all talk at once except for my dad. We could listen to each other while still talking. It was really a talent, poor Bonnie came there and she couldn’t do it. She had to give complete attention to whoever was talking at the time. That’s exactly the way it usually was at our house, we always had somebody staying with us, we always took in strays.