Interviewee: Clinton Hardy
Interviewer: Mark Durtschi
 
Mark Durtschi: In Stirling, Clinton was born on January the 27^th 1909, he has been a long time resident of Stirling, has lived here his whole life except for occasions when he has been off on missions. The date today is the 6^th of June 1996. Clinton has mentioned that he would like to start out talking about the very early times, about what times were like when he was a young boy and even about stories that he has heard when he was young that people told him that are no longer here. So go ahead, you may begin.

Clinton Hardy: Well I guess I would tell you about how my folks came to Canada. They came in 1899, my grandfather Hardy and his family came in I believe May of 1899. They were called up here to help build a canal between Kimble and Stirling to get irrigation into this area. That seemed to be the reason why the church made arrangements to get this land for the people here. Of course because they couldn’t go into Lethbridge, couldn’t go within twenty miles of Lethbridge. When they came on the train they came just as far as Stirling.

Mark Durtschi: Can I stop and ask you a quick question about that. The just could not live in Lethbridge, they could go up there couldn’t they?

Clinton Hardy: They could go up there but we went there to get coal. You couldn’t live in Lethbridge, in the twenty miles of Lethbridge.

Mark Durtschi: When did that actually change, when did people start moving there?

Clinton Hardy: I imagine that it would be around right somewhere around the First World War when they changed it, in 1914 around that area. It may have been shortly before that. When it was 1914 I was only five years old so it was just about that time.

Mark Durtschi: So going back before I interrupted you, you were talking about your folks couldn’t live within twenty miles of Lethbridge. So they decided to?

Clinton Hardy: Well this is where they came. Mr. Brandley had been here with his small group and my Grandfather and his family came on the train with all of their stuff on the train. I think about a month after the Brandley's came, they were the first ones. My grandfather built a home on Fourth Avenue and fourth street right here. They lived there for some time and my grandfather hardy was on the first village government and so on. Some of the first ones here, he had a brother Leonard was here. He had the first store that was here, and then a few years later he sold it to Mr. Brandley. My grandpa was here until about 1905 or 1906 and decided that he would go back to Utah. So he went back to Utah but in the meantime he had two hundred acres of land just out of Stirling here west. They get some acreage to pay for working on the canal. I think that they paid a dollar a quarter of acre of land. He had two hundred acres, when he left my dad made arrangements to pay him for it.

Mark Durtschi: How old were you guys.

Clinton Hardy: I wasn’t even born when he left. He went back to Salt Lake and I wasn’t even born.

Mark Durtschi: So your father, did he stay here?

Clinton Hardy: My father stayed right here, when he came up he was working on the canal and so he stayed right here. I was born in a little house right over here on the corner in 1909. When I was about two or three years they moved this house out to our farm just about a mile out of there. We lived out there until 1917. They came back and lived in a little house down here; they used to call it old shoe maker Nelsons house. We lived there for a few months when my dad was building a new house, he built it in 1918. So then after that we moved into the house here in 1918. So we were in our regular house, it is still standing there then at that time I know I remember driving quite a few nails in there to fix the lattés. So it was quite an ordeal. The early part of the town that I have been told about at the time they told about my great uncle owning the store and just across this road, just a little ways was a little tiny post office. That was run by George Oler and that is where they had the first post office. It wasn’t much bigger than a shoebox, it was very small then just a little farther north they had what was called a Stirling hotel. It was there, it didn’t stay very long because people didn’t want to use a hotel because people would live with the people that were here. When they had friend here they would live with them until they moved on.

Mark Durtschi: What happened to the hotel?

Clinton Hardy: Well the house was still down there.

Mark Durtschi: The building didn’t burn down or anything like that, the just stopped using it.

Clinton Hardy: Ya, Wilf Brandley bought it and he lived in it, he lived in it all of his life. I don’t know who is living in there now. Just across the road from the hotel was John Sixes placing and he had
a little lumber yard there. You could buy rough lumber and it was there for a few years. Just across the road was a corner shop, saddle shop and everything just across the road from Sixes.

Mark Durtschi: Do you remember who run those different shops?

Clinton Hardy: Well I can’t remember their name right now, I know who they were but I just can’t remember their name, they were there for quite a long time. I think it was nelsons, I am not sure. Anyway, at the store there that my great uncle had they had put in telephone lines in the town and so they had a telephone office there they used to call the telephone and put the ring in.

Mark Durtschi: So there was a live operator right there in Stirling?

Clinton Hardy: They had a live operator and they had that right along with their store. It was there for several years. My aunt used to run the, I had two aunts and my mother’s two sisters; they used to work in there quite often.

Mark Durtschi: How late at night did it become before you couldn’t call anyone.

Clinton Hardy: I think that it went until nine o’clock. Jennebie Barton was a main one and Verna Spackman was another one that did some operating of the telephones there. It was very interesting. Of course we had our old confectionary. The building is still there, right up here on the road.

Mark Durtschi: Which one is it?

Clinton Hardy: Do you know where Dennis Fletcher lives?

Mark Durtschi: Is it close to there

Clinton Hardy: It is just a little north, the Canadian groceries, it is right there. That is where we used to get our confectionary and get our soft drinks. We would get candy and stuff like that. It went on for years. It was quite interesting thing; it is interesting what Stirling did after they got the water. Of course when they first came my mom said that the grass was belly deep to a horse and there were so many mosquitoes that you couldn’t tell the color of your horse because they were covered with mosquitoes. They said it was just terrible; the eighteen mile lake here was nothing but a bed for mosquitoes. It was really bad. They started ploughed the land and after they got some of the land ploughed then they planted their grain or whatever they needed. If not too long, a year or so ago very many years they had the irrigation ditches all over the place. That made it much better.

Mark Durtschi: There were irrigation ditches running down every block.

Clinton Hardy: Oh yes, all the farms had irrigation on them. They were ordering their crops and everything, it was very nice. It was the eye would say that is why Stirling started I guess to build a canal down this area. All this Raymond Magrath area would all be under water. So that is how it came about. My dad and my grandpa both worked on the canal and that is how they got enough money so they could buy two hundred acres.

Mark Durtschi: Digging the canal.

Clinton Hardy: Digging the canal and they would plough and bring it out with scrapers that is how they worked it out. It was very interesting, my mother’s folks came in 1899 from Whitney Idaho and left the first of September and came to Cardston in 1899. They caught typhoid fever on the way and so when they got to Cardston people in Cardston wouldn’t let them come into town. So they set up their tents for the winter out on leaves crick, a river just down east of Cardston and they stayed there all winter in tents. Joe Smith came up the next spring to Cardston and he found out about that, he just about tore those people in Cardston apart for not taking them in.

Mark Durtschi: Let me ask you, what were the winters like in Cardston?

Clinton Hardy: They are cold, I am telling you it was cold, my folks lost quite a few of their horses and cattle that winter because of the cold.

Mark Durtschi: They didn’t lose any of their family though?

Clinton Hardy: No, didn’t lose any family, my mom lost all of her hair from typhoid, she was bald.

Mark Durtschi: Did it come back?

Clinton Hardy: Oh yes, it came back beautiful. Then Cardston came and took them in for a little while until they could get their things straightened out. As soon as they got it straightened out they came to Stirling. That was Samuel Clark’s family.

Mark Durtschi: Did they work on the Canal at all?

Clinton Hardy: Yes the worked on the Canal, they were called to come there too.

Mark Durtschi: Could you tell me just a little about that, how people came up here in the first place to work on that canal?

Clinton Hardy: Some of the came with their wagons, quite a few of them came on the railroad. They would come to Stirling and then from Stirling they would go wherever they wanted to go.

Mark Durtschi: So they were kind of on their own.

Clinton Hardy: They would come here and live with the people here in Stirling until they found where they wanted to go and then they would go.

Mark Durtschi: What do you mean by them were called to come up here?

Clinton Hardy: Well the church got a way of getting this land for their people. They wanted their irrigation so they called different people all over Utah just about and called them to come up here to work on the canal and make their living here.

Mark Durtschi: So the church game them a challenge to build the canal?

Clinton Hardy: Well it was a missionary call.

Mark Durtschi: So it was like a church assignment then?

Clinton Hardy: Ya, church assignment, missionary call to come up here and build a canal. Probably one of the most interesting things is how the agriculture stored here; first they had to plough the ground. The stared out with just a single plough with two handles on it to hold and then you would. They would put two horses on the plough and break the sawed. After they broke the sawed a team with a man with one plough would maybe plough an acre to an acre and a half a day. After they get some done they would disc it with a disc and that would break the sawed up and then they would disc it and harrow it. It would be ready to have their grain planted. Quite a lot of the grain was planted by just broadcasting it and then harrowed in because they didn’t have any drills then.

Mark Durtschi: Could you explain broadcasting a little bit to me?

Clinton Hardy: Well the people just put a sac on their back and they would be head to a bush or something like that and they had to hand folded it and through it out. Then they would harrow it in and that was it. Over the period of a year they would get a lot of the land broken. The next year they were able to plant their grain. The first drills were about ten feet wide and you had kind of a sliding shoe and it cut into the ground a little ways in the middle of where the shoe was in. A little bit later they had what they called press drills. They had discs and press wheels to press it in and that made it a lot better job for drilling.

Mark Durtschi: How big were the discs that the broke up the ploughed ground with?

Clinton Hardy: Well they would plough it just deep enough so that they would make the grass good and then they would break that down and that is what they would work with.

Mark Durtschi: How many horses were on those discs?

Clinton Hardy:Well the discs were only about I guess maybe a foot around and then they would just rolled it just kind of broke it over, kicked it over.

Mark Durtschi: It wasn’t a double disc like they have now days.

Clinton Hardy: No, just a single then but a little bit later then they had their double discs.

Mark Durtschi: Were those also pulled by horses?

Clinton Hardy: Everything was pulled by horses. In fact I remember just out north of here even as late as I was I remember this man out there that did some of his ploughing with an ox team. I saw that. But they were supposed to be all horses. It wasn’t until a point before they ever got to tractors doing very much.

Mark Durtschi: Were horses smart that after you had ploughed with them a little bit that they would know just where to go?

Clinton Hardy: I think mostly, but they always had brains on them so when they told them to turn around that they would follow that. One of them was a furrow horse and he thought of that and the other one would be right beside him. Then a few years later they got everything ploughed and it was all broken up good. Then it didn’t plough so much and they started cultivating with a cultivator. That would leave more of the stuff on the top and that would leave it from blowing too much, they worked with a cultivator. I remember for two or three years I cultivated on my dad’s farm out there and I had a twelve foot cultivator pulled with twelve horses. The wheelers were there and there were six across then the middle were four and then there were two in the front to make twelve. You had quite a few lines drag to hold on to. I was just a kid but I had to drive those twelve horses on the cultivator. 

Mark Durtschi: Do you remember how wide that cultivar was?

Clinton Hardy: Twelve feet wide. You would just sit on the old cultivator and cultivate all that you could. I remember as a kid I used to ride on the drill when dad was drilling. I was just a tiny kid but I was ride on the place swayed or ride on it while he was drilling. Then after if not too long they started raising alp alpha because they forgot irrigation and so then we had haying to do.

Mark Durtschi: Let’s hit the haying after we finish with the wheat. Let’s talk about irrigation for a minute that would be the next step in raising the crop after we have got it in now.

Clinton Hardy: For several years they never irrigated their wheat but when they did irrigate it, it was all done flood irrigating.

Mark Durtschi: Now how do you do that?

Clinton Hardy: Well you just find a place where there was kind of where you would be taking the water out was a little high and you would let the water out and let it run wherever it would go.

Mark Durtschi: Did they use canvas stands to get the water out of the ditch?

Clinton Hardy: Well we just put a dam in the ditch and cut a hole in the side and let it run out into the other little ditches. 

Mark Durtschi: What was this dam like?

Clinton Hardy: It was just a dirt dam but not too long after that they started making canvas dams and I have several of them out in the yard. Then in the fall we had these old winders that we would cut six or eight feet wide and run that through the binder and the binder would take that and bind it up into bundles. Then we would pick the bundles up and chop them up into groups so they would
be dry and then they would be hauled into the threshing machine and thrashed.

Mark Durtschi: Okay so if I have this correct, bundler would cut the wheat and bundle it and kick it out the side. You would pick the bundles up and stack a bunch of them together standing up.

Clinton Hardy: We call it shocking them. Sometimes we would put, six to twelve bundles in a shock with the heads up.

Mark Durtschi: So they could dry.

Clinton Hardy: So they could dry and when they would dry they were ready for you to thrash and you have got a thrash machine and you come in and they would go on and they could take their forks and throw them in a wagon and take them in to the thrash machine and thrash them.

Mark Durtschi: The thrash machine was just out in the middle of the field wasn’t it?

Clinton Hardy: You would just have it wherever you wanted your stack of straw and then most people would have a bin or the wheat would run right into the bin right off from the elevator and they would put them in and some of them were hauling and if they could they would dump it in their wagons and haul the wagon right up back in the bin.

Mark Durtschi:Could you give me a brief description of what these trashing machines were like?

Clinton Hardy:Well the first ones had a steam engine. That steam engine had a big drive wheel on it and they would put a belt to drive the engine on the separator which was over here and it had a drive wheel on too. They would put the belt on the two so when the engine started going the separator would go. Then the separator was one that thrashed all of the stuff out and cleaned it and separated the straw from the wheat and took out all that.

Mark Durtschi: What would you use boiler to heat it with, was it coal?

Clinton Hardy: It was coal because we always had coal from Lethbridge; there weren’t any trees around so we burned coal.

Mark Durtschi: Was there a problem with the cinders started the straw on fire.

Clinton Hardy: No, they had them so that they place where they kept cinders they would be cold before they put them on the ground or anywhere. They had another place where they had to shovel the coal and they would shovel the coal into the thing. Then they had the water tank where they could haul water so they had water going all of the time. Later on when they had the gas tractors running they had a drive wheel on just the same way as they did on the steamer and they did that and didn’t have to worry about steaming.

Mark Durtschi: How many people did it take to operate those old things?

Clinton Hardy: Had about a twelve to sixteen inch separator you would take about twelve to sixteen wagons to keep them going.

Mark Durtschi: So there was a lot of people hauling and a couple people actually running the machine.

Clinton Hardy: They had a man that ran the separator; they had the engineers run the engine. Then all the rest of the people were ones who hauled in bundles except all of the others the farmer probably had teams there to haul grain away if there was any putting it in the bins then there was always one in the bin to keep it shoveled away from the thing. That is what my job was for many years were to shovel grain into the bin and keep it away from so it wouldn’t plug up.

Mark Durtschi: Did you just drive a Bennett wagon, isn’t that what they mostly used to haul the wheat from the threshing machine.

Clinton Hardy: No, they were all hard wheels but I don’t know of anybody that used those to haul any grain.

Mark Durtschi: I must have my terminology wrong then.

Clinton Hardy: Bennet buggies were for lighter stuff in the wagon, they didn’t haul grain, and they had the real steel wheels.
 
Tape 1 Side 2
 
Clinton Hardy: The wind started blowing, making their land blow a lot and it was becoming real band and then they started strip farming, just a strip of summer fall and a strip of grain and then a strip of summer fall and then grain. That way we got rid of the land blowing. But now at the present time they have grown away from the summer fall and the other things now so that they don’t have any summer-fall they put stuff in every year. I don’t know, I think that they have made a mistake but that is what they do now. They use more of the things. I really think they would have better crops and better quality crops if they still did strip farming where they summer-fall a strip then raise the crop in a strip and then summer-falla strip.

Mark Durtschi: Do you recall how wide these strips used to be?

Clinton Hardy: I would say, fifty sixty yards maybe, sometimes maybe a little wider sometimes a little narrow, it all depends on the kind of soil that you had to work with. Sometimes you had to make the strips fairly narrow to keep them from blowing. Other times you could make them a little bit wider but you set your farm out into strips and that is the way that you kept them. 

Mark Durtschi: Okay, we have probably hit raising wheat pretty good should we go to the alp alpha.

Clinton Hardy: Well alp alpha we just raised alp alpha where they had irrigation and they would get it level pretty well so that it would easily be irrigated by flooding. Then they would cut it with a mower and rake it and when it got dry then they would haul to the end and stack it. My dad built I think one of the first hay derricks in the country, he built it himself. Then he built another on e or two for other people. He finally decided to get something besides wagons to haul the hay in so he made, he kind of worked on two skids on the ground then in front he had several two by sixes running out this way. Then they were sharp on the front ends, a team on each side and then they would pull it up and go and get the grain all piled up in there and then they would take that into the stack and just run up beside it and pull the thing underneath. Then go and get another load and the people there would have their hay fork and then a horse to the little hay for up and that is the way that they did it. The haying business was quite interesting. When the hay was ready to cut then we would cut it with a mowing machine.

Mark Durtschi: How wide was the bar on that mowing machine?

Clinton Hardy: Generally about six feet.

Mark Durtschi: And one horse or two horses?

Clinton Hardy: Two horses on that. Then after the hay got dried a little bit, not to dry but just dried a little bit so it wasn’t quite so heavy we would rake it and rake it into winter holes.

Mark Durtschi: What would you rake it with?

Clinton Hardy: A hay rake, it wasn’t theses rakes that go to the sides or anything it would go like this to the place that you would want it and then you would dump it.

Mark Durtschi: So this rake had a bunch of rows of tines about three or four inches apart. The tines were bent up and all the way down around.

Clinton Hardy: Ya, then when they got full you would just dump it and leave it and let it down again and go raking again.

Mark Durtschi: So you would get a pile of hay in the tines and you would raise the tines. How would you put all of those little piles of hay into one?

Clinton Hardy: That was your job when you were raking you hays so that you made it so that you were in when you had dumped it.

Mark Durtschi: In other words you were careful of where you dumped it.

Clinton Hardy: Absolutely, then after we got a little bit drier we would go along the row with the thing and make it up into we used to call it hay cocks and make it in piles and make it easier to haul when you had to haul it in the wagons.

Mark Durtschi: Could you drive that machine that you used to put windrows in the piles a little bit.

Clinton Hardy: It was just a big rake, I imagine it was around eight feet wide and two big wheels and you sat in about the center of it with the horses in front of you.

Mark Durtschi: They tines on your rake were two by fours?

Clinton Hardy: Not on the hay rake, they were steel. They were only about that far apart.

Mark Durtschi: You are telling me, I got confused; you used the same rake to make the windrows as you used to put the windrows into piles.

Clinton Hardy: Ya, the same thing. Then when the grain was dry we would haul it in with wagons until sometime in later by dad built a, he called it the buck rake. Then you didn’t have to haul it in wagons you just picked the hay right up off of the windrows.

Mark Durtschi: Describe that to me. 

Clinton Hardy: Well you just had the buck rake made out of wood, it had two big heavy skids on either side, the team on each side. Out to the front I imagine the tines they would be ten to twelve feet ling made out of two by sixes.

Mark Durtschi: So it would look like a bid cone I guess.

Clinton Hardy: They would be about six inches about and then on the ends of then the edges would get sharp and up a little ways so that they wouldn’t dig into the ground

Mark Durtschi: How wide was this whole thing?

Clinton Hardy: I would say about ten feet wide.

Mark Durtschi: Ten feet wide and those wooden tines every six inches.

Clinton Hardy: Ya

Mark Durtschi: Then a team of horses on each side to pull. Okay, how would they move the hay with that?

Clinton Hardy: Well they would just drag it along and move it, if they wanted to turn, one team would slow down and the other one would go along. They wheel things would skid over where they wanted it to go and that is where it went.

Mark Durtschi: So you would bring those piles of hay up to the stack using that. Then you would push it right up next to the stack and then how would you get the fork out from underneath the pile of hay?

Clinton Hardy: Just turn the horses around and pull it right out from underneath the hay.

Mark Durtschi: So the horses were on a fairly long lead so they could turn around.

Clinton Hardy: The horses were on a chain you see and they turn and when they get there turn around again and it would pick up hay again.

Mark Durtschi: So the two teams would make a hundred and eighty degree turn, pull the rake back out again and then make another hundred and eighty degree turn and move forward again back to the other part.

Clinton Hardy: They had one man on each end to drive each team.

Mark Durtschi: It took two people to do this.

Clinton Hardy: Yes, so that is the way that it worked. When it came to I suppose that just about covers most of that.

Mark Durtschi: Well let’s talk about how you got the hay on top of the stack?

Clinton Hardy: Well we had the hay derrick and a hay rope went up around the derrick and up and over it had the horse that would pull up the forks where you wanted it and do it again to build up the stack.

Mark Durtschi: You mentioned to me before several different types of hooks that they used to raise hay with on a derrick.

Clinton Hardy: We used to have what we call the Jackson fork, that was the bigger one, that would take more hay and be better, then they had the other one that was just went down to the ground,
I have forgot the name of it. Anyway it wouldn’t take nearly as much hay as the other.

Mark Durtschi: There were catches on every one of them so you could trip it.

Clinton Hardy: You could trip it where you wanted it and there it was and then the horse would back up so that you would get the fork back so that you could load it again and away you went.

Mark Durtschi: Were the derricks somewhat controllable so that the derrick would be over top of the load.

Clinton Hardy: See the derrick was a big derrick, way high.

Mark Durtschi: What were the derricks made out of, what did they look like?

Clinton Hardy: The hay derrick was the basis was a square and it was built of heavy timber and it was right across the middle that was the heaviest because that kept all of the weight. Right in the center the thing went right straight up for fifteen feet or so.

Mark Durtschi: So the whole thing was set up like a big tripod with the vertical pole coming right up through the center.

Clinton Hardy: After we got there then they had the long pole.

Mark Durtschi: Long pole and then there was a beam right over top of that.

Clinton Hardy: It went like this and up higher, on each end they would have the pulleys and the rope going through.

Mark Durtschi: So the whole thing was turn able on the vertical beam.

Clinton Hardy: That’s right, that vertical thing you could move it anywhere you wanted to.

Mark Durtschi: So there was a cable that went from the hay up to the top of the boom, down to the side and back down to the side of the derrick and through a system of pulleys that pulled the hay up.

Clinton Hardy: Ya

Mark Durtschi: Okay, do you have any experience getting hay out of the field in the winter to feed?

Clinton Hardy: We always just would go and use a little hay cutter and cut pieces off and then we would load it onto our hay racks with forks. That is the only way that we ever did anything else like that.

Mark Durtschi: I guess that your wagon had a sleigh on them then.

Clinton Hardy: Yes, they had hay racks. Our roads originally were just prairie trails but after a little while we endeavoured to make them so that they wouldn’t have mud holes and we did that by making little grades. We went by feet or horseback, in the winter time we would go by sleigh. It was very interesting so a lot of times we would get in the intersection and we would make the whole intersection quite smooth and then we would have circles of swinging the sleigh, just going around.

Mark Durtschi: So you would get your horse to play around.

Clinton Hardy: The horse was in the middle and they would just go around and around. That was quite interesting, there weren’t very many people that had the team that knew how to do it but my uncle had a team who was just absolutely past master at it. We just had some of the greatest swings that you ever saw. Sometimes we would go around the circle three or four times before we finally quit. I think that is about all because we could go a little bit further by making the roads a little better as we went along. After we made them a little bit better than we would start hauling gravel and sand in from the gravel pit just outside of town. The gravel wagons were quite interesting.

Mark Durtschi: How so?

Clinton Hardy: Just wagons and they put two by sixes I think and they would go the full length of the wagon. They would just lay them right under the wagon thing, just the wagon running gears. They generally had a little one on the bottom maybe a two by four and then they would have a thing on each end so that they could hold more gravel and they would pile up the gravel and everything. They would bring it out and when they were going to dump it they would move this little two by four because that was easiest and then the stuff would come out from that. It would fall on the ground and then they would move the two by six and it would go again, that is the way that the dumped it.

Mark Durtschi: So the whole floor was moveable.

Clinton Hardy: They would move it all around and then they would dump it and move it all back together again and load it up again to do the same thing. So they had to gravel roads here in Stirling quite early because we had the gravel pit close by. Then of course later on they finally got to oiling them and hard surfacing.

Mark Durtschi: Could you tell me a little about the Stirling pasture?

Clinton Hardy: Well the Stirling pasture was a pasture out by the eighteen mile lake and that is where people would take their cattle to a pasture in the summer. I was one of the, I took all of our cattle, the ones that we milked and that. I took my milk cows and my grandpas and several of my uncles and another boy by the name of Charlie Selk he took a lot more, his family and his groups and so I think that we took most of the cows out to the pasture, although there were others that took them as well. You would leave them out there all day and bring them in so that they could be milked, put them in their carrel and milk them. 

Mark Durtschi: If you brought everyone’s cows back.

Clinton Hardy: We just brought the milk cows, the others we just left out there.

Mark Durtschi: How would cows then get to each individual on the farm area there?

Clinton Hardy: We would bring them in and just leave them where the people were and we took care of them.

Mark Durtschi: So every family had to come and get their own cattle.

Clinton Hardy: They had to take care of their cattle, we lived right close to where their places were and sometimes we would put them in a fence.

Mark Durtschi: Did you leave them in carrel there somewhere? There must have been a carrel or at least a fenced in area for them to come and get their cattle.

Clinton Hardy: No, for a long time there wasn’t any fences around the things like that. People had to watch their own things pretty closely. So when time for the cows they would be there to put them in the carrel and take care of them. When they were in their carrel they were all okay until the morning. Then they would run again.

Mark Durtschi: So the people brought their cows out to you in the morning.

Clinton Hardy: They would bring them to a place and we would just drive up and pick up the cattle.

Mark Durtschi: Financially how did that work, who owned the Stirling pasture?

Clinton Hardy: I don’t know that anybody ever paid anything for it. I know I didn’t get paid for anything, I don’t think that my folks ever got anything for putting the cows in the pasture. It was just out there, the community pasture and they fixed it so that they didn’t get into any of the farmers places out there. They just left it that way.

Mark Durtschi: So it was a community resource used by everyone freely.

Clinton Hardy: Everyone could use it how they wanted to but they had to keep the gates shut.

Mark Durtschi: Was there quite a bit of livestock that was out there?

Clinton Hardy: There were some that stayed there all of the time but not a great deal, I don’t suppose it was over a hundred head at any time. I don’t think it would ever be over a hundred head, maybe even less. Sometimes it may be down to fifty or less. So it was because the grass got short it wasn’t anything there much

Mark Durtschi: So the grass did run out eventually

Clinton Hardy: Ya, but it was a good place that we would take out milk cows out to feed in the summer time. It was much better than trying to find a pasture. All people in the early days, most of all of them even now, their houses were built in town and they went out to their farms to work and then they went in and out every day. But my grandpa decided that he would move his house out to the farm because it was only a mile out. So we moved out there and we were out there for a few years. I know that for the first few years I walked to school or else they brought me in by horse back in the winter time I would come in on a water sleigh. At noon I would go down here to my grandpa Clarks place and that is where I ate my dinner. Going on a horse my dad would come and get me back and then he would meet me in the morning. But generally in good weather I always walked that mile and back.

Mark Durtschi: What did you do for lunch?

Clinton Hardy: I went down to my grandpa’s place for lunch. We had an hour and a half lunch period from twelve to one thirty. So I could go down there and have my lunch down there. Any time it was good weather most anytime it was really good weather I always walked.

Mark Durtschi: Could you tell me a little about what the school was like when you attended?

Clinton Hardy: Well it was built in 1904 and it was built of brick that was made right here, in Stirling. My dad and my grandpa were two of the principal brick builders, they formed a brick and someone else took care of the brick killed when they cook the brick. Then they took the brick in and built the school with it, the place where the dug out the clay to make the brick is just right down here on the coulee.

Mark Durtschi: That was good brick wasn’t it.

Clinton Hardy: It was really good brick, I have got some of the brick now. So they built the school and it was built. Each room they would take two grades, grades one and two in one room, grade three and four in another room, grade five and six in another room, grade seven and eight in another room then the high school another room. Nine, ten, eleven, and twelve, one teacher took each room. You would take half the day half of the time teaching in grade one and then take a turn for grade two. That is the way that they taught. 

Mark Durtschi: So you didn’t always have the same teacher.

Clinton Hardy: Some things they may have been able to put them both together and teach them the same thing, which was under certain conditions. They had the big bell in the school and when they built it up they didn’t know how they were ever going to get the bell in the bell frame because it was so heavy. It was a beautiful big bell. So they didn’t seem to be able to find anybody who ever had time or anything to get the bell in the bell frame. So my great uncle Leonard Hardy and a group of Indians, probably about ten or twelve of them, they were the ones that put the bell in the bell frame.

Mark Durtschi: Did you watch by any chance?

Clinton Hardy: I wasn’t born when the built that. Then the bell was just about the same as a fire alarm in the town. You could ring that bell and you could hear it for a mile or two.

Mark Durtschi: Did they use it as a fire alarm?

Clinton Hardy: Every morning at eight thirty it rang for five minutes. Then at nine o’clock it rang for the starting of school. Then if there was anything bad that happened in town they would always ring that bell so that people would know.

Mark Durtschi: Let’s say it rang at twelve thirty, what would the average person do?

Clinton Hardy: Well they would say there is something wrong, they would look around and try to see what it was.

Mark Durtschi: Was there a village fire department here?

Clinton Hardy: They didn’t have any fire department then or anything like that at all.

Mark Durtschi: Was there a gathering place when the bell rang?

Clinton Hardy: No, if the bell rang people would look around and if they came in they would always go to the school to see if they knew what the problem was. Because the person that rang the bell should know.

Mark Durtschi: It would ring for any kind of emergency?

Clinton Hardy: Any kind of emergency buy you could set your clock every morning at eight thirty when that began to ring and you would know that your clock was right. It rang for five minutes then they were getting people ready so that they could go to school in time at nine o’clock it was just a little dingle and that was the end of it. It was a very important thing. The used that school until finally it burnt down and it burnt the top off and they fixed it and used it again for a little while before they tore it down and built a new school. So it broke when they set fire to it broke it.

Mark Durtschi: You say that when the school burnt down that someone set it.

Clinton Hardy: I don’t know, it was right at the top, it might have been a break in the chimney, I don’t know. I don’t remember when it burnt down. It was after I was married. Then they rebuilt it on the inside and they used it, put a new roof on it but they put a flat roof on it after the roof like the old one. Then they used that for a little while and then they built a new school.

Mark Durtschi: What did they do with the kids for school when it burned? 

Clinton Hardy: Well they used the old Ogden place up here for school for a while. Because the Ogden’s had left, there was hardly anybody there so the just moved in and made a school out of it. The old school, they built a smaller thing and it wasn’t very big, it was big but there wasn’t much to it because it was only just until he got it fixed up. So they had some school in there too.

Mark Durtschi: Could you tell me a little about the church, the old white church, the wooden church?

Clinton Hardy: Oh yes, that church was built not to long after the people came into Stirling, it was a large church.
 
Tape 2 Side 1
 
Mark Durtschi: We are with Clinton Hardy again today; this is tape two of the series. Clinton has found some very interesting information about the early history of Stirling. I am just going to turn it over to him now.

Clinton Hardy: I found history that the first school teacher in Stirling was Jean Hardy. The oldest school I don’t know they must have held it in a house for a short time but as soon as they got to church built they held school in the church. The church was built the first year after the people landed here. We all know that Theodore Brandley was the first bishop and his councillors were Samuel Faucet and Franklin Grant. The ward was organized on the 25^th of June in 1899. The first ward clerk was Hennery Shoeth and he was put in on the 8^th of October 1899. Then he was changed and in 1900 Robert Withers was made the ward clerk. In 1902 F.D. Grant became the bishop with William B. Hardy and William Miller of councillors. Then the bishop rick was reorganized in 1904 on the 13^th of November. Bishop Fawns was made bishop; his councillor was Lewis Baker and William T. Ogden. Then he was bishop until the 22^nd of October 1939 when Leaf Erickson was Bishop. After that of course I don’t need to talk too much about them because most of them know but bishop fawns Held the bishop office about as long as or longer than any man in the church. The old Post Office was in the old Brandley store for a short period of time.

Mark Durtschi: You told me the other day how many years he was the bishop.

Clinton Hardy: Well he was 1904 to 1937 about thirty five years.

Mark Durtschi: That’s a very long time.

Clinton Hardy: A long time anyway. The old post office was in the old Brandley store and then after a short time the built a small post office just across the road from where the old store was. They said that when they first came into the country they came about four pm in the stayed in the section house along the railroad. They had eighteen car loads of furniture and it said that Theodore Brandley got up and left his bed at night because the bed bugs were so bad that he couldn’t stay in bed. I guess that they had a lot of bugs around at that time. Now as far as entertainment in the ward is concerned in the early times it was all made up their own entertainment. They had dances in private homes they had them in the church and the main person who played the music for their dances was Paul Zaugg and he played the violin and if there was an organ around then they would play that. Of course it was in the church they always had an organ there and other places, later they might have had pianos in their private homes and they played the piano. Paul Zaugg was the main violinist, later on we had the Oler family and they had an orchestra and they played for a lot of the dances then. People who came to the dances if it wasn’t too far they would walk or if it was too far they would come in democrats and horses or else they rode a horse. Some of them came in wagons that were the way that they did it. All of the recreation in the ward for years and years was just made up by the people themselves; there wasn’t any organization that organized recreation at all. They just made it up for themselves, where they wanted it.

Mark Durtschi: Can I as you a quick question before you go on. Could you describe a democrat wagon?

Clinton Hardy: Well a democrat was just a buggy, sometimes they had one seat and sometimes they had two. Sometimes they only had one horse and sometimes they had two on them. They were much lighter than a wagon and so they were called democrats or they were called buggies. Some of them had tops and some of them didn’t. Most of them at that time had tops but they could let the down and put them up if it happened to rain or something like that. That was the way that they went. As far as the land was concerned the land was three dollars an acre for people who worked on the canal. They got paid half cash and half land script and so they could pay either in land script or cash, at three dollars an acre. The lots in town, that is they paid lots in town like this they had lots for twenty five dollars a piece. They bought them from the church because the church owned the property for the town. The people who started homesteading at that time the land cost ten dollars for a quarter sections. They had to live on it for three years, six months of the year. Then they could buy it for ten dollars an acre.

Mark Durtschi: Would you know if that was land around here?

Clinton Hardy: A little further east of here was where they had most of their homesteading. They had some north but most were east. My uncle Howard and my uncle Rylee Clark were down that way and they had homesteads down there a lot. It was about five or six miles out of New Dayton, almost straight east of Stirling. I know that, my aunt Harriet had said that they laid the park out as far as they were going to have the park right as they laid out the town. They never said anything about it; it was just an open piece of grass for years. Later on in about 1920 in that area somewhere when my mother got the idea of starting to organize the ting to make a park and so they finished it off and tried to put in trees to start making so that they would have a park. My mother was the one that was the head of the situation.

Mark Durtschi: While your mother did that what were some of the other things, the improvements made to the park?

Clinton Hardy: Well she just thought that they needed to improve to make a park sot that they would have a park place to have their celebrations and so on. Do things more in the town, they had it in the park instead of anywhere around.

Mark Durtschi: Did they put in any ball fields in at that time?

Clinton Hardy: Not at that particular time, that was alter on but they used to play ball there all the time. They played baseball and they had horseshoe pits and they played horseshoe. But as far as having it organized like it is now, that was way later. They just had a place there where the people of the town could go and have their park and have their organizational things, maybe just family situations going in there. That is how they did it. So they, I think that was the main thing that so that they didn’t until way later before they did very much organized recreation. In the schools we didn’t have any recreation at all in the school. It was all school study and so if we did anything like that we played basketball and baseball and things like that under the church. There was never anything in the school for a long time; all of our schools were just for study. The school had rooms; each room had two grades in it. One room had grade one and two. Another room had grade three and grade four. Another room had grade five and six. Another room had grade seven and eight. Another room held all of the high school, nine, ten, eleven, and twelve. The teacher had to organize so that he taught each one of those groups during the time of the school.

Mark Durtschi: So there was one teacher for the entire high school.

Clinton Hardy: One teacher for the entire high school, one teacher for the two grades down the line. They first did the school in the old church and then when they built the school in 1904 they built the school and moved into the school. They had several wells in town, seven or eight I think, they dug them by hand and some of them are about fifty feed deep. They would get down and the water came up but it wasn’t any good, it was just fit for livestock, it wasn’t good to drink. So they had about three wells that they dug right down close to the coulee. They were only about six feet deep and that water was good to drunk. So the people that wanted water to drink would take water sleighs or something like that and haul barrels down and haul it up to their houses. That you could drink and then the other well you could use for any other part of the water, they used that for washing and doing that kind of stuff around the house. They had to do it all by hauling it all up in barrels. Now the ward here was quite famous for many things. Our basketball team was the first basketball team in Canada and they introduced basketball into the country. They were a very good basketball team and in so many ways, the school finally had got a team much later on and they became very good in the class that they had here. That was their big thing, was basketball and baseball. Of course in other ways we had dramas here, we used to put on three act drams. They were all very high class dramas, they were all good. Stirling was notes for its dramatics and the things that they put on in drama. Our drama leader was Elodia Christenson and she became so good in everything that she eventually became the president of the Canadian Drama League in Canada. We had two at least two of our dramas that were so good in church drama that they were taken to Salt Lake. I was in one of the dramas that went to Salt Lake. It was very interesting. As far as those things were concerned the town of Stirling was very well known and almost famed for those things. As far as their singing and choir was concerned they were know all over the country. My mother’s family both boys and girls were excellent singers in fact their youngest boy William became one of the great singers of western Canada and the United States. He was one of the best. He was our choir leader here and we sang in quartets and our choir was well noted and we just noted everywhere for its singing, we just had so many good singers in the ward. Not only the Clarks we had the Olers and we had several others, the Perrett’s, they were all very good singers. So we what was known as one of the best choirs in Alberta. It was very well known. Now we never burned any wood very seldom in our stoves because there were no trees or anything around here and what little wood we did have was just to start fires with, we got them from the ties that they took out of the railroad. They would take the old ties away and then people could go out and they could buy a mile of the ties for four or five dollars. Then we would bring them home and pile them up and cut them up and that is what we used for kindling wood. All of the fire that we had, our heat was coal from Lethbridge. Hauled coal from Lethbridge in wagons, sometimes they would get a group of them together and have a whole box car loaded with coal. Down on the railroad they would dump it off beside the tracks and they would all go and get their coal out of there and paid for it that way. In a few of the later years my folks found a place over almost right west of Stirling maybe ten of fifteen miles I guess it was and they found some coal down in the river bottom. So they went over and they uncovered that and they would dig the coal out and haul that coal in. During the depression in the 1930s in that area that is the way we kept our homes warm, hauling all of that coal for years and years. We dug our own coal and then dug it home and that is the way that we did it. We had many things like that, it might be interesting to know the names of a few of the people that were in the school here. There was Albert Brandley, he was twelve years old, Joe Brandley was fifteen, there were others, I won’t have any of their names but there was Owen Mileing, Albert Finley, Martha Clark, Mary Clark, Aleve Clark, Hazel Hardy, and Louie Oler. Those were some of the very first people that went to school here and the first principal was Blair Ripley, he was the first teacher. They had just one room in the old church where they held their school. Now it says here that the old big Brandley house cost $1500 when it was built. The old church in order to make it insulated they filled the walls up with mud.

Mark Durtschi: This is the first wooden church right?

Clinton Hardy: The old wooden church yes. They had an old tithing granary that was up here, which is where they took in their tithing. They might want to take eggs, they might want to take wheat or they might want to take something else like that. They didn’t pay money for it and took it to what was called the old tithing granary.

Mark Durtschi: Who kept it?

Clinton Hardy: I don’t know the man who kept it but it was someone who was appointed by the church. He probably wasn’t the only one, there have probably been several.

Mark Durtschi: Did you remember that being open?

Clinton Hardy: Oh yes the old building is still here.

Mark Durtschi: Was it open every day?

Clinton Hardy: It was open I think about once a week. Right next to it they had the baptismal font right next to the tithing office, they had another house and that was the baptismal font.

Mark Durtschi: So it was a building just for.

Clinton Hardy: A building just for baptism yes. They had a stove down in the font o that they could warm the water so that is how it went. They took their vegetables and butter and eggs to the old tithing office.

Mark Durtschi: That was tithing, did that get redistributed or was it sold.

Clinton Hardy: Well it was generally redistributed to the people who needed it. If it wasn’t I imagine that it was sold to the store or something like that. I think that mostly it was just distributed to the people that needed it. That is about all of the things that I have on this thing here.

Mark Durtschi: You mentioned to me once before a little bit about the very first car that came to Stirling. I was wondering if you could tell me about that again.

Clinton Hardy: Well the first car that ever came into Stirling, one of my cousins saw it coming and he ran down the road in front of it just as fast as he could go and hollered to all of his palls and friends along the road. He said run like hell kids here comes Christ in his horse and carriage. That was the first car that ever came into Stirling. After that there was one or two cars in Stirling, not very many. Frank Coffin had a car, Verge McKee had a car, and I don’t remember whether there were any others. My dad had an old Model T Ford, it was not too far from the first car in the area and he cut the back end of it down and made a kind of little truck so that he could haul stuff in the back of it. It wasn’t very big or anything like that; the old Model T Fords wasn’t very big either. He used to call that Ray Hardy’s puddle jumper. That is the way that we came to church from the farm. Before that we came either in buggies or in the winter time we came in water sleighs or maybe in another kind of a sleigh. In the summer time we would come in buggies or else some of the times when mom couldn’t come we would walk to church, the kids would and dad.

Mark Durtschi: How many months out of the year did you drive your car?

Clinton Hardy: We drove the car; we didn’t drive it too much in the winter time although we did some times because we put chains on the back wheels so we could get along alright.

Mark Durtschi: You talked a lot to me about this School bell.

Clinton Hardy: Yes when they built the new school the bell frame was up pretty high, it was a hard job to get that old heavy bell up into the bell frame. Evidently the men around were so terribly busy that they wouldn’t take time to help put the bell up. So my grandpa’s brother got about a dozen Indians.

Mark Durtschi: Which brother was that?

Clinton Hardy: Leonard, he was my grandpa’s nephew, it was Jesse that got the Indians together and had the Indians help him. He and the Indians but the bell in the bell frames of this school. That school bell was the famous bell of Stirling, it rang every morning at eight thirty, and you could set your clock by it because it was always right. It rang for five minutes so that everybody would know that it was time to get ready to go to school. Then it would just dingle a little bit a nine o’clock. If there was anything that happened in town like a person or a fire, that old school bell rang just like a fire alarm or anything like that. It was a very important thing until the old school burnt down. When the school burnt down it burned the bell frame in a way that the old bell fell down and it broke. They never could use the bell.

Mark Durtschi: What did your dad do in Stirling?

Clinton Hardy: Well he was a farmer here but he was in the business, he was one of the first, my grandpa was the first overseer and then my father was the next group of people, he was one of them. My dad was the first mayor in Stirling. They had the mayor and then they had councillors and a secretary. Our secretary here in Stirling until he became, I believe that he became all the same as a ruler in town. That was Perry Barton. 
 
Tape 2 Side 2
 
Clinton Hardy: They are very civic minded in every way. He helped build all of the churches that they had and built the amusement hall that we had here. He was a builder as well as a very civic minded man. He was just a man to build talent, to build people, to build towns to build everything. No matter what it was? He was a very fine man. My mother was very much the same way but she passed away when she was not very old, she was about forty to forty five years old when she passed away.

Mark Durtschi: How old were you at the time?

Clinton Hardy: I was about twenty four.

Mark Durtschi: Could you tell me a little about your ice house, about getting the ice?

Clinton Hardy: We put all that stuff in the winter we would find a place where the water was really deep so that the ice would be really good. We would saw it up in squares about the size of one or two and then haul it in and put it in an ice house. We would have either wood shaving, sometimes we used straw. Sometimes we used saw dust, generally it was straw. We put the stuff in there, piled it all up and cover it all over with straw, and then it would keep that way all summer. When you wanted to get a piece of ice you went in and took the straw off of it and put your straw back on again and took your ice home and that would take care of it.

Mark Durtschi: Would you put ice in the cistern?

Clinton Hardy: Well when we put ice in our cistern we made sure that the water was good that was in ice. We knew that it had to be good water. We would cut it up and then we would just put it down our cisterns just before the ice broke up we would put it down in the cistern like that and that would give us another bunch of water so that the water would last longer in the cistern. It was cold water too and so we always put the water in early in the spring so that we didn’t have to haul water, we could wait until the irrigation water came and got good and clear before we put water in the cistern.

Mark Durtschi: So how long did that water stay cold in the summer?

Clinton Hardy: Well it was always cold in the cistern no matter what. It was always cold but it was a littler colder when there was ice in it. So that was just to help so that we didn’t have to haul all of the water to put water in our cistern because who knows. In the winter we used quite a bit of the water and sometimes the cistern would be almost dry early spring, even before the water got into the canal. So early winter we would put ice in there so that it would melt and still give us water until the water came into the ditches and then we could fill it. So that was why we put ice in our cistern. Not everybody did that but we did, we did it all of the time. This happened when I was about fifteen years old, maybe I was a little older than that because we had moved back into town and my father asked me to go out to the farm on the horse. We had a horse pasture down here and I kept my riding horse down there. He wanted me to go out on the horse and get all of the horses out in the field because they were running out in the field, bring them down to the carrel because he wanted to use them the next day and he wanted them all there. So I went down and got my cousin Leon Hardy to go with me. We rode out on the horse bareback, he was just a year or two older than I was but he was a Haemophiliac and very badly crippled. He could walk for a little bit but you don’t arms were not straight out and he would use his legs. He was a Haemophiliac, he rode the horse and so we went out with me. When we got out to the farm I put him off right where the house was and I went up into the field because it was pretty hard for two of us to ride a horse in the field rounding up horses. So he was sitting there waiting for me to bring him the horses back and of course when I got them all together I was in a rush, just as fast as I could bring them. Right about where he was sitting there was two gates, one toward to the house where they watered the horses and then another one this other way and went up to the carrel. They were both wooden gates and we just had to pull them back. As the horses came whooping down there as fast as they could go, some of them went through one gate and the others went through the other, the one that went through the gate to the carrel hit the gates and moved it back a little bit. I couldn’t handle my horse very well because he was kind of a bull headed thing. It didn’t have a bridal on him. So we decided to follow the ones that went down by the carrel. One of them went through there and got his feet tangled up in the wire gate and he just keeled over, I landed underneath him, right in the mud puddle. I landed so that he couldn’t move, of course I couldn’t move because I was under him. He couldn’t move at all, if somebody hadn’t come along he would have died and I would have too. My cousin was right there and he could see that there was a situation pretty bad. He thought well I have got to do something to get that horse off him. So he could get me, we went over and he grabbed that horse by the hind leg, that horse just kicked him and knocked him galley west. I don’t know, it must have kicked him ten or fifteen feet. He got up and offered it a little prayer to help him with what he had to do. He came back and he grabbed the horse by the hind foot again. You can believe it or not he turned that horse completely over, pulled it right over. That horse weighed about fourteen hundred pounds. Of course when you get the horse over it would just get up, he came and grabbed me, I was face down in the mud and my mouth was wide open and full of mud. My nose was full of mud, it was really stiff mud. So he pulled the stuff out of my mouth and out of my nose and then I was able to breath and I started breathing. I came to in about ten or fifteen, we got the horses in the carrel, and we never told anybody about it. Believe me that that was a lord blessing me and him because he was able as a cripple, a small cripple to pull that fourteen hundred pound horse right over. Then he pulled the stuff out of my mouth so that I could breath and I breathed. It is funny that I wasn’t dead before then. It took a little while for him to do those things but that is the way that it happened. My wife, when we were married our first baby born it seemed like my wife couldn’t carry a child. Finally she did and we had two boys. After that she couldn’t carry any more children, she just couldn’t. She just couldn’t carry them at all. So we went to the temple and asked president wood to give her a blessing and he gave her a blessing that she would have more children. So we immediately came home tried it again and bang, here came another miscarriage and another miscarriage. So then we decided that the only way, the way that the lord wanted us to have more children was to adopt. So we would fulfill that blessing we adopted on girl and then a year later we adopted another girl. So we had two adopted children and then of course my wife and I we always went to the temple all of the time. Then we went again to president wood and told him our situation and what we had done and then he blessed my wife again and he said you will have a girl child and you will bring her to the temple to show me. So after we came home from that blessing we tried again. Lone and behold she conceived and she carried that child and we took her to the temple to show. After that we had to have no more children. But that was the most wonderful child that you could ever imagine. She came in answer to prayer and blessing that was given to my wife. No other way could she ever say that it could be in any other way because of how many miscarriages she had? She was only able to carry two boys, she miscarried one before our first boy was born and then another one was born, then after that just miscarriages until finally we went to president wood and asked him about this and he blessed her to have more children. Still miscarriage so we decided that the blessing had to be answered through adoption so we adopted two girls. When Bob and Linda’s twins were born everything seemed normal. In a very few months though there seemed to be something wrong with the little girl Jamie, her one arm didn’t work. Later it seemed like she couldn’t crawl or try to walk. She couldn’t do anything about trying to talk. Linda and Bob asked if I would give her blessing so I got Jim Dayton and we administered her. I didn’t know what promise or any particular blessing but we asked our heavenly father to bless her according to his will. Nothing happens spectacularly but she began to grow normal and by the time that she was two years old she was perfectly normal except for a slight limp. She was a wonder to the doctors, they said that she would never walk or talk. Today in 1986 she is a lovely youngster apparently perfect in every detail. The lord does share prayers of faith and need. Here is what her mother wrote. There is a picture of the twins there with my wife. For Jamie, one of god’s special children, you said mama today and I cried. I sat there holding you so full of love and I cried. You must have thought me silly to cry over such a thing. But we didn’t know if you would ever be able to talk or walk or sing. You took your first steps today and we all cried. Mommy and Daddy and Christy and Kelly, Jason to, even though he didn’t know why, you must have thought us silly to cry over such a thing. But we didn’t know if you would ever be able to walk or talk or sing. You sand Rock a by Baby to your little wall today. Through my tears I watched you play as my thoughts went back to another day. I think it was sometime in early spring that I sat and wondered then if you would ever walk or talk or sing. You are one of god’s special children, one of his children that he sent here to be with us because he had a job for you to do. He wanted you to teach us that we should never take for granted all of the little ordinary things such as learning to walk or talk or sing. You have been such a blessing to us. You filled our home with love. You have increased our everlasting faith to our heavenly father above. You have accomplished such a lot to be such a little thing. I am sure that god is feeling very proud as he watches you learn to walk and talk and sing. 

Mark Durtschi: Could you please tell me a little more about the old white church and the different things that it was used for?

Clinton Hardy: The old white church was just one big room; it was big enough so that they could play basketball in it. The things that we sat on were just wooden benches with backs on them. They would fill the whole room and that is where we would hold our Sunday school and our church. When we played basketball we would just take those benches and move them to the side. Pile them up on the side and we would play basketball in there and there was quite an interesting thin had happened one day. There was one ma, I remember old brother Mertz he was sitting on the edge of one of the benches there and a man was talking. Evidently it must have been not to interesting to brother Mertz as he went to sleep and fell off and fell on the floor where a wild loud crash. They had to stop church while they gathered him up and got him fished up so that they could get him on the bench again. I remember that instant very plainly. I wasn’t too far away when he fell off the bench so I saw it all. It was very interesting. There were many wonderful things that happened in that old church, many wonderful beautiful church things. It was in that church that I met President Joseph F. Smith, shook his hand and talked with him. I have talked with every president of the church since Joseph F. Smith of the first five presidents of the church that I have known and talked to everyone. I remember them all. President Benson has been my very special one because of the association that my mother’s folks had with him. They were next door neighbours in Whitney Idaho.

Mark Durtschi: Would you like to tell us about that?

Clinton Hardy: When President Benson was born in 1899 the first of august he and his mother didn’t know whether either one of them would live. So my mother and her sisters took care of President Benson as a tiny baby to try and keep him alive while the mother and sisters tried to do their best to keep Sister Benson alive. They did it and they both ended up alive, they took care of Brother Benson for quite a little while. Then on the 1^st of September my grandfather Clark and his family left Whitney because they had been called as missionaries to come to Canada. They left on the 1^st of September but that first month of President Benson’s life my mother and her sisters took care of President Benson. So through that way I became very close to President Benson. I visited him many times I have exchanged letters and pictures with him and did many things with him. He was a very fine friend of mine. I visited President Kimble Fawn in Arizona and I have known personally every president of the church since after the first five. 

Mark Durtschi: That is extremely interesting, I was wondering, you were the post master for how many years?

Clinton Hardy: About seven years.

Mark Durtschi: Could you tell me a little about that and also about the post office robbery that happened when you were the post man?

Clinton Hardy: Well when we became post master Elodia Christensen was the post mistress for many years before that. She got so old that she finally had to let go. She recommended me for the new post master and I was able to pass so I became post master. The post office then had been moved up town into a post office right next to the store which is now the Canadian Grocery. It was then Peterson’s store. I was the post master there for about seven years. While we were there I guess it was the first robbery that had ever occurred in Stirling. A group of some people, I don’t know how many broke through the back window of the post office and took all of the money that was left in the post office at that particular time of the night. At that time we were taking all of the gas and electricity and other things like that, telephone bills, they paid them all at the post office. We had quite a bit of money on hand. Most of the time I bring some of it home but generally I left some at the post office in a safe. But the safe for some reason or another we never locked the safe so when they came in they got into the safe and they went through everything in the post office and found every bit of money that there was there. I don’t remember how much money they took but it was quite a bit. The companies and the post office stood the loss so it didn’t cost me anything, only the fact that I had to put bars on all of the windows after that so that nobody could get through without breaking down the bars. I think that was the first robbery that ever happened in Stirling.

Mark Durtschi: Was it the last one?

Clinton Hardy: Well they had another one up here not too long ago at the Edwards store, the red apple.

Mark Durtschi: Did you enjoy being the post master?

Clinton Hardy: Yes it was very nice, I knew practically everybody in the country at that particular time and they were all my friends. Very fine people, then now since I have been out of the post office and gotten a little older and forgot things I hardly know anybody in town anymore. I knew everybody in town and a lot of people out of town that came in for their mail. It was a very interesting time.

Mark Durtschi: Okay, I know this happened before your time, when they made brick down at the coulee. I know that you can tell me something about that?

Clinton Hardy: Well they found a place down there that had the right kinds of clay to make bricks. So they dug the clay out and made the bricks into the size that they wanted to and put them in a kill and cooked them. Then there were bricks to be put into the school. My father and my grandpa were two of the main brick makers. They formed most of the bricks and they were put into the little kilm that they made down there so that they could cook them and make them hard. Then they brought them up here to make the school. They made all of the bricks to build the first school out of the place just down here on the coulee; they dig all of the stuff out of there to make the stuff to get the bricks.

Mark Durtschi: Any idea how long that lasted?

Clinton Hardy: Well they didn’t make any more bricks after that.

Mark Durtschi: Did they just make bricks for the school?

Clinton Hardy: Just for the school and that is it, they just made it for the school. They had to have a school and they wanted to make it with a good solid building so they made the brick to make it. They didn’t have the money to buy the brick, maybe they didn’t buy brick at that particular time, and they may not have been able to buy the brick. But they couldn’t buy it anyway because they had no money so they made their own brick. It was very good brick, I have still hot some of the old bricks here at the house.

Mark Durtschi: Out of all of the plays that you were in, which play stands out the most in your mind and could you tell me a little bit about it?

Clinton Hardy: Well the play that I think most about because it was long, but there were so many that were so good. But this one is because I was in it, I was one of the main girls that were in the play, I was her father. The name of the play was dust. It was so good and done so well that we were sent to salt lake and we had to take all of our things to make all of our furniture and everything. We had to take it down.
 
Tape 3 Side 1
 
Mark Durtschi: It is the 15^th of June 1996 we have just been discussing the depression years a bit and he was talking a little about that so maybe we could go ahead and listen in.

Clinton Hardy: In 1929 in November I was called on a mission to the North Western States. I went and I stayed out until February of 1931, didn’t stay my two years because my money ran out and my dad had to sell my only cow to get enough money so that I could come home from the mission. It was quite a thing. Our mission president was very considerate about that and so the summer that I was out all of the missionaries traveled with that person script all that summer. So that helped some, I think that my monthly money was between thirty five and forty dollars a month for a whole month.

Mark Durtschi: You got that from your dad right?

Clinton Hardy: Yes, my last four or five months I worked in the mission office, I was sending out book and stuff like that, getting their monthly reports and putting them all into a thing so that we could send it out to all of them. So I lived with Sister Sloan right in their home.

Mark Durtschi: Let me ask you a question, right from when you left until you came home, that was the early part of the depression. Did you notice any differences when you came back?

Clinton Hardy: Well when I came back I am telling you there wasn’t very much food in the house and I remember my shoes that I had on at the mission field were kind of worn out. My dad resold them with discarded tires, he cut out in the bottom of my shoes and then he would nail them on. That was the kind of things that we had on our shoes for many years. Dad cut it out of old thrown out automobile tires. They really worked well because they wound never wear out. But it was about all we had to eat was the eggs that we had our chickens and we had a cow so that we could get milk and butter. I know that we exchanged butter and eggs for things at the store that we needed at the store, other than that we lived just on the things that we grew on the garden and out on the farm. It wasn’t easy and yet it was very much a learning situation. We learned to get along with fewer things and have a lot of fun besides.

Mark Durtschi: So you don’t really see the depression necessarily a bad time just as different, maybe a little scarcer.

Clinton Hardy: No, sometimes I think that they are almost needed to bring people back to their senses. It is not easy but you get along especially if you have got a little bit of things on hand. On the farm we always had our wheat and we had eggs and we had our own pigs and cows to kill to have meat so we would get along fine on the farm. We had no big problem. You learn to know what is most important in life much more than you do when you have everything that you want. It makes quite a difference.

Mark Durtschi: Okay, so let’s not just jump over that, what is it that you find important that you learned in the depression years that you wouldn’t have learned otherwise, or not as quickly?

Clinton Hardy: Well the thing that I learned most I think is how to take care of the dollar. To use it at the time in the way when you receive the most out of it, we probably learned the value of money and the value of things like that more in the depression more than any other time. Because you had to think, is this shirt better than this shirt over here. If you bought one you would buy the one you would wear the longest. Same way with a suit or anything else that you had, you were very careful and you got the very best thing that you would get at the lowest price. This way you learned more the value of money and more than any other way. If you have plenty it doesn’t matter so sometimes you buy a lot of things that are of no value at all. You are very careful in what you but and what it was worth to you. I think that was the greatest thing that we learned in the depression. We learned also how to make fun for ourselves, not only in our home but in our ward. We had house parties and things like that to have fun. Any of our activities or sports or anything like that was all done through the church so there was no cost there So they made it so that you understood things much better than you would have done without that schooling.

Mark Durtschi: Could you describe for me some way how that has affected you whole life since the years of the depression have passed?

Clinton Hardy: It has affected my life completely. It has hung with me my whole life, I don’t know what I would have done if it hadn’t been for that. My wife is the same way, it stayed with us, those lessons we learned, we kept and we kept them all through our lives so that we were able to take care of the things and we never did have very much money. We took care of our family and took care of those things like that, I think that they get along alright and we get along fine. We had a car most of the time in our live so it has helped us lots. In the later parts of our lives after the kids have left home we had enough money put away so that we took a trip to Central America, we took a trip to Jerusalem and all of the holy land. We traveled practically all over the United States.

Mark Durtschi: So you are saying that the depression has really taught you a way of life.

Clinton Hardy: It really taught us how to live so that we could enjoy ourselves and not have to have a million dollars to do it with. I think it was a very wonderful thing. We went on our second mission and we knew how to life on a small amount of money in our second mission and we took care of our car on a second mission we traveled. Sometimes we traveled three, four hundred miles a day. We took care of an all of that and I think that we did it on about eighty dollars a month. I know that the mission president came down to our place to visit us and he was congratulating us on how our dishes were all just like the stuff that bought in little things. He couldn’t get over the idea of how we got along that way; he was very happy and congratulatory of on how we got along. He was really happy.

Mark Durtschi: Are those about the same times that you went to Lethbridge to haul coal; I guess you hauled coal before the depression.

Clinton Hardy: I hauled coal a long time before the depression, because during the depression we had gas and electricity here and we hadn’t then. The coal was before that, we hauled it for about three or four years before that so that helped us so that we didn’t have to pay so much a ton for coal. That is another thing that we learned is to get along with things like that. Did you ever go to the river bottom to get your own coal?

Mark Durtschi: Did you ever go to the river bottom to get your own coal?

Clinton Hardy: Well we would all work together as a family and we would just put it wherever we wanted it. When we had enough so that our basements were all filed with coal for the winter or more then we would quit.

Mark Durtschi: When you say that you would all work together are you talking about just your family or are you talking about several families?

Clinton Hardy: Both of my aunts in one case, my grandpa Clark he was here and his family, then my dad’s brother and his family, then my mother’s family, that was my mothers, they had three or four families that lived here, so they all worked together to get our winter supply of coal.

Mark Durtschi: Do you remember how you got the coal out of the river bottom?

Clinton Hardy: Well we just had a team and a slip scraper and we just went down at the river bottom and we took the dirt off the top of the coal, it wasn’t very deep then. Not over a foot in most places. Sometimes it was deeper than that. We would take that all off and we would take chizzes and crowbars and all those things to break the coal free from generally about, some of the coal seams were three feet thick. So we would just break it off in lumps and then if there was any smaller coal we would take that too. We would just throw that in our wagons and fill it with a load and we had more than one wagon load there we would load two or three wagon loads.

Mark Durtschi: How fast did that go, how lo0ng would it take to fill a wagon?

Clinton Hardy: It all depends, sometimes it would take us half a day, other times it would only be a short time. It all depends on how much we had to move and how easy and how well we were able to break it through. Some broke through easy and some broke through hard so it depended. We would probably take about three wagons over there and we would load them all and go over in the morning and get some on that day. Then we would stay overnight and finish loading them the next day and come home. Sometimes we would stay two there two nights, it all depends on, that is how we got our coal.

Mark Durtschi: Did you do that in the summer time when you were kind of between the things on the farm.

Clinton Hardy: It was in the fall sometimes, generally after harvesting was done that is when we would go. There are other times when we got the coal from Lethbridge and have it brought down in a coal car. Other times we would go up there and go right to the mine with their wagons and come home. Sometimes a group, sometimes quite a large group would get a box car full of coal and they would go down and haul it out and then they didn’t have to go so far with horses. Other times you would haul it down with a four horse team.

Mark Durtschi: When you went to Lethbridge to buy coal, I presume that was before the depression but did some of that also go on after the depression?

Clinton Hardy: No not after the depression because during the depression we had our gas and electricity so we didn’t have any more coal.

Mark Durtschi: This was all pre depression years when you went to Lethbridge to buy coal.

Clinton Hardy: During the depression years you generally went and got your own out of the river bottom. Before the depression we got coal from Lethbridge. I didn’t very often go, dad was usually the one who went and got the coal. I think that I maybe went once but I remember that we went down to the river bottom, right down to the mines at the river bottom. That is where we got our coal. I know that dad always used to go and get the coal from Lethbridge.

Mark Durtschi: Thanks, I appreciate you telling me about that. Could you tell me a little about the Chinooks that happened around here?

Clinton Hardy: Well we don’t have Chinooks now like we used to have them, for some reason or another I don’t know why. But I have seen Chinooks and then leaving I have seen the temperature fall or rise sixty degrees in a half hour or less. A lot of people can’t believe it but I have seen it several times go up thirty degrees in fifteen minutes. I remember one time when we, dad and family we were going to Raymond in a bobsleigh. Right in the middle of the winter and it was cold. We were going over to Raymond, we cut up through the fields about a mile, and it was about a half mile from where highway fifty two is now. We just started going left a little bit when a Chinook came along and dad said I think we had better go home. I don’t think we had better go to Raymond. So we turned right around and went that mile and a half back to our home. Maybe about two miles I guess to our home out on the farm. By the time that we got back to the farm our bobsleigh was running in mud. So we don’t have Chinooks like that anymore, I don’t know why. When John Sikes was buried I remember the thermometer went up about twenty five degrees just before we left the church to go and bury him. It was quite warm when we buried him. By the time that we got him all covered up and everything was okay. The time we got back to town again it had gone down thirty degrees. I remember that one just from that one thing. I have seen it so many times; I have seen it change sixty degrees in a half hour or an hour, which would be normal procedure.

Mark Durtschi: When they hit what kinds of problems did that cause?

Clinton Hardy: Nothing of a problem because it would take the snow off and then another half an hour it would all be frozen over again. Sometimes it might go for a couple of days and it would be a nice thing for the stock and stuff because it was warm for a could of days and then it would get cold again.

Mark Durtschi: So generally it wasn’t to much flooding then?

Clinton Hardy: Oh no, it wouldn’t flood anything because it wouldn’t last long enough. You could get some puddles here and there but generally it doesn’t have very much snow. Generally when we would get a large amount of snow like that it would just make the snow go down and make it more solid that way. But those Chinooks were really something. A story that I heard, I will tell you this one it was quite interesting. It was about a man who lived in Cardston, he was going out of Cardston, going out west. He got a little ways out and then though he had better turn back because it looked like maybe a Chinook was coming. He just got it turned back and there were a couple of Indian squaws that wanted a ride. So he put them in the back of his sleigh and so the Chinook hit. At the time he got to Cardston the horses, he had them on the run because he wanted to get hit too bad with the Chinook when he got to Cardston. The horse had over a foot of ice hanging on their nose and his face and all of that had ice and stuff all over it. The two old squaws in the back had died of heat stroke. He just kept that far ahead. This is one thing that is absolutely true because one of my friends in Cardston told me this, one day a Chinook hit and it only came to Cardston just at the main road, right about the middle of the road he stopped. On the west side of the road it was about forty above. On the east side of the road it was down to about twenty, it was freezing. It stayed that way for a whole day. It never moved, right on the main road of Cardston, half and half. The west side was warm summer and the east side was winter.

Mark Durtschi: This country up here is famous for its wind. Are there any stories that come to mind right now about the wind?

Clinton Hardy: No stories other than the wind blew half of my tree down here and caused me to have some troubles when I was trying to get it cut down and taken care of. But not very often, we had some terrible dust storms so that you could hardly see your hand in front of you.

Mark Durtschi: Dust storms now days aren’t anything like the old days.

Clinton Hardy: Well they changed their farming. Before they used to have all of their land in one and they would put the whole thing in and then they would plough it. That just got the land all real fine and the wind would come and it would just pick that stuff up and blow it away, that is when we would have our dust storms. Then they started to strip farm that stopped the dust storms pretty well. Now the farmers of today are getting back to a bit more stuff and I am afraid that it is going to bother them. Now they are farming so that they farm every year and they don’t have any summer fall, they don’t get very good crops. If it gets to be kind of a dry year I don’t get anything. With summer fall you have your two years into one year so you get a better crop. But they do it this way now so to maybe keep it from drifting so they do it every year. There are a lot of other things, killer weeds and have often though that strip farming would be the best but I don’t know, I haven’t farmed since they started this other way. I noticed a year or so ago that the crops in the fall are not very good.

Mark Durtschi: Changing the subject a little bit, if that’s alright. You told me earlier that when the white men first came up here, when the Mormons first moved up there was a lot of Indians in this country here.

Clinton Hardy: Ya there were quite a few Indians in this country in fact the last great dance that they had, Great Spirit dance that they had just outside Stirling here and then after that it was barred by the government. They wouldn’t let them do it anymore.

Mark Durtschi: This all happened before your time right.

Clinton Hardy: Ya this was all before my time, my folks told me about it but it was shortly after that the people came in here and I forget what they call the dance now but the spirits of the dance anyway. It was a very important dance to the Indians and they did it just out here about a mile and a half or two miles east of here. After that they weren’t allowed to do it anymore. Then they moved the Indians into the reserves.

Mark Durtschi: You mentioned also before that Marquardson owned a lumber yard.

Clinton Hardy: Yes

Mark Durtschi: Where was that about?

Clinton Hardy: Well just up here on the corner, it is an empty corner now, they have all torn it down, right there by the Canadian Grocery. Then just west of the Canadian grocery we had an overall factory for a short time, a year or two. Rumrose had it. It lasted maybe a year or more. I guess GWG and the rest of them all kind of out did them and put them out of business.

Mark Durtschi: You are talking about the big manufactures.

Clinton Hardy: They manufactured overalls for a short time, not too long. I think it lasted about a year ago and then they tore the building down and it was gone.

Mark Durtschi: Could you tell me a little about basketball down here, you were saying that then it was an even bigger thing than it is now.

Clinton Hardy: The basketball team from Stirling introduced basketball into Canada. My dad was on the basketball team. They were very good, for many years Stirling was known for its basketball teams; they didn’t have any school teams.
 
Tape 3 Side 2
 
Clinton Hardy: I remember all of them that played on the basketball teams but they were the early ball games. Then we had other ball teams with Bill Eaves, Merle Eaves, and I played on one or two of them but I wasn’t much of a basketball player. I wasn’t like the others but them there were many others and my boys were on basketball teams that were well known. So they have as I say Stirling has been know just up until recently as a basketball town for almost ever since it was started. But not in the schools, it was outside of the school situation.

Mark Durtschi: Was a lot of that church involved.

Clinton Hardy: Well not too much of it, it was mostly just a town situation and Raymond the same way they had a town basketball team. They would take it from some of the best of their school and other things and put them all together and made their teams. That was how they made it kind of a town team.

Mark Durtschi: Those first teams played in the church didn’t they?

Clinton Hardy: Well that is the only place that we could play was in the church. Nothing else was built. So it was played in the old church and then when they build the amusement haul they played in that and of course now it is in the church amusement haul now. We used to have a separate amusement haul. After we got rid of the old church and built the second church in 1930 it went until 1980 I think. They had a separate place where they played basketball and stuff like that.

Mark Durtschi: Did you ever see your dad play on a team?

Clinton Hardy: No, because I was too small to remember. He was on the big team in that started up the whole thing in Stirling. Stirling has been known as a basketball town most of its life. The kids today have a tough fate to live up to, but they are doing pretty well at it. There was a group of them mostly my relatives were down at the grandpa Clarks place and they wanted to come up town for something. It was a terribly dark night and they didn’t know if they could make it around because there had been some excavating done there right where the park is now. They didn’t know just exactly where it was and my uncle says you guys just follow me and I will show you where to go so that you won’t get fall into anything. Everything will be fine. So they all started out and he would lead and they were just tagging along behind him and he made a misjudgement and ran into one of these basements they just got and he just went down and all of the others just landed right in on top of him. Almost before all of them landed on top of them he says what the hell you are following me for. They got up town alright, none of them got hurt all that bad but it was just kind of a funny thing that happened.

Mark Durtschi: That was before your time too?

Clinton Hardy: Yes I wouldn’t have known because I was a little too young but I believe that my dad was in on the deal too, I don’t know.

Mark Durtschi: Could I ask you to explain a little bit about your family life to me?

Clinton Hardy: Well for several years we lived out on the farm and I had to walk out to the school at that time. In the winter time I rode on a horse or else my dad brought me in on a horse or brought me in on a water sleigh. I never brought my lunch because my grandpa Clark lived just down here. I just went down to his place for lunch. So that was my early schooling and I have often wondered what in the world I would have done in my early life if it hadn’t been for a wonderful dad and mom that I had. They were just absolutely superb in every way. I so love them and respect them for the wonderful people that they were. I am quite sure that they have helped me all of their live, they have been gone for a good many years now but they still help me. Interesting thing about my wife and I, I never was much of a ladies man just for a short time at that but I went on my mission and then I met this girl Della Miller on my mission and I felt like she should be my wife. Never did anything of course on the mission.

Mark Durtschi: She was a fellow missionary?

Clinton Hardy: She was in the same mission that I was. She was in the same time in the same district. So we were very good friends as all missionaries are good friends and so after I came home we corresponded all of the time and she came to the temple. The missionaries from the northwestern states would always come to the temple because that is what our mission president had them do. So I would leave here and take my dad and mother up and we would go up so I could get to visit her while she was at the temple. So that way I met her that way and I was just going to the temple. Then we corresponded and finally I wrote to her father to ask if it was alright if I marry her and he said yes it would be alright. She had consented to marry me over that. But we were never together on a date and never went out together until last ten days before we were married. I went down to the states and was there for ten days before we were married in the Salt Lake temple and that was the only ten days that we were ever went out on any time for any dates at all. She was the most wonderful woman you could ever imagine. We had almost six years of just beautiful friendship and love. I feel so strongly about her, even now. She just so much a part of me in every way, for that reason I think it was because of the teachings of my dad and mother that we should be very careful in choosing our friends and especially our gender friends that are the opposite gender and all of that. As a result she has been about the only one that I have ever had any strong feelings for in all my life. As I said we did all of our corresponding by letter. We were only together the last ten days before we were married. She did everything, she helped me in everything, she was good on the farm, and she kept our house just perfect. Everything was just exactly right. She was with me and behind me in everything and in fact she was helping me at all times so that I could do better. She was a wonderful woman. I felt so strong, I had an interesting thing happen here about two years ago, I had trouble chewing my teeth for a couple years before she died. She would tell me quit chewing your teeth you is making so much noise. Finally she decided that there was no need of just talking about that or anything. Whenever I start chewing my teeth she would just take her finger and touch my lip right there. I knew what it meant so I would stop. About two years ago she had been dead about six years now, about two years ago I got started on chewing my teeth and my mouth was sore and I just kept chewing my teeth. Finally I was just about ready to take my teeth out and leave them out for a day or two so I could straighten them out. I was just getting about ready to take my teeth out and put them in water when I felt a finger on my mouth like that. It was her finger. I have never chewed my teeth since then. So she is watching over me even here now. I only hope that I will be able to be with her when I leave here. I hope that I have lived right to be able to be with her. That is a big job to be able to live with her because she is such a remarkable angel. That is one thing that I liked about it because she helped me outside and I tried to help her inside and when I didn’t have anything to do outside she was running the combine and just about every machine on the farm and knows how to do it. So in return I tried to help her in the house whenever I could, do what I could there so we had a lovely live together.

Mark Durtschi: You have given me so much good information and our interview is just about over. But before we part here I am wondering if you can give me some kind of a broad overview of the many changes that have taken place from when you were young and how things were done then and now.

Clinton Hardy: Well I think that there is quite a difference. When I was a youngster we didn’t have very much money, any of us had very much money. We made our own enjoyment; we made our own parties and games and so on. Generally outside games and we did all that. The youngsters now days their fun is all made up for them with the TV or something else like that, they do those things according to their TV and radio and all those things like that. It is very different then I was, it is more flighty that just good plain fun. I can see a tremendous change right there in how the youngsters of today carry on and do what they did when I was young. In our days we didn’t have radios we never had anything like that. Now they have all of this rock and roll and all of this other stuff on TV so that they can jump and squeal and run around and do all sorts of things and it gives them many different ideas of getting in on the drug situation or smoking and drinking and all that. In our days that wasn’t a thing like that at all because our youngsters didn’t have all the money to spend they didn’t have anything, very little. They had to make their own fun and all of their own things. We had amorously good times, we made them ourselves. In that was I think it was much better time of entertainment then they have at the present time.

Mark Durtschi: So you are saying that a lot of this new technology is kind of a negative.

Clinton Hardy: It makes a great negative thing in all of their lives; it comes off onto the older people when they have to hear it too. It just seems to get into the older people as well as the youngsters. It is not a good thing. I feel that our youngsters of our day had more real good fun than kids do today. Although it may not look like it they had more real satisfying fun. They were doing plays and they were doing things like that, debates and many other things like that that give them a lot of fun and it didn’t cost anything and it was satisfying rather than just the way things are today. A lot of these things aren’t satisfying; they seem to have more and more. So as a result it is just not good.

Mark Durtschi: I really appreciate the interview, this is the last tape of this series and I really appreciate the time that you have taken to be interviewed, thank you.

Clinton Hardy: I hope that it won’t be too boring to review.

Mark Durtschi: It won’t be thank you.
 
Transcribed by Clinton Dovell