Ron Rose Childhood Memories
I’m Ron Rose and I was born in Spokane and actually my folks traveled between my mom’s place of birth in California and Spokane for a couple years and then my dad wanted to move back home which was the Bruce Creek Williams Lake Area. It was a small community of about 20 different families but it was a centralized community and being a centralized Community they were very hard-working, very honest people and very helpful to each other.
We had a one-room Country School called the Bruce Creek School District number 26. And there were 13 of us kids on the average every year out of that community and the kids were the center of the social life of that community no matter if it was Christmas, if it was Easter, if it was Halloween, if it was May Day, the kids always put on a program.
One of the mainstays of our community in my childhood was everybody knew everybody and like I say everybody helped everybody so it was a big thing for the community to get together and go watch the kids get up on stage and sing Christmas carols, if it was the Christmas program. I remember sitting on the stage at the corner of the stage waiting to do a little Christmas poem and as I was waiting there I was listening or watching some of the other kids do their little program and all of a sudden something grabbed me and I turned around. Here was Santa Claus and he just scared the heck out of me. I was probably in about the third or fourth grade.
Kids back then had quite a few chores and things to do. We all had chores. The chores at home were like getting in the firewood for the wood cookstove and the heater wood and chopping it and that all started at a young age. Then in the summertime the folks give us a little chores to do like cutting brush around the house or cleaning up and at an early age I picked a lot of rocks. Well it was a farm situation. My first 12 years were on a 2700 Acre Farm/Ranch Was there a special adult or a person in your life that had a lot of influence on you as a kid?
The name that comes to mind is Clarence Pump. I spent a lot of time in my childhood with Clarence. He was a bachelor, an old bachelor. When we moved up from Spokane we moved in with Clarence and stayed with him. Mom did the cooking and of course dad worked for him and then we moved down to another place that he owned. But actually Clarence Pump was probably closer to a dad to me than my real dad because I spent so much time with him and he taught me so much. He was so fun to be around and we hunted and fished and worked hard. One of the things that comes to mind is when I graduated from high school he was turning over a hill up there to alfalfa from wheat ground and we had to pick the rocks on that Hill. That was during my senior year and for the senior party I had to go home and go to bed because I was going to pick rocks the next day.